Page 34 of Summer Lessons

Carpenter shrugged. “He’s got nothing to worry about. Skip and Richie came out to the club after Thanksgiving. It was all good, people were chill—”

“Obviously not too chill, because Skip had a bruised cheek,” he pointed out, remembering standing in his office and watching Richie drop Skip off that morning. He hadn’t asked—hadn’t been close enough to Skip as a friend to ask—but he was putting it together now.

“Yeah, well, that guy was an asshole without the homophobia—and Skip hit first.”

“Seriously?” Dane interjected, and Carpenter nodded, grinning.

“Skip’s got a bit of a temper. Like, Richie’s asshole stepbrothers pissed Skip off in a wrecking yard once, and Skipper threw a sledgehammer through a car window. He was all modest too, like it wasn’t nothing, but Richie was like, straight through the windshield.”

Mason had to laugh a little. “Okay. So I get it. The team’s fine with the gay. But I don’t thinkTerryis.”

“Jefferson?” Carpenter asked—ClayCarpenter, and Mason had a moment of fury for bullshit male codes that said the soccer team all used their last names because that was manly.

“Yes. His name is Terry Jefferson. And I don’t know if he’s had a normal relationship in his entire life, and everything I say and do makes him look at me like, ‘Here is the rich douche bag in his natural habitat. Watch as he looks fruitlessly for dinner after sex. Look, rich douche bag, look! You are playing with a different breed of asshole now, and there is no dinner to be found!’”

He had to stop because Carpenter and Dane were hanging on each other helplessly, laughing until they cried.

“It wasn’t that funny,” he said with dignity after they’d stopped.

“Oh my God, it really was,” Dane panted, catching his breath. He stayed there, leaning on Carpenter, and Carpenter didn’t seem to notice.

“Jesus, that was awesome,” Carpenter confirmed. Then he sobered and looked at Mason perceptively. “But not so easy to live through.”

“No,” Mason said shortly.

Carpenter grimaced. “I don’t know him that well, honestly. You know who you should ask, don’t you?”

Of course. “Skip.”

Carpenter shrugged. “He’s the captain of their little ship, as far as that goes.”

Mason scrubbed his hands through his hair. He hadn’t put any product in it, and it was sort of a curly riot at the moment. He liked it like that sometimes. “I don’t understand him either,” he confessed, feeling pathetic.

Carpenter sighed. “You know, Dane talks about your folks all the time. My folks are just like ’em. Still a couple. Got their shit together in a paper cup. It makes you feel invincible, right?”

Mason thought about all those times he’d sat in the principal’s office and known that his mother and father would love him regardless. “Yeah.”

“When you don’t got that feeling, like you can screw up and it’ll be okay, you stay a kid a lot longer, at least in your head. Because you don’t know how to do anything else. Nobody showed you how.”

“Great. Because I didn’t feel old and creepy enough.”

Carpenter shot him a white grin through his scruff. “Anybody can see you’re a big kid pretending to adult, Mason. But you at least know how to pretend. Anyway, talk to Skip. They’ve known each other as long as Skip’s known Richie—he might have some info.”

Mason nodded, feeling a little better. But he still didn’t play the next round, because he was too busy watching his brother and Carpenter destroy the enemy like old and blooded brothers.

Or like two guys working hard at not falling in love.

MONDAY HEcalled Skipper through the tech line.

“Tesko Tech Business Services, this is Skipper Keith!” God, he sounded happy. Happy, perky, and sweet. He had from the first time Mason had called his department and gotten him. And Mason, coming off of Ira and worried about Dane, had asked him to come up to his office and watch porn.

The thought of it still made his cheeks burn.

He expected himself to just blurt out things like that—but to have that unfortunate victim of his social ineptitude turn into a friend? Embarrassing.

“Hello, Schipperke,” he said now, making himself sound jovial and smooth. He always tried to channel his father when he did this. Or Fred MacMurray. “How are we doing this morning?”

“Well, apparently we’re having lunch with a VP in the east wing, because he got his brother to take our friend out for lunch, and we don’t want to eat alone.”