Creamed #2
With his hands shaking and JJ barking at him, Ollie knew trying to get the pastry right was going to make this the longest day at the job yet.
After a while, the line finally thinned—and then it emptied out completely.
The last customer had been a sunburned hiker who bought a single slice of key lime pie and asked if the truck took Venmo.
That was thirty-two minutes ago.
Since then, nothing—just the drone of the generator, the wheeze of the dying A/C unit, and the slow, suffocating press of afternoon heat against the walls of the truck.
“How much longer do we have to sit here?” Ollie asked, dragging the back of his wrist across his forehead. His T-shirt was plastered to his chest, dark with sweat.
“You know the rules,” JJ said, not looking up from the counter he was wiping down for the third time. “Sold out or sunset. Whichever comes first.”
Ollie glanced at the fridges.
Still half-full.
Then he looked out the serving window at the sky, where the sun hung fat and stubborn over the western ridge, hours from touching the treeline.
"This is insane. It has to be a hundred degrees in here."
"Probably more," JJ said with an indifferent shrug.
"The thermometer on the generator read ninety-six twenty minutes ago, and that's outside.
In here, with the fridges pumping heat? We're easily over a hundred.
" He tossed the rag into the small sink.
"If you're that hot, get out of your clothes and stop bitching about it. "
He said it the way he said most things—offhand, careless, like a puck he'd flicked across the ice without looking where it landed.
Ollie should have let it go.
But something in him—the same stubborn, competitive nerve that made him sprint the last fifty meters of a race when his lungs were already screaming—refused to let JJ have the last word.
If JJ was going to dare him, even casually, Ollie was going to call him on it.
Without a word, Ollie grabbed the hem of his sweat-soaked T-shirt and yanked it over his head, then kicked off his sneakers and shoved his shorts down his legs in one fluid motion.
The clothes landed in a damp heap by the fridge, hitting the floor with a heavy thump that made the sweat-soaked fabric seem even heavier.
Suddenly, Ollie was standing in the middle of the truck wearing nothing but a pair of tight, low-rise, powder-blue boxer briefs—the kind that hugged his hips and thighs like a second skin, cut low enough to reveal the sharp V-lines tapering from his obliques down to the bulge tucked inside the front pouch of them.
The sweat dampening the cotton wasn’t helping, either.
His underwear wasn’t something he’d planned on showing anyone today. But the relief was immediate, and he didn’t care. Even the hot air inside the truck felt blessedly cool against his wet, slick skin.
JJ turned from the sink, and his eyes traveled the full length of Ollie's body before he could stop them.
It was quick—a sweep that started at Ollie's face, dropped to his chest, his stomach, and then lingered, just for a fraction of a second too long, on the bulge inside those powder-blue boxer-briefs.
He didn't say a word. Neither of them did.
It was a strange, loaded beat—the kind that should have been filled with a joke or an insult but instead just hung there, heavy and unexplained.
JJ's gaze caught on the way the thin cotton clung to Ollie, close enough to show the round, unmistakable shape of his dickhead pressed against the inside of the fabric.
It was more than either of them had probably expected to see, and JJ turned back to the counter a half-second too late to pretend he hadn't noticed.
Ollie saw the look. He felt it land on his skin—a quick, startled heat that prickled across his chest before he could comprehend it. But he was too unsure of what it meant—and too afraid of what acknowledging it might invite—to say anything.
Instead, Ollie leaned back against the fridge and let out a long exhale. Then he flashed JJ a smug grin and crooned, “Thanks. That was actually a good idea.”
JJ rolled his eyes. Then he pulled his own shirt over his head.
"Wait—what happened to toughing it out?" Ollie grinned.
"I spend half my life on the ice," JJ muttered, unbuckling his belt and stepping out of his cargo shorts. "How do you think I feel right now, baking in a steel box?"
"We're both from Georgia, dude. But I guess standing in a chilled arena all season turned you into a baby the second it gets above eighty, huh?" Ollie teased.
"Says the guy who stripped first," JJ shot back, balling up his shorts and tossing them onto the pile with Ollie's clothes. "Don't act tough when you're the one standing there in your little underwear. What gay shop did you buy those from, anyway?"
JJ was down to a pair of old, thin boxer shorts—faded navy, soft from a hundred washes, loose around the legs and just small enough on his bigger frame to ride up his thighs.
The elastic waistband sat low on his hips, and the worn cotton did almost nothing to conceal what was underneath.
Saying he’d owned them for years would have been an understatement.
Ollie tried not to look—and failed.
JJ's body was a different species from his own.
Where Ollie was smooth and streamlined, built for cutting through water with minimal resistance, JJ was thick and rough-hewn, built for absorbing contact and dishing it back harder.
His shoulders were broad slabs of muscle that rolled when he moved.
Dark-blond hair dusted his chest and trailed down a set of hard, defined abs before disappearing beneath the waistband of his boxers.
He had the kind of body that announced itself—the kind that took up space and dared you to do something about it, knowing damn well you couldn’t.
And between his legs, even in the baggy boxer shorts, Ollie could see a bulge that looked far too substantial for the loose fabric. He wondered just how big JJ was down there.
He bit the inside of his cheek and looked away.
"You know swimming isn't even a real sport, right?" JJ said, settling onto the floor with his back against the fridge, his knees drawn up and his elbows resting on them. "Anyone can swim. You do it with your buddies at the creek on a Saturday afternoon—that doesn't make you an athlete."
"Right. And hockey is what—ice-skating with anger issues?" Ollie shot back.
"Hockey is agility, balance, coordination, and speed—all while other guys are actively trying to kill you." JJ jabbed a finger at Ollie. "You know what I used to do in the summer back home? Skinny dip in the Chattahoochee with my boys. Doesn't mean I was training for the Olympics."
Ollie barely heard the rest of the argument. His mind had snagged on two words—skinny dip—and was now doing something deeply unhelpful with them: constructing a vivid, uninvited image of JJ naked, waist-deep in a muddy Georgia river, water streaming down that broad chest and those thick thighs.
He shook it off. Or tried to, anyway.
He sat down across from JJ and slightly to the side, his back against the steel cabinet beneath the serving counter.
For a few minutes they just sat there, trading the same tired shots about whose sport was real and whose was glorified recreation, the argument generating more heat than the sun outside.
Then Ollie shifted to adjust his position, and his gaze drifted to the wrong place at the wrong time.
JJ was sitting with his knees up, legs slightly apart, and the loose leg hole of his worn boxers had fallen open just enough to reveal a sliver of what was inside.
Ollie saw it before he could look away—the curve of one of JJ's balls, heavy and low-hanging, resting against the inside of his thigh. Huge.
Something jolted through him.
A sharp, electric pulse started behind his ribs and shot straight down into the pit of his stomach.
It wasn’t jealousy, exactly, and it wasn’t only curiosity.
It was something he didn’t have a name for, something he couldn’t begin to understand—something that made his mouth go dry and his skin feel two degrees hotter than it already was.
He looked away fast, heart hammering, and did what any nineteen-year-old straight guy would do when confronted with a reaction he couldn't explain: he overcorrected.
"You know swimmers get more pussy than hockey players, right?" Ollie blurted. "Everybody knows that."
JJ barked out a laugh. "You're grasping, bro. Admit it. Who ever heard of a swim-team groupie?"
"Ever seen the movie Swim Fan? It's literally about a girl who's obsessed with the swimmer at her school. I don't remember anybody making a movie called Hockey Fan."
"Isn't that movie like a million years old? That's the best you've got?" JJ grinned.
"At least swimming has cultural relevance,” Ollie countered.
"Cultural relevance," JJ repeated, deadpan.
"You sound like a brochure." He reached down and adjusted himself through his boxers with a casual, shameless grip—cupping and shifting his junk like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"Girls like a guy who knows how to handle a big stick. End of story."
The gesture was crude and careless and it shouldn't have done anything to Ollie at all. But it did.
He felt a flush crawl up the back of his neck, felt something stir low in his boxer-briefs that he absolutely could not afford to let stir.
His eyes, moving on a will of their own, darted back to the gap in JJ's leg hole—just in time to catch the heavy shift of his balls settling back into place after being grabbed, the sack hanging lazily against his inner thigh.
He wanted to see more.
The thought arrived before he could stop it, raw and unwanted, and he crushed it immediately. It's just to prove he's full of shit, Ollie told himself. He's bragging about being big, and I want to see if he's lying. That's all this is.
But his pulse was still running too fast, and the heat in the truck suddenly felt like it was coming from inside his own skin rather than the air around him.