decide for myself. So who’s the guy?” He practically sang the question, like it was some kind of victory for having gotten that much out of me. As I opened my mouth to give him a piece of my mind, Tex said, “I’m joking, kid. You can have all the secret high school lovers you want.”
If only you knew…
I took my plate to the edge of the dividing wall between the kitchen and the living room so I could see him. “I feel like responding to that comment will give away more than I want to.”
“It will. Even that gives away too much, though, so Uncey Tex’ll take it.”
“Ass,” I muttered, both of us smiling at the exchange before I returned to fixing my snack.
Fortunately, the only thing Tex had picked up on was that I was feeling something, not who I was feeling it for. Aside from Taryn or Ben, he was pretty much the only one I had to worry about figuring me out. Most people couldn’t read me, something I was relieved about on the build the following day, when James and I had to split up because we were short a few of our usuals. DJ was teamed with me, though, so we had a good enough time, even as I found myself listening for the sound of James’s voice on the roof. I couldn’t tell if I was catching it as much as I thought…or just wanting to hear it badly enough to imagine it. As the day wore on, I began fearing we might not have any time together and I’d have to wait another week for a chance to have even the most innocent of conversations with him.
It was stupid how relieved I finally was to share some time with him during the lunch break, when a bunch of the volunteers we usually hung with sat in a circle. There were seven of us in the group, men and women of varying ages from teens to sixties. Bentley—a fifty-five-year-old vet turned contractor with a penchant for tall tales—relayed a story about an epic blunder during one of his contractor gigs at a local elementary school.
Using a plastic fork, James dipped a chicken nugget in the sweet-and-sour sauce at the bottom of the small box they came in before taking a bite. It’d been just over a month—this was the fifth day of working together like this—but I felt like I was already getting to know some of his little quirks.
As Bentley reached the end of his story, the group erupted into laughter. James got some sauce on his bottom lip, and I watched as he caught it with the back of his finger and slid it in, somehow making that totally hot. He scanned the group, like he was checking to see if anyone else had caught his fuckup, until his gaze caught mine. He closed his eyes and seemed to laugh at himself, and then our eyes met once again, briefly, before we turned our attention back to the group’s suspicions of the truth of Bentley’s tale.
I appreciated moments like this, where James and I weren’t teacher and student. We were two guys having a laugh at a silly mishap, laughing with our peers.
Two guys, one oblivious to how the other was foolishly letting his imagination get away from him.
After we finished lunch, Bentley realized some supplies had been swapped with another build and asked for volunteers to fetch them from the other site. I promptly signed up with James, who offered to drive DJ’s truck over so we could pick up the correctly measured boards and bring them over.
“This seems familiar,” I remarked as I slipped into the passenger seat.
“Yeah, I prefer the reason we’re in the same car this time.” He searched around. “Jesus Christ, this thing’s so old, I’m surprised it’s not a stick.”
“I’m gonna pretend to know what that joke means.”
He cringed. “‘These words like daggers enter in mine ears.’”
I had to laugh. “Dude, I’m shitting you. I know what a goddamn stick is. You aren’t that much older than me.”
He smiled, shaking his head. “I’m not the one to tease about that stuff. You could tell me gullible was on the roof of this truck, and I’d look.”
It was such a self-deprecating comment, one that left me wondering about his wife, the secrets he kept about whatever had gone so wrong, what had led them to growing apart, as he’d put it. But I didn’t push as