Fakers (Licking Thicket 1)

I moved over to sit next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. “It did mean something, sweetie. It meant you had a big future ahead of you. That doesn’t mean it had to be a future together. The man is gay. Even if he hadn’t come out, you would have been miserable if the two of you had gotten married.”

She rolled her eyes again. It was a favorite reaction of hers. “He’s not gay. Give me a break, Mal. We dated for years. I’d know. Plus, the man’s never brought a boy home before, and when he does, the guy is clearly straight.”

I laughed at her. “He’s gay, Ava. I promise.”

“Oh, so now you think your gaydar is functioning? What about last weekend at the Twisted Sister? I pointed out the man in the blue shirt, and you swore he was straight. Then he came over and asked you to dance.”

I pet her hair. “Sweetie, he didn’t ask me to dance. He asked me to suck him off in the men’s room while his girlfriend was pulling the car around.”

She blinked at me. “Oh. Well, what about that time—”

I held my hand out to stop her. “I’m going to stop you right there. My gaydar is not perfect, but your Brooks Johnson? He gay. Super gay. Like really very gay.” Maybe I needed to stop thinking about how gay he was because it made me remember how intense his gaze had felt on mine. It wasn’t healthy.

“Pfft. The man he’s dating mentioned wanting to run to Walmart to buy some blue jeans.”

I tilted my head at her. “Come again?”

She moved away from me to lean against the opposite arm of the futon so she could put her feet in my lap. I began rubbing them automatically. She had me trained well.

“Paul said he didn’t have any blue jeans. And Brooks had told him he needed blue jeans for the Great Lickening Thursday.”

I opened my mouth to say that it was perfectly understandable for a man not to have packed blue jeans to come to Tennessee in August, but she opened her mouth before I could.

“He only brought Dockers.”

Dockers.

I stared at her. “Shit. You might be right.”

She closed her eyes and groaned when I pressed my thumb into her arch. “He was cute, though, right?”

I thought of Brooks and his tall, wide-shouldered presence. Even if I hadn’t seen the framed homecoming photo of him and Ava on the front hall table at the Johnsons’ house tonight, it was easy to picture him as the most popular boy in school growing up. He had shiny blond hair cut shorter than he’d worn it in high school which made him look ten times more professional and a thousand times more boring.

“So cute,” I said absently. Before I’d learned who he was, I’d noticed green eyes with flecks of blue in them. His lips had curved up in a self-deprecating grin that had revealed the tiniest little crease next to one of his eyes. He had a single eyebrow hair that seemed to be fighting against traffic like it was trying to go up the down escalator. Was there such a thing as an eyebrow cowlick?

“He said they work for the same ad agency. That’s how they met,” Ava continued. “Did you see how sweet he was with the baby?”

I didn’t remember seeing Brooks with a baby, but I nodded anyway. “So sweet.” And he was. As much as I hated him on principle because I was Ava’s best friend and Brooks Johnson was enemy number one, I hadn’t been able to help noticing him running around fetching things for his mom all evening and offering to help several of the older ladies at the barbecue find comfortable places to sit. I’d even overheard a lady giving him hell for staying away from the Thicket for several years, and Brooks had simply stood there politely nodding and saying how much he’d missed everyone.

“It’s not like they’re going to last. Even if the man is gay, Brooks is going to leave him. It’s what he does. He leaves.”

She said it with a sniff and a hair toss, but I could see the hurt in her eyes. Brooks Johnson had been the one who’d gotten away, and I’d known from the get-go coming back here was going to poke at that old wound until it bled like a stuck pig.

“Honey, the man is gay. What would you have had him do?” I asked softly, rubbing my way up her calves.

She met my eyes and seemed to deflate. “It was the way it all happened, Mal. Not… not the fact that it happened.”

I narrowed my eyes at her until she huffed. “Fine. So I wanted to marry him. Is that so bad? Did you see him? The man’s a dish.”