Page 16 of Sean's Sunshine
“It’s a good thing. I do all the exercises. I can walk around the house now. Get out of the chair, get to the bathroom without help. But I still need you in the house. Just, you know.” He gave an embarrassed smile. “Not quite the same way as that first day.”
Billy caught the smile and let it do what Sean had intended: help him relax. “Yeah, yeah. I get you. You’re right. I’ve got a pretty cushy setup here. My own room. Free food and rent. Gotta admit it’s been nice not having twenty-four-seven live porn going on around me.”
Sean rolled his eyes. “Now you’re bragging.”
Billy was going to cackle and make light of it, but suddenly he couldn’t. “Naw, it’s not like that. I mean, I’m not really exaggerating much. Somebody gets busy in that apartment every night, and often more than one couple. Or throuple. Or whatever.” He grinned and shrugged and was surprised when he felt his cheeks heat. He’d thought he was beyond that. “It’s just, in the flophouse, you’ve got people who know the score. They have sex for money, so everyone knows they tested clean, so doing it all in-house is sort of a blessing. And it doesn’t come with any strings—you don’t have to worry about a date or if you find your soulmate the next day because these guys, they’re friends, and they’re not going to jam you up if you make a real emotional connection, you understand?”
Sean’s eyebrows went up. “Sounds perfect.”
Billy shook his head and became very absorbed in his cottage cheese. “I guess not,” he said thoughtfully. “It didn’t hit me so much until Henry came to live with us. And at first it was easy to write him off as a judgy bitch, right? But then it turned out Henry was in love with Lance—like,reallyin love with him. And you start to realize that somebody who can be that kind and who had his own problems too wasn’t really judging us. He wasworriedabout us. And… well, shit started changing.”
“Like what?” Sean asked. He’d pushed aside his empty cereal bowl, and here they were, two dudes talking again, and Billy had a moment to wonder why this felt like the thing he’d been missing all his life.
“Well, first of all he made Fisher and Zeppelin realize they were in love and maybe should find a better job to support that.”
Sean chuckled weakly. “That’s fair.”
“Yeah, but none of the rest of us caught it. And he just… did that. Caught shit. Like the fact that the super was charging some of the kids blowjobs in lieu of rent and not telling them, so he was getting blowjobsandextra money.”
Sean made a pained sound, and Billy remembered that guy had been part of a case, and it hadn’t ended well for him. “Rivers actually caught that,” Sean told him.
Billy cocked his head. “You know this because…?”
“I was there,” Sean said with a shrug. “Rivers didn’t tell me in so many words. I think he didn’t want you guys to have to talk to the cops.”
Billy grunted. “God. That guy. You see? You see why Rivers is sacred with my people? But anyway, Henry was still part of that whole change. That idea that we could be young adults and not simply kids fucking our way through life. Henry’s the one who sat Cotton down and told him to stop falling for every ‘daddy’ who asked him for a BJ, and it was a good thing too, because Cotton was dying by degrees. But even those changes didn’t stop the fact that the guys who stayed in the flophouse—and the new guys just starting porn, like Vinnie, who got there last week—have no problem with sex on tap. And….” He shrugged, trying to remember where he’d been going with this.
“And it’s nice to be staying in a place where that’s not the focus of your day,” Sean said dryly.
Billy remembered the wave of breathlessness, of arousal, that had swept over him when he’d seen Sean’s bare and pale body in the shower not an hour earlier.
“Sure,” he said, wanting to bang his head against the table.
“As flattering as that is, I do get it,” Sean told him. “It’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to have a relationship. Sometimes”—he shrugged—“it’s easier to keep your head out of that whole scene when you’re focusing on your job.” He gestured to Billy’s schoolbooks piled in the corner. “You’ll see,” he said. “You already see. School’s taking part of your focus now. You won’t need that whole….” He made a little circle with his finger.
“Sex on tap?” Billy supplied.
“Yeah. You won’t need that.” It was funny that Sean seemed so sure, given how much sex he didnotappear to be having.
“I don’t need it now!” Billy said defensively, not sure why he felt so stung.
“Well, obviously not. I’m just saying, it does sound like a young man’s game. You know, like counting how many socks you can wank off into—”
“Did youdothat?” Because that sounded like a flophouse game to Billy. In fact, he couldn’t believe nobody had done that before.
“God no. That was my younger brother. My mother made me talk to him. She was mortified.”
Billy stared at him. “Wow.”
“I’m saying. But eventually Charlie stopped doing that because he graduated from high school and was working his way through college, and he met a girl. Suddenly how many socks he could go through was not nearly as important as how much he could spend on flowers and decent restaurants.”
Billy snorted. “I tried that once—”
“With a girl you didn’t love,” Sean pointed out, and Billy shook his head.
“This—thisis what you get when you talk to a guy,” he muttered.
“Someone who won’t take yourshit!” Sean retorted, but he was grinning when he said it, and Billy was forced to smile.