Chapter 10 Summer
Summer
Josha
“You didn’t have to punch him, Gem.”
We’ve escaped to the back of Hals’s truck, leaving Ethan and his fists back at the party, which—despite the recent drama—is still going strong.
“He was being a dick,” he says.
“You slept with his girlfriend.”
“And he was trying to get you to suck his dick.”
“So what? I’m gay. That’s what gay guys do.” Theoretically. Someday.
“He’s not gay. He has a girlfriend.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s not gay.”
“It means his shouldn’t be the first dick you suck.”
I shrug. Not touching that with a ten-foot pole.
“Why do you even want to?” he asks. “He’s. A. Dick.”
“I want to get laid, Quill. Like”—you—“everyone else.”
“So you’re gonna settle for the first dick that comes along?”
“Like you’re so discerning about where you stick your dick.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because…you’re not like me.”
“Because I’m a virgin? Or because I like dick?”
He eyes me over the paper towel pressed to his nose, and a snort escapes him. My own lips twitch into a grin.
“How many times do you think we’ve said ‘dick’ in the last five minutes?” he asks.
“A lot.”
“You’re a dick glutton.”
“You’re a dick whore.”
He cocks his head, dropping his hand to his thigh. “I’m not sure that came out exactly right.”
“‘I do not think it means what you think it means,’” I say in my best Inigo Montoya voice, and he collapses forward into my lap, laughing.
“You’re getting blood on my jeans.” I shove him off before he can notice my dick starting to get ideas, and hand him a fresh paper towel from the roll at my side. “Here. You need to keep pressure on your nose.”
He takes it from me with a sigh and flops onto his back. “This party sucks.”
“It’s your party,” I remind him. He pestered Hals to let us raise the tent for months, specifically so he could throw these parties.
It took us a whole week to set it up, even with half the lacrosse team helping, and Hals helped me rig the sound system and let me hang a few of the lights.
It was the best part of the summer, almost like before.
Gem even agreed to rigging his Chinese pole and has been practicing sporadically—a mixed blessing, since I love watching him burn off energy in a way that doesn’t involve alcohol or sex, but loathe how it leaves me achy and frustrated.
“It still sucks.”
“We could hide out in the Airstream and watch Rick and Morty,” I offer. “Since I’m not getting laid, and all.” Not like I was seriously considering it. Ethan is a dick. But it was nice to feel wanted for a minute.
“Nah. My dad’s in there, and he’ll freak if he sees my face.”
“He’s gonna find out eventually. You’re gonna have a black eye tomorrow.”
“Worth it to put that asshole in his place,” he mutters, and my heart does a stupid little flip. Why does he have to be so fucking complicated? Every time I try to put some healthy distance between us, he pulls me right back into his drama.
“I can’t believe you cock-blocked me tonight,” I say.
“You’re not really mad.”
I hate that it’s not even a question.
I hate that I’m already thinking about how I’m going to jerk off later to this image of him—sprawled in the truck bed, with blood spilled on his bare chest from fighting over me—pretending he threw the first punch because he was jealous rather than being overprotective and infantilizing.
“What the fuck am I lying on?” he asks, squirming upright and tugging at the shapeless tangle of knotted rope.
“It’s a hammock. Your dad found it at The Ark the other day and thought it would be cool to hang it out here on the lot.”
“Really?” Shifting further to the side, he examines the splitter bars with interest. “Let’s go set it up.”
“Right now?” It’s almost midnight, and it’ll be pitch black under the trees.
“Sure. We can put it in Milla’s old spot by the dry creek. It’s still got all the fairy lights strung up, so we’ll be able to see fine.”
Using our phone flashlights, we dig some webbing straps and carabiners out of one of the box trucks and haul the hammock into the woods. The spot is close enough to the tent that the music of the party filters through, and the string lights create a feywild hollow.
Gem settles cross-legged in the dirt and lights a joint while I loop a strap around the first tree and stretch the hammock toward the second. The musky smoke curls in the air like temptation to ruin.
“How come you’re not more fucked up, Rocket?” he asks, voice already lazy from the weed.
“Because I only drank beer instead of downing shots like some people.”
“That’s not what I mean. You’ve grown up with a shitty drunk father and a mom who’s barely around, and you turned out perfect.”
This. This is exactly my problem. Why does he have to say this kind of shit to me?
“I’m plenty fucked up,” I assure him. I’m a complete mess over you.
He waves the joint vaguely toward where I’m now securing the second carabiner to the ring knot above the spreader bar. “You’re good at everything. You keep your shit together all the time. Meanwhile, I’m over here crashing through life from one disaster to the next.”
“Your mom left. You’re allowed to be”—reckless. Selfish. Wild—“sad.”
“Sad.” He spits the word without tasting it and uncoils from the earth, brushing pine litter from his ass. Closing the distance between us, he offers up the joint.
Maybe his recklessness is contagious, because for one lunatic second, I imagine leaning in and sucking a drag from between his fingers. How his skin would be warm and rough against my lips, and how his eyes would dance with reflected revelry.
These are shark-infested waters.
I take the joint with my fingers and inhale, letting the pungent smoke create some much-needed distance between my neurons.
“I think you’re bored,” I tell him. “I think you miss your mom and the whole Big Top thing. Have you ever spent a whole summer in one place before?”
The hammock sways dramatically when he flings himself into it, but the straps hold.
“I don’t miss ‘the whole Big Top thing.’ I only did it because I had to. I’m not Milla. You getting in?” He wriggles to the far side of the hammock and giggles when it almost dumps him into the duff.
“You’re at least as good as Milla. Lack of focus isn’t the same thing as lack of talent.
” I catch the swinging edge and lower myself down beside him, careful not to let our bodies touch, but as soon as my weight settles, gravity makes a mockery of my restraint.
I breathe the next words into his hair. “You’re better at choreography. ”
“Knowing what will make other people look good isn’t the same as looking good myself.”
“You always look good.” Fuck, I’m high, and his bare chest against my arm is frying my circuits. He smiles, luminous in the twinkling shadows.
“Then I don’t need a circus, do I?”
“I miss it,” I confess. I’m not suffering the same sense of abandonment that Gem is, but I am bummed that Shilo left right when I was starting to feel like a part of something. “I wish I’d had a chance to go on tour.”
“It would’ve been more fun with you along.”
“Maybe we still could.” Maybe it’s not too late to save him from his restless self-destruction. “Hals knows all the same people your mom did. And he ran the tech stuff. What if we convinced him to do a show next year with us?”
“You wanna pitch a show to my dad?”
“Why not? You could come up with a concept. You could even help direct it. And I could design lights and sound. I bet it’d be fun.”
“It’d be a shit ton of work. And I think you’re overestimating my abilities.”
“I’m not scared of work. And you’re underestimating yourself. You do that a lot,” I finish quietly.
“You’re fucking high.”
“I am. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.”
“My dad will never go for it.”
“He will if we come up with something really good. He misses it too. And I know he still talks to your mom. She might even agree to be like an adviser or something. Help with casting.” Please say yes.
He blows three smoke rings into the trees.
“Okay.”
It almost works.
In an uncharacteristic display of self-awareness, Gem comes up with a Lost Boys theme. The concept is brilliant, which I tell him repeatedly, and although it doesn’t completely stop his partying, something in him settles as he’s slowly coaxed into forgetting his insecurities.
Instead of surfing, we spend our afternoons poring over promo reels and YouTube videos of performers his family’s connected to, discussing the feasibility of building a tramp wall in the tent, and researching possible venues around the state.
And—much to my not-so-covert delight—Gem is practicing on his pole again.
Regularly. In these tight gym shirts that ostensibly protect his skin from the grip coating but mainly seem designed to hug his muscles and make gay guys drool.
Hals catches on to our scheming pretty quickly when we start asking “hypothetical” questions about costs and contracting.
He doesn’t make any immediate promises, but he’s obviously happy to have us back in the tent doing something that doesn’t leave him with a mess to clean up and new worries in his eyes.
For a while, it feels like that first spring when I thought I’d found my future in a blue-eyed boy and a striped tent. Then, two weeks before Thanksgiving, Shilo returns with Cheyenne and Milla in tow.
And everything goes to shit.