Page 7 of Summer Lessons

“Order for us both,” Mason told him, enjoying this very much. “And then come join me.”

The next morning Mason woke up in a hotel room covered in come next to a trashcan full of condoms. His wallet was missing. There was a note next to the bed.

Paid for the room, left your car keys. Took the cash and the credit cards. You were a sweet lay—but maybe next time buy a dildo. Less expensive and easier to clean.

Mason rolled over on his back and peeled the sheets off his despoiled body.

Yep. It had been a great ride, but maybe he should stick to Masturbation Monday for a while.

Eight months ago

“MACE, I’Msorry.”

Mason looked up from the tumbler of Glenlivet he’d poured himself just before Dane walked in the door of his Walnut Creek home.

“Not your fault,” Mason said, knocking back the whiskey with a shocking disregard for how much it cost. Well, Mason’s job was sort of spectacular. He could afford the best. It had been one of his primary attractions for Ira.

And then Ira had started fucking Mason’s boss.

Now the job and the money and the house were no longer attractive.

“How did you find out?” Dane asked, grabbing a tumbler for himself and sitting down kitty-corner at the rather long table. Mason and Ira had entertained a lot in the past four years. Mason wasn’t so great at entertaining, really—he still managed to say the wrong damned thing at the wrong damned time. But Ira had beenspectacularat it, ordering the right wines, knowing the right jokes, knowing how to tell them to the right people.

Mason had been so grateful, actually, because Ira had smoothed the way with Mason’s boss. Mason’s first social interaction with the man had been to tell him how much he enjoyed casual Fridays, because his first job out of college had been for a guy with a stick up his ass who made employees wear polo shirts to company softball games.

Therewereno casual Fridays at Bent-Co. Mason had been showing up in khakis and polo shirts on chutzpah alone.

Fuck.

But Ira had been able to make Roy Carruthers see the humor in the situation. And apparently Ira enjoyed doing that so much that he and Roy got together at least twice a week to laugh and laugh.

Or that’s what Mason assumed they had been doing when he picked up his dry cleaning during his lunch hour one day and spotted the two of them coming out of a hotel lobby, laughing and razor-burned and chummy.

And then he’d looked at Ira’s credit-card summary—he left his reports on the desk in the study, where they both sat and did bills and used the home console—and saw the twice-weekly expenditures. Oh, wasn’t that nice. One day one of them got the drinks and the next time that guy got the room.

Wouldn’t Roy’s wife be surprised?

But Mason wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. He had enough trouble cleaning his own house—and that’s what he did. But first there was the argument, and the denial, and then there were the recriminations on Ira’s part, about how Mason was some sort of savant who couldn’t be around people and who didn’t have a romantic bone in his body and who might have been great in the sack but whose pillow talk was awkward and disgusting.

Mason didn’t know what to say about that. He liked to talk about sex. He liked to touch and taste and feel—for him, sex was all about the senses. There were no bright lights, no trips through the tunnel to see Jesus—there was just the glory of physical sensation. The rest of it—the building a life part—that was the part where his heart got all squooshy.

He had not, as of yet, connected the two.

He’d told his mother that when he’d called to tell her about the breakup, and he’d heard her sigh from Redwood City. “Oh Mason—honey, you have the best heart. And when you find someone—thesomeone—it’s going to be someone who gets that about you.”

“The only person who gets that about me is my mother,” he’d said, trying to make things light.

“And your little brother, who thinks you walk on water.”

“Sh—let’s not tell him the truth, okay?”

“I think your little brother has it spot-on, Mason Hayes. If you’re going to disillusion him, you’re going to have to tell him yourself. He’s on his way over.”

And that’s where they were now. Dane had hotfooted it over from their parents’ house, where he was living as he finished stage one of school, to apparently drink really expensive Scotch.

“So he was cheating on you for how long?” Dane asked, sipping appreciatively. He’d changed his major three times as an undergrad, and the money his parents had saved for his education had run out. He was currently working two jobs to pay for his tuition—he told Mason once that he was starting to believe Miller reallywasbeer.

“Two years.” Mason took a gulp, because as Ira said, the finer things in life were wasted on him.