Page 8 of Shades of Henry
“I’ll show you the super’s office, the vending machines, the laundry room, and then we’re going to borrow Billy’s car—” He jangled the pocket of the sweatshirt, where Billy’s keys sat. “—and go get pizza.”
Henry let out a bark of laughter. “Pizza?”
“Yeah. Mountain Mike’s—it’s right down the street. I’m a paid resident now, and I’m not going back to Little Caesar’s, no way, no how.”
“Resident?” Henry said, and Lance didn’t let the surprise bother him. “As in med school?”
“Yup. Student loans only get you so far. But, uh….” Oh, how embarrassing, secrets already. “Don’t tell the rest of the flophouse, okay? They think I’m still a student. I just get tired of explaining first-year intern and residency and student loans—this way they don’t get all weird because I’m a real doctor.” Lance wasn’t going into the rest of the happy psychological porn dance he did, not with Henry—not now, when he still remembered Henry’s palpable disdain.
“Yeah.” Henry let out a sigh and his shoulders slumped. “I’ve got some savings from the Army, and in the Midwest, it would have set me up for a couple of years. Not so much here.”
“And your brother didn’t want you to be alone.”
Henry grimaced. “No, sir, he did not.”
Lance let that one hang as they walked down the damp sidewalk. As a whole, the grounds were kept nicely—the shrubs were clean of litter and the grass neatly trimmed. The complex itself was, well, complex. Lance had lived here for three years, and he hadn’t figured out the rhyme or reason to the numbers on the different buildings.
The super’s office faced the street, with a buffer of a wide lawn, a fence, and a sidewalk. Across the parking lot were the dumpsters, and Lance told Henry that they kept the key on the peg by the door. The rule was supposed to be the first person who saw the trash was full took it out.
“How’s that work for you?” Henry asked, wrinkling his nose, as if he knew what to expect from a houseful of post-adolescent men.
“Not as well as you’d think,” Lance said, quirking his mouth in a smile, inviting Henry to laugh with him.
Henry rolled his eyes. “Sure. Do you keep a chore chart or anything?”
Lance wrinkled his nose back. “Uhm….”
And now Henry assumed a patient look. “Does the toilet need to be donated to science?”
“No respectable lab would take it,” Lance said, feeling embarrassment for the first time in ever.
Henry shrugged. “I can do that shit. I….” He sighed. “It’s why I joined the military. I like order.”
“How far’d you get?” Lance asked. “In the Army, I mean.”
“Staff sergeant,” Henry said, and Lance heard the faint ring of pride in his voice before his shoulders curled forward even more. “I miss it.”
“What happened?” Boy, was Lance curious—but not surprised when Henry shook his head.
“Can we not talk about this?” he asked plaintively. “Please?”
Lance took a breath and gestured. “Super’s office. By the way, avoid him if you can. He’s this sort of creepy asshole who likes to leer. Anyway, we usually pitch cash into the kitty and get a cashier’s check to give to him. Due on the first, late on the fifth.”
Henry nodded shortly. “Everybody pay the same?”
“People with actual beds in the bedrooms pay twenty bucks more a month than people on the couch and the air mattress.”
Henry grimaced. “How’s the couch?”
“Not bad. We actually replaced it last year, because it gets a workout.” Lance watched Henry’s eyes get big, and backtracked quickly. “Not like that! No! Seriously. We just like to be social. So, you know, movie nights, game nights, ‘sit on the couch and eat ice cream and bitch about our lives’ nights—the couch and the recliner and the kitchen chairs and the air mattress. Works for us.”
“So if I’m sleeping on the couch, who gets the air mattress?”
“Well, it’s been sort of like musical chairs. Randy, Billy, and I all pay for a bed, but the master bedroom has a queen and a single. So Cotton, Curtis, and Zeppelin all go random when it’s time to sleep. Zeppelin’s prone to bring home Johnnies guys to get busy, so he usually gets the queen-sized, ’cause it’s practically the guest bedroom. Curtis has the single unless Zep brings home more than one guy, and Cotton takes the couch or the air mattress, depending.”
Henry shook his head. “Oh my God. It reallyisporn-o-topia in there!”
Lance let out a breath, not sure if he could explain. “Yes and no?”
