Second Hand (Tucker Springs) Read Online Free PDF Page B

leaned back to light his next cigarette, “have another drink.”

What are you doing?
    The question kept rattling around El’s head as he watched his adorable, straight, hot mess of a redhead finish off his first beer and blithely accept another when offered it. El told himself he was amused, that was all. Bemused, actually, because he couldn’t quite make Paul out. Which meant he was bored and feeding Paul drinks and watching what happened as a way to pass the time.
    Except he watched the way Paul’s lips clung to the glass and had to check urges to skim his knuckles down Paul’s sharp, innocent cheekbones.
    What was he doing, indeed?
    “So what are you going to do?” El asked, forcing himself to stop having idiot fantasies. Maybe if Paul talked about his ex-girlfriend enough, El could write him off as another sorry sap serving as a walking advertisement for why not to have relationships. Not to mention that if they both said girlfriend often enough, maybe El would cotton on to the fact that Paul was straight.
    Paul blinked at El in drunken confusion. “Do?”
    The more clueless Paul got, the more adorable he became. “About Stacey,” El prompted.
    “Oh.” Paul stared sadly into his half-spent glass. “Nothing, I guess.”
    Right. Obviously. “Moving on then? More fish in the sea?” El nodded wryly at the door throbbing with club music. “Should have taken you to your kind of pond.”
    Paul blinked as if he didn’t understand. “Pond? Oh.” His gaze returned to the glass again. El began to wonder if Paul thought it might be some kind of alcoholic gazing glass. “I don’t think I have a pond.”
    “Oh yes. That’s right, I forgot we were supposed to be picking up people at the laundromat.” When Paul registered even deeper confusion, El reached for his cigarettes and lit up. “It’s a joke. I told a friend of mine we shouldn’t try to make hookups in bars but at regular places, and now it’s kind of a running theme.”
    For a second, El worried Paul might think that’s what this was, a hookup, but then he remembered Paul was Captain Clueless. He seemed to be considering El’s theory of relationships, though, and after a few moments of drunken pensiveness, he nodded. “That’s true. I met Stacey in the school commons. She needed someone to hold her books while she wiped up a coffee someone had spilled across our table, and she bought me lunch as a thank-you. Everything sort of happened from there.”
    It was his face, El decided, the way you could see everything he thought about as it passed between his ears. Guileless, simple thoughts. For example, right now Paul was trying to figure out how he could repeat that kind of scenario. El would’ve bet money on it.
    Too bad he wasn’t the relationship type. Too bad Paul was straight.
    Too bad no relationship ever worked out, period.
    El wondered about Paul being entirely straight, though, like when El’s conscience got the better of him and compelled him to shuttle Paul back to his house. It wasn’t the fact that Paul clung to El while he held him up—he was drunk; that came with the territory. The glances, though, made El pause. Paul checking the way El filled out his T-shirt. Staring at El’s waist after he’d poured Paul into bed. Simple things that were almost guaranteed to be El reading into his intentions.
    Simple things, though, that fucked royally with El’s head.
    He stopped by Rosa’s the next day and listened to her carry on about her man of the moment, listened as she spouted the same lines she always did about how they’d made a connection, about how there was something special about this one, about how she could tell by looking into his eyes that he understood her in a way no one else had. El wished he had the other seventy times she’d told him that on tape to play back to her, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d still be convinced this was The One, right up until the moment he cheated on her or left her without warning