String Boys Page 10

  He gave a moan of his own and threw his head back against the couch.

  Kelly slid off his lap and to his knees, his head between Seth’s thighs. This time Kelly wrapped his lips around Seth’s cock—cock! Yes, a cock! What a wonderful word—and sucked gently.

  “Harder,” Seth begged. “But no teeth.”

  And harder.

  And he used his fist at the base and his lips on the head.

  And that’s about as far as he got before Seth came again.

  This time when Kelly sat on his lap, they just made out, soft and slow until Seth wondered when his phone would go off.

  And then he sat up abruptly, dumping Kelly on his ass.

  “What?” Kelly asked, sounding fuzzy.

  “My alarm! Kelly, I didn’t set my alarm! It’s seven forty-five!”

  “Oh shit!”

  Kelly popped up, and the next few minutes were a mad scramble. Kelly’s shirt was full of come and sweat and Seth threw it in his laundry and gave Kelly one of his own. Both of them needed a washcloth, and wiping off was hard because they were tender, and finally, at seven fifty-one, they were both done and sitting in the front room with the TV on, trying to look casual, when Seth’s dad walked in.

  “Hey, Seth,” he said, his voice low and unusually quiet. “You have a good, uh, practice?”

  Seth and Kelly looked at each other and tried not to smirk.

  “Yeah. It was okay. Uh, Kelly’s folks should be home in a few. They said to come up and eat ice cream cake when they got here.”

  Craig Arnold took a deep breath and looked at Seth. For no reason, his eyes seemed a little shiny in the lamplight, but he smiled anyway. “Did you even eat dinner?” he asked, sounding unaccountably plaintive.

  Seth grimaced. “No.” And as if to prove it, Kelly’s stomach growled, punctuating the silence.

  Dad laughed then, and some of the sadness left his voice. “Well, we’ve got frozen burritos. I’ll put them in the microwave and come watch TV with you guys until Kelly’s folks get home. How’s that?”

  “Sure, Dad. Uh, we were going to ask you something anyway.” And it was funny, because when he looked at Kelly for confirmation, neither of them was thinking about sex, just like that.

  “Yeah? What’s on your mind?”

  Seth and Kelly started talking about the kids by the bus stop, and how Castor Durant was the son of someone at Isela’s church, and he was threatening without saying anything, and they were afraid.

  Dad came back into the room with the burritos on plates and some apple slices with them, because he made sure Seth had vegetables or fruit with every meal.

  He regarded the boys seriously and grabbed the remote to put the show they were watching on pause.

  “Are you afraid of these boys?” he asked bluntly, taking his seat in the battered corduroy recliner. Seth used to sit there alone, doing his homework, before Kelly’s dad had started taking Seth’s dad to meetings.

  “Yes,” Seth replied without hesitation. He darted his eyes to Kelly, who was nodding quickly.

  “They’re nobody to mess with. They smell bad. Like they been lighting up. And they’re dirty. And they bump into us all the time. And call us names. It’s, like, if my brother just goes and decides to turn on us, we’re toast, ’cause Seth can run, but neither of us can fight, and—”

  “What sort of names?” Dad asked, looking them both in the eye in turn.

  Seth’s stomach grew cold. “Just… you know. Names.” Oh God. No. Not going there. “Just… you know. They’re not nice. And there’s rumors about them and drugs and kids and the school and—could you just make sure Linda doesn’t let the girls walk home alone anymore?”

  Dad nodded and gave them both a weak smile, chewing thoughtfully. “I think that’s a very good idea. And you know what? I don’t have any ties to that church. Maybe I’ll stop by and give Castor Durant’s dad a happy hello.”

  “Yeah, just don’t tell Isela’s dad you like my happy ass,” Kelly muttered. “That man does not like me.”

  “I’m starting to get that,” Dad said grimly. “And he probably wouldn’t like Seth either.”

  “I would imagine not.”

  Seth and Kelly exchanged glances again, and Seth’s dad hit Play on the remote.

  Later, Seth would remember that moment and think about how funny it was. Kids always thought they knew everything, when adults often saw through them from the start.

  He’d also think about his father’s lingering guilt about the bad times, the dark times, when there had been yelling and hitting, and about how his dad had worked so very hard to fix the thing he had broken when they’d both been young and sad.

  And how this moment, right here, went a long way to putting paid to all that went on before.

  A Dark Alley

  “AGNES!” SETH called, treading water by where the rope swing let off. “I’m freezing! C’mon, baby girl, do it or let me come in!”

  Kelly wrapped a towel around his shoulders and made himself comfortable on the camp chair.

  “I think we should bring Seth on all our outings,” Mom said next to him. “He’s the best toy the girls have ever had.”

  Well, of course he was. While Kelly and his dad were busy helping Mom build the camp and help with the dishes and the food—and Matty was busy showing Isela that he didn’t have to do anything but be freaking useless unless he was stepping and fetching for her—Seth was playing with the girls, inventing games, going swimming, and taking them out in the rented canoe. Matty sneeringly said he made a great little woman.

  Kelly was done with his older brother.

  But he was falling more and more in love with Seth every day.

  Soccer Wednesdays had continued. Seth’s birthday gift had been another blowjob, this one with Seth lying in bed and Kelly between his spread thighs.

  Kelly had also given him a present—stickers to put on his violin case, because his father had given him his own violin for his birthday. It was used, because a new one, custom-made, would have cost more than Seth’s dad made in a year, but Seth’s face had lit up the moment he played it.

  His father had put his heart and soul into finding that gift.

  The stickers on the violin case were rainbow ones—LGBTQ if someone wanted to read that into them—but they also had a leprechaun on them, and Kelly was very aware his name could be construed as Irish.

  He told Seth it was his way of sticking to Seth through thick and thin.

  He also told Seth that meant he could go to Bridgford and not worry about losing Kelly, but Seth had sort of… tuned out of the rest of that discussion, the same way he’d done with his father for the past two months. Here it was, the beginning of April. They were on spring break, and Seth had still not made a decision.

  It was driving his teachers batshit crazy.

  It was driving Amara batshit crazy too, because she had the same opportunity, but she didn’t want to go without a friend.

  Kelly had finally taken her aside one day and told her point-blank. “Look. We both want him to do what’s best for him, but he’s really stupid right now. You should go. You have his cell number. You have his address. For that matter, you have mine. Write him. Call him. Text him. If nothing else, he might come in the middle of next year because you frickin’ nagged him into it, okay?”

  Amara had drawn her little cupid-bow mouth into a weird figure-eight shape, and she patted his cheek. “Kelly, has it occurred to you that you’re the reason he’s stupid right now?”

  Kelly grimaced. They hadn’t said anything about their relationship, but of the three of them, she was the least stupid. Seth had been right—she was funny and smart. The first day she’d come to sit down with them, Matty had given her a dirty look and said, “Just don’t eat my dessert, okay?”

  Before Seth and Kelly could tell him to go to hell, she’d said, “I’m a good girl. Everybody knows we don’t eat pudding until we’re married. You go ahead and have all the pudding you want.”

&nb
sp; And then she’d just stared at him, her eyes big and emerald green, and Seth and Kelly suddenly realized that she’d said something incredibly filthy.

  They burst out laughing, and they could see when it hit Matty, because his ears turned practically purple. Instead of laughing—like any decent person would do when someone had just thrown that much awesome shade over their heads—Matty stood up and stalked to the trash, where he’d thrown his pudding away. Then he’d grabbed Isela from where she was having lunch with her friends and made her follow him to wherever. Probably a cave, so they could hang upside down like bats and eat pudding that way.

  Kelly loved Amara so much for that moment, he gave her his dessert with a grin, and she thanked him.

  “As long as this is the only pudding you expect me to eat,” she said primly, licking the foil lid.

  “Naw, I don’t get that way with girls,” Kelly said, and then he and Seth froze. He’d meant that to be, he didn’t get crude with girls, but in that silence, they could all hear the truth.

  “Well, that’s too bad,” Amara muttered, rolling her eyes. “And I’m so surprised. I could have a heart attack and die from that surprise. Next you’ll tell me that pudding is bad for me and I should cut down on carbs.”

  “Pudding is the food of the gods,” Kelly argued. “And you should eat anything you want. I swear. Girls and being skinny. You’re great. If I liked girls even a little, I’d date you. But I don’t. So sit with us all the time and keep being our friend and ignore my dumbass fuckin’ brother, okay?”

  And that had been that. Amara had been solid with them. She texted Seth, she texted Kelly, and both of them had one mutual project to work on.

  Getting Seth off his ass to commit to Bridgford.

  But Seth was being Seth about it. He’d play all the beautiful music in the world, but figuring out how to make that work for him, take him places, was just… outside his universe.

  Especially now that he and Kelly were taking Soccer Wednesdays to some unprecedented levels.

  They hadn’t made it past the blowjob yet. Kelly kept hoping they’d manage to work a sixty-nine into their repertoire, but every time one of them touched the other with his mouth, there was come everywhere and it was game over.

  It didn’t matter.

  They were in blowjob territory, giving and receiving, and Kelly couldn’t decide which he liked better.

  On the one hand, having Seth’s mouth on him, as well as his rough, strong fingers—he was incredibly talented and enthusiastic. At one point, he asked Kelly if he should take up the trumpet so his mouth muscles could get tighter, and then he’d blown Kelly stupid. So Kelly told him to take a hard pass or he wouldn’t be able to think because all his brains would be sucked out his dick, and as it was, it was a close call to make sure that didn’t happen.

  On the other hand, touching Seth’s body was like the holiest part of church that no priest ever talked about. Making him shiver and make his noises and gasp and moan and come?

  That was Kelly’s best thing.

  It’s too bad he didn’t get graded on that shit, because he sure did do a lot of studying and planning and thinking about it. He could practically write a paper on the best way to suck Seth’s dick, starting with teasing the end and finishing up with a little tug on his balls and a hard, slow stroke inside Kelly’s hot mouth.

  But it had taken two months’ worth of Wednesdays for them to get there, and Kelly was falling down in the make-Seth-not-be-stupid department. Now, on their long-awaited camping trip in the Sierra Foothills, he watched as Agnes finally committed to the rope swing, letting go with a shriek in the middle of the lake and practically drowning Seth in her scramble to hang on to someone after she surfaced.

  Seth pushed up out of the water, though, and laughed with her. “You did great!” he sputtered. “You want to do it again?”

  “Yes! Yes! Lily! Lulu! You have to try this thing!”

  Kelly’s mom laughed softly. “I’ll have to make Seth get out in a minute. His lips are blue.”

  Kelly nodded and grunted, still thoughtful.

  “What’s wrong?” His mom was so very good about knowing when something was wrong. She hadn’t said a word to him about Matty, or the way they’d stopped talking and barely acknowledged they were together when walking home. But she didn’t let Matty or even Isela talk shit about gay people or poor people or any of the people Isela’s church seemed to hate so much.

  “He needs to commit to that school,” he said.

  “Bridgford?”

  “Yeah. Mom, have you heard him play?”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “That’s… it’s an amazing talent, you know that.”

  “He can go anywhere. He could have apartments in New York and Paris.” Kelly had read about Paris and its art galleries and artists. Part of him wanted to go to LA, where the street artists were, but a whole other part wanted to see the Mona Lisa, even though he knew it was only the size of a postage stamp and fifty-thousand people saw it every day. “He could play for a million people who would all walk away thinking, ‘That’s the sound of God crying,’ and it would make their hearts better.”

  He didn’t realize he was so close to crying until his voice cracked.

  “You would miss him,” she said. Well, who couldn’t see that?

  “But what sort of”—boyfriend—“friend would I be if I didn’t make him go? If I just kept him in our neighborhood. It’s not fair, Mom, but it would be even less fair if he didn’t do what he’s supposed to do.”

  “Have you stopped to think about what Seth would want?” Linda asked gently. She seemed to know something Kelly didn’t about that—but Kelly knew a lot of things she didn’t know too. He knew that Seth didn’t want to leave his father because he was afraid Craig would start drinking again. He knew Seth was also afraid that the peace they had, the peace where Seth was loved and cared for and wanted, would go away. He knew that Seth tried really hard to keep his head in the here and now so he could do things like get to school on time and do his homework on time. Kelly had seen his phone. It was full of reminders like “Get up early to write paper,” and “Brush teeth every day,” and “Scrub all the places super good Tuesday night.” Kelly was especially fond of that last one.

  He knew what Seth looked like right after he’d come, and he was vulnerable and dreamy and he said sweet things that no boy said if he wasn’t in love.

  And he knew that Seth wouldn’t admit to wanting to go to Bridgford because it might hurt his dad or Kelly or even Agnes and Lily and Lulu—but Kelly didn’t want to say that because it would mean saying too much about himself.

  And that would hurt.

  “I know he needs to go,” Kelly said simply, for once not talking about all the thousands of things in his head all at the same time.

  “Well, mijo, I think if he listens to anybody, he’ll listen to you.”

  Kelly rolled his eyes at his own mother. “Sure,” he said sullenly. “Here, watch this.” He sat up straighter. “Get out of the water, dumbass! Your teeth are chattering!”

  “L-let m-m-me c-c-atch the tw-twins first!” Seth chattered back, and Kelly looked at his mother pointedly.

  His mother raised her eyebrows. “Javi, honey?” she said sweetly, and Kelly’s dad looked up from the fishing pole he was trying to set up, because he promised Matty there would be fishing, even though Xavier Cruz had never fished a day in his life.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get Seth out of the water, would you? He’s freezing.”

  Dad set the fishing pole down, made sure the hooks were in the tackle box and sealed it, then waded out into the late afternoon waters of Lake Sugarpine like he was marching to his doom. “Holy God, Seth. Get your ass in to shore and warm up before dinner. Jesus, kid, if we bring you home like a giant popsicle, your dad will never forgive us.”

  “Daddy!” Lily called, standing on the granite rock with her hands on the rope swing. “Daddy, Seth was gonna catch us!”

  “No, he wasn’t
!” Xavier called back. “He was going to get you to dump your fuzzy butt out here and then try not to get dropped on. I can do that just as well. Now come on, you three. One last jump with the rope for all of you, and then go up on shore. Seth, go.”

  “Ok-k-k-k-k-ay.” Seth chattered his way to shore, walking stiffly in his water shoes, probably because his joints had frozen up. Linda stood with a big brightly colored towel and wrapped it around his shoulders, and Kelly tried hard not to be mesmerized by the way Seth’s dark brown nipples drew up into teeny little bullets in the cold.

  “You, go sit in the sun next to Kelly,” she ordered. “I’m going to go see if the chili’s almost ready and start the hot dogs. When you can actually move again, you two can come up and set the table, since we can’t trust you to have the good sense not to freeze to death.” Then she stood and pitched her voice across the lake. “Javi! When you get the girls out of the water, come make a fire! It’s going to be chilly tonight!”

  “I hear you.” Dad frowned. “Where’s Matty and that gi—I mean Isela. He needs to help too!”

  Kelly’s mother rolled her eyes. “They’re off taking a nature walk,” she said, insinuation dripping from her voice.

  “A nature walk? They went to go find out about the birds and the bees is more like it!” Dad laughed. “Augh! Lily! Warn me!”

  Kelly’s sister swung out of nowhere and dropped on his head. They went down in the water, floundering, and Kelly took the moment of privacy to make sure Seth was warming up.

  “Your lips are blue, mijo,” he said softly. “You need to get out of the water sooner, or your balls will disappear.”

  Seth made that dorky little laugh in his throat and bobbed his head, and Kelly wished they were alone so he could rub his thumb on Seth’s blue lips and maybe put some color back in them.

  “So,” Seth said, his voice still an undertone, “you think your b-b-rother will still—”

  “Sneak off to get laid?” Kelly finished. “I hope so. Best time of the trip!”

  They didn’t do anything, not really. Last night, Matty had waited until they both grew quiet and their breathing grew even, then had snuck out of the tent, mumbling something about the bathroom. But they’d both heard Isela getting out of the girls’ tent at the same time. Mom and Dad were sleeping on an air mattress on the floor of the minivan, so they probably didn’t hear. Either way, Matty and Isela snuck off to be alone at night, and Kelly and Seth kissed.