Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4 (20 page)

“We’re not twelve. Maybe go easy on the calling us
boys
thing.” Vinnie’s snooty drawl was arch, meant to provoke. He succeeded, as always.

“The second you stop acting like a childish bastard—”

“Oh my God,” Denny had snapped. “I will pull this car over if I have to separate you two.” Shocked silence blanketed the car, until someone broke out in smothered giggles. “Jesus. Stop making me talk like my dad, you assholes.”

Getting back in the car after their latest pit stop, it was Rafi’s turn to claim the front seat next to Denny. Hoping to ease some of the tension between them, Rafi extended an olive branch to Austin.

He twisted in his seat to look at his cox. “Call the tunes for the road, Austin.”

“Let’s make a video,” Austin suggested after a moment. Truce. He leaned forward between the front seats until he could read Denny’s iPhone where it was mounted on the dash, the navigation app open. The car filled with groans of protest.

“No way.” Vinnie, of course.

Rafi passed the phone to Austin. “Pick something good and we can put it on YouTube.”

“No way!” Vinnie was sputtering in the back seat behind Rafi. “Bob, back me up here.”

Rafi didn’t see Bob move a muscle in his nap slouch, but the quiet man’s voice was full of amusement. “I love singing.”

“Gah.” Vinnie kicked the front seat hard. Rafi whipped his head around.

“Knock that shit off,” Denny commanded, glancing over his shoulder, beating him to the punch.

“Sorry. God. Mom and Dad in the front seat, huh?” Vinnie bitched and Rafi’s face got hot. He could see Denny out of the corner of his eye, biting his lip and trying not to laugh. What did that mean? Did the guys already see them as a couple? Jesus. He hadn’t even figured out how to make that transition himself. “Fine. We can make fools out of ourselves. Sure.”

“Taylor Swift!” Austin was scrolling through Denny’s music.

“I don’t have any—”

“Yes! Wow, you’ve got a whole lot of Tay-Tay on here, don’t you?” Austin’s eyebrows had climbed most of the way up to his hairline.

Denny waved a vague hand in the air, his face turning pink. Rafi took pity on him. “Or we go with something classic, like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.”

“‘Honky Tonk Women’,” Bob suggested dryly.

“‘In the Navy’,” Austin countered with a laugh, and Rafi shook his head.

The banter continued as Denny merged back onto the highway, moving into the left-hand lane to zoom up the road as his friends argued about pop classics versus new music.

Okay. Road trips were definitely fun.

At Denny’s aunt’s house, there was a race for the bedrooms as soon as he unlocked the front door. Denny lifted a brow as Rafi watched the other three sprint up the staircase in front of him.

“It’s first come, first served on bedrooms, dude,” Denny said. “Except for the master bedroom, which is mine because, you know…host.”

“Mine!” Shouting voices carried from the upstairs.

“Fuck you. This one’s mine.”

At Denny’s curious look, Rafi shrugged. “I don’t really care where I sleep.”

“You want to share a room with Bob?” Denny asked, laughing. Bob’s snoring was legendary. Poor boy had some kind of sleep apnea and was supposed to sleep with an oxygen mask or something, which he refused to do. Sober Bob only snored at regular roof-rattling volume. But drunk Bob… Drunk Bob snored to raise the dead from their graves. Drunk Bob had been known to drive his own suitemates to put a towel at the base of his door in an attempt to drown out some of the thunderous snorting and snuffling.

Rafi’s eyes widened. “Hell no.”

“Well, you might be too late.” Denny cocked his head and listened. “Sounds like Vinnie and Austin are not sharing the bunk beds this time. Which means you can share a bed with one of us or grab the second bunk in with Bob.”

Share with one of us.
A buzzing tingle set up shop at the base of his spine.
Share a bed with Denny.
Wouldn’t that be the nuclear option of declaring their hookup?

“Shit. There goes sleep.” He could read the disappointment on Denny’s face when he didn’t jump on that chance, but Denny’s voice was normal when he spoke again.

“I crash down here sometimes, actually.” Denny dropped his backpack at the foot of the stairs and led the way into the large living room to their right. A cast-iron pot-bellied stove on a large brick platform anchored the room. Long, overstuffed couches stretched out perpendicularly to the stove, with a large TV on the opposite wall. The TV was the most modern-looking thing in the room. All of the furniture had seen better days, which made Rafi a lot less nervous about their weekend. “The rest of the camp gets pretty cold at night, but if you load up the stove with logs before bed, it stays hot until morning. You could always crash here.”

“Why do you call it a camp?” That word sounded strange in the context. Camps were places in the woods where people pitched tents or…something. Rafi had never been camping either, and trying to imagine what that was like was beyond his scope.

Denny shrugged. “That’s just what it’s called.”

“This is, like, a really nice house, you know? It’s weird that you call it a camp.”

“Maybe it’s a Vermont thing. Or my weird family. And everything here is pretty old. All this furniture is from the eighties or something. But nobody worries about anything getting dirty, and if you forget to take your boots off when you come in, the floor cleans up pretty easy.”

Rafi smiled at him, flashing back to home. “No chance I’m gonna forget that.”

Denny laughed. “Yeah, not like your sisters ever let that happen.”

Having grown up in an area where everyone drove everywhere and parked their cars in garages, Denny hadn’t been in the habit of taking his shoes off the moment he entered the door at his friends’ homes. One visit to the apartment Rafi shared with two of his four older sisters—the other two sisters cycling in and out on a daily basis, with keys of their own—had trained him up quick in the habit of taking them off in the hallway outside the door. City people who walked everywhere, most Chicagoans were used to taking off their shoes before entering their own or anyone else’s homes. Denny had learned after one particularly aggressive blast of Spanish that he’d better not track dirt into their home if he didn’t want to get hustled back to the front door by one of Rafi’s sisters.

“Come on. Help me put away the groceries.” Denny picked up two of the grocery bags from where they’d been abandoned on the floor by the others.

It turned out what Denny meant by
put away the groceries
was get the frozen stuff in the freezer and dump everything else on the counters, so Rafi took over the putting-away task. Denny mostly seemed to work at getting in his way, parking himself in whatever spot would allow him to lay hands on Rafi to maneuver around him. The gentle brushes to Rafi’s arms, his lower back, his hips were driving him crazy.

When the other three trooped back downstairs, they were immediately shooed to the back porch.

“I’m not about to try and explain to my aunt why the camp reeks of pot if she comes up next weekend,” Denny said, holding open the door. “Anyone who wants to smoke does it outside.”

Then he hopped up on the counter and watched as Rafi sorted through all the food, lining up the packaged goods on the shelves in one of the empty pantry cabinets next to the fridge. When he caught Denny staring at him, Rafi shrugged self-consciously.

“Old habits,” he explained in a mutter, turning back to where he was setting cereal boxes on their sides to fit them all on one shelf. This was embarrassing. “We used to get ants like whoa if any food was left out on the counters. Drove my sisters crazy.”

“Hey, don’t mind me. I like a man who knows his way around a kitchen,” Denny teased from his perch. The sun was streaming through the windows, and Rafi felt like it was all shining like a spotlight, right on him.

“Shut up.”

“Shutting up. I’ll just watch instead.” Denny crossed his legs, propping his chin on his fist.

“Stop it.” But Rafi laughed while he said it, and Denny didn’t stop. He camped it up with the best of them, as if being silly was what it was going to take to get them back to where they’d been the previous weekend. Silly, with a side of sex god, Denny’s eyes drawn constantly to Rafi’s dick and mouth.

Rafi looked out the window over the sink to where Austin was attempting to do handstands in the backyard, Vinnie and Bob standing to the side and laughing at him. When he turned back to the kitchen, Denny was waiting with a grin and a saucy wink. Rafi grabbed Denny by the ankle as he passed and yanked him to the edge of the counter, where Rafi kissed him so hard he made himself dizzy. By the time he turned back to the groceries, Denny’s gaze was both hot and bubbling over with laughter.

Maybe being silly was exactly what could get them there.

Hours later, Rafi didn’t know where to look. White boys were freaking out everywhere. And okay, Vinnie was technically Korean American, but when hoedown fiddle music was on the line, apparently he was as white as any of them. Austin was on top of the coffee table, playing his imaginary violin like it was on fire, curly clown mop flying everywhere. Bob, Denny and Vinnie were shouting something about fire on the mountain, and telling boys to run.

“How can you not know ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’?” Austin cried, jumping down to run over to the iPhone and replay the song.

“Oh God. Not again.” Every time they hit a song someone liked, they put it on repeat for way too long.

“This time, it’s for your soul.” The cox cackled and pulled him onto the table before jumping back to the couch. Rafi tried not to worry about whether or not Denny’s family’s furniture was going to collapse under his weight. Austin might be a little fucker, but Rafi was not.

And seriously, what the hell? There was disco fiddle music and then a total country hoedown with something about a dog biting and all four of his teammates were going nuts, bouncing on the couch cushions in a way that would have gotten Rafi a fast smack from one of his sisters.

Rafi swore it was twenty minutes before he managed to get off the coffee table, his friends cursing at him for being on the Devil’s side.

He had to admit, shouting out the “you sonuvabitch” line was fucking awesome.

And it wasn’t too surprising that a bunch of rowers, the most competitive motherfuckers he’d ever known, would love a song that was mostly two dudes saying,
I’m better than you
. And,
No way, asshole. I’m the best there’s ever been.

Shit. They oughta play that song at practice.

“Again!” Austin shouted as the song ended.

“My abuela would have some serious lectures for you,” Rafi said, laughing now at the insanity of it. High people were ridiculous. “You gon’ bring the Devil, you play that song too much.”

“Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!” Austin chanted, jumping up and down on the couch until Vinnie nailed him in the face with a throw pillow and Austin fell to his back, laughing, arms and legs draped over the cushions in every direction.

Rafi shook his head.

Crazy white boys.

“Bring me the finest muffins and bagels in all the land,” shouted Austin, from his position on the couch, reciting something that sounded like a quote. “I want to drink from the keg of glory!”

“Easy, killer. I don’t think you need to drink anything other than a nice glass of water before bed.” His morning run was going to be hellish enough in these mountains, so he’d switched to water after his second beer. He might be road tripping and missing practice, but that didn’t mean he was going to slack on his training runs.

“Muffins and bagels,” his friend muttered, curly hair all squished up around his face with his head shoved into the corner of the sofa.

“The finest in the land,” Rafi promised, and left to search out the junk food in the kitchen. He knew what was coming next. They’d bought two hundred dollars’ worth of groceries—because rich kids shopped with their eyes and not their stomachs—and he bet most of it would be devoured before breakfast.

In the kitchen, he rifled through the cabinets. The creak of the swinging door behind him announced that someone had followed him to the food. Austin, probably. Maybe he’d gotten the munchies faster because he was so little the pot blew through his system more quickly?

“I’m thinking chips, salsa and guac, to tide you over while those disgusting Tostino things are baking,” he said without turning around.

“Tostinos are awesome.”

A shiver ran up Rafi’s spine on cat feet. He’d recognize Denny’s voice in the pitch-dark, with bombs going off all around them even.

He kept his back to the room, listening for the sounds of Denny’s approach, wondering how close he would come.

A warm body pressed against his back as Denny reached over Rafi’s shoulder and plucked the bag of Ruffles from the cabinet.

“I’m more of a potato chip and French onion dip man, myself.” Denny’s breath ghosted against his ear.

Rafi cleared his throat. “You know there’s nothing natural in that dip, right? It’s, like, a tub of onion flavoring and paste.”

“But it’s so…so…good.” Denny didn’t move away. He reached around Rafi to the paper towel roll.

Denny was speaking like that—slow and breathy—on purpose, the motherfucker. And staying too close, so close Rafi could feel the heat of his skin as Denny tugged enough paper towels off the roll to cushion the space shuttle’s re-entry.

“Stop it.” He hip-checked Denny away from him, needing some air that didn’t smell like Denny’s deodorant and laundry detergent.

And how fucked-up was that? That he was pretty sure he could pick the smell of Denny’s laundry soap out of a crowd in a blind sniff test. Original Tide had never given him a semi before Denny Winslow.

“Stop what?” Denny asked, voice dancing as he stayed put.

Jesus fucking Christ. There was room for an eight-man shell to do a one-eighty in this kitchen. Was it absolutely necessary for Denny to stand on the same two square feet of real estate as Rafi?

“Stop…touching me.” Saying it out loud felt like flirting because he didn’t mean it. He’d been thinking about being touched by Denny ever since Denny had asked him to go on this road trip. He couldn’t forget that for the first five minutes, the plan had been for him and Denny to be up here by themselves. Far away from all their friends and professors and everyone else who got in the way back on campus.