AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And since he’d spoiled it, he needed to fix it. Pronto.
He set the broken blooms aside gently, took the bulkhead stairs two at a time, and burst into the sunlight. He glanced sharply right and left, shielding his eyes with one hand. The summer kitchen door was closed. Had the student taken refuge there? Dev hesitated, but pivoted and took off in the other direction. If the guy was hiding out in the kitchen, he’d still be there after Dev circled the house. But if he was already in his car and burning rubber on his way out of town, Dev needed to head him off at the pass.
Fuck. He was hot and sweaty and covered with metal shavings. He knew from experience that when a guy his size barreled toward someone, people tended to jump to the wrong conclusions. So he slowed down and stopped, shielded from view by the white lilac bush.
He listened carefully—he didn’t hear a car engine, although the sound of Pete’s mower drifted from further down the street. He waved a bee away, but then scratched his head, staring at the flowers. Lilacs. Dev had scared the poor dude into dropping the ones he’d picked, so maybe offering up a bouquet would be a way to defuse the situation. Besides, who tried to stage an assault when they were carrying an armful of lilacs?
He pulled out his pocketknife and cut several sprays, then tucked the knife away, plastered a smile on his face, and rounded the corner to face…
…Absolutely nobody.
The lawn was empty and no car stood in the drive. He was too late, after all. “Shit.” Sylvia would be devastated.
He let the hand clutching the flowers drop to his side, thumping them on his thigh for good measure and sending a cascade of white petals onto his work boots. Head down, he trudged toward the porch steps, and then froze when he caught something out of the corner of his eye.
Suitcases.
He hurried forward. Two suitcases and a messenger bag, with a faded red hoodie draped over the largest one. The knot in Dev’s belly unraveled. Maybe it wasn’t too late after all.
Although… Where was the guy’s car? No flatlander Dev had ever met wanted to be stuck in Home with no means of escaping to marginally more cosmopolitan Merrilton. All of Sylvia’s previous students had arrived in laden vehicles, from vintage MGs to minivans. True, Pete’s Uber-slash-Lyft business made people a little more mobile, but fuck. If it meant holding on to the sole student, Dev would drive the guy around himself.
“It’d be a break from staring at the damn budget all day,” he muttered.
Voices drifted through Harrison House’s screen door, followed by a burst of recognizable laughter.
Kenny. Dev heaved a relieved breath. If anyone could talk somebody off the ledge—any ledge—it was Kenny Li. He’d been doing it from the time they were kids, his sunny nature and nonjudgmental inclusion de-escalating more playground squabbles than all the school guidance counselors put together.
Dev suspected Kenny had helped his best friend, Mitch, figure out his sexuality when they were in high school. Neither one of them had ever said anything about it, but right after graduation, Mitch had taken off for college and his career as an openly gay geotechnical engineer who specialized in working in developing countries. Kenny had stayed in Home, taking over his family’s fix-it shop, Make It Do, when his parents had retired to Arizona.
Since Dev didn’t want to undo Kenny’s work and scare the student—the only student—again, he eased up the steps as quietly as his size fourteen boots allowed, wincing at the creak he hadn’t managed to fix in the top step.
When the voices inside didn’t stop suddenly, he crept across the porch, straining his ears to hear the conversation. Yeah, maybe eavesdroppers rarely heard anything good about themselves, but he needed more ammunition if he expected to encourage the guy to stay for the entire Summer Kitchen session.
Students had bailed before, either because they found the curriculum too grueling—Summer Kitchen was a serious training school, not a carefree way to pass the time, drinking mimosas with friends while you gossiped over the pastry. Sometimes, Sylvia had expelled them, although that had happened more often in the early days when students were still vying for one of the limited spots.
Dev angled himself so he could peer through the screen door without being too visible from inside. He couldn’t see the student from this angle, only Kenny, standing next to an angular knee-high object that must be the new nightstand.
“Really?” Kenny asked between his signature chuckles.
“I’m sorry to say that it’s true.” The other man’s voice was light and pleasant—a tenor—and held an undercurrent of amusement. “I mean, I’m not totally divorced from reality. I knew it couldn’t really be the Iron Giant.”
“I expect it was Dev in his welding gear.”
“Dev?”
“Devondre Harrison. He’s—” Kenny caught sight of Dev lurking outside the screen, his eyes widening comically behind his tortoiseshell glasses. “How about that? Here he is now.”
After that intro, Dev could scarcely refuse to come inside. He opened the screen and stepped onto the entry’s weathered oak floorboards, somehow recovering the smile he’d lost when he thought he’d scared the guy away.
“Dev, this is Casey Friel,” Kenny said. “I was just telling him that you don’t commonly keep robots or monsters in the basement to scare away the flatlanders, but I’m not sure he believed me.”
Dev tried to make a comeback to Kenny’s snark—he’d had plenty of practice over the years—but somehow he couldn’t make words. Because Casey Friel had to be the absolute embodiment of Dev’s perfect man.
His impression of somebody Kenny’s size was correct. Casey was the same height, and like Kenny, his body was wiry rather than muscled. While Casey had soft brown curls to Kenny’s shiny, board-straight black hair, they both wore it a little overlong and shaggy rather than close-cropped like Dev’s usual style.
But Dev had never felt the least stirring of lust for Kenny, maybe because they were practically brothers, growing up together as they had. Casey, though…
Dev belatedly shifted the lilacs to in front of his waist like a fucking bridal bouquet, because something about Casey’s wide, guileless hazel eyes, the spray of freckles across his nose, the quirk of his mouth that made one side of his lips tilt up higher than the other… Well, Dev definitely needed the groin camouflage.
