Downpayment by AJ Mars

Author:AJ Mars [Mars, AJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay romance
ISBN: 978-1-63476-911-2
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2016-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

“PUT SOME clothes on. Meeting cancelled.”

Mike blinks at Chris and works the sleep out of his eye with the back of his wrist.

“Chop chop.” Chris shoos him toward the bedroom closet. “Borrow one of my jumpers as well as a T-shirt. It’s bloody cold outside.”

Taking a stumbling step, Mike turns and catches a glimpse of Chris in the mirror. He looks odd. Or maybe not odd. Just different. Really, really different. His legs are—there’s, like, a lot of them. Or rather he’s got the usual complement—two per human being—but they seem to go on for miles.

“You’re wearing jeans,” he says, realizing.

“Well spotted. Would you care to join me?”

But Mike’s still fixated on the jeans, and the remark makes him laugh, even though he knows Chris didn’t mean—that. They’re tight like orange peel, and Mike definitely won’t fit in them too, even if they are 30 percent elastic. Chris must guess what he’s thinking, because he balls up Mike’s scruffy pair and throws them into his face.

“Ow,” Mike says, catching them way too late.

Sluggish of thought and movement, he pulls them up his thighs. Chris proffers a T-shirt and a black and red jumper. The jumper is the kind of soft that makes babies snuggle in adverts. Mike makes a meal of getting his arms and head through the right hole while Chris calls him a slow poke and tugs on a leather jacket.

“Breakfast when we get there. All right?”

“Yeah. That’d be nice. I’m pretty hungry, actually.” Mike lets himself be manhandled out the door to the lift. “Er… where are we going?”

“I’m taking you shopping.”

It’s not shopping. Shopping, to Mike, is what he did with his schoolmates. They used to walk around the town center on a Saturday morning in an alarmingly large group, weighing the merits of Halo against the trainers everyone wanted. This—this is some world where everything is white except the paper bags and nametags, both of which are yellow and always in plentiful supply. He dodges through a minefield of people spritzing perfume and trails after Chris as he strides between the counters and through the crowds of sales girls and shoppers like he’s Moses parting the Red Sea. They emerge into menswear, where a mannequin in Burberry is standing archly against the wall with one hand raised and a pink tie around its throat.

Mike runs his fingers down a display of neatly folded shirts and tries to ignore the thumpa-thumpa-thumpa in his eardrums. He’s not too happy to be this close to designer clothes again, after what happened yesterday. He peeks up through his bangs and looks for salesclerks wearing blank sneers. But the guy behind the desk looks like a surfer—or a model for expensive surfing gear—and he tosses over an idle “You looking for something specific?” The accent is Australian and effortlessly cool.

Snatching his fingers up into his armpit, Mike shakes his head.

At the same time, Chris says, “Be a poppet and tell Karen her ten o’clock’s here?”

Karen, it transpires, is barely five feet tall but adds a foot to her height with hairspray and attitude.

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