Summer Lessons Read online

  “A man can always hope,” he said a little wistfully.

  “Yeah.” The sigh on the other end of the line hurt something in Mason’s chest, but he couldn’t say why. “I’ve given up hope. I’ll take soccer instead.”

  “Would you take golf, or are you too scared of rich douche bags?” The words were out before Mason could stop them.

  “Fine. I’ll play your silly rich person’s game, since you’re going to clean your own cleats and all.”

  Mason was about to fist pump before he realized he didn’t know if this was a date or not. Or if Jefferson was really gay. Or if he’d be interested in Mason if he was.

  “So when’s good for you?” Caution, Mason, caution—let’s try not to say anything about sucking on his neck and fondling his penis before we know the important things.

  “No time is actually good for me,” Jefferson muttered, “but since we have three weeks before the next soccer season picks up and my mom’s used to me being gone on Saturdays, can we fit it in there?”

  Mason had to think about it. Tee times usually had to be reserved a couple of weeks in advance at almost any course in the area, but…. “How early can you be there?” he asked hopefully. “Because if we can do a six-thirty tee time, we can squeeze that in.”

  Jefferson’s low-throated chuckle was one of the dirtiest, most sexually arousing things Mason had ever heard.

  “Squeezing things in? I can do that.”

  “Gurgh.” So help him, it was the only thing he could say. That one sound, and he was suddenly sporting a chubby in his family gathering slacks, and his only hope was that he didn’t go for full-blown wood or he’d renew the lease on his circumcision.

  “So, the Saturday after New Year’s? Like, a week and a half from now?”

  “Yeah,” Mason managed. “I’ll call you if they’re full up.”

  “I can do full up too,” Jefferson said, and how did that sound suggestive? Mason hadn’t been laid in nearly ten months—that was the only answer for how “full up” could sound like an orgy porno.

  “I, uh, don’t know how to take that?” Apparently Mason took it like sex on tap, but that was probably his own hormonal imbalance at this point.

  “Reserve the day, even if you can’t reserve the course,” Jefferson said cryptically. In the background, Mason heard his mother’s voice shouting, “Terrence, are you going to be on the phone all day? It’s Christmas. Do you even care? Weren’t we going to church in half an hour?”

  “I’ll be there,” Jefferson said, his voice firm. “You just text me with where.”

  “Will do,” Mason said, and then, because he could hear some of the desperation in Jefferson’s voice, “I promise.”

  “See you then.” And then he hung up.

  “Dane!” Mason hissed, grabbing his phone from the island console and thrusting it at his brother.

  “What?” Dane snarled, because losing sleep had never been his favorite thing.

  “I need you to do something for me—”

  “Now?”

  “Shut up and reserve a tee time for me at Timber Creek.”

  “You woke me out of a sound sleep for a golf game? I’ll never make you breakfast burritos again!”

  Mason fumbled with one hand and made Dane take the phone. “What you just slept through was Jefferson calling me up and scheduling a golf game. And inviting me onto the soccer team. And… and laughing. Laughing like… like chocolate-coated hormone sin. And I really need to play that fucking golf game!”

  He was hyperventilating, oh yes he was, but his groin still ached a little from that laugh. And his heart was still beating with the adrenaline high of being called up and… oh hell. At the very least it was a play date with a friend, and since Ira had gotten all of those with the split, Mason was going to take that at face value and run gleefully onto the golf course.

  “Oh. I slept through that? Talk about unfair.” Dane straightened up and started messing with Mason’s phone. “Of course, you need to make that reservation right now. But you know what the price is gonna be?”

  “You need to stop somewhere?”

  “I’m feeling like a highly caffeinated milkshake. Next Starbucks you see.”

  Awesome. He was going to be side-seat granny driving all the way to San Mateo. But that was okay, because Mason had a play date with a guy who could get him hard with just a laugh.

  Even if Jefferson was straight, it was the most exciting thing to happen to Mason since Skipper didn’t sue him for suggesting gay porn as a perfectly appropriate office activity.

  “HOW ARE you doing, son? Have you met anybody?” Mason’s father, Roger, was the most dad-looking dad Mason had ever met. He looked like Ferris Buehler’s father, or the dad in American Pie. Not that those two dads looked alike, but Roger Hayes gave off that same “dorky dad doing his best” vibe. He was tall, with silvered brown hair, a thin, handsome face, and a kind smile. Mason’s mother had sat next to Mason at the principal’s meetings and the teacher’s meetings and the meetings with baffled parents—and Mason’s dad had listened to the breakdown and then taken Mason and Dane out to eat and asked them what else they’d seen that day.

  It had been the “what else they’d seen” that Mason had lived for.

  If Dad could focus on the other 95 percent of the day besides the part that Mason had fucked up, then Mason could believe there was more to his life than just his fuckups.

  It was that simple.

  It’s what had gotten Mason through 95 percent of his life, actually.

  So Dad’s gentle probing into Mason’s love life wasn’t a bad thing, really—Mason just didn’t know how to answer.

  “Have I met anybody? Well, I had a terrible crush on a guy from work,” he admitted. “But he’s sort of taken.”

  “That’s not promising,” Roger said. “Not gonna lie.”

  Mason’s smile stretched his cheeks. His dad could say things like that—“not gonna lie”—in spite of being born and raised on the peninsula in a conservative neighborhood. He could blend in anywhere, unlike Mason, who had needed to channel Fred MacMurray just so he could talk to Skip on the phone without going “Nurk!”

  “Well, the good news is that he’s a friend now, and his boyfriend isn’t going to stage a hit, and his best friend is now Dane’s best friend too.”

  “Wow—he may not be happiness, but he sounds like a carrier.”

  Dad. “He is.” Mason let out a breath, and some of his carefully nurtured optimism about Jefferson faded, and some of his worry about Dane surfaced. “But, you know, Dane’s getting his hopes up about the friend, and I….” God. Dane had been such a gleeful baby. And when his moods were balanced, he was a pretty gleeful adult. But Mason had been there through some of his dark times—had carried him kicking and screaming to the doctor’s once after a bad breakup, when he’d holed up inside his dorm and stopped eating.

  Mason would do anything to make sure his brother didn’t get his heart broken.

  “You worry,” Roger said, making himself comfortable in the recliner next to the couch where Mason was sitting. They were pretending to watch Jurassic Park on television, because it was a better alternative than football, which nobody in Mason’s family followed. Dane and Janette were in the kitchen, doing the actual cooking. Mason and Roger liked food—they were fans, in fact—but they were not actual participants in the food-making sport. If it hadn’t been for Dane, Mason would have survived on chicken sandwiches for the past five months.

  “You don’t?” Mason said, his voice throbbing with anxiety for his little brother.

  “No, I do.” Roger laced his fingers around his knees and stretched. “I just… I’m getting a bit old, Mason. There comes a time when you have to have faith in your children, even if they’ve got problems.”

  “You’re not old,” Mason said automatically, but he could do math too—if he was thirty-six, that made his dad not in his sixties anymore.

  “Okay, I’m not old.” Roger smiled at him gently.
“But I do have faith in you.”

  “It’s just easier to do that when I keep my mouth shut,” Mason said glumly.

  Roger’s smile turned wicked. “Why would you want to do that when your words always give us the most delightful surprises?”

  Mason’s eyes burned. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Has Samuel L. Jackson been eaten by the fucking velociraptor yet?”

  “Nope—but the gamekeeper who looks like the velociraptor has.”

  “Spielberg did that in Jaws too—it’s a handy trick.”

  Mason nodded and smiled at his dad, but he really couldn’t talk right now. He was too busy getting excited that some guy who thought he was a rich douche bag wanted to play golf.

  Break for Balls

  DANE’S CHOICES for painting his room and tiling his bathroom were bold and simple—sky blue and white. Mason couldn’t complain, because the colors brightened the house but they didn’t clash with the neutral carpeting in the hallway, and when Dane accessorized with dark purple bedding and curtains, the extra color gave the whole thing a pop.

  They stood back the Friday after Christmas and looked it over, both of them sweaty and filthy and really, really glad that they could turn the water back on after the incident with the water main when they were replacing the toilet.

  “We did good,” Dane said in awe.

  “You did good,” Mason praised. “I was a credit card and a strong back.”

  “No, seriously—you looked up how to use all the stuff. That one wrench looks like something you see in cartoons only—I don’t know how you thought it was a real tool.”

  Mason laughed, secretly pleased. The truth was, he’d been studying how to redecorate Dane’s rooms for a month. “Ira hired someone to do the house in Walnut Creek,” he confessed. “I just… I wanted to, you know—”

  “Prove you didn’t need that two-timing fucknugget to make your house a home?” Dane supplied.

  Mason wrapped his arm around Dane’s sweaty, paint-spattered shoulders and hauled him into a hug. “Just my baby brother, whom I love,” he said sweetly.

  “Yeah, yeah—I’m cleaning up. We already made that deal. Now go shower. Don’t you have a golf game tomorrow?”

  “Next week!” Mason called as he trotted off to shower. But speaking of…. He grabbed his phone and texted Jefferson as he waited for the shower to get hot.

  Ready for golf next week?

  I’m ready for golf TOMORROW and I’ve never even played.

  Oh hell. Shit—I could try to find a driving range to visit to work on your swing.

  How about I teach you soccer?

  Mason stared at the text. Oh. Okay. Well, if whatever they were doing didn’t work out tomorrow, he still had a tee time next week. Why not?

  He refused to get excited about it. Any of it.

  But he couldn’t shake Jefferson’s eyes peeping shyly out at him through his hair either.

  MASON SHOWED up at Tempo Park bright and early Saturday morning, cleats in hand, wearing shin guards, soccer socks, and knee sweats.

  And a hooded sweatshirt over his long-sleeved shirt and gloves, because it was nine in the morning in the rat-tail end of December, dammit!

  Jefferson arrived as Mason was on his second trip around the field. His green Toyota coupe belched a big cloud of black smoke before it puttered to a stop.

  When he got out, he was wearing soccer shorts and a T-shirt, and Mason felt a surge of annoyance. It was obvious the guy was just aching to get out of the house and away from an overbearing mother, but she couldn’t be bothered to nag him about wearing a sweatshirt?

  “Aren’t you freezing?” Mason called out as he jogged up the hill toward the parking lot.

  “Like a brass monkey with no nuts,” Jefferson retorted, throwing his ball over Mason’s head and into the center of the field. “Can we do another couple of laps?”

  It would figure that he was way faster than Mason without even trying. Mason finally just told him to run on his own while Mason kept at his steady jog-trot that got him around his neighborhood in the morning.

  When Jefferson veered off from the outside of the soccer field to the center, with the ball, Mason headed that way, unsurprised when Jefferson used his toe to pop the ball up to his knee, and his knee to pop it up so he could bounce it solidly off his head. It arched over to Mason.

  Who caught it wetly in his arms.

  “Mason, you’re killing me,” Jefferson said, but he was laughing as he said it. He’d pulled his wedge back into a brief ponytail, the shorn sides of his hair still thick enough that Mason couldn’t see any scalp through the stubble. Mason suddenly wanted to touch his scalp, feel the strands of hair through his fingers, but Jefferson’s voice called him back. “Now set it down and use the inside of your foot to pass it to me.”

  Mason did, feeling like the world’s tallest, gawkiest, most awkward human.

  “Oh my God. Killing me.” Jefferson passed it back, making an obvious turn to his foot so Mason could see him using the inside of it to pass. “Now don’t be a toe-poker. You have more area on the inside of your foot, so more control. Now send it back!”

  Again, and again—it was like a game of catch with your dad, except with your feet and a big vinyl ball, and they moved around the field as they kicked. And except Mason’s dad had never actually played catch because of that whole coordination thing.

  Jefferson kept up an insane patter of trash-talk-slash-encouragement the whole time.

  “Yeah, see that? You toe-poked it. You see where it went? Southern Angola, that’s where it went. Now watch me run for it, ’cause you like that, you crazy bastard, yes you do. Okay, see what I did? I passed it. Did you see where it went? It went straight to you. Notice that? Notice that it went straight to you? Wasn’t that nice of me? Now can you frickin’ pass it this time? Oh, that’s nice—you stuck to the continental United States that time, now can you use the side of your frickin’ foot for sweet Christ’s sake!” And so on.

  Mason didn’t participate in any of the patter—he was too busy running for the ball and listening, bemused, as Jefferson bossed him around as no man had bossed him around before, in or out of bed.

  Finally Jefferson got irritated and booted the ball the hell off the field. Mason gave him a weak wave and went trotting after it, dribbling it back slowly and with great concentration, sticking his tongue out of the side of his mouth like a little kid.

  He got up to where Jefferson was ready and very carefully popped the ball over, using the inside of his foot, breathing a sigh of relief.

  “Woo-hoo!” Jefferson bounced straight up, pumping both fists, and then he ran full barrel to Mason, arms out, so Mason had no choice but to catch him in a massive sports-guy hug.

  Mason managed to lift him up and whirl him around. The feeling of his tight, muscular body so solid against Mason’s thighs did the same thing Jefferson’s laugh did.

  Mason whirled to a stop and set Jefferson down, feeling giddy and a little dorky and embarrassingly aroused.

  “Water break!” Jefferson crowed. Then he grabbed Mason’s hand and hauled him up the hill to the small concrete bathroom with the drinking fountain.

  He grabbed Mason’s hand.

  That was pretty much Mason’s only warning.

  He found himself dragged into a freezing bathroom made of cinder blocks with a concrete floor. It must have been cleaned the night before, because it didn’t smell bad, but it was damp and wet and colder than the frosty soccer field, which at least sat in the sun.

  As Mason looked around, surprised to find himself in such a place, Jefferson put two icy hands on his cheeks and the world stopped.

  Mason looked immediately into an intense set of brown eyes with crinkles in the corners, while he responded to a laughing, mischievous smile.

  Oh. Oh yes. It wasn’t imagination and he wasn’t being an awkward perv—this guy liked him, and he liked the time they spent together, and—

  And his mouth was hot, wet, and heavenly as
he pulled Mason down into a heart-stopping, ravishing kiss.

  Mason had been waiting his entire life to be kissed like this. He wrapped his arms around Jefferson’s shoulders and pulled him closer, creating a warm cocoon in the shiver of the bathroom. Jefferson’s tongue grew more aggressive, as did his hands, sliding under Mason’s sweatshirt and T-shirt, shaping the muscles in his stomach, the density of his chest, and—

  “Oh! Damn!”

  The almost painfully engorged points of his nipples.

  Jefferson laughed as Mason gasped, and pinched them again. Mason bucked up against him, mostly hard and filling fast, and Jefferson shoved a knowing hand down his sweats and grasped his cock without shame or apology.

  “Oh my God.” Because… hand on his penis. It was all he’d wanted since he’d first seen the puberty video, and suddenly this nice man was doing the thing he’d always craved.

  “Nungh….” And doing it well.

  Jefferson squeezed and stroked and took Mason’s mouth again while Mason’s central processor completely shorted out. He didn’t think about the cold, or the fact that he didn’t know this man well, or that they were in a semipublic place. All that got through was Hand. On my penis!

  And then Jefferson wrenched away from him and sank to a squat, pulling Mason’s sweats and Under Armour with him.

  Mason’s vision went a little gray around the edges as Jefferson squatted there and grinned up. His hand kept up that stroke with the twist at the end and the thumb digging into his pee slit, and the other hand danced around Mason’s balls.

  “Admit it,” Jefferson said wickedly. “You expected this.”

  “Wanted,” Mason admitted, naked and unable to play coy. “Didn’t exp—eep!”

  He wasn’t proud. Jefferson’s mouth, hot and treacherous, engulfed him, swallowed him to the root, and then sucked back, keeping a delirious pressure on the crown. Mason had watched videos and practiced blow jobs like this, but nobody he’d been with had ever been as grateful as Mason was now.

  “Oh God,” he moaned, wishing he was comfortable enough to even lean back against the wall. They were in a public bathroom—and that thought, of his cock out in the air, of Jefferson squatting before him and servicing him for no reason at all, made his ass clench, his taint tingle, and his balls swell.