Creamed (Straight to Gay MM First Time Short Stories)

Creamed

"Just pump it in there and pull out, already."

JJ's voice cut through the swelter of the food truck like a knife.

Ollie gritted his teeth, both hands white-knuckled around the steel pastry injector as he tried to force another ribbon of vanilla bean cream into the tiny hole in the side of a puff pastry.

The filling resisted, then erupted out the back end in a fat glob that oozed down his knuckles and dripped onto the counter.

“It’s—fuck—it’s not going in,” Ollie muttered in frustration.

“Because you’re not angling it right. Shove it in harder. Stop being so gentle,” JJ barked.

"Then get over here and do it yourself,” Ollie groaned.

"I'm taking orders. Figure it out, dude,” JJ returned.

A woman in a floppy sun hat was already tapping her credit card against the steel counter with the impatient rhythm of someone who had been standing in ninety-three-degree heat for too long.

Behind her, a line of customers snaked along the gravel shoulder of the parking lot, faces flushed and glistening, fanning themselves with crumpled programs from the morning's lakeside music festival.

Beyond the serving window, Cayuga Lake stretched out wide and impossibly blue, its surface so flat and bright under the July sun that it looked like a sheet of hammered silver laid across the valley floor.

The hills that cradled it rose in thick, ancient walls of maple and white pine, their canopy so dense and green it almost made you dizzy to look at it.

Rocky outcrops jutted from the ridgeline like broken teeth, and somewhere in the trees, a trail wound up toward cliffs that overlooked the whole shimmering scene.

It was the kind of view that should have made a person feel lucky to be alive.

Inside the truck, it made Ollie want to scream.

The food truck—a converted step van painted buttercream yellow, with a cartoon pie on the side and the name Freshly-Made Cream Pies arched across it in looping pink script—was beautiful from the outside.

Cheerful, even.

It was the kind of thing families posed in front of for Instagram photos, and the sort of thing that made teenage boys snicker at its name without ever quite confessing why.

Inside was a different animal entirely.

Everything was stainless steel, sharp corners, and bolted-down industrial surfaces that radiated the day's heat back into the cabin like a convection oven.

Six glass-doored mini-fridges lined one wall, packed tight with cream pies, fruit tarts, and flaky pastry shells, their compressors humming and churning in a losing war against the July sun.

A single window unit rattled above the serving counter, wheezing out air that was barely cooler than the breath of the two sweating nineteen-year-olds crammed inside.

"Summer is a shit time to sell cream pies," JJ announced, bracing his forearms against the counter as Ollie finally wrestled the pastry into something presentable and slid it across to the waiting customer.

"The A/C is a joke. Everything's melting before it hits the counter. And Miss Jolene has to be spending more on gas for that generator than she's pulling in. How does she make any money?"

“How many times do you want to have this conversation?” Ollie shot back without looking up.

"Anyway, she's making money hand over fist, clearly," Ollie continued, already reaching for the next order ticket. "We haven't stopped since eight this morning."

JJ grunted—the closest thing to a concession he ever offered—and turned back to the window.

They'd been at this for five days now. Five days of ten-hour shifts in a steel box barely wide enough for one full-grown man, let alone two college athletes with egos that took up more square footage than their bodies did.

The cruel irony was that Ollie Vogel and JJ Foulkes had spent most of their lives in the same zip code and had never needed to exchange more than a passing nod.

They’d both grown up in Linden Falls, a sleepy, well-to-do suburb south of Atlanta where Friday nights belonged to football, and everything else—swimming, hockey, tennis, whatever—was just something guys did to pad their college applications.

Ollie had been the quiet, dark-haired boy who disappeared into the pool at five a.m. and resurfaced with state medals nobody in town talked about.

JJ had been the loud, broad-shouldered kid who played hockey at a rink forty minutes away, because Linden Falls didn't have one, and came back with bruises nobody asked about.

They’d shared hallways, maybe even a class or two—neither of them could remember. But they’d never had a real conversation. That much, they both knew.

Then they’d both ended up at Whitson University in upstate New York—a small Division I school tucked into the hills of the Finger Lakes—and the universe, with its usual dark sense of humor, had apparently decided they were a package deal.

Neither of them had scholarship offers pouring in, and Whitson happened to recruit them both for their respective sports.

With few other options, Ollie and JJ had unknowingly chosen the same university.

Ollie joined the swim team and promptly became its most decorated freshman in a decade, his times in the 200 free turning heads across the conference.

JJ walked onto the hockey team and fought his way into a starting role by October, racking up assists and penalty minutes with equal enthusiasm as the squad chased its first conference title in twenty years.

Two breakout freshmen. Same small-town high school.

Same hungry energy. The university's sports publicity office couldn't resist the narrative, and suddenly Ollie and JJ were being shoved into the same photo ops, the same alumni features, the same breathless local news segments about Whitmore's own “Dukes of Hazard” from the same small town in Georgia.

Neither of them wanted the pairing.

Each was desperate to be his own thing—his own name, his own highlight reel—and being tethered to the other felt less like a compliment and more like a leash.

Then came summer, and with it, the grim reality that their small college town had almost nothing in the way of seasonal work. Being hockey and soccer scholarships, they didn’t cover summertime living expenses like some of the cushy football and basketball scholarships did.

Miss Jolene—a sturdy, silver-haired woman with a booming laugh, a Whitson bumper sticker on her minivan, and a cream pie recipe she guarded like a state secret—had hired Ollie first, recognizing him from a swim meet she'd attended with her granddaughter.

When JJ showed up three days later, recruited through the same booster-network grapevine, Ollie had looked at him from behind the serving counter and said, flatly, "Can't get out of my shadow, huh? "

JJ had smiled—the kind of smile that preceded a hard check into the boards—and said, "Didn't know you cast one, little guy."

It had been like that ever since. Muttered jabs. Elbows in tight spaces. The constant, low-grade friction of two guys who had never needed each other and now couldn't escape each other, made worse by the fact that neither could afford to quit.

Miss Jolene paid well—absurdly well, by college-job standards—and the sell-out bonuses she dangled at the end of each shift were enough to keep both of them grinding through the discomfort, day after sweltering day.

Most of that first week, they'd kept it civil. The insults stayed under their breath and the jabs stayed small. They moved around each other in the narrow galley with the tight, practiced choreography of two people trying very hard not to touch.

But today, parked at the head of a hiking trail in a regional park with nothing but trees, cliffs, and the lake for company, the walls of the truck felt closer than ever.

The afternoon crowd from the music festival had finally thinned, leaving long, empty stretches between customers—stretches that forced them to share the silence, the heat, and each other.

Ollie could feel the warmth radiating off JJ's body every time the bigger guy squeezed past him to reach the fridges.

JJ stood six feet tall, with wide shoulders and a broad, chiseled frame that seemed purpose-built for taking up space—and he did it gladly, moving through the truck with the unhurried confidence of someone who had never once in his life been asked to make himself smaller.

His dirty-blond hair was cropped short and styled neatly even in the heat, and a tediously-groomed, sun-bleached beard framed a jaw that always seemed set, like he was one wrong word away from grinning or throwing a punch and hadn't decided which.

Ollie, by contrast, had spent most of his life learning to be efficient with space.

At five-foot-eight, with a swimmer's lean, tapered build—narrow hips, long arms, smooth skin shaved clean from collarbone to ankle for the sake of a hundredth of a second in the water—he moved through the truck with a quiet grace that JJ seemed to find both impressive and irritating in equal measure.

His dark hair fell across his forehead in a way that softened features already sharp enough to be called pretty, a word he'd been hearing—and loathing—since middle school.

He was beautiful in the way that made other guys uncomfortable and girls curious, and he knew it, even if he pretended not to.

His good looks were trouble enough. Then there was the fact that, for a competitive swimmer, he was woefully short—and he was reminded of it every time he stepped onto the starting block.

And every time JJ shouldered past him, Ollie had to flatten himself against the counter to let him through. And every time, the contact lasted a beat longer than it needed to.

It didn’t help that every time Ollie looked at JJ, he saw a guy who could have been a swimmer. Ollie was the actual competitive swimmer, and yet JJ looked more built for the sport than he did. It only made him feel more bitterly frustrated by the hockey jock’s big, arrogant body.