Summer Lessons Read online

  “Mmm,” Todd breathed. “You are making it so very hard to resist.” He smiled coyly from under blond lashes.

  Mason bit his lip, his stomach exploding into a nest of butterflies. “And isn’t a pole in the hole worth a cock in the bush?”

  Under his hand, the promising steel of young lust wilted into revulsion.

  Which was exactly how Todd looked at him as he pulled away and wandered dispiritedly down the path to his own dorm.

  Mason moaned and banged his head softly against the brick wall. “I’m never going to get laid.”

  When he got back into his dorm room, his cell phone tinkled in his pocket, so excruciatingly loud his roommate grumbled and fell out of bed. God, one day he’d figure out how to fix the settings. Face hot, he stumbled into the hallway and flipped open his phone.

  “Hi, sweetheart—just wanted to see if you’re driving home over spring break.”

  “Hi, Mom,” he said, both mortified and relieved to talk to his mother. Yeah, she’d seen every embarrassing moment in his life in living color, but yeah—she’d always managed to make them better. “Uh, okay. Sure.” Since he and Todd would obviously not be hooking up for the sex of a lifetime.

  “So.” She cleared her throat delicately. “Will you be bringing any, uh, friends home?”

  “No, Mom. Still a virgin.”

  His mother’s sigh of disappointment gusted through the earpiece. “That’s too bad, sweetheart. Your father and I are rooting for you!”

  He let out a helpless chuckle and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Good news is, at least I’m not using the word ‘penis’ anymore.”

  He recognized her vodka-and-Kool-Aid voice. “No?”

  “Nope. I scared this one away talking about the president.”

  “Well, your father and I think he’s a dick too, if that helps.”

  Mason couldn’t help it. He laughed. “It helps. You help, Mom.”

  “Well, that’s my pleasure, hon. We look forward to seeing you.”

  “Love you,” he said, knowing his voice pulsed with homesickness and not caring.

  “Love you too.”

  She hung up, and he leaned against his door, still chuckling. Well, yes, sex would have been nice, but you couldn’t beat family.

  And later that semester, when Mason finally lost his virginity to Todd Slezcyk, he thought that sex was woefully overrated. He still loved his family, though—and his mother, bless her soul, told him to keep trying. Eventually the sex thing would live up to all the condom commercials.

  Seven years ago

  MASON LOOKED at his watch and sighed. Gordon was late.

  Gordon wasn’t his first boyfriend, or even his second or third—but he was the first boyfriend Mason could see himself spending the rest of his life with.

  And Mason was going to ask him to move in at dinner tonight.

  He’d had reservations for a month—a lovely table in a restaurant by the bay. He’d recently bought a house in Walnut Creek and had been making the hour-long commute into the city every day. Gordon had been leaving his San Francisco apartment to come stay at Mason’s house nearly every weekend for the past seven months, and while they seemed to agree on everything from politics to books to movies, those weekends were….

  Well, boring.

  Blowjobs on Friday night. Butt sex on Saturday—Mason always topped. Snuggles Sunday morning.

  Mason wasn’t complaining, per se, but he was hoping that if they actually lived together, they would discover, perhaps, the joys of Sixty-nine Monday, Blindfold Tuesday, and Mason-Gets-to-Bottom Every-Other-Thursday. He loved Gordon as a friend and liked him as a lover, and maybe if they took this up another notch, he could love him as both.

  He was in the middle of a glass of champagne and visions of Sex-Toy Saturday when his phone rang.

  “Gordon?” he said happily, hoping this meant Gordon was close by—maybe just caught in traffic, since his office was a scant two miles away from the restaurant.

  “Mason? Uh, so, you’re at the restaurant?”

  “Yeah! Are you on your way? I can order.”

  “No… uh, Mason, I hate to do this on the phone.”

  Oh God. “Really? I’ve had reservations for a month, and you’re going to do this on the phone?”

  “How do you know what I’m going to do?” Gordon whined. “Dammit, Mason, that’s pretty presumptuous of you!”

  “Well, tell me what you’re going to do!”

  “I’m going to….” He could hear Gordon cringe. “Break up with you.”

  “I knew that’s what you were going to do.” Sex-Toy Saturday died a quiet death. “Why?” He didn’t care why. He felt like asking was a courtesy, really—a sense of closure for Gordon that Mason didn’t need.

  “Mason… I care about you—I do. But… you know. We just have different needs. You… you like sex. I… I’m not so crazy about it.”

  And Mason heard the unspoken two words in that sentence. “With me. You’re not crazy about sex with me.”

  “I didn’t say that….”

  “You didn’t have to. Talk to you later, Gordon. If you want any of your stuff, you’ll have to come get it yourself.”

  “Mace, don’t—”

  Mason hung up. Goddammit. Here he was at a place where they served some of the best steak and lobster in the city, the kind of place where the amuse-bouche alone went down the throat like butter, and the guy he’d hoped to share it with didn’t want to share anything with him—not even spit.

  Fuck.

  He signaled the waiter, who looked at him apprehensively. “Is the other member of your party—”

  “Not coming?” Mason said shortly. “Perfidious? Really boring in bed? Yes. Yes, he is.”

  The waiter, a young man a little younger than Mason, looked Mason up and down and then smiled prettily. “I’m not boring in bed,” he said bluntly. “And I’ll be happy to come.”

  Mason blinked, pleased. The waiter had dark brown hair, brown eyes with green flecks in them, and a square jaw with dimples in his chin. He had a smile that could get cooked spaghetti hard.

  “Are you getting off soon?” Mason said hopefully.

  “Well, my shift’s over in fifteen minutes,” the kid said. “Maybe I can get off later.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Logan. Yours?”

  “Mason. Logan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How would you like to be part of a new tradition?”

  “What would we call that?” Logan asked, standing so close to the table Mason could see the sizable package outlined in his slacks.

  “Find-Someone-to-Fuck Friday.”

  Logan’s throaty chuckle warmed Mason to his toes. “I am so there.”

  “Order for us both,” Mason told him, enjoying this very much. “And then come join me.”

  The next morning Mason woke up in a hotel room covered in come next to a trashcan full of condoms. His wallet was missing. There was a note next to the bed.

  Paid for the room, left your car keys. Took the cash and the credit cards. You were a sweet lay—but maybe next time buy a dildo. Less expensive and easier to clean.

  Mason rolled over on his back and peeled the sheets off his despoiled body.

  Yep. It had been a great ride, but maybe he should stick to Masturbation Monday for a while.

  Eight months ago

  “MACE, I’M sorry.”

  Mason looked up from the tumbler of Glenlivet he’d poured himself just before Dane walked in the door of his Walnut Creek home.

  “Not your fault,” Mason said, knocking back the whiskey with a shocking disregard for how much it cost. Well, Mason’s job was sort of spectacular. He could afford the best. It had been one of his primary attractions for Ira.

  And then Ira had started fucking Mason’s boss.

  Now the job and the money and the house were no longer attractive.

  “How did you find out?” Dane asked, grabbing a tumbler for himself and sitting d
own kitty-corner at the rather long table. Mason and Ira had entertained a lot in the past four years. Mason wasn’t so great at entertaining, really—he still managed to say the wrong damned thing at the wrong damned time. But Ira had been spectacular at it, ordering the right wines, knowing the right jokes, knowing how to tell them to the right people.

  Mason had been so grateful, actually, because Ira had smoothed the way with Mason’s boss. Mason’s first social interaction with the man had been to tell him how much he enjoyed casual Fridays, because his first job out of college had been for a guy with a stick up his ass who made employees wear polo shirts to company softball games.

  There were no casual Fridays at Bent-Co. Mason had been showing up in khakis and polo shirts on chutzpah alone.

  Fuck.

  But Ira had been able to make Roy Carruthers see the humor in the situation. And apparently Ira enjoyed doing that so much that he and Roy got together at least twice a week to laugh and laugh.

  Or that’s what Mason assumed they had been doing when he picked up his dry cleaning during his lunch hour one day and spotted the two of them coming out of a hotel lobby, laughing and razor-burned and chummy.

  And then he’d looked at Ira’s credit-card summary—he left his reports on the desk in the study, where they both sat and did bills and used the home console—and saw the twice-weekly expenditures. Oh, wasn’t that nice. One day one of them got the drinks and the next time that guy got the room.

  Wouldn’t Roy’s wife be surprised?

  But Mason wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. He had enough trouble cleaning his own house—and that’s what he did. But first there was the argument, and the denial, and then there were the recriminations on Ira’s part, about how Mason was some sort of savant who couldn’t be around people and who didn’t have a romantic bone in his body and who might have been great in the sack but whose pillow talk was awkward and disgusting.

  Mason didn’t know what to say about that. He liked to talk about sex. He liked to touch and taste and feel—for him, sex was all about the senses. There were no bright lights, no trips through the tunnel to see Jesus—there was just the glory of physical sensation. The rest of it—the building a life part—that was the part where his heart got all squooshy.

  He had not, as of yet, connected the two.

  He’d told his mother that when he’d called to tell her about the breakup, and he’d heard her sigh from Redwood City. “Oh Mason—honey, you have the best heart. And when you find someone—the someone—it’s going to be someone who gets that about you.”

  “The only person who gets that about me is my mother,” he’d said, trying to make things light.

  “And your little brother, who thinks you walk on water.”

  “Sh—let’s not tell him the truth, okay?”

  “I think your little brother has it spot-on, Mason Hayes. If you’re going to disillusion him, you’re going to have to tell him yourself. He’s on his way over.”

  And that’s where they were now. Dane had hotfooted it over from their parents’ house, where he was living as he finished stage one of school, to apparently drink really expensive Scotch.

  “So he was cheating on you for how long?” Dane asked, sipping appreciatively. He’d changed his major three times as an undergrad, and the money his parents had saved for his education had run out. He was currently working two jobs to pay for his tuition—he told Mason once that he was starting to believe Miller really was beer.

  “Two years.” Mason took a gulp, because as Ira said, the finer things in life were wasted on him.

  “What a douche nugget. You want I should take a hit out on him? I work with some really unsavory people at the restaurant—they know people.”

  Mason laughed, feeling the burn behind his eyes. “I’m sure they do,” he said, loving his little brother so much in that moment that he forgave him completely for coming along as a baby and sucking all of the attention from Mason. “And no—it’s okay. He doesn’t make that much as a graphic artist—”

  “He’s not that good, Mace. He’s not. I mean, I never told you this, but I used to bring your guys’ holiday cards into school and have the real graphic artists make fun of them. They enjoyed that. They enjoyed that a lot.”

  And the laughter burbled up, unstoppable, much like Dane himself. Dane was just as odd a duck as Mason was, but Dane made that work for him. He wore his hair messy and his beard neat, and the fine lines developing in the corners of his big brown eyes were mostly from laughter and a little bit from confusion—Dane’s love life was less conventional than Mason’s in that he wore his condition of singleness like a beacon, right up until a sudden passion sucked him away from his family, his studies, his bills, and his common sense. After he almost got kicked out of school—and changed his major for the third time—his parents had given him a good talking-to and then pulled him toward a shrink.

  With a few memorable glitches, Dane had taken to his new medication regimen like a champ, and the last four years of pre-veterinary school had been much less turbulent. But Dane was still not looking for a permanent lover, and Mason worried about him.

  Until right now, when it appeared Dane had the right idea all along.

  “So,” Dane said, taking another drink. “I got accepted to Davis.”

  “For veterinary school?” The school was famous for that field. “That’s awesome!” He smiled at his brother in relief—good news. He’d needed it.

  “And I’m going to move out of Mom and Dad’s house and be all on my own far away.” Dane looked at him calmly and blinked his wide-set brown eyes at his big brother, and Mason looked at his little brother and understood.

  “Are you worried?” he asked, wishing Dane all the happiness in the world but knowing that sometimes happiness was so much harder than it sounded. Bipolar disorder was never going away, and Dane put on a good game face, but balancing his meds had been a big fat pain in the ass. Having a combo now that even allowed him a sip of Scotch was a victory, and Mason would totally trade places with him if he could. Mason didn’t need friends or lovers—God knew he managed to fuck up any combination of the two. But Dane deserved it all.

  “Yes,” Dane said, smiling briefly so Mason would know he was serious. “Yes, I’m worried. Mom and Dad are… you know. Mom and Dad.”

  “Awesome,” Mason said quietly, because who could argue.

  “Yeah. And Mom has this way of making me remember my meds without nagging, and Dad has this way of just grounding me when something has triggered me and I need to take that one pill for the really bad days, and….” He shook his head. “And is it stupid that I like not going off the deep end? That I like knowing that if I lose my shit, someone will be there to catch me?”

  “No,” Mason said. “Not at all.”

  Dane looked up at him briefly and swished his glass around. “So, can you leave all this behind and catch me?”

  And that’s how Mason decided to move to Sacramento with his little brother so Dane could go to school and Mason could get a new job and they’d both know that somebody was there to catch them.

  But sometimes your little brother isn’t the person who needs to catch you. And sometimes you need to be ready to catch somebody else.

  So, Five Minutes Ago

  “HE WAS cute,” Dane said as he and Mason got into the car. They were parked in front of a modest house in a tiny Citrus Heights suburb, where Mason’s friend Skip had thrown a lovely Christmas party for his friends on his rec league soccer team—and Mason and Dane.

  “Skipper?” Mason asked wistfully, because yeah, Skip was cute. Six foot three, blond, blue-eyed, with this sort of open kindness in his face that forgave anything—even Mason’s inappropriate come-on when Mason first called him for tech service.

  Some things never changed, and Mason’s foot-in-mouth disease was one of them.

  “I’ve met Skipper,” Dane said dryly as Mason started the car. “I thought he was cute then, but he was taken then. Still taken now.
”

  Mason grunted, not wanting to talk about his crush. “And Richie is a good match for him,” he admitted, feeling gracious.

  “If anyone hurts Skip, Richie will kill them and stuff their body in a car trunk and put the car in a crusher,” Dane said matter-of-factly. “The guy’s like an arctic shrew—he looks cute and fuzzy, but if you put him and three other shrews in a bucket with the lid on, when you open the bucket the next day, there’s going to be a fat Richie and a whole lot of blood.”

  Mason’s eyes widened. “Did you take your meds today?” he asked, a little panicked because it was the holiday season and things had gotten hectic. They were driving down to Redwood City tomorrow to spend Christmas with their parents, and Dane had endured a grueling series of finals that had ended two weeks before.

  “Yes, Mason, I took my meds!” Dane waved his hands. “You’re missing the point.”

  “And what’s the point?” Mason piloted the Lexus SUV through the small neighborhood. He’d had a sedan before they moved, but just like with the house in Walnut and Ira and his job at Bent-Co, Mason wasn’t sorry to see the change. He was now vice president of product quality at Tesko Tech. He still didn’t actually know what he did, and he was sadly still in a lot of meetings. He made enough to pay the mortgage on a decent-size house in Fair Oaks, and his commute to work wasn’t bad. Dane’s commute to school was heinous—he left early three days a week and came home after eight—but Mason made sure he didn’t have to work during his last few years of school.

  Well, he’d made some money on the Walnut Creek house, and he had nobody to support. If you couldn’t spoil the shit out of your little brother, what was your purpose in life?

  “The point was, that Jefferson guy—”

  “Terry Jefferson?” Because Mason and Jefferson had talked for quite a bit while Jefferson’s mother sort of hunkered in the background, glaring at them.