Sidecar (8 page)

Like a rabbit burrowing into warmth, he scooted over to where Joe was sleeping, and wrapped his arms around Joe’s waist, pressing the length of his young, slender body up against Joe’s back.

He wasn’t entirely sure how he ended up being kicked out of bed, but the thump of his ass hitting the floor shook the little house.

Joe was sitting up in bed, scowling at him. “Do this again, I’ll call the social worker in the middle of the goddamned night!” he snarled, that temper flare lighting up the darkened room. “Jesus, kid. Go the fuck back to bed!”

Casey turned around and bolted, slammed his side of the bathroom door shut, and made sure it was locked from his room. He lay in his bed, shivering, until dawn, held awake by embarrassment and humiliation.

T
HE
next morning, Joe greeted him with pancakes and a grunted good morning. He asked about Casey’s schoolwork, and he asked for Casey’s help making a shopping list for Thanksgiving dinner. He wanted to know if Casey wanted a haircut, since Joe was going into town, and he wanted Casey’s opinion on how best to get his transcripts. He was kind, personal, and involved in Casey’s life, just like he had been for the past two weeks.

He didn’t once mention what he and Sharon had been doing in the room before she left, and he didn’t once mention what Casey had done afterward. It was like it didn’t happen.

Casey decided that, for the time being, he could live with that.

Shakedown

~Joe

T
HEY
spent Christmas and Thanksgiving quietly enough. Casey helped Joe cook both dinners, and they both waited for the next morning to do cleanup. Joe bought Casey his own Walkman for Christmas and took him to town to buy music. (And then counted himself very virtuous indeed, because the kid’s music? Really? George Michael and Madonna? Gross!)

The kid’s little attempt at seduction was not even
discussed
between them. Joe thought it was better that way. He had to give the kid points for trying, but really? Sixteen? Joe had
some
standards.

And he had to admit, Casey met them. Yeah, he was feisty, and he tended to do shit without thinking, but by the time Christmas was over, not only had he taken to feeding the outside cats, he’d adopted a trio of kittens and brought them inside. After the first day of walking inside and seeing that kid cuddling a little orange fuzzball to his cheek and talking to it like it was human—“Hey, furr-burf, stop that. No, I don’t want my nose bit. No. I said no. Yeah, well, licking’s okay. Go ahead. Good for the pores. Who needs Clearasil when you’ve got kitten tongue? Oh yeah, right there, keep going. I’ll go put some milk on my forehead, we’ll clear that little blackhead problem right up!”—Joe went and bought a cat box for the bathroom, and suddenly the little fuckers couldn’t run under his feet enough. (He also bought some Clearasil, for which Casey expressed profound gratitude.)

But that was okay. Between Casey and Nick, Jay, and Jordan (because, according to the kid, those were the only three characters he could stand from the damned book), the house was a little less lonely. (Although Joe did notice that Nick was a girl cat, like Jordan. When he asked Casey about this, Casey replied that he’d always figured Gatsby was giving it to Nick anyway—this way, the cats could do something about it. Joe was planning on getting the cats fixed, but he put it off when he heard this. Anything so Casey could see a happy ending.)

But eventually they did have to deal with the paperwork thing when enrolling Casey in school, and a social worker
did
need to get called in. Joe could hardly blame Casey, either—the kid had kept his nose clean, had worked hard, apparently had been a model prisoner at the continuation school. (Given what Casey said about his fellow inmates, this wasn’t far off. He claimed to have spent a half an hour during a “science” class searching a local field for psilocybin mushrooms. He had a small baggie full of regular run-of-the-mill fungus to prove it.) But eventually the authorities figured out the bogus social security number
wasn’t
his and that was how the transcripts he’d doctored to say Casey Daniels didn’t pass muster.

So here Joe was, looking at the fortyish social worker with the newly minted tatas and the overly full lips and trying to explain why the kid should stay with him.

“See, the thing is,” Joe said, smiling apologetically, “he doesn’t want to go home, and I don’t want him back out on the street. He almost didn’t survive last time.”

The woman had no eyebrows. Or she did, but they were penciled in, and those little pencil lines formed perfect semicircles when she made a little “oooh” movement with her red-lipsticked mouth.

“Oh, that’s just so
sad
! And you brought him here and took care of him? Without a woman here? Oh, Mr. Daniels, that’s just so
kind
of you.”

Mrs. Cahill put a perfectly manicured set of bright red nails on Joe’s sleeve. He looked at the hand, to her suddenly predatory eyes, to her hand again. He closed his eyes for a second and then looked at Casey, who was sitting across the table from him.

Casey scowled at the hand, and then met Joe’s eyes, and then looked at Mrs. Cahill, who had told them straight off that they were probably going to have to change this living arrangement immediately.

Casey swallowed—Joe could see it from across the table. Joe pulled up a smile to cover the silence. “Well, ma’am, I do like helping people out.”

“Oh, you
do
?” she cooed, leaning in further so Joe could see how low-cut her sweater really was and how very firm her recently purchased breasts were too. “Now, see, that’s nice.” She leaned even further forward, so those hard breasts were butting up against his arm. The nipples were very, very pointy against the cashmere of her sweater. “There are not many men who would do that for… for
anyone
, much less a young boy!”

Joe swallowed and met Casey’s eyes. Casey was looking like he’d just sucked a lemon, but he sighed and nodded, like he was giving Joe permission to do whatever it took.

“Well, ma’am, I was taught to give back, you know what I mean?”

She was practically sitting in his lap, and, well, his lap had never really objected to a curvy set of anything pressed up against it, and was responding in kind. That wicked scarlet manicure dropped down to his thigh, brushing his semierect cock in his jeans.

“That’s really rare,” she breathed in his ear. “I think that maybe, if you were willing to demonstrate just how… how
deep
that commitment to
giving back
really was, we could see if maybe you and your young charge could continue on in peace.”

Joe and Casey locked eyes one more time, and Joe was half-defiant—You
wanted this!
—and half-pleading—
Save me!
Casey’s beseeching look back told Joe all he needed to know.

“Why sure, Mrs. Cahill. Whatever I can do to, uhm, deepen my commitment, right?” He turned and smiled at her, knowing that he had a nice one, with well-cared-for teeth and generous lips under his mustache and soul patch.

She was so close he could smell her cosmetics. “For one thing, you could call me Sandy.”

Joe licked his lips. “Well, Sandy, how ’bout we go into the other room and talk while Casey goes and does his homework.”

He looked up at Casey and rolled his eyes, while Casey mouthed “Thank you!” with almost desperate gratitude. Sure, the little bastard would thank him
now
! Where was he going to be when Joe had to ’fess up to Sharon, whom he had almost convinced to stay the night?

But it didn’t matter. He had a condom in his pocket, and Mrs. “Call me Sandy!” the social worker was rubbing his thighs, and he had a job to do. Joe had to go take one for the team.

J
OE
got out of the shower and found that Casey had made hamburgers. He’d even cut up tomatoes, lettuce, and pickles on a little plate and toasted the bread. Joe smiled tiredly and wondered if it would be overkill to take another shower before he went to bed.

“Thank you,” Casey said quietly as Joe sat down, and Joe nodded.

“She’s going to be back in three months.”

Casey grimaced. “I’m so sorry.”

“I bleached the couch.” He had a little spray bottle of Formula 409, which he used for the bathroom. The couch wasn’t going to smell right for a week.

“I really appreciate it.”

“I’m a shitty role model.”

“No!” Casey shook his head adamantly, and Joe was surprised to see that his eyes were shiny. He stood up abruptly, and the chair behind him went flying backward, and he launched himself at Joe for a long, wordless hug. Joe held him tightly, for once not concerned with propriety or breaking the boundary he’d worked so hard to establish. Suddenly just the warm, nonjudgmental human contact of someone who wasn’t going to hold that half hour of his life against him was really all he could ask for.

“You’re a great role model,” Casey whispered into his still damp hair. “You’re great.” He got hold of himself after a minute and went and sat down, and Joe missed him. Not in a sexual way—oh God, no!—but in a warm way. Still, he’d been raised to be honest, and he was about to correct Casey—what he’d done was easy. It was true, he wasn’t a fan of rules, but that half an hour had broken a big one—and for no other reason than that Joe didn’t want to deal with all of the other rule makers when what it came down to was that they were butting into how he lived his life in his house. Even more than that, he didn’t want to deal with Casey’s fear or his own ever-present fear that Casey would just turn around and bolt and run.

“I could have done something different,” Joe muttered, and Casey shook his head.

“My dad,” he said, and Joe grew very still. Two months—November, December, and now they were into January, and Casey hadn’t so much as breathed a word about his folks.

“My dad,” Casey repeated, breathing carefully, “snorted coke once a month—used to say it was his reward for being a good little corporate slave. So he voted for Reagan, and even has a picture of Nancy on his wall, and he’s snorting coke once a month, and I’m pretty sure he’s banging the secretary or someone, because Mom’s been drinking an awful lot. And both of them have dinner parties, and they trot me out and talk about my sports and my grades, and the way my dad talks to teachers when I don’t have the grades he wants?” Casey shivered and wiped his face with the back of his hand. “And it’s my fault too. I was a shitty student. If someone didn’t make me, I just didn’t do it. And here—” Casey gestured with his hand. Here. Here it was different. He swallowed and then looked at Joe with an expression so damned grown-up, Joe’s heart poinged a little. “Here what I do or say matters. You talk to me about the books, and they matter to you. You just did something a little wrong so I could stay. I’m so grateful, because the place I was from, that was a lot more wrong, okay?”

Joe nodded and looked at his hamburger. The kid had used ground beef instead of the frozen patties. He’d cut up little onions and peppers in it, like Joe had shown him. He’d still need that second shower, he thought, picking up the hamburger, but maybe he wouldn’t need the wire brush.

He took a bite and swallowed and smiled at Casey. “This is really good,” he said, and Casey smiled back a little.

“Thanks, Joe.”

“You’re welcome, kid.”

I
N
J
ANUARY
, not long after Joe soiled his morals and his pecker in Mrs. Kindness-is-Frickin’-Deep Cahill’s patoongie (and consequently broke up with Sharon Rosenthal), Joe took Casey to get his driver’s permit. Two weeks later he took him to get his license, and the truck, such as it was, was Casey’s to drive to school. After two weeks of working his ass off and catching up on his classes, Casey begged super nicely and was allowed to get a job working at the McDonald’s right up at the Foresthill exit. Casey often called it “the place where it all began,” but Joe could never get him to explain that.

One night Casey was late enough back from his shift—which ended at nine—that Joe began to pace, stalking from one end of the yard to the other, his hands in the pockets of his lined leather jacket, his booted feet crunching in the one or two inches of snow that had hit the ground the night before. He heard the puttering whine of a motorcycle with a small engine and a light frame about three minutes before the shitty-looking UJM with the peeling electric-teal paint job on the tank pulled up. Casey was on the back, and because there wasn’t a bitch seat, he was scooted forward so far his crotch must have been rubbing the other kid’s ass for the entire ride. His head was as bare as a baby’s ass, and he was shivering in the hooded sweatshirt he’d worn to school that morning.

The kid on the front was in full regalia: a helmet with a windscreen, leather jacket, leather riding gloves, and a scarf. Joe’s jaw tightened. Casey got off the back of the bike, blowing on his hands and looking apologetically at Joe.

“I’m sorry,” he chattered as he took a few awkward steps forward. “The truck wouldn’t start. I tried getting it jumped and everything, and I d-d-d-idn’t figure out what it was.”

Joe closed his eyes and swore. Okay. That was forgivable. Then he opened his eyes and narrowed them on the kid with the helmet.

“Take your helmet off,” he snarled, and the kid did. Joe didn’t like him any better without it. He had a narrow face, with acne (it was the age—Clearasil wasn’t helping Casey none either), but he sported about six hairs on his chin and five on his upper lip and was trying to pass them off as a goatee. His eyes were nice—blue-green, lined with dark lashes—but Joe was not going to be pacified by the thought that Casey’s hormones allowed him to overcome his common sense.

Joe glared at the boy long enough to make him uncomfortable.

“Casey, I thought you said you didn’t live with your dad?”

“C’mere,” Joe snapped. The kid did, taking a few tentative steps in. Joe gave him a quick open-palmed smack on the side of the head.