Free Something Like Summer by Jay Bell Page A

popular kids. He had almost forgotten
the crowd Tim ran with. How the nice person in front of him could
be cronies with the biggest assholes in school was hard to
comprehend.
    “ Haven’t been on any dates
yet?” Ben asked, even though he knew otherwise.
    “ Yeah, that too,” Tim said
without any great enthusiasm. “Shit. I still haven’t called Krista
since this happened. She’s going to be pissed.”
    “ Who’s that?”
    “ My girlfriend. Krista
Norman. Maybe you know her?”
    “ I think so,” Ben said
evenly as an image of an anorexic witch sprung to mind. “Wow, and
you haven’t called her for a week?”
    Tim shrugged, slipping
further down into the tub. “I guess I should have, but it just
seems pointless right now. The pain killers pretty much kill my sex
drive, you know.”
    Ben didn’t know, but now he
could safely assume that Tim wasn’t hoping to initiate something
with his weird choice of social setting. Such a shame. It would
have been a scene right out of those magazine stories. The straight
guy starts talking about his girlfriend and gets aroused,
eventually turning to the only other warm body around…
    “ She never puts out
anyway,” Tim continued. “She’s a real cock tease.”
    Ben swallowed a laugh,
Tim’s line fitting the fantasy all too well.
    “ That sucks. You’ll
probably score major sympathy points, though, when she sees you
injured.”
    “ Hey, yeah! You’re right!”
A lazy smile came over Tim’s face as he considered the
idea.
    Ben cursed his mouth and
brain for conspiring against him. Soon after he was sent upstairs
to fetch a new outfit for Tim, which was fun and only helped to
further the feeling that they were a young married couple. Was Tim
at all aware how this felt for him? Did he care, or was all this
just a blur of opium-induced numbness for him?
    As the afternoon faded into
evening, the pressure outside finally peaked and exploded. The sky
opened with a grumble of thunder and a hammering of rain. They
killed the air conditioner and opened the windows, enjoying the
rhythmic sound of water pummeling the leaves outside.
    Ben busied himself in the
kitchen, attempting to make a simple dinner of spaghetti and
meatballs. He had gone over the process a dozen times with his mom,
who was becoming increasingly puzzled at his sudden interest in
cooking.
    The pasta sauce wasn’t a
problem, since it came from the supermarket in a jar. The meatballs
were trickier since the meat wasn’t fully defrosted. Ben sculpted
them into balls as best as he could, his hands stinging from the
cold. Timing was something he hadn’t considered before he started.
The pasta was finished boiling before he had even started frying
meatballs or warming up the sauce. He took the pasta off the heat
but left it in the water in the hopes of keeping it
moist.
    After an hour of effort, he
ended up with pasta that was much too soggy and meatballs that were
slightly burnt on the outside but barely cooked on the inside.
Because he couldn’t mess up the sauce, and as he had done with his
pancakes, he used a generous amount of it paired with Parmesan
cheese to help cover up his mistakes.
    Ben set the dining room
table, but abruptly changed his mind, feeling it revealed too
blatantly his domestic fantasies. That and the result of his labors
didn’t seem worthy of such a formal presentation. He brought the
plates into the den instead and placed them on the coffee table.
MTV serenaded them in the background as they began their
meal.
    Tim reacted to the food
like a ravenous stray dog. He tore into it at a speed that promised
he wouldn’t be tasting very much of anything, much to Ben’s relief.
They were halfway through their meal when the power went off. A
vehement snarl of thunder followed the sudden silence, the storm
proclaiming its role in the outage. There were a few minutes of
scrambling in the dim light until matches and candles were found
and lit.
    “ Romantic,” Tim joked as
they resumed