Page 6 of Need a Hand?
Second, Damian simply didn’t have any reason to see Peter again. He’d apologized. It had been awkward and annoying. Thank fuck it was over.
And so as he slunk out of the hospital the next morning embarrassed as hell, staring at the ground and hunched over to hide from any EMTs he might know, Damian felt like even more of an idiot than usual.
Peter had already been released, for one thing.
And he really shouldn’t have argued with the receptionist. If she decided to complain about him, there went the ledge Damian’s career was clinging to by its fingertips.
Damian had to try really hard not to think about why he felt like his day had gone to shit. It wasn’t like he’d been so super eager to run into Scary Mary again (and he’d be willing to bet every single kid at her elementary school had called her that, just maybe not to her face), and Peter wasn’t…he wasn’t anything special. Right? A normal guy.
So he had really, really nice eyes. Beautiful, even. And a cute smile, and kind of a cute everything. Damian hadn’t gotten a look at his ass, more’s the pity, but that was probably cute too. And round. And…
And Peter was so not Damian’s type. He didn’t exactly have a type, unless guys who bottomed and weren’t too weird and hit on him at a club counted as a type, but even so, Peter definitely wasn’t it. Too weird, for one, and more importantly way too shy to hit on anyone. Although if he was looking for a top, Damian might make an exception to his “let them come to me” rule…okay, no, not going there, because he didn’t need an erection in the hospital parking lot.
He’d barely made it to his car when his phone chimed in his pocket. It had to be either one of the guys sending him some stupid meme, or his parents nagging him about showing up for dinner. He didn’t give a shit about memes right now. And he’d rather eat cheap pizza alone for the millionth time than have to listen to his bro and sis talk about all the smart shit they did all day at their smart stupid jobs.
So fuck the phone.
It wasn’t until he got home and cracked a beer (yeah, it was still eleven in the morning, but whatever, he’d only had four hours of his 48 hours off, he was allowed) that he checked the phone at last. He dropped the mostly-full can into the sink with a clunk and a hiss of spilling beer.
Finally,finallyhe had another client. He’d signed up as a handyman with this app that was supposed to connect firefighters, who had two days off out of every three, were in great shape, and never had any money, with old ladies and people who needed a little help around the house and yard.
But he only got hired maybe once every couple weeks. So he maybe could have put more effort into his profile, and yeah, maybe he’d used the same photo he used for Grindr, but the handyman app had a totally suggestive name too. Like, shouldn’t thirsty divorcées who needed a handyman love that shit? And yeah, maybe that had been his reasoning when he was drunk and he felt like kind of an asshole for it, but whatever. He wouldn’t actuallybean asshole if some nice lady hired him to fix her sink. It was just marketing.
Only not, because he didn’t get that many jobs, and he had no idea how to change his profile to make it more appealing.
But here was a job! And since he might be losing his actual career, it felt like a sign from the universe. Damian fist-pumped and whooped and then froze, looking around himself embarrassedly even though there was no one else in his apartment. The blinds were down. Okay.
He cleared his throat, sat down at the table, and read the details.
The job was listed as “general maintenance/new residence,” which basically meant someone had just moved in to a house and wanted to fix it up. Probably ripping up carpet, touching up paint, maybe installing new cabinet hardware—all stuff Damian could do in his sleep after spending summers in high school working for an old friend of his dad’s, who’d flipped houses when the market was booming.
He changed into clean jeans and a tight T-shirt, just in case Janet P., who looked middle-aged and friendly in the app photo, wanted some eye candy after all, and headed off to the address the app gave him.
Damian’s apartment wasn’t in the worst part of town, but it wasn’t the greatest, either. The laundromat next door to his building wafted a constant smell of cheap detergent, the 7-11 on the corner always had at least three dudes out in front of it yelling about something, and the freeway ran by only about fifty yards from Damian’s bedroom window. But hey, he could afford it.
The house he pulled up to ten minutes later wasn’t in the greatest part of town either, a little run down and with a lot of cracked siding and weedy yards. But at least it was all residential, and the street was quiet. Not bad. Damien wouldn’t have minded living in a neighborhood like this if he could get the down payment together.
He parked two houses down and surveyed the place as he strolled up the sidewalk. A waist-high chain-link fence surrounded a little cottage with a seriously ugly peeling mint-green paint job and a tiny front yard. A giant, dusty tangle of purple bougainvillea filled one corner of the yard by the sidewalk, and in the other sat a sad-looking little lemon tree, still in the black plastic pot they used at garden centers.
One guess what his first job would be. At least digging a hole wouldn’t be too bad on a sunshiny fall day like this one. Not that Santa Rafaela ever had bad weather, exactly, since southern California was awesome. But you couldn’t beat seventy degrees and sunny with a sea breeze blowing by, especially compared to climbing around in a smoky building with seventy-five pounds of gear.
The gate squeaked enough to let the whole neighborhood know he’d arrived, but he still knocked on the door—and then waited. And then knocked again. He double-checked the address and knocked a third time.
After a long couple of minutes, Damian heard shuffling footsteps and some low grumbling—low grumbling? That wasnota female voice. Either that or Janet P. had made some changes since she signed up for the app.
A bolt thunked, the door swung open, and there, in a faded blue T-shirt and boxer-briefs with Sonic the Hedgehog on them, stood Peter. His hair stuck up in all directions, making him look a lot more like Sonic than Tom Holland right then, and his glasses hung slightly askew. The waistband of the underwear dug in just a little tiny bit, showing the slight chubbiness around Peter’s middle. He was so fucking cute Damian could hardly take it, and Damian’s chest had a weird, light bubble in the middle of it, a heady mix of surprise and relief andhow the fuck did this happen.
“How the fuck did this happen?” The words came out without Damian’s permission, and he knew he was turning fucking red again.
Peter blinked up at him, his mouth hanging open. “What?” And then, after a beat, “I’m going to kill her!”
And then he slammed the door shut, right on Damian’s toes.
“Fuck, fuck,fuck,” Damian yelled, hopping on his uninjured foot and trying to hammer on the door with the hand not currently flailing through the air. “Damn it, open the door, Peter!”
Peter’s “No!” came through the thin plywood loud and clear. “Go away, Christ, don’t you get that this is a setup?”
At last the throbbing pain in his crushed toes simmered down enough that Damian could think. He wasn’t that great at it, according to everyone who knew and loved him and a few people who knew and disliked him, but that didn’t mean he was a complete moron. Peter intended to kill someone, and from what little Damian knew of his life, that probably meant Mary Jane. Because she kind of had that effect on everyone.
