Page 118 of Bobby Green

Reg tightened in his arms, but Bobby didn’t let him go.

“I’m not breaking up with you,” he said, voice harsh. “And I’m not giving you an ultimatum. But Reg—Reg, I know who I want to be. I know who I wantusto be. And I know it’s going to take a while for you to put your finger on it. But when you do, let me know, okay?”

“Don’t break up with me,” Reg whispered.

“Right back atcha,” Bobby told him, holding him tighter.

“Don’t give up on me.”

“Not going anywhere.”

Reg pushed up in his arms then, taking his mouth, and Bobby responded right back. The quiet evening Bobby had in mind melted away in the heat of Reg’s hands on his body, in the franticness of his touch.

Bobby put a hand on either side of his neck and touched foreheads. “Easy,” he whispered. “Easy.”

Reg nodded, trembling, and Bobby turned him toward the bedroom, close and dark, where they touched all the time, and both of them knew the rules. Their clothes hit the floor in a jumble, and Bobby laid Reg down, feet in the air, and grabbed the lube from under the pillow.

“Fast,” Reg begged, naked, stroking himself, shameless. “Just… fast.”

Fast and now, Bobby knew. Because they’d both heard it, what could be the death knell of them, the thing that could break them apart.It’s got to be you, Reg, Bobby thought as he stretched Reg, slicked him up, made him ready.You’ve got to do it. I can’t help you.

Reg groaned, shaking, and Bobby thrust in. For a moment Reg’s grip on his cock was completely overwhelming, as he’d prayed it would be. Oh yes—it was them. It was only them. It was Bobby and Reg, and they were the bright light in the center, and the universe whirled around them. Bobby began to thrust, letting that light wash over him, letting their pleasure become the only thing that mattered.

Beneath him Reg shook, he trembled, he screamed Bobby’s name andonlyBobby’s name. There was nothing between them, not flesh, not doubt, not family.

Reg’s back arched so hard he came off the bed, his impossible angle hitting Bobby just right. Bobby cried out, groaned, and fell forward, coming that quickly, too quickly, because the white light would fade, would drain from them like come, and they would be left, just their heartbeats, alone in the darkness of an uncertain world.

A Different Normal

V CAMEhome in late April—and John came back to Johnnies about two weeks earlier.

Reg would remember the dates as seeming to be so close together, because life without V and John had become the new normal before then, and although he missed them both, the new normal was really so wonderful he didn’t have a way to put words to it.

Bobby and his mom found a new, better apartment with two bedrooms. It wasn’t too expensive, because his mom was finding work. She had a job with a temp agency, but finances were solid since Bobby was working two jobs. His mom still wasn’t awesomely excited about one of them. Bobby told Reg that she frequently tried to feed him extra during his three-day abstinence, and Bobby spent a lot of time boxing up leftovers to give to the street people who could be seen searching the dumpsters in their neighborhood, but she wasn’t mean about it either. In fact, she was pretty nice to his friends as a whole. She had Dex and Kane over for dinner, as well as Ethan and Jonah, and Lance and the other guys from the flophouse.

Bobby said she’d never had so many people to cook for, and between his two jobs and the temp job, they were making enough money for her to cook.

There were also about ten million craft stores in Sacramento, Bobby said—Reg wasn’t sure about his math—so the number of boxes in the spare room had gone up as well.

And most of the time itwasa spare room.

Bobby would finish waiting tables and come over to Reg’s and work on the house. He completely replaced the fence and dug out the backyard to plant grass seed. By April they had a nice carpet of grass in the back, some starting in the front, and he’d replaced the floors in the hall and was taking measurements for cabinets in the kitchen.

“Do you know how to make cabinets?” Reg asked apprehensively. It seemed like someone who knew how to make cabinets should probably not be in porn.

“No,” Bobby said, frowning as he wrote the measurements down on paper. “But I know how to install them. I’d need you to pitch in on the having them made, but we could rip them out and replace the flooring, then put in the new ones.”

Reg had looked around his crappy kitchen with big eyes.

“I got no idea how to do all that.”

“Well, I do—but it’s going to take two of us and….” Bobby bit his lip and grimaced, and Reg knew what he wasn’t saying.

He didn’t want to do it with V there.

Well, Reg couldn’t blame him. Did they have, like, boarding places for people with schizophrenia? So, like, she could go live there for a month, like a vacation, while they had hammers and saws and whatnot all over the house so they could fix the floor and install the cabinets?

Probably not, Reg reflected glumly.