Free Shiny! by Amy Lane

just friendly? Will seemed to be the sort of up-front guy who would just smile like that, friendly-like.
    Which was too bad, because Kenny was sort of hoping it was shy. Shy meant… well…. “Why weren’t you attracted to whatserface?” Kenny asked, hoping he sounded sincere.
    “She wasn’t my type,” Will said, pushing himself to the other corner of the couch to mirror Kenny.
    “What is your type?” Kenny asked, happy, mellow, settling down for a long talk.
    “I’m just figuring that out. What’s yours?”
    Kenny sighed. Well, that was, uhm, vague. “So far, it’s slutty and unfaithful.”
    “That’s too bad.”
    Kenny looked up to see those plain brown eyes looking at him sincerely, and he had a thought to find out some more about this guy. “How come you’re not out with your own friends?” he asked.
    Will managed a shrug when he couldn’t move his shoulders. “How come you’re not out with yours?”
    Kenny thought about his office, and the people there who sort of moved independently of one another. And about his school friends who were still partying when Kenny had apparently really wanted to settle down.
    “I’m between peer groups,” he said with dignity. “What about you?”
    Will sighed and pulled up his knees. He still dominated the couch, but it was precious of him to think he could crouch there like a little kid. “Well, obviously I didn’t have any peers in my old job,” he said, and Kenny laughed.
    “Obviously.” He’d watched the people from that church come and go—the women never wore pants and never cut their hair, and he and Gif had spent the first six months living there expecting the neighborhood association or whatever to politely ask them to leave. That had never happened, and he realized that fundamental didn’t necessarily mean unkind—but it certainly didn’t mesh well with the sort of educated geekiness Will exuded either.
    “And the people in the teaching credential program all had… I don’t know. Lives. Grown-up stuff. Families and stuff. It was like, we all graduated and scattered. Which, by the way, is sort of what happens after work too. Even in the bigger schools. We all fought the battle with the kids and then… went home. It was sort of anticlimactic.”
    Kenny nodded, suddenly feeling the gravitas. “Yeah. That’s hard. You want to celebrate with your fellow warriors.”
    Will nodded. “Right? And we didn’t. So there I was, big geeky Will going home to my shitty little apartment, and then I got laid off, and then I subbed, which makes you no friends at all, and then I got another job, and… well, you saw how that ended.” He sighed.
    “Well, what about the website business? How’s that going?”
    Will shrugged. “You’ve seen what I do for promotion—”
    “Yeah. Jack and shit. C’mon, open your laptop back up. Show me what you can do!”
    Well, what he could do was pretty damned impressive. Eye-catching, user-friendly—and he didn’t use any of the ready-made templates, so the businesses all looked original.
    Kenny hunched over the laptop on the coffee table and very carefully pushed all beverages back from it. “What the…? Pest control?”
    Will beamed. “Yeah—do you like the little mice and cockroaches running away?”
    Kenny looked at the animated GIFs and had to admit, “Yeah, they do add visual interest. And—organic gardening?”
    “Yeah—that’s my aunt Cara’s business. I mean, she’s not really my aunt, but she’s my mom’s friend—”
    “Yeah, yeah—I know how that goes. I had a ‘cousin’ who used to beat the crap out of me through school. He’s like my favorite relative now.” Kenny balanced his ice water and made the little air quotes, and Will smiled in understanding.
    “Yeah—anyway, she like, mortgaged her entire life to build this little farm and start a business, so I did her website for free.”
    Kenny looked at it—the pictures were clear and the prose was crisp and unmistakably Will’s.