Free After School Activities by Dirk Hunter Page B

sounded pretty incredulous.
    “Especially not Kai. He’d just make fun of me. Rightfully so. It is
    kind of silly. And not, like, in a malicious way or anything. He’d tease me
    like he does about everything. With anything else I’d be fine with it,
    but….”
    “But when it’s your secret dream, it’s different.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I get that. But if you do decide to go the Batman route, I can
    always murder your parents for you. You know, anything to help out.”
    We laughed, then lay for a while in comfortable silence.
    Eventually, Adam said, “What time is it?”
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    “Nooooooo,” I protested.
    “I don’t think ‘no’ is a time.”
    “Asking what time it is inevitably leads to saying ‘look at the time! I
    have to go.’ How about we just don’t?”
    But Adam wasn’t going to be dissuaded. He pushed me off him,
    slipped out of the bed, and padded across the room to where his pants
    were folded on my desk. He rifled through them and found his phone.
    “It’s almost three,” he said to me, then to himself, “Holy shit, that’s
    a lot of messages.”
    I still lay in bed, watching him standing there, completely naked,
    listening to voice mails. There might be better ways to spend Saturday
    afternoons, but I had a hard time thinking of one. He stood with his head
    cocked to one side, hand on his hip, lower lip caught distractedly in his
    teeth. I was getting hard, thinking of the things I’d like to do once I
    convinced him to come back to bed. But as he listened to the messages, a
    change started to come over his face. Tension returned to his jaw. His
    eyes became harder, losing the warmth I had seen when he looked at me.
    He started to fidget.
    Finally, the messages came to an end. He started pulling on his
    pants, turning away from me. “I should go,” he said.
    See? I was right. Time-checking always leads to me-leaving. It’s an
    undeniable fact. But it didn’t seem appropriate to bring that up again, as
    much as I wanted to do an I-told-you-so gloat.
    Instead, I said, “Who were the messages from?”
    “Pete,” Adam said, pulling on his shirt. “He left me six messages. He
    started off crying, saying he was sorry, that he didn’t want to become like
    Dad. Begging me to forgive him. Then he got mad I wasn’t answering.
    Then the apologizing again.” He sighed. “I need to go home.”
    Wordlessly, I slipped out of bed, walked over and grabbed Adam in
    a hug. At first he stood there, like he was stubbornly resisting the
    affection. Then he hugged me back, squeezing so tight my ribcage almost
    split open like a nut.
    “Thanks,” he whispered in my ear.
    “You could, just, not.”
    “And stay here forever?”
    “I mean, if you wanted.”
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    He sighed deeply and broke off the hug. “I can’t, as cool as that
    would be. He’s being an ass, but he’s family. I can’t just leave.” He went
    to the window and opened it. I shivered at the sudden blast of cold air.
    Adam once again popped the screen out of the window, but stopped short
    of stepping out. He turned back to me and eyed me from head to toe as
    though memorizing the sight of my still naked body. I fidgeted a little
    self-consciously at the scrutiny. Adam stepped back up to me and
    paused, looking a little nervous. Bashful, almost. He gave me a quick
    peck on the lips. “Bye,” he said. And he left, popping the screen back in
    the window from the outside.
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    CHAPTER EIGHT
    THE ASTUTE observer might have noticed by now that I was in a bit of a
    bind. Less than a month ago, I had been a slightly lonely, though
    impossibly charming, seventeen-year-old with absolutely no romantic
    prospects on the horizon and, honestly, I wasn’t really looking for any. I
    certainly wasn’t expecting any. But now I found myself with two, equal in
    appeal and in confusion.
    What was I going to do?
    If this were any other situation, I could do what I usually did when