Page 10 of Bobby Green

And he was pretty sure it was the sort of thing that would be blocked on the computer back in the manager’s office too.

LIBRARY COMPUTERSblock porn—so do internet cafés.

Vern looked at the card on his break, though. It featured an artistic line silhouette of a shirtless man, and he knew exactly what he was getting into. He looked at the card again, which read [email protected], and wondered who he could flop with that night and if they would mind if he used their laptop.

Then he noticed that the card had an address on it.

One right there in Sacramento.

And he had the next day off.

THE PLACElooked… respectable. A little one-story office complex that appeared to be designed around a courtyard, since there were trees growing out of the middle. Solid. The girl behind the counter looked like a handkerchief in a hurricane, with flyaway brown hair and a sleeveless flannel shirt, and she stared at the phone like maybe it would bite. The thing rang, and she fumbled the receiver, then pushed a pulsing button with extreme trepidation.

“Uh, Johnnies? Kelsey speaking? How can I help you?” The voice on the other end spoke, and her elfin face lightened fractionally as things seemed to work. “Okay, yeah. I’ll hook you up with John. He can help you.” She stared at the phone and jabbed a finger at the board again. Raising an eyebrow, she muttered, “And I hitthisto hold, andthisto transfer, and—”

There was a solid tread in the hallway. “Oh, Kelsey…,” a voice sang, sounding like a man at the end of his patience.

Kelsey grunted. “Sorry, Dex. What’d I do this time?”

“Well, I got a real earful of the new girl getting an ass full. Was that your intention?”

Kelsey gave a weak smile. “Well, at least this time it wasn’t on speaker.”

Dex let out a weary laugh and massaged the back of his neck. “An improvement,” he admitted, then sighed. “Okay—show me who you were trying to transfer. Let’s try this again.” He looked up and saw Vern there, and some of the weariness eased up. “I was hoping for an email, but I got a visit,” he said with a bright commercial smile. “That’s even better. Give me a sec and we can talk.”

While Vern was waiting, he looked around, thinking the office looked so… normal. So pedestrian. Boring, even. With the exception of some kitten posters behind Kelsey, saying things like “Hang in there, baby!” and “Today’s going to be a great day!” most of it was beige. If Vern hadn’t heard something about the new girl getting an ass full, he never would have guessed porn.

While he was staring around the space and wondering if anyone had ever sat on the copier bare-assed naked, the bell above the door rang.

The guy who walked through didn’tlooklike a porn star. Not like Dex or Kane, who were muscular and waxed—down to their eyebrows, Vern was pretty sure, or Kane would have had a unibrow. This guy had scalp stubble dyed an obvious blond. His pale brown skin had the remnants of childhood acne on the cheeks, with cheekbones that made the league minimum for handsome and a short jaw with a pointed chin. Vern might have written him off completely in the looks department, but he had friendly almond-shaped blue eyes and a smile with a sort of pureness—like Keith Gilmore, but without the cunning or the self-awareness of being a douchebag.

He paused as he saw Dex and Kelsey working on the phone and waited until he caught Dex’s eye.

“The schedule in the office?” he asked, pointing to a door leading to what looked to be a conference room on the right.

“Yeah, but it’s a mess,” Dex muttered. “Tango’s off, probably for good, so gimme a minute, Reg—I meanDigger,” he said determinedly. “We might need you more.”

Digger—who was apparently also Reg—smiled sunnily, unfazed by the gaffe of his name. “Okay, Dex. I’m here.”

He turned to Vern and held out his hand. “Digger. Are you new?”

Vern shook his hand, wondering at that sunny smile and those guileless blue eyes. Was this guy hiding something? Keith’s good-ol’-boy smile hid an opportunist who thought forty bucks for a blowjob made him Mother-Fucking-Teresa, but this guy didn’t seem to have an angle.

“I don’t have a computer,” he said apologetically. “Dex there offered me an audition, but I wasn’t sure for what.”

Digger nodded. “Porn,” he said simply, wiping the mystique away with one pass of a battered, fine-boned hand. “You’ve never heard of Johnnies?”

Vern shook his head in apology. “Sorry. No. I don’t even know what kind of porn itis.”

Digger’s shrug seemed philosophical. “Mostly gay, but they’re trying to get girls now. Like branching out.” He smiled that easy bolt of sunshine again. “I like girls. I mean, guys are good, but I started with girls, and sometimes it’s nice to trade off.”

Vern’s brain sputtered and sparked. Such an easy way to think about it, right? But who did that? Who just said, “Yeah, I’ll do either one. They’re both nice”?

“So,” Vern said, trying to get his brain wrapped around the concept, “like bisexual?”

Digger’s frown made him look like a puzzled baby. “But isn’t that like gay? I’m not sure I’m gay.”

This conversation was officially the strangest thing Vern had ever done with a stranger. “Well, bi means you like both,” he said patiently, and embarrassment crossed Digger’s open face.