I’m a leftie when I write, eat, throw a ball, or do pretty much anything else, but I jerk off with my right hand. I know. I’m a conundrum.” He smiled to himself as he turned around to inspect the shed some more. There was a very decent chance that Noah was going to punch him by the end of the day. Frankly, Alex was surprised the guy hadn’t seemingly lost any of his cool yet. Alex was usually much quicker to irritate people.
“You’re something, all right,” Noah muttered as he straightened himself. Half of his ass was still dusty, but Alex wasn’t going to mention it. He enjoyed seeing the otherwise straightlaced Noah a little dirty.
“So now that we’ve shared and are already that much closer, why did you bring me to your hall of shame?”
“It’s not my stuff. It’s just…” Noah sighed. “You know Friends?”
“The TV show? Doesn’t everybody?” Alex wasn’t sure where Noah was going with it. “I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve seen an episode, but I used to watch it, sure. Why? Oh! Is this one of those times where your tiny town is so far away from civilization that the really popular things reach your corner of the woods with a delay? Like when Titanic was really big in Afghanistan around the turn of the century. Did you people just get Friends here?”
“Are you being a Chandler and using humor as a defense mechanism?”
Alex raised his brows and tipped an imaginary hat in Noah’s direction. “Touché.”
Noah was giving him that look again, the one that seemed to imply that he suspected there was more to Alex. That the façade of the charming, fun, easygoing rich boy that Alex had painstakingly built over the years to cover up the chaos inside him had a very real threat of turning transparent when it came to Noah. And that was something Alex couldn’t afford. He turned away.
“So, Friends,” he prompted.
“Oh, right. There was this one episode where Monica had a secret closet, where she keeps all kinds of crap that doesn’t fit anywhere else. This here is Carl’s secret closet.”
“Okay?”
“We need to empty it out. I might not be a hoarder, but Carl sure as hell is fast approaching the territory. He doesn’t like to throw things away, which I sort of get. Reuse, repurpose, and so on, but most of this stuff is just junk, and we need to get rid of it. You can start today, and we’ll continue when Carl is in Seattle for two days next week.”
“Dude, Carl is a giant. Are you sure we should be pissing him off by throwing out his crap?”
“Unless he needs to stuff something in here, he won’t even notice. Besides, what’s he gonna do once it’s done? Make us cart that crap back in here? We could use the space. The busy season is in full swing, so we’ll soon have ourselves more animals than we can fit, and Carl knows it just as well as I do. Turning down injured animals is not an option, especially when there’s no one in a sixty-mile radius that can take them in.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Alex shrugged. Angering Carl still didn’t seem like a good plan, but then again, when had Alex shied away from bad ideas? What was one more to the tally?
4
The previous summer, Alex had spent two weeks in Brazil. He and a bunch of people Alex didn’t even know that well, but who liked to party, had rented a house and spent those two weeks drinking, lying on the beach, and partying. On his last night there, Alex had picked up a guy from a bar and they’d ended up on the beach, where the guy was all too eager to let Alex fuck him. It was good while it lasted, but later, there was sand everywhere. Alex felt like he was picking sand out from his ears a month later. He hadn’t thought something could be worse than that experience.
He’d been wrong.
Dust was everywhere. It got into Alex’s eyes, nose, and throat. Summer had officially kicked in, so the heat was unbearable. Sweat beaded on Alex’s back and ran down his sides. He was wet all over, which in turn, made the dust stick to his skin. Alex had been fucking miserable.
But then Noah had shown up.
After their conversation in the shed last week, Noah had been hard to catch. Alex had stopped by the office regularly like a good stalker