Page 27 of Country Road Romance

“Anyway, that’s enough of that,” Joyce said airily. “As I’m sure Jared’s told you, I’m Joyce, and this is Doug. None of that Mr. and Mrs. Russell stuff, either.”

Jared was right about that, at least,Charlie thought.

“We have to figure out where the two of you are going to sleep,” Joyce went on. She wagged a finger at the both of them. “I don’t know what type of shenanigans the two of you have been getting up to, but I want you to know that there will be no hanky-panky in this household, at least not until the two of you are married.”

Charlie wished he could take a picture of the mortified look on Jared’s face. He looked like a fish out of water, with his mouth hanging open and his skin turning several shades of pink.

It made him want to kiss him.

“Mother,” Jared finally managed to choke out, “I don’t know what idea you have about the two of us, but I can tell you absolutely that the two of us haven’t been getting into any ‘hanky panky.’” He made a point of using scare quotes to exaggerate how ridiculous he found the situation. All of that just made Charlie want to kiss him even more.

“Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes,” Joyce responded. “I may be your mother, but I’m also pretty up-do-date on how things work these days.”

“Joyce,” Doug said gently, “are you going to go on about this all day or are you going to show the boys where they’re going to sleep?”

She huffed.

“Well, I guess we can have Jared stay in the guest room, though the only thing we have in there is the fold-out bed at the moment.”

“Don’t put yourself out on my account,” Charlie rushed to say. “I don’t want Jared to not be able to sleep in his own bedroom. I’m totally fine with sleeping on a foldout.”

Joyce shook her head. “Absolutely not. You are the guest in this house, and that means that you will have the best accommodations.”

Charlie could tell that Jared wasn’t particularly happy about this, but he got the feeling that Joyce wasn’t the type of person whose wishes could be thwarted, either by her husband or by her son.

“I guess I’ll just have to get used to having a backache for the next couple of days,” Jared said not-very-graciously.

“There are always sacrifices that we have to make when we have guests,” Joyce reminded him.

“In that case we’d better not wait around. Come on, Charlie, and I’ll show youmyroom.”

“Coming, dear,” he said, as they made their way upstairs. The upstairs, like the rest of the Russell house, felt cozy and lived in, with the sort of comfort that could only come from a place that had been home to the same family for years. Even Jared’s room still had little reminders of him, including a poster from a ‘90s movie and a book of the collected poems of D.H. Lawrence.

“So,” Charlie said, looking at the room around him, “this is where you grew up, eh? I like to think about all of the hours that a moody and melodramatic young Jared spent listening to Patsy Cline and writing bad poetry.”

“What makes you think that my poetry was bad?” Jared asked.

“Because every little gay boy writes bad poetry when they’re a teenager.”

Jared couldn’t help but laugh at that. “I guess you may have a point. Fortunately I threw most of it away, so that no one would have to see the embarrassing things that I was writing about and all of the many crushes that I had as a teen. I did keep most of my journals, though, but mom might have thrown them out. She’s not the type of person who likes clutter.”

“I heard that!” Joyce shouted from down the hall. “I may like a clean house, but I know when not to throw out something that’s actually valuable.”

Jared shook his head as his mom was speaking.

“Don’t listen to her,” he whispered. “I’ve lost count of the number of things that she’s thrown out without even asking me first.”

They stood there in a somewhat awkward silence for a few minutes, before Jared finally shrugged and started moving toward the door. “I hope that you’re very comfortable in my room, Charlie Garrett,” he said.

“You know,” Charlie said, hardly believing the words that were coming out of his mouth, “you could always sneak out in the middle of the night and come back into your room. If, you know, you wanted to have a good night’s sleep.”

He knew that sounded like he was asking Jared to come hook up with him in the middle of the night. In his old bedroom. In his parent’s house. It was like the beginning of almost every romantic comedy situation gone wrong. Of course, that was exactly what he was going for, and the thought of Jared crawling into bed with him in the middle of the night made him feel all kinds of ways, and he had to shift position to keep from embarrassing himself.

“As my mom said, we run a clean establishment here,” Jared said with a twisted little smile, breaking the tension in a flash. “And for that reason I will be suffering through the ignominy of sleeping on the couch in my own parents’ house.

Even so, Charlie couldn’t stop thinking about that image of Jared getting into bed with him. The harder he tried to put it out of his mind and think about something else–preferably something far less stimulating–the more insistently it kept intruding on his thoughts.

He was saved from any further thinking by Joyce’s voice calling from downstairs.

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