Page 4 of Shades of Henry
David touched his pocket again and sighed. “Hang tough, Henry. I’ll get back to you with your living sitch, okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Davy.”
“’Course. Washing machine’s in the garage.” David waved to a connecting door on the far side of the living room, and Henry took the hint and left him to his phone call.
As he emptied out his duffel of pretty much every scrap of civilian clothing he owned, he fought the burning in his eyes and the horrible conviction that facing his brother would have been a helluva lot easier if Davy had beaten the shit out of Henry like he deserved.
It was funny that Davy mentioned prison, though—Henry wondered if any of the troubled kids Davy had known had ended up there. It had seemed so random, but then Davy’s life was a lot different from Henry’s. Maybe his friends were targets for unfair prosecution.
Henry swallowed. They would have been, if they’d been in his barracks. He and Mal had known that right off. Maybe there was a reason for Davy’s brain to go there.
And maybe it was just God, warning him of things to come.
Den Mother
“LANCE! MAN,do you have any laxatives? I’m….” Randy’s pink freckled nose scrunched up, making him look about twelve instead of barely nineteen. “I’m sort of… you know. Stopped up.”
Galahad “Lance” Luna grimaced. “Randy, what have we talked about?”
Randy shifted uneasily. “Eating vegetables.”
“What else?”
“But it’s just so—”
“What else?”
“Gross!”
“Yes, but so is a bowel torsion. Stop douching every fucking day, Randy. Whoever you’re fucking can deal with a blowjob. That shit kills the bacteria in your bowels that helps you crap. You areliterallya constipated douchemonkey. Man, I get wanting to get some between your scenes, but you know one of the really outstanding things about using condoms?”
Randy swallowed. “Easy cleanup?”
Lance touched his nose. “Bingo. Now I’ve got some stool softeners in my bag. I’ll get them. But man, stop trying to live on diet soda and come, okay? It’s bad for you.”
“Okay, Lance.”
“At least drink some coffee with cream—it’s a natural laxative.”
Randy perked up. “Really? I did not know that!”
Lance restrained himself from ruffling the kid’s hair. Randy was a fully functioning adult and hell-bent on proving that his private parts functioned better than all the rest of him put together—including his brain.
“Add it to your vices,” he said graciously. “Diet sodaalsokills the good stuff in your stomach, so consider it a twofer.”
Randy grinned, because that was his kind of humor, and Lance left the kitchen for the bed he’d marked as his.
God, these kids needed a nanny.
He fetched Randy his laxative and then went back to his textbooks, because in spite of the lovely late March day outside, he had to pass this damn exam in the morning, and then he had a shift to work for his residency at UC Davis Medical Center immediately after. God…. He’d wrapped up his postgraduate internship just a few months earlier, and now he had three more years of following Dr. Schearer through his residency in cardiac medicine before he could look for a fellowship or establish a practice.
So he could finish paying off his student loans.
He actually made a decent amount now that he was finally a resident. Not scads of money—but certainly better than a credentialed teacher after twenty years of tenure. But Lance had expenses, and he was paying off his debt, and secretly, in the place he never wanted to admit, Johnnies and the guys there had become his home—so much so that he fed their misunderstanding that he was still in school. It was just easier to stay in the flophouse if people thought it was because he needed the money.
He still did a porn scene every two months or so, not so much because he enjoyed them—although he did, because cutting loose his inner hedonist and fucking the shit out of somebody, no strings attached, was a voyeuristicrush—but because all the guys, with all their drama, made him feel wanted.
He wasn’t above feeling wanted. Everybody needed validation, right?
