You and Me

By Hollis Shiloh

Jack and Lucas work together and enjoy making each other laugh. It's weird to Jack to only find a best friend now, when he's technically a grownup. He isn't sure it's mutual. And he's pretty sure he has a crush on Lucas.

 

Now Lucas is in trouble and doesn't have anywhere to stay. Jack finally convinces him to move in, but Lucas insists it's just till he's on his feet.

 

As his stay becomes longer and their lives weave together, Jack has to decide if he's ever going to say anything about how he feels, or if he just needs to get over this. But his crush doesn't seem to be fading...

 

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spare Words Press
• Release date: Sep 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393719052

Book preview

Stories copyright September 2020 by Hollis Shiloh.  All rights reserved.  Do not reproduce without written permission from the author.  All characters and events are fictitious, and any similarity to real people or events is coincidental.  Image content is being used for illustrative purposes only and any people depicted in the content are models.  Cover by Bayou Cover Designs.  Proofreading thanks to anonymous.

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ABOUT THE STORY:

Jack and Lucas work together and enjoy making each other laugh.  It's weird to Jack to only find a best friend now, when he's technically a grownup.  He isn't sure it's mutual.  And he's pretty sure he has a crush on Lucas.

Now Lucas is in trouble and doesn't have anywhere to stay.  Jack finally convinces him to move in, but Lucas insists it's just till he's on his feet. 

As his stay becomes longer and their lives weave together, Jack has to decide if he's ever going to say anything about how he feels, or if he just needs to get over this.  But his crush doesn't seem to be fading...

36,000 WORDS

heat level: sweet

young adult / new adult

You and Me

by Hollis Shiloh

Chapter one

My hand was shaking a little, though I didn't know why.  I stuffed my hands in my pockets so he wouldn't notice, and sat down on the bench beside him. 

Hey, Lucas.  Can I drive you somewhere?

He shook his head.  No surprise.  He'd never said yes before.  He sat primly on the park bench, his bike parked beside him.  He'd changed out of his work shirt, but it was getting cold out, with a very light rain, and his jacket didn't look warm.

It was late, after work, and he clearly didn't have anywhere to go.  I'd been suspecting it for a couple of days now, the way he was starting to look more and more unkempt and unsure of himself. 

Lucas had always been a fairly fastidious guy, about his schedule, about his uniform, about the rules and rhythms that guided his days.  Seeing him steadily fall apart was hard.  I'd known he was my best friend at work.  But it was more than work.  I cared about him the rest of the time, too. 

Maybe Lucas could take care of himself, maybe he couldn't, but seeing him flounder for too long was something I didn't know how to handle.  If I saw he was having a hard time, I stepped in and helped.  Sometimes I intervened in a conversation.  Sometimes I moved him out of the way of a dangerous place to stand or walk.  He didn't always have the best sense of self-preservation, even though he wasn't stupid. 

I wished I knew what was wrong now, so I could help him with it.  Because something was definitely wrong.

I get the feeling times are tough, Lucas, I hinted.

He shifted a little, just enough to shrug, and clasped his hands together between his knees.

Was he cold?  I bet his fingers were cold.  I thought miserably that it would be the worst thing I could do if I reached over and tried to warm his hands up. 

I wished I had some gloves to offer him.  Not that he'd probably take them, either.

Maybe Lucas mattered a little more to me than I'd like him to guess, but he had to know I cared at least a bit.  Couldn't he trust me that far?

When I found him stocking shelves with a set, blank look of misery on his face, where he was clearly going through the day only by putting one foot in front of the other, determined not to show any emotion at all, I knew somebody or something had gotten to him. 

Sometimes I could cheer him up, distract him and make him laugh.  We could talk for hours if there was a chance. 

Not that there often was.  But I found excuses to check in with him throughout the day.  It always made me feel better to see him, to talk to him.  Maybe it was something about the trusting way he looked at me, the warmth in his eyes when he smiled up at me, or the way I just felt good when I was with him. 

I wasn't a joke to Lucas.  Unlike a lot of guys, he never made hilarious Asian jokes around me.  And he wasn't a joke to me.  His awkward moments didn't make him any less awesome, to me.  He made me feel things I'd given up on feeling—like that there were people in the world I could actually trust.  Well, at least one. 

But he apparently didn't feel the same way about me.  I tried not to let that sting, but it did anyway.

I sat next to him on the bench, silent and not knowing what to say.  If it was anybody but Lucas, I'd have said something and left, mumbling and embarrassed and determined never to put myself out there like that again to be snubbed.

But it was Lucas.  He was cold and miserable and silent, and I didn't know why. 

So I sat there.  It was the only thing to do, when I couldn't walk away.

HOW I FELT ABOUT LUCAS was exasperatingly like a first crush, and I didn't really know how to deal with that.  I kept telling myself it was just a friendship thing. 

I didn't have a lot of friends, had never been good at making them.  When I did have friends, it was more like people I knew and hung out with because we did things together, because they tolerated me. 

There was never anybody who really wanted me around especially, like as a preference.  If I could blend in or be useful to a group, I was a friend.  But I'd never had anybody to have deep conversations with, where I could lose track of time because I was enjoying being with them so much.

With Lucas, I didn't feel awkward or like someone who was just tolerated.  He took me seriously.  He'd discuss deep things with me or just laugh about silly stuff.  He didn't mind silly jokes, and he didn't mind deep conversations.  He just liked me—liked talking with me, being around me, sharing lunch times together, when we got lunch breaks, and he looked at me so trustingly sometimes I almost couldn't stand it.

It would be easier to say I just thought of him as a buddy if I didn't also get jealous when he was talking and laughing with someone else.  If I didn't also notice his body quite a bit.

Sure, I'd always noticed guys as much as girls.  I was basically very distracted all through high school, noticing everybody and trying not to.  But very little came of all my noticing, and nothing with guys, except that almost-kiss with Austin behind the bleachers.  He avoided me after that, which reinforced the idea that if I had feelings, I'd damned well better keep them to myself. 

I wasn't exactly doing great for myself in the romance department now, either.  I was awkward at the best of times, and I didn't put myself out there.  To be honest, dating wasn't a huge priority for me.  It seemed like a great way to get hurt, more risk than reward.

There were no girls around here that I was really drawn to, and I didn't want to settle for somebody I didn't actually like, who would also be settling for me.  Guys were even more complicated.  The one app I'd signed up for had made me feel even shittier about myself, before I deleted it off my phone.

College wasn't for me, and I was more or less stuck in this dead-end town working two jobs.  I could've gotten away with less, and spent more time in front of the TV, playing video games, or wasting hours online.  But it made me feel good about myself to know I could work so hard. 

I liked hard work.  I liked feeling like a man.  Muscles that burned, mind going pleasantly blank as I focused just on what I was doing, and not life and all its questions and confusions, where I was going and what I was doing.  It was good to have a task and accomplish it.  It was good to feel strong and useful and in control. 

If I had to sit through four more years of classes just to end up in debt and probably not get a better job than I had now, I'd probably go nuts.  I wasn't sorry I'd decided not to go to college.  I was just so damned glad to be out of school.  But now, a couple of years later, I did have some questions about where my life was going, and when I'd finally start to feel like a real grownup, not just an overgrown kid who was winging it half the time.

I didn't feel like a grownup when I was with Lucas.  Far from it.  I felt like a kid again, silly and giddy over the stupidest nonsense, able to believe in a place where best friends existed, where it wasn't every  man for himself all the damned time.  And that felt pretty damned good.

But I definitely noticed his body.  He wore the same trousers and golf shirt the grocery store made us wear.  It didn't hide his slim, muscular frame well enough to keep me from thirsting after him. 

Apparently I could still be a horny bastard about guys I liked as friends, or maybe just about him.  I'd thought Austin cured me of that.

I was very aware of his build.  He was sleeker than me, like a runner or a swimmer, though he wasn't athletic as far as I could tell.  He could trip over his own feet if he wasn't careful, and when he spoke of high school, it was with a shudder. 

Not that either one of us brought it up often.  It wasn't my favorite subject, either.  I hadn't known him then.  We were in different townships and different schools. 

I wished we could have met then.  I'd probably have been more awkward with him than I was now, not that I didn't get inappropriate hard-ons sometimes still. 

It really wasn't cool of me, to lose my breath if he took off his shirt in front of me.  He'd change unselfconsciously in the back room, putting on his work shirt only once he'd biked here, so he didn't sweat in it, and he'd take it off at the end of the day, too. 

The first time, we'd been clocking out at the same time as each other, and I'd more or less trailed him to his locker in the back where he kept his backpack and lunch—they were shitty old lockers, and didn't fit much—and I about lost my tongue the moment he unselfconsciously pulled his