Page 14 of Wandering in Darkness
I raise an eyebrow, not quite sure that’s how that works, but this is Felix we’re talking about. I open my mouth, prepared to tell him that he really should leave Grayson’s stuff here, and then decide that I actually don’t give a shit. “Sure, you can have it. You can have anything in this house you want.”
“Aw, how nice of you,” he says as he swipes a couple of things as he walks by and even scouts out the kitchen for some candy and cookies. “Ooh, Brigs will love this.”
While Felix is busy scavenging, I decide I should find someplace to eat since I am a bit hungry. When I pull up my maps to look for a breakfast place, the address Grayson had written down immediately pops up. I stare at it for a second before erasing it and finding a breakfast place a couple of miles away.
FOUR
CAL
“So…” Lane starts as we wait for our meal to arrive. Though Copper is with us, the pig had to stay in the car, much to Felix’s displeasure. He claims Brigs is “horrifically lonely,” but I’m not sure the pig even woke up when we left the vehicle.
“I’m really sorry to waste all of your time like this,” I say. “I can drive you back, and then Grayson can just… figure out this nonsense himself.”
“It’s fine,” Felix assures me. “It’s Saturday and we had nothing else to do. Maybe there’s something to do in the area while we wait?” He pulls out his phone to look. “Let’s see, let’s see… there’s bowling. Lane, how well do you bowl?”
“I bet I’ll be as good at bowling without my eyesight as I was with it.”
“We went bowling together once, didn’t we?” I ask, the long-forgotten memory flooding my mind. “Back in school there was a big group of us who went, and everyone thought it was hilarioushow awful you were at it because you were always the best at everything you did.”
“I bet it’s his surplus of muscles,” Felix says. “I bet it doesn’t allow him to gently bowl.”
“You think he looked like that in high school?” I ask as I eye Lane’s figure. I mean, Lane wasn’t a small guy in high school, and he enjoyed weight training, but he didn’t turn into this… beast until after he hit twenty.
Felix grins. “In my mind, he came out of the womb looking like this.”
“I don’t think his mother would be alive if he had,” Antonio comments.
“His mother has claimed I’m her new favorite child. She’s actually replaced her current childrenwithme. The other day she was like, ‘You are just… magnificent, Felix.’ And then she smooshed her boobs against my face and told me she loved me. My eyes were locked on to Lane’s father’s eyes the whole time. It made it minorly awkward.”
“Just minorly?” I ask.
“A smidge, really.”
I glance at Lane, who seems to be part of some different world. By the looks of it, he’s not even listening in. It’s honestly a wonder that he chooses to stay with Felix. It’s almost as if Felix has this magical ability to say the strangest shit, to make people ridiculously uncomfortable, yet still win us over. Maybe it’s not that there’s something wrong with him, but that there’s something wrong with us that we continue to hang around.
“Tell me more about Lane’s high school life. Was he at least… the hottest guy alive?”
“He was pretty popular,” I admit. “He was in football and wrestling?—”
Felix’s head snaps to face Lane. “You wrestled?”
“I did for a little bit. I honestly wasn’t the fondest of it, but I thought I’d try it.”
“I want to see you in one of those outfits!”
“Oh hell no,” Lane says.
“He only wrestled because the guy he liked was in it. It never actually came out that Lane was gay, but I sure could tell by the way he stared at the guy he liked,” I say with a grin.
“You are completely right. I very much joined because he was in it. He was the only openly gay guy in my grade and instead of being like, hey, I’m also gay, I just laughed too hard at his jokes and did whatever he did. Somewhere in my adolescent brain, I thought it’d be fun to roll around on the floor with the guy, and instead, it was like… he pummeled me to the ground without a care in the world, none of which was pleasant.”
“Did you ever tell him?” Felix asks.
“Sure didn’t. When we graduated, I remember him rushing over to say something and I fist-bumped his shoulder with a ‘You’re the best, bro!’”
That has me laughing. “You bro’d him?”
“I did.”
