Page 18 of Shades of Henry
“You can sleep on Randy’s bed,” Henry offered blandly, and Lance’s look of horror reassured him.
“Only if I’m into pain. His sheets are so stiff, they’d cut my skin.”
“God, that kid’s lucky he doesn’t get scabs on his penis. For God’s sake, that thing’s like the Energizer Bunny of dicks!”
Lance had to hold his hand in front of his mouth, he was laughing so hard. When he calmed down, he dropped his hand and said, “You shit! All the kids are asleep for once and nobody’s having sex! God, don’t make me wake anybody up!”
Henry gave one more chuckle. “Sure. You can have the air mattress. Do you have to be anywhere tomorrow?” Lance had classes sometimes—in-services, Henry supposed, not knowing what the doctor term for it was—and meetings all the time. It was hard for Henry to keep them all straight.
“Well, yes, but only because I want to,” Lance said cheerfully. “Have you met Reg yet?”
Henry nodded. He’d been to the Johnnies main office several times. He’d never been invited to the back suites, where the offices were made to look like bedrooms and the filming happened during business hours, but he’d been back there on occasion to make repairs. And hehaddropped Galen or Davy off in the front on several occasions. That’s when he’d met John’s shy promotions director.
And had wondered about him, a lot.
Reg wasn’t pretty, or at least as pretty as the other guys. He was, in fact, pretty average, although his body looked like he took care of it. His hair was getting a little thin on top, so he kept it buzzed short, and his cheekbones weren’t razor perfection. He had an amazingly sweet smile, and while Henry had noticed that he wasn’t quick on the uptake—he’d needed to be reminded of who Henry was more than once—he was very good about asking questions from the people around him. Reg wouldn’t have made it in the military, he was just not quick enough, and from what he’d let drop, he’d spent several years in porn.
Until this night, right now, Henry had been sort of pissed off about that. Who had let this guy—this not-so-bright, super sweet guy—spend his twenties giving it up for anyone who looked good on camera?
But Reg talked about trying to fix a house and trying to keep a car, and about how any job he could have gotten out of high school wouldn’t have let him do that. And Cotton—that kid couldn’t work six days a week in food service, with people yelling at him. He’d be a wreck.
Sure, there were better ideas—but you usually needed connections to get you that job, and these guys were barely connected to their own shoes.
Henry was beginning to get a picture of a very different world than the one he’d assumed existed, where gay men were the same as sex perverts and porn stars were degenerate drug abusers. These were his father’s ideas—these were the thing he’d said loudly about Davy the minute Davy left. These were the ideas Henry had littering his brain from the minute Mal had kissed him, laughed in his ear, and shoved his hand down Henry’s pants, when they were sixteen.
But he was starting to see that sex was very different than he’d been raised to believe. He was almost as horrified as he was surprised.
That didn’t stop a part of him from thinking sex should be sacred.
“Have you met Reg’s boyfriend, Bobby?” Lance asked, breaking into his thoughts.
“No, not yet, but Reg said he was looking to hook me up with a construction job.”
“Well, he’s about six-three, and built like a tank. Like maybe three-hundred pounds of chest with a thirty-inch waist. It’sinsane.”
Suddenly Henry remembered one pertinent bit of information that Reghaddropped about his boyfriend, and heknewa brilliant shade of magenta was washing up from his neck.
Lance chortled. “Reg told you Bobby’s got a ten-inch dick, didn’t he?”
Henry buried his face in his hands. “Yes!” he wailed. “Why did I have to know that?”
“Because, my brother, you would have wondered, and now you don’t have to. Reg is doing you a service. I’ve filmed scenes with him—it might even be eleven inches, but the kid doesn’t like to brag.”
Henry felt his grin break free before the full import of what Lance said hit. “Scenes…,” he choked, and Lance looked away, obviously embarrassed.
“I’m sorry. I… we’ve been trying not to mention that in front of you. You get all weird, and the guys get weird, and… you know. You seem to be fitting in okay. And now I had to go—”
“Forget about it,” Henry said, waving his hand and ignoring the hollowness in his chest. “It’s just… weird. To think you were… whatever. Why are you telling me about Reg and Bobby?” His throat ached, like it did when he was trying not to cry, and he was a little appalled. What was wrong with him? Why did the thought of Lance with some Panzer tank with an eleven-inch johnson freak him out so badly?
“Oh!” Lance sounded as desperate for a different subject as Henry was. “Yeah! Because Bobby’s foreman has a boat. The guy offered to take Bobby and some friends out on the river, and Bobby picked Reg of course, but I got the invite too, so, well, it’s my day off and I’m not spending it catching up on my med journals, and that’s pretty damned exciting.”
Henry was genuinely happy for him. “You work too hard,” he said, leaning sideways against the couch and wrapping his arms around his knees. “You totally deserve it.”
Lance put down his medical journal and turned to mirror Henry’s pose. They were facing each other from across the couch, and Henry suddenly realized how intimate this conversation was, in the living room at night, the only two people awake in the house.
“Well, you deserve a medal for falling on the Cotton grenade tonight,” Lance said with admiration, and then he sobered. “Did your dad really take a strap to you and Dex when you were kids?”
“Yeah,” Henry said, not sure when that had become a secret. “But, you know, not randomly. Only when we were dumbasses. Didn’t your parents spank you when you were a kid?”
