Free Bad Company by K.A. Mitchell

of egg salad to let go of his hair. It wasn’t because he’d disappointed his little soldier by ensuring that Brandi would never hit on him again. It was something he couldn’t put his finger on, though his balls wanted to crawl up inside him at the thought of grabbing the mop and going on like nothing had ever happened.
    But if he walked out, he could either grovel for his father or admit to Nate that he couldn’t handle a single day on his own. Kellan got the mop.
    There was a lull of about ten minutes after the first horde had been fed and recaffeinated before the second wave hit the door. The rush seemed easier this time. He didn’t crash into everybody, and they all started singing along to some of the soft rock on the radio, so the time went faster.
    “Ooo. Pretty mouth and a pretty voice,” Terrell teased as he helped Kellan rebag one of the trash cans.
    “God, Terrell, you’re such a slut. He has a boyfriend.” Brandi had her hands on her hips in that weird solidarity girls got about the possibility of guys cheating. They had one hell of a network, which made them tougher to ditch than the paparazzi.
    “Now that is a crime. He’s too pretty for that.”
    The teasing made it easy to play along, so Kellan dragged Terrell with him to the back door like he was about to have his way with him.
     
    By three ten, Kellan knew he was going to make it. The café closed at three thirty, but only six customers came in after two, and Sandra and Kellan cleaned around the one guy reading a paper in the corner so that they’d be able to leave on time. Yolanda was in her office, and Brandi and Terrell were doing something complicated to the espresso machine, when Kellan spotted Eli walking past the front windows ahead of Nate and some woman.
    Eli had a huge camera bag over his shoulder.
    Brandi abandoned Terrell to the machine’s growls and hisses and ran over to Kellan, waving her phone. “I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal.”
    “Huh?” Kellan glanced at her and then back at the trio coming into the café. Nate was wearing glasses. He hadn’t been wearing any yesterday, so Kellan had figured Nate had either had that laser surgery or started wearing contacts. The frames were dark and squared off, completely different from the kind he’d worn as a kid, and they looked right on him. Maybe his eyes were dried out from his drinking last night, but he looked better in them than out of them. More Nate-like.
    “Nothing ever happens in Baltimore, but here you were, so I emailed a friend with a pic, and she put it online and now—” Brandi was still talking, shoving her smartphone under his nose.
    “What?” Kellan looked at the phone’s screen. There was an image of him in his egg salad smeared apron, playfully steering Terrell toward the back door with an arm around his neck. But that wasn’t all. The pic was on one of the big gossip sites with the headline Unreality Star: Bad-Boy Brooks Likes Boys.
    “I hope I didn’t make things worse. I didn’t think it would get all blown up like that,” Brandi apologized again.
    “What would get all blown up?” Eli tried to get a good look as she waved her phone. Finally, he grabbed it from her hand. “Oh, fuck. We’ve been scooped. What happened?” He handed the phone off to Nate.
    Nate glanced down than passed the phone back to Brandi with a quick apology. “Looks like you’ve been outed.” Nate stared at Kellan, eyes unreadable behind those solid brown frames.
    The espresso machine might have been spitting steam right into Kellan’s ears to make them feel so full of noisy air he couldn’t think straight. This was his plan. And it was working. But he kept remembering how fucking hard it had been to get those words out to Brandi—and he really didn’t give a shit what she thought about him. It wasn’t only his dad who was going to see this. Everybody. Everyone he’d known. Delia and Kimmie and Rainy would believe he’d been