4. Diego #2
This conversation was getting a little too personal. Diego glanced around the empty kitchen, taking in the humming machinery, the quiet calm. “I thought you said you had shit to do.” Wasn’t that Wylie’s reason for hauling his ass inside?
“Yeah, but that was just an excuse. Seemed like you needed an easy exit.” Wylie took another long pull from his vape, tilting his head back to bare his neck, and even though that shit was bad for you, he looked sexy as hell doing it.
Sometimes, Diego caught a flash of the man’s tongue piercing, and it always sent a little trill of excitement through him, which just showed how hard up he was for some male companionship.
“How do you know Cody?” Wylie asked, tucking away the vape and crossing his arms over his chest. Nice biceps too, Diego noted.
“We grew up in the same neighborhood. Used to be tight. Haven’t seen him in a while.
He’s changed. Guess I have too.” Diego should probably explain some of what Cody had mentioned, his time in prison at least, to reassure Wylie that he wasn’t violent or dangerous, but he really didn’t have it in him at the moment, and thankfully, Wylie wasn’t asking.
“Must have been a shock,” Wylie said, still looking at Diego, steady though, not like he was trying to pry information out of him but giving him an opening nonetheless.
“Yeah.” If Diego hadn’t been forced to detox, what might his future have looked like? Would he still be using or doing increasingly bad shit to afford his habit? Would he be dead in a ditch from an overdose? All questions he didn’t really want to contemplate.
“You want to talk about it?” Wylie asked like it was up to Diego to share. Or not.
“Not really,” Diego answered honestly.
“Fair. We’re pretty much done here for the night,” Wylie said as he stood and offered a hand. “How about I drop you off at home?”
The warmth and generosity Wylie had shown him was something he’d need to process later, on his own. In the meantime, he didn’t need any more favors.
“I live close by. I can walk.”
“It’s on my way,” Wylie insisted.
“How would you know?” Diego asked with narrowed eyes.
“Don’t be a dick. Just take the ride.”
That almost made him smile. Wylie must have seen right through him–all bark, no bite. Diego wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but he took Wylie’s hand, appreciating the strength of his grip, his steadiness too.
“Fine,” Diego said, feigning reluctance.
“Good man.”
Diego had spied Wylie’s ride a few times before from inside the pit and had admired the way Wylie would swerve into the parking lot, windows down, music blaring with one hand on the wheel and a vape hanging from his mouth, all cool confidence and swagger.
The Dodge Challenger had a crisp orange paint job and black racing stripes that followed along the clean lines of its sculpted body.
Then, like now, Diego was a little turned on by both the car and its driver.
“Like my whip?” Wylie asked, probably noticing that Diego was a bit starstruck.
“Your what?” he asked. Since getting out of prison, it seemed the younger generation spoke a different language at times. Even with just the five years between them, there was a linguistic divide Diego had yet to bridge.
“Charlene, my whip, like when you whip your car around a tight corner.” Wylie made the motion of swerving with one hand. Right.
“I’m a little rusty on what the kids are saying these days,” Diego admitted, and Wylie was clearly bright enough to figure out why.
“Lucky for you, I’m here to help you out.”
“Debatable,” Diego replied while running a hand over the car’s front fender, but he did appreciate Wylie’s not-so-sly attempts to catch him up on what had been going on in the world since he’d last been part of it.
“She’s a V8.” Wylie offered him his key fob. “Want to drive?”
What the…? Was this man crazy? “What is wrong with you? Handing off your keys to a stranger? Don’t you love and adore her? What if I was a car thief? Or just a really bad driver?” Diego asked with incredulity.
Wylie cackled at his little outburst. “You seem like a pretty careful guy, and I know where you work.”
Just like that, easy as pie. Diego was a little jealous of the man’s optimism, his assuredness that things would work out well for him.
Diego had been reckless in his youth and had thought he was invincible, but this was something else.
This was the confidence of someone who had been truly loved and seen for who they were.
Diego bet Wylie’s parents adored the shit outta him.
“Tempting, but nah.” Diego was still shaky from his encounter with Cody and didn’t need the added pressure of performing. It’d been seven years since he’d driven a car. What if he crashed into something?
“Some other time then,” Wylie said with a wink.
The man was flirting with him, right? Was Wylie really interested, or did he just like to mess with him? He knew that Diego had been to prison, and he’d been pretty nonchalant about that too. Maybe Wylie’s fatal flaw was that he had shitty taste in men.
Diego stuffed down whatever feelings he might have about that wink or the promise of a next time and climbed into the cozy two-door coupe.
The interior was immaculate, with black leather upholstery and a spotless dash and console, lovingly maintained.
It still had that new car smell, even though it was more than a decade old.
Leather mixed with cloves and a masculine spice that belonged to the owner himself.
Diego wished he didn’t like the smell so much, wished he didn’t want to run his nose along its source and suck his–
“Manual, that’s nice,” Diego said, interrupting his runaway train of thought while admiring Wylie’s grip on the gear shift, the prominent veins in his hands.
It conjured images of what else those hands might be able to handle.
Fuck, Diego had to stop thinking this way.
He’d been able to stuff those feelings way the hell down for seven years. Why did that need to change now?
“Hard to find these days, but I like the control, and it’s easier to rev the engine at stop lights.” Wylie flexed all five fingers around the gear shift’s knob.
Diego chuckled at that. He sounded rusty.
He could just imagine this young punk rolling up to a red light, glancing over at another hotshot driver and revving his engine for the thrill of it.
“I learned to drive a manual on my grandfather’s old Jeep that he used for hunting. Ever race it?” Diego asked.
“Not really. I’m too much of a chicken shit to go all-out. My mom…she, uh, she was killed in a car accident.”
For some reason that information seemed out of place with the image Diego had conjured of Wylie in his mind. Diego had envisioned family vacations and game nights and framed photos along the hallway, lovingly dusted.
“Shit, man, I’m sorry. Drunk driver?” Diego asked.
Wylie shrugged. “Not sure. Some asshole was driving recklessly across the Howard Franklin, zipping in and out of traffic. My mom was coming home from a late-night shift at Tampa General. He tapped her and she went into the wall. Fucker drove off. Hit and run.”
“Fuck, man. That’s awful.” Diego wished he could exact retribution on whomever had been so carelessly cruel, to steal Wylie’s mother from the world and then fuck off without any consequence at all.
“She was in a coma for a while, but she just couldn’t pull through,” Wylie said with a heavy sigh.
“What a fucking nightmare,” Diego said, glancing sideways at him.
“It really was. Seeing her hooked up to all those machines helping her breathe and everything else, it fucking sucked. Getting all worked up if, like, her eyelid twitched, all for nothing. Then the doctors told me she’d slipped into a vegetative state, and that was it, you know?”
Wylie glanced over at him briefly, looking young and vulnerable. Diego wanted to wrap him up in his arms. He would have if they weren’t in the car. He settled for laying a hand on his shoulder. “How old were you when all this happened?” he asked.
“Sixteen.”