Page 27 of Twice Shy

“Mr. Morgan! Ollie!”

Joel’s eyes fluttered closed, lips tightening in the closest thing to impatience Ollie had ever seen on the man’s face. But it was gone before he opened them again and turned to squint down the beach to where Jackie was slogging toward them in her pink galoshes. “Hey Jackie, what’s up?”

“Well!” She stopped about ten feet away to catch her breath. “I expect the ladies to gossip, but we’re starting the first race in twenty minutes and...” She trailed off, flapping a hand towards them as if to say—‘And look!’

Ollie looked. They were still only half done with marking out the route. “Don’t worry,” Joel said. “We’re on it.”

“It’s my fault,” Ollie said. “Luis’s been ‘helping’.”

“Yes, I saw.” Jackie’s smile thinned. “Would you like one of the moms to watch him while you finish?”

“No.” Ollie didn’t mean to snap, but he couldn’t afford anyone thinking he needed help with the boys. “I’ve got it. I’m fine.”

Jackie gave him a brittle look, her usual bonhomie decidedly absent. “Alright then, just remember the time. We can’t start late, or we won’t be done before the tide turns.”

Ollie grimaced as she turned on her heel and trudged back toward the growing crowd at the head of the beach. “Was I rude? I didn’t mean to be.”

“Jackie can be pretty full-on,” Joel said, which wasn’t a denial. He picked up his broom handle. “She means well but she takes all this to heart...”

Ollie lifted Luis on to his hip and grabbed his own broom handle. “I know. I know she was trying to be helpful, but people always think I need help. And I don’t!”

They were almost at the dunes now, turning to walk back along the beach. Luis started squirming and complaining and Ollie had to stop and put him down again, shaking out his aching arm and stretching his back. He missed the days when Luis could fit into a papoose.

“There’s nothing wrong with needing a little help sometimes,” Joel said.

“Yeah, well.” There was when your competence as a parent was being questioned in the courts. “I know, but—”

“Like this,” Joel said, and scooped Luis up, setting him on his shoulders, one big hand clamped around Ollie’s leg to keep him onboard. “How about that, big guy?”

Luis giggled, and Ollie winced as Luis’s little fists tightened in Joel’s hair. “You really don’t need to—”

“I’m happy to, Ollie, if it’s okay with you that I carry him for a while?”

Perhaps it was the authority in his voice, or the way he said Ollie’s name, but Ollie relaxed and nodded. “Sure, okay. Thank you.” He bent down to retrieve Joel’s broom handle and handed it to him. Their fingers touched, and he experienced that same electric jolt he’d felt in the Rock House last week.

He wondered whether Joel felt it too or whether he was simply imagining the sensation, but Joel had slipped his sunglasses back over his eyes and all Ollie saw was his own reflection gazing back.

As soon as they finished and reached the crowd at the head of the beach, Alyssa grabbed Ollie to help distribute stickers to the competitors. So he didn’t get a chance to say anything besides a quick ‘thank you’ when Joel lifted Luis from his shoulders and handed him back. But Ollie watched him for the rest of the event.

Joel spent most of the afternoon marshalling the kids into their various runs—starting with preschoolers and ending with sixth graders. He gave Luis a big thumbs-up as he and Ollie toddled the length of the beach in the preschooler run, and the sight of him cheering them on made Ollie’s stomach give a silly flutter. Easy to imagine having someone like Joel in his life, a partner to share all this with. But, as he’d learned to his cost, few guys wanted to take on two small boys. At least, Axel hadn’t wanted to, and Ollie couldn’t blame him; they’d only been dating for a few months when Jules had died. After they’d split, Ollie had put all thoughts of dating aside, mostly because he was too tired and strung out to think about it. Also, soft play areas and mother-and-baby groups weren’t exactly ideal places for a gay man to find romance.

Now, his budding friendship—was that the right word?—with Joel was making him realize how lonely he’d been these past two years. How starved for male company, even the platonic variety. He’d left all his friends back at CU Denver when he’d come to Long Island in the immediate aftermath of the accident, and although they’d tried to stay in touch it hadn’t worked out. On the one occasion Ollie had gone back for a weekend he’d felt like a ghost haunting his old life—places and people looked familiar, but he just couldn’t relate to lives that seemed self-absorbed and shallow compared with his own, and yet so free and simple he wanted to weep with envy.

After that, he’d let the friendships fade. No point in torturing himself with what-ifs.

But Joel was different. Older, for a start—although notthatold—and with some baggage of his own. Plus, he liked kids. Genuinely liked them rather than just tolerating them so long as they kept out of his way.

A case in point came later that afternoon, when the sixth graders were running. Joel had watched all the other events, but this time he got in there with the kids. Ollie smiled at the way he towered over them as they clustered around him eager for attention. But when the whistle blew, and they set off, Ollie realized Joel was running with one kid specifically. Something about the way the girl loped along, limbs flailing, didn’t look quite right, but she was concentrating hard and keeping up with the rest of the pack. A couple of times Joel steered her back onto the track when she threatened to veer off and Ollie noticed Joel was using his body to keep a space open around her. Once, she tripped and went sprawling in the sand. Ollie expected Joel to help her up, but he didn’t, he just stood back and made sure nobody else tripped over her while the girl scrambled awkwardly to her feet and ran to catch up, Joel jogging along behind. By the time they’d finished the whole loop—which was a long run for anyone—the girl was panting hard but smiling despite her sandy knees. Joel clapped her shoulder and bent to say something in her ear that broadened her smile into a grin. When Alyssa came along, handing the kids their competitor’s medals, the girl rolled her eyes like the rest of her friends (way too grown up at eleven for a cheap plastic medal), but nevertheless she hung it round her neck before she headed off to join her waiting family.

Joel watched her, looking pleased, and exchanged a wave with the parents.Yeah, Ollie thought,this is a guy who likes kids. Which was great because liking kids was essential in any friend of Ollie’s; he and the boys came as a package, after all. Buy one, get two free.

Ollie didn’t see Joel again to talk to until after the adult run had finished, everyone had been exhorted to collect their sponsorship money, and people started to leave. As usual, it was the same handful of parents who stayed behind to clear up.

Not that Ollie minded. It had turned into a glorious, almost warm fall afternoon and the beach was still novelty enough that he didn’t mind hanging out there a little longer to fold up tables and collect the trash people had left behind. Even better, Rory and Luis were playing happily together, digging in the sand near the steps to the boardwalk. He made the most of a little quiet time.

“Hey, need a hand?”

Ollie looked up from where he’d been kneeling in the sand beneath a folding table, trying to figure out how the mechanism worked. Joel stood on the other side watching him. He looked sowholesomestanding there with his short hair riffling in the breeze and his navy windcheater half unzipped—like he’d stepped out of a catalogue of outdoorsy fall fashion—that Ollie felt a sudden, impish urge to unzip all that teacherly decorum. “I’m trying to figure out how this thing works,” he said instead, ducking back beneath the table.

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