Bede glanced at him as he inhaled another lungful of smoke. Then he looked away and imagined that as the blue twilight came fully down, he could see stars poking through the darkness above the tops of the pine trees.
“Really pretty, but it’s not just his face, which is, you know, sculpted.” Bede made a gesture, drawing his fingers in the air in front of his face. “Or his long legs. Or his hair, always in his face. He’s just one of those people.”
“Those people,” said the young man.
“You look at them, and you just know—” Bede paused to exhale, licking his lips again. “He’s a real person. There’s nothing fake there. The lights are on in those gray eyes and everybody, and I meaneverybody, is home.”
“You like ‘em smart, then.”
“I don’t know.” Bede inhaled a lungful of clear, pine-scented air, an apéritif to his next draw of pot, and let it out slowly. “Maybe I do.”
Winston had been smart, with a brain for numbers and a knack for sniffing out undercover cops, or drug dealers who would welsh on you as soon as they’d walked out of the alley.
Maybe smart wasn’t the word to describe Galen, and pretty didn’t seem enough. And maybe it’d taken Bede a whole week ina strange place and several tokes of the good stuff to realize it. That Galen was nothing like Winston.
Yet something inside of Bede stirred at the thought of how he sure as hell hadn’t laughed as much as he did when he was around Galen. Never enjoyed delivering dry zingers just for the pleasure of hearing Galen laugh.
It was as if, when he’d gotten out of the white prison van, he’d stepped into a whole different dimension.
“I like ‘em smartandannoying.”
Just as Bede was about to take another draw, footsteps came from around the corner, and Galen was there. There were sparks in his lovely gray eyes as he scraped the hair back from his face, as if he simply could not believe what he was seeing. Looking even prettier than in Bede’s mind’s eye.
“Are you smokingpot, Bede?” Galen asked, loud and angry. “And you, Beck. What you doing? Smoking is not allowed in the valley, youknowthat.”
With a laugh, Beck took a draw, held in the smoke, and blew it out slowly, like he was the toughest kid on the playground and simply unafraid, or at least unworried, about getting a whole lot of detention. He pinched out the orange-embered end of the joint with his thumb and forefinger, then drew out his Sucrets box to tuck the joint away.
“Just don’t tell Royce, okay?” Beck said with a jaunty smile.
“Honestly, what the hell are you playing at?”
Galen directed this fully at Bede.
“It’s been so hot,” continued Galen. “The woods are dry as a bone. It’s a fire hazard. You could start a forest fire.”
“Not playing,” said Bede, casually, slowly, enjoying the pleasant eyeful of Galen, hopping mad, flushed. He drew himself up straight, his back pressed to the side of the first aid hut, and couldn’t hide his slow smile. “I’m just smoking. And looking.”His eyes swept Galen up and down, slowly, a warmth spreading through him. “Enjoying the view, as well.”
At Galen’s rough sound of astonishment, Bede chuckled as he snubbed out his joint between his thumb and forefinger and handed it to Beck. Who added it to his Sucrets box, which he placed in the pocket of his blue jeans as he picked up an army green duffle bag that had been waiting patiently at his feet.
“That the guy?” Beck asked, pausing at the corner of the first aid hut, one hand spread across the wood.
“How could you tell?” asked Bede, turning to look at Beck.
“Sparks are flying, man,” said Beck, and then he was gone, disappearing around the corner of the building like so much pot smoke.
In his relaxed state, his first truly relaxed state in over five years, Bede did not care that Galen was right there, witnessing this particular conversation.
Who knew what conclusions Galen might draw from such a confession as Bede had just made, but he was a free man, wasn’t he? Free to think whatever thoughts came to him. Free to feel whatever he felt, including a hot streak of desire for a man that he wouldn’t have even noticed five years earlier. A man that, according to every convention he could think of, he simply could not have.
Well, he could look. So he did.
“What is going on with you?” demanded Galen, taking a step closer. “How much did you smoke?”
Bede shifted up from the wall of the first aid hut and also took a step closer to Galen. Now they were less than a foot apart, standing in the smoke-laced glare of the auto light.
Bede’s impulse was to answer the call shifting inside of him, from his belly, along his thighs. The relaxation brought about by the pot shifted into desire, released on a cloud of inhibition long gone.
As Bede well knew, the lights were on in those gray eyes and everybody was home, and he saw exactly the nanosecond that Galen figured out what Bede’s intentions were. Or what they would have been, had Galen not flat-palmed Bede against the wall and taken a step back.
