Free Shiny! by Amy Lane Page B

but I’m slow. It took me a while to figure out what first sight really was.”
    “Yeah, Cara,” Nina said archly. “Sometimes it takes someone a while to realize what first sight really is!”
    Cara rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah… you were sneaky.”
    Kenny strangled a laugh. “Will is anything but sneaky. He was just clueless!”
    “That’s not true!” Will protested. The music had resumed, and for a moment he watched Ashley being whirled around by what looked to be an older cousin, and he envied her. He wasn’t great at it, but he and Kenny had at least learned to dance. “I knew exactly what I was doing,” he said with dignity, and Kenny raised an eyebrow in disbelief.
    “And what’s that, precious?”
    Will grinned proudly. “I was making myself indispensable. ”
    And in that moment, Kenny’s smirky front fell away, and what was left was what Will thought of as the real Kenny. He was funny, yes, but he was also the same guy who cried at weddings.
    “Oh,” he said, sounding poleaxed. “Well, consider yourself ‘mission accomplished.’”
    Will grabbed his hand, too conscious of Kenny’s vulnerability to even take advantage and keep making fun. “Well, you know. I do have a good idea every now and then.”

Confessions and Confusions
     
     
    I T WAS sort of embarrassing to admit it, but Will’s mommy was still his best friend—although after two weeks of visiting Kenny a couple of times a week, he thought maybe Kenny was starting to outrank her.
    Will mowed his mommy’s lawn every weekend. She’d never asked him to, but after his father had passed away, it became his job, and after he’d moved out, he’d continued to do it. She wasn’t there all the time—in fact, she had enough volunteer projects that she was there maybe half the time—but when she was there, they often had lunch or went shopping or sometimes just sat and chatted, with no excuse needed whatsoever.
    This Saturday was no exception to the lawn-mowing—or wouldn’t have been if Sacramento wasn’t having some bizarre, unprecedented three days’ worth of muggy, icky rain in the middle of the weekend. Will was sort of depressed; he’d told Kenny he’d be over Sunday to mow his lawn too—he’d done it for the last two weeks, ever since Kenny’s little “oopsie, I’m so drunk ” episode. Kenny had cried on him that night. Even though Will had made plans to sleep over in case he’d gotten drunk, he’d changed his mind at the last moment because Kenny had seemed to need it so badly. The next morning… well, Will hadn’t wanted to just ditch out on the guy. So he’d cooked breakfast, and made himself domestic, and talked to his new bestie some more.
    And now Kenny’s lawn needed mowing again, and even if it didn’t, Will would need to find another reason to go. Kenny had gone in for his blood test this week, just to make sure Gif hadn’t left him any nasty bugs Kenny hadn’t been planning on, and Will thought he might like the moral support, but Will didn’t want to seem like creepy guy who was always over either.
    It was a delicate line to walk for someone who wasn’t used to delicacy, really. But still, Will’s standing appointment with his mother was not yielding so Will could waffle and flip-flop about Kenny.
    Besides, although his mom was busy today, his aunt Cara was hanging out, watching her DVR, and the two of them sat down for lunch. This put a dash of awesome in Will’s day, because Cara was hands down one of Will’s favorite people.
    He wasn’t sure why he and Cara had always seemed to hit it off so well. He had clear memories of Cara just stopping by his house when he was a kid and saying, “You want to come play in the dirt with me?” And Will had gone. She’d always been working places where he could sit and play and tell stories to himself for hours, and unlike his father, who had wanted a better accounting of Will’s time than that (football, track, starting his own business—