“Yeah, I think we’ve heard just about every variation of that joke there is, over the years.”
“How many siblings do you have?” I asked, curious. I knew his brothers owned one of the bookstores we’d be visiting today, but didn’t know much beyond that.
“I’m the oldest of six,” he said.
“Six?” I exclaimed, covering my mouth and coughing. “Damn! That’s a lot of kids!”
“Yep. Never a dull moment around the house, I can tell you,” Leesaid. “After me, there’s Weaver, she’s the only girl, then Kaine, Bishop, Sonny and Hicks. Kaine and Bishop are adopted, everyone else is biological.”
“Wow. I have a hard time imagining that big of a family,” I said, almost wistfully. I’d lived with Tira and Zem for about five years after escaping Milwaukee. While I loved and appreciated all they had done for me, there’d always been this feeling in me that it was temporary, that I’d lose them. Hadn’t been too far wrong as Tira had had a heart attack two years ago and passed away. By that time, I’d been in Seattle for three years and Zem was in college, and well on the way to beginning her own life.
“It was a lot,” Lee said, his face softening as he took a sip of his coffee. “We didn’t have a ton of money or anything – things ebbed and flowed with the business, you know. Clothes were hand-me-downs, everything got re-used. But we never doubted we were loved.”
“Mama K always says the only thing you can get more of by giving it away is love,” Lee said, his eyes soft as he glanced at me.
Our eyes caught for a moment, and time seemed to stop. That zing of electricity was back in the air. It was like the power of his gaze went right to my heart, then took a sharp ninety degree turn right to my cock, which was thickening uncomfortably.
I dropped my gaze and looked away, embarrassed at my body’s response. I felt like a fucking teenager. Was my face going to break out in zits next? Why was my body choosingthisguy to suddenly come alive for?
Lee cleared his throat again and started gathering up the remaining dishes. “Well, I guess we better get our shit together if we want to get to the signing. It’s about a thirty-minute drive from here, so we should get going.”
I nodded and headed back to the bedroom to pack up my things. I noticed as I walked down the hallway that there was another room to my right. The door was ajar, something I hadn’t noticed earlier. This door led to a smaller room than the one I was in. There was an extra-long overstuffed couch on one end of the wall, with piles of pillows and blankets thrown across it. Now I knew where Lee hadslept last night. But it was the contents that really made this room stand out.
The walls were filled with shelves full of robots. I couldn’t help but move closer and found myself staring at row after row of Transformer toys. Their bright, sometimes garish, colors brightening the room.
They were unboxed and posed dramatically. Some of them were incredibly detailed, and all seemed to have been lovingly taken care of.
I reached out to touch one, then thought better of it and snatched my hand back, terrified of breaking something.
“You can touch it,” I heard a voice behind me say. His voice made my cock jump, and I knew my face had gone bright red. I'd entered what was obviously a private area without permission, and was now praying my pants were loose enough to hide the way my body was responding to him.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered, trying to slip past him. “I shouldn’t have come in… I should have asked first.” I said.
He smiled at me again, this time a lighter expression. It seemed to brighten his whole face and made the green of his eyes sparkle.
“It’s okay. I believe strongly that toys are meant to be played with,” he said, his voice like velvet stroking parts of me no man had ever touched, which was saying something. He reached up and snagged the robot I’d been fascinated with and held it out to me.
“One of my favorite characters from the show was a set of combiners called the Technobots – five guys who were these futuristic vehicles that combined into this big robot called Computron.”
Lee grinned and pointed to some of the other robots on the shelves.
“Most other combiners of the time made these giant muscle guys, but Computron was essentially a giant supercomputer. He was kind of slow, but he was calculating. They have a cool color scheme – white, red, orange,” he said, pointing toward them.
“Scattershot, Strafe, Lightspeed, Afterburner and Nosecone,” he said, gesturing to the toy in my hand. “The animation is terrible, the story is terrible, but the toys are cool.”
Lee grinned at me, his eyes starting to regain some of the animation I’d seen in them yesterday. Damn, that grin… It did strange things to my gut. I felt hot and cold at the same time and it made me wonder if I was coming down with something.
Lee broke my train of thought as he set the Transformer back up on its shelf.
“You can absorb their awesomeness later, though,” he said. “We have to get going.”
7
Lee
The driveto the store was uneventful, but informative. Mason and I had a lot in common. We spent the time talking about Transformers, comic books, sci fi movies – a little bit of everything.
“Okay, so seriously,” I said, when we were just a few minutes from the store. “You’ve never watched Buffy The Vampire Slayer?”
