Shiny! Read Online Free PDF

pockets self-consciously. “I’m sort of a night owl when I don’t have work in the morning. Mom’s an early bird. We used to have the most fearsome fights when I’d stay up until five and she’d get up at four.” He sighed. “And unless I can find another job, we may have those fights again real soon!”
    Kenny grimaced in sympathy. “And hence, beer,” he said again, and Will smiled again, because at least Kenny knew how to banter.
    “Absolutely. Your car or mine?”
    “Here, let me make sure Princess has enough food and water, and we’ll take yours. I know myself too—I’m going to drink until I puke. You good with that?”
    Will grinned. Why wouldn’t he be? He could spend more time with this energetic man who liked the same geeky music and the same geeky books Will did. The alcohol? That was just an excuse to talk, right?
     
     
    “F AMOUS LAST words,” Nina said drily. “You notice we’re serving punch and not champagne.”
    “That’s probably a good idea.” Will’s nod had nothing in it but earnest intention, but he didn’t miss the way Kenny patted his knee sympathetically. Yeah, turned out beer wasn’t one of Will’s strengths after all.

Straight-up Friends
     
     
    “B UT … BUT … but I don’t understand where it goes !”
    Kenny laughed at Will outright as he sat at the bar, chin resting in his hands, looking mournfully at the second long draft glass on the table in front of him. Oh, sweet baby boy—Kenny couldn’t believe a drink had been his idea.
    Kenny knew a basic watering hole on Greenback, one of those places in strip malls that looked too seedy to stay in business but that had enough cars in front of it to never go broke. It wasn’t a gay bar, but it wasn’t a redneck bar either. The interior was dark, windowless, and subdued. People were there to drink someplace not alone, and not to get in anyone’s business. Yeah, there was some picking up, and probably some drugs in the bathrooms, but nobody wanted to make trouble.
    Will had known enough to ask for house draft but not enough to stop after one, but Kenny hadn’t minded. He’d nursed his cosmo and engaged in a whole new kinky and unexplored form of intercourse that he and Gifford had never really gone in for.
    Talking.
    Will Lafferty could really talk.
    Not in an obnoxious way either—in an interested way.
    “So you’re a graphic designer,” he’d started as they sat down—because Kenny had given out that much on the drive over in Will’s vast sailing ship of a grandma car. “That’s awesome. Do you design games? Logos? Do you make cartoons? Because that would be cool. Do you ever go to the anime and sci-fi conventions?”
    For a moment Kenny considered being overwhelmed, but then he realized that not only did Will speak his language, he apparently lived in Kenny’s home country.
    “Yes!” Kenny exclaimed excitedly. “See, that’s why I went to design school. Not, like, you know, a real BA—like a three-year course in graphics. Anyway, they were all about how to get a job in the real world, and all I wanted to do was draw comics and stuff. But I could never think of a storyline, you know? I have these great scenarios for like, three frames, but I could never put them together for an arc, you know?”
    “Oh my God, I do know, and I’m so jealous. I can write the arc—not the detail stuff, but I’ve got these, like, ten-page short stories, and I have catalogs of world-building details, but I just… it’s like if someone could, like, film the story in my head or something, I’d have enough for an entire work, but I don’t have any patience for the prose, you know?”
    Kenny grinned at him delightedly. “I know! Think we’re too spoiled? I mean, I remember teachers complaining about that for the longest time—that we were spoiled for visual details and the words were the hard thing.”
    William took a long draft of his beer and nodded. “Yeah, well, maybe we should just consider it an emerging