“You have no idea how much I want to see you.”
He was doing scary things to my heart, making it stop and start. “Call me when you get there so I know you made it.”
“I certainly will.”
“Or call me before if you get sleepy, or even if you don’t get sleepy,” I suggested, and worried, suddenly, that I was pressuring him.
“I wouldn’t want to keep you awake.”
“Yeah, but I like staying up with you,” I found myself saying before my brain kicked on. “Or, you know, if you just need some time alone to think, then don’t worry about—”
“No, I…I would love to talk to you.”
I swallowed so I could respond and not croak out the words. “Okay, then, I’m headed home. I’ll talk to you in a bit.”
“Yes,” he replied, and there was a catch in that beautiful voice of his before he hung up.
After a quick but thorough search of the room and bed for anything else he might have left behind, I went back down to the lobby. To my surprise, as I walked by the bar on my way to guest parking, I saw Doug––he must have rallied from earlier––sitting at a table with a man. The bartender had obviously done last call and the lounge was closed; that much was clear from all the cleaning being done around them.
I sprinted toward the sliding glass doors, glad Doug hadn’t seen me so I didn’t have to stop to talk to him. Stepping outside into the crisp evening air seconds later, I reached my bike and put the watch on my left wrist before pulling on my helmet.
I thought about Cam and couldn’t stop smiling.
I was almost to my apartment when I remembered I was out of coffee for the morning, as well as milk, so I swung into the twenty-four-hour convenience store down the block from my apartment building.
Small towns were weird. You could go days, sometimes even weeks, without seeing anyone you knew, and then other times you’d run into the person you sat behind in homeroom in high school. It was a crapshoot. Unless you were me and Mayor-elect Merrell “Bear” Barrett.
Closing the door to the milk fridge, I looked left and there he was, the crown prince of Barrett Crossing, whose family the town was named after. They owned the businesses that were considered the lifeblood of the town—a casino, a wholesale importing operation, and several car dealerships—as well as a couple gas stations, a sandwich shop, and the town’s only marijuana dispensary. He had always been rich. I had been, first, dirt poor, then regular poor, and now was living paycheck to paycheck.
In high school, no one had been a bigger star than Merrell Barrett. He was an All-State quarterback as a sophomore, and had a full-ride scholarship to Auburn University ready to go when he was a junior. He’d been everything, from prom king to homecoming king to captain of the football team when he was a senior. No one had it better.
I, on the other hand, had nothing.
After my mother left, I lived in a trailer in a park in the not-great part of town, and hung out by the truck stop near the interstate on the nights I didn’t work, hustling and giving blowjobs to truckers or anyone else passing through. I’d seen Mer there one night, and was stunned. Why was he there? To eat? His family owned an entire town where he could chow down for free, so why was he slumming? And it wasn’t that it mattered that he’d seen me. If he’d told our entire class I was turning tricks, no one could have thought any less of me than they already did. They all thought I was trash anyway. Working with all the other teens at the fast-food places, or the water park during the summer, or the movie theater, was fine. But washing dishes at Kingman’s, being a barback late into the night when everyone else was home sleeping, that was some kind of travesty. I didn’t get it, the weird judgments, but it was high school, so it defied all logic.
When I’d walked out of the bathroom, needing to wash my face and gargle, I turned the corner to walk under the overpass, and Mer was there by the dumpster. I was going to walk by, but he said my name, which was weird because I’d never heard him use it before.
Stopping, I waited, hands in the pockets of my ancient, threadbare denim jacket, to see what he wanted.
“How many guys you blow in one night?”
Flipping him off, I continued on, but he jogged to catch up, falling in step beside me.
“The fuck do you want, Barrett?” I asked, annoyed and tired, needing to sleep. It was almost two, after all.
“I want one.”