Nesting Habits Read online

“It was pretty horrible, wasn’t it?” Lee sounded so proud.

  “You’re a rock star. But yeah, h-horrible.”

  Lee stopped at the back of a faded green hatchback station wagon and slid his guitar inside under a blanket. He practically had to stand on the car to get it closed. He laughed as they fell into step, side by side again. They kept going in the same direction to a little coffee shop less than a block beyond the parking lot. Lee said to grab a table and he’d bring the goodies.

  He wasn’t kidding. Lee came to the table with a tray holding two mochas piled high with whipped cream and sprinkles beside a dinner plate loaded with a muffin, two square treats, and two cookies. Phil had sat in the corner with his back to the wall in an old and slightly musty club chair. Lee pulled the matching chair so it sat at a right angle to Phil’s, the arms of the two chairs touching, and placed his booty on the little table in front of them.

  The girl who’d fixed the coffees leaned across the counter. “You’re putting that back before you leave, Lee!”

  He blew her a kiss and plopped into the chair.

  “Let me see the pictures you took?” Lee broke a very large chocolate-chip cookie in half and gestured to Phil that he should help himself.

  Phil hesitated, not sure about letting Lee see how he looked from the other side of the camera, even though Lee had to already know how drop-dead hot he was. Even if his nose and chin were maybe a little on the pointy side, Phil couldn’t think of anyone who was more photogenic. Even Alex Pettyfer couldn’t compare. But Phil couldn’t resist Lee’s smile, so he turned on the view screen and handed over the camera.

  Lee took it with his empty hand and rested it on his thighs, the lens parting them just so. Phil felt the heat of being stuck in a long-sleeved shirt even though March didn’t seem to be going out like a lamb. Lee paged through the shots and made the half cookie disappear at the same time. When he licked cookie crumbs from his fingers, Phil had to work not to sigh out loud. Lee grinned and looked up, and Phil knew he wasn’t hiding that he wanted to be on the receiving end of that tongue. Those fingers weren’t turning him off either.

  “These. Are. Awesome. Heidi!” Lee jumped to his feet and waved at the girl, even though she hadn’t stopped staring in their direction for 1/800th of a second. “Heidi come and see what a rock star I am!”

  She came out from behind the counter, and the look she gave Phil doused his mood like a bucket of cold water. Or maybe her outfit did it: black tights, a red plaid mini-kilt, and a filmy black tank. Her face softened as soon as she saw the first picture. Heidi watched intently as Lee scrolled through, and even asked him to go back a couple of times so she could see a particular shot again. When she looked up, she hadn’t been transformed into the president of Phil’s fan club, but she wasn’t trying to fry him with her stare anymore.

  “Amazing. I never would’ve guessed that crappy club could look so good.” She actually smiled.

  “Th-thanks.”

  And there went her smile. Thankfully another customer came in and she had to go back behind the counter. Phil did a decent job of putting her out of his mind too. They sipped coffee and ate junk food for a few minutes, during which Lee scrolled through the pictures again.

  “Say, if I give you my e-mail address, would you send some of these to me? My mom and sister would love to see them.”

  “Sure.” Oh, sure, of course, now that Heidi the Judgmental can’t hear, a syllable comes out fine.

  “Cool. I’ll just send you a message to your phone and then you’ll have it.”

  Phil got that that was his cue to give up his address, so he dug his phone out of his pocket and showed it to Lee. It was just easier that way: [email protected]

  “Oh man. Jerry’s not your dad?”

  “Nope.”

  “I just figured. Sorry about that.” Lee ducked over his phone, thumbs flying, and his ear slowly returned from red to pink.

  “N-no problem.”

  “So what kind of music do you listen to when you have a choice?” Lee grabbed the muffin and his coffee from the tray and leaned back into the chair. He crossed an ankle over his knee and rested the cup on his shin.

  Phil shrugged.

  “You listen to music, though.”

  “N-not really.”

  “Whoa.” Lee looked shocked and a little sad.

  They found the tipping point—much sooner than I thought. Why would a musician be interested in someone who was glad whenever he was left to live in silence?

  They debated the merits of more than one musical genre while the goodies slowly disappeared, but it wasn’t long before Lee offered to drive him home. Phil almost lied and said he needed to stop in somewhere on the way so he could walk back, alone, but that would be wrong. He’d never be able to look Jerry in the eye again if he lied to get out of an uncomfortable situation. Sure, he was disappointed he hadn’t measured up to what Lee wanted, what Lee could surely get by snapping his fingers in any room anywhere, but this wasn’t a matter of survival. You couldn’t just throw best practices out the window because they were inconvenient.

  On the drive, Lee surfed the radio. At each new station, he asked Phil what he thought of the music. Phil surprised himself and liked some of it. Jerry played the jazz station whenever he couldn’t get a baseball game, and that felt more like work than something you’d listen to for fun.

  Lee pulled into the driveway behind Jerry’s car as far as he could—blocking the sidewalk but not sticking out into the street too much. The wipers sounded like a heartbeat as they worked to clear the light but steady rain from the windshield. Lee turned to Phil and was in the middle of a sentence when Phil leaned over the console and kissed him. Just a short kiss, warm and chocolatey. It wasn’t more than a few seconds before Phil pulled back, but when he did, Lee moaned and leaned forward to keep their lips together a second or two longer.

  Maybe it’s not a good-bye kiss after all.

  Phil trembled as he fumbled behind him for the door latch. He felt shaken under Lee’s stare, which he was pretty sure was worthy of the label lusty, but Lee leaned back against his seat right away, so maybe that wasn’t right.

  “G-good night, L-lee.” Phil took a slow deep breath and tried to smile. He didn’t do half bad considering every nerve ending popped and fizzed like the fuse on a cartoon bomb. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  Lee nodded and Phil heard the door latch spring open behind him. He didn’t want to leave. He wanted to invite Lee inside and kiss him some more, but his feet whisked him down the driveway. He didn’t trust himself to look back; all he needed was to do a face-plant in the spotlight of Lee’s dim headlights.

  His phone buzzed before he made it to the side door, but he waited until he sat on his bed to look. The message from Lee was only one word.

  Yowza.

  Lee

  AFTER A week of crawling under houses and squeezing into tight spaces Uncle Lenny didn’t want to bother with anymore, Lee was ready for the weekend. Phil had stayed at the front of his mind all week—his graceful fingers and his patience and the way his lips burned like he had a fever. But most of all, those ice-blue eyes. He’d never seen anyone with dark hair and light blue eyes like that before, but it wouldn’t have mattered if Phil had no eyes at all. He was that hot.

  Lee parked in front of the house next door and hoped they wouldn’t complain too loudly when they got home. Parking anywhere in spitting distance of Goose Hollow was just about nonexistent, so they shouldn’t be surprised. Before he had a chance to get out of his car, Phil came out of the house and put a tripod into the back of an older model Jeep, green—no, teal—with a hardtop. Normally Lee would’ve sprung from his rickety old car and immediately started working on getting into the guy’s pants, but Phil Brask made him feel anything but normal. Lee had had his share of hookups, but even while they were in progress, he always knew something was missing. And now he knew exactly what that something was.

  Phil came back down the driveway with a cooler, a
big cooler for only one guy, and Lee wondered where he was going that he needed to take so much food along. And he wondered who else would be there. Lee watched him bend at the waist and arrange things in the back of his Jeep, and the urge to protect him—from people like Ainsley, who said he’d break Phil’s nose if he took another picture, but not in such nice language—won out over the desire to peel off Phil’s jeans and give him the pounding of a lifetime. That desire was there too—oh, yes it was, big time—but even though he suspected the sex would be earth-shattering, the thought of hanging out and sharing whatever was in the cooler sounded more exciting.

  Lee opened the door and waited until Phil straightened up before pushing it closed. Phil whirled, startled, but before Lee made it onto the sidewalk, Phil seemed to have warmed up to the surprise.

  “How’s it going?”

  Phil nodded and then turned around and closed the door of the Jeep.

  “Where are you off to?”

  Lee watched him take a breath and think about what he wanted to say before replying. It was hard for him to watch Phil’s gaze drop to the pavement, but he didn’t blame him.

  “T-take some pictures. H-herons are n-nesting.”

  Phil peeked up, and a funny little shiver ran up Lee’s back.

  “Like some company?”

  “S-sure.”

  Hot damn, Phil looked happy about it. How a guy could look so happy without actually smiling, Lee had no idea.

  Phil opened the driver’s side door and cocked his head, grinning just a touch when he looked back and Lee hadn’t moved. He seemed surprised that Lee would rather watch him walk away than do something constructive like get in on the passenger side.

  “This your ride?” Lee asked while he pulled the seat belt across his chest.

  “Y-yeah. Jerry sold it t-to me when he bought his new c-car.”

  “Jerry drove a Jeep? He doesn’t seem the type.”

  “M-midlife crisis.” Phil clicked his seat belt on and shot a sidelong glance Lee’s way before starting the engine.

  “Cool. I bet you don’t worry about it leaving you stranded alongside the road.”

  Lee tried not to read too much into the fact that Phil let him invite himself along. The guy worked with lawyers, for shit’s sake. One kiss notwithstanding, what could he want with a plumber’s apprentice beyond company?

  If the answer to that is sex, why do I feel let down?

  They’d been on the road for about twenty minutes—Lee entertaining Phil with stories about his week that were only embellished in the sense that they had the gunk wiped off—before he wondered where they were headed. “Are we going up to Willston?”

  “W-where’s that?”

  “You don’t know Willston?”

  Phil made a quiet sound, like he was exasperated, but Lee was having a hard time concentrating. Every time Phil moved his hands or turned the wheel, Lee broke out in goose bumps. He wished Phil would take off his long-sleeved denim shirt so he could watch the muscles in his arms. The collar of a robin’s egg blue T-shirt peeked out at his neck, so he could take off the outer shirt and if he felt cold, there was always the heater…. Lee snapped out of his own head when Phil cut him a strange sideways look. Must’ve been caught staring. At least there wasn’t any drool on the front of his shirt.

  “Oh. Okay, I see.” Lee chuckled a little. “You’ve been to the coast, though, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So instead of going up the hill past Manning, you turn right onto forty-seven. Another half hour or so and you’re in lovely downtown Willston.”

  “Oh. I turn off b-before there.”

  “Ah, the trail.”

  “The trail.”

  “I remember when they were building that trail. It started in town and just kept going—you didn’t want to get caught going past the barriers.” Lee laughed, remembering being chased away from the construction site more than once.

  “You’re f-from there?”

  “Yeah. My mom’s place is a few miles outside of town on the northwest side. She grows organic herbs for some fancy restaurants in Portland.”

  Another twenty minutes and two plumbing-mishap stories later, Phil pulled into a parking space between the trail and the ditch alongside the highway. The trail, a one-lane wide stretch of blacktop tracing an old railroad route for twenty-one miles, appealed to families who brought their kids and bikes and dogs in droves every weekend of good weather. Lee got out of the Jeep and stretched, embarrassed that his thoughts sounded like a trail advertisement.

  He’d never seen anything interesting alongside the trail, but he was willing to bet his opinion would be completely different by the end of the day.

  Phil already had a soft-sided square bag slung over his shoulder and a tripod in hand by the time Lee got to the open tailgate.

  “What do you want me to carry?”

  Phil patted the cooler and smiled in the direction of Lee’s belly button. Lee hoped Phil was thinking about something a little lower, but it was probably a long shot. He grabbed the red cooler, and it didn’t seem as big as it had back in Portland.

  “This is a lot for one guy. How long were you planning on staying out here?”

  Phil shrugged. “As long as I have to.”

  Lee flipped the cooler open and then closed it before too much of the cold could escape, even though it wasn’t seventy out.

  “All right. Cue the Dew.” He hefted the cooler out and made sure Phil was clear before he closed up the back.

  “I can get something else too.” Lee held out his free hand and nodded toward the tripod. Phil didn’t move—not at all, he even seemed to be holding his breath—and slowly Lee wrapped his fingers around the shiny metal apparatus and took it. “It’s the least I can do. You’re saving me from a day of boredom. Or worse yet—band practice.”

  Phil glanced up and Lee winked before starting off in the direction of the trail. Lee didn’t want to leave him behind but hoped Phil enjoyed the show as much as he’d liked watching Phil walk away from him.

  By the time he turned around, Phil had almost caught up. He was smiling, sort of, but still looking at the ground. Lee counted the smile as a win and let the rest go.

  Phil led the way across the trail with Lee a half step behind him, until they were about twenty yards past the blacktop. He stopped and looked around and then struck out on a westerly deer trail. The trees weren’t very mature, so they had to work a little to get through the damp underbrush. A few minutes later, Phil stopped at a picnic table strategically placed in a clearing.

  “Whoa. How’d this get here?” Lee’s voice was barely a whisper. It was so quiet, even that felt a little loud. He didn’t miss that kind of deep quiet—on the rare occasions his mom’s place was actually quiet, it could only mean everyone was busy working.

  Phil grinned and held his hand out for the tripod. “I kind of s-swiped it from trailside.”

  Lee grinned back, impressed, and a little surprised Phil would do something like that; he lived with a lawyer, after all, and the table wasn’t light. While he put the cooler on the table, Lee wondered how long it took Phil to wrestle it all the way into the clearing. He sat beside it with his feet on the bench and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Let me know if I can help.”

  Phil nodded and took the tripod to the far end of the clearing. Lee looked around a little but kept one eye on Phil. It almost looked like someone had created the area, an oval space ringed in the yellowing leaves of trilliums and five healthy second-growth trees. Lee tried to figure out exactly where they were and what would’ve been there before the trail, but gave up before too long. That wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as what Phil was doing. He’d chosen a spot for the tripod and bent at the waist to tighten the screws keeping the legs at the right height.

  Yowza.

  When he turned to come back for his camera bag, he must’ve seen Lee’s rapt expression, but he didn’t seem embarrassed. Maybe he wasn’t shy after all, just quiet. That coul
d be interesting.

  When Phil had the camera set up, he waved Lee over. “Bring a couple Dews?”

  Lee popped the tops on two cans, one in each hand, as he walked across the clearing. He’d spent a few Willston Jubilee weekends working in the beer gardens, and opening twice the number of beers he could drink at once wasn’t the only useless skill he’d practiced. Phil’s eye roll didn’t take anything from the fact that his face wasn’t pointed toward the ground.

  “Ch-check it out.” Phil took a long pull from the can as he stepped aside to let Lee look through the viewfinder.

  Lee was speechless. The view was like nothing he’d ever seen in real life: a huge bowl-like nest that had to have been made from branches the size of his wrist sat near the top of a tall old maple. Two full-grown blue herons stood outside the nest, and as Lee watched, four or five beaks appeared and started a cacophony of bird sounds.

  It was cool, but not cooler than what happened next. Phil moved so close he was almost pressed against Lee’s side, and then he bumped him out of the way with a strategically placed shoulder. Lee took a few steps sideways to keep his feet and when he turned, Phil was snapping photos like a photographer on America’s Next Top Model. And smiling. Not a split your face kind of smile—somehow Phil’s plain joy packed even more of a wallop. Phil was captivated by what he was doing—snapping a series of pictures, fiddling with the settings on his camera, and then snapping few more.

  If the guy puts that much effort into sex, I might not live through it.

  If it ever happened. Or when. Whatever.

  Phil didn’t stop until the birds quieted down. Lee thought he saw the parents fly away but couldn’t be sure because they weren’t close enough to where Phil stood. When the birds had been quiet for a while, Phil put the lens cap on, checked the tripod, and sat on the other side of the cooler.

  “What’d you make for lunch?”

  Phil snickered. “S-subway.”

  He pulled a foot long sandwich from the cooler and nodded toward it, inviting Lee to do the same. Lee wondered again how long Phil planned to hang out because inside the cooler were four sandwiches, a large tub of what looked like potato salad, and a square of something wrapped in foil that Lee dearly hoped would turn out to be dessert.