Tangents: Volume 1 by Gregory Ashe

Author:Gregory Ashe [Ashe, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodgkin & Blount
Published: 2023-11-02T18:30:00+00:00

Summer Nights

The cabin was perfect—right on the water, surrounded by short-leaf pines, with plenty of room for the eight of them. The only design flaw was that all the bedrooms branched off the central living area. Ok, two design flaws: the bedroom doors hadn’t been installed with deadbolts. Considering Shaw, Emery wondered if he could silently move the dresser in front of the door after John fell asleep.

That didn’t seem like it would be happening anytime soon. John flopped onto his stomach. Then onto his side. Then onto his back. Then stomach again.

Emery turned the page in his book. Loudly.

“I can’t sleep,” John said.

Good husbands, Emery had learned, did not always say everything they were thinking.

“I shouldn’t have had that energy drink when Auggie broke them out.” John ran his fingers up Emery’s thigh, coasting over the lightweight pajama pants.

It took a moment. Then Emery said, “Oh no.”

“We’ll be quiet. It’ll be fun.”

Emery shook his head.

“It’ll be naughty.”

“No, John. Nope. Unh-uh.”

Sighing—a bit theatrically, in Emery’s opinion, John rolled off the bed.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“To watch TV.”

“Like that?”

That in this instance referred to the white compression shorts and total lack of shirt, which all together left about eighty-five percent of John’s golden skin and dark ink on display.

“Everybody else is asleep,” John said.

“Don’t count on it.”

“Do you want me to put more clothes on?”

Emery opened his mouth. Then he sensed the trap. “It’s your body.”

John grinned. “That was a close one, wasn’t it?”

Emery gave his husband the middle finger and returned to his book. Laughing quietly, John let himself out of the room.

In theory, it should have been the perfect end to an excellent day. The book was riveting—a series of forensic case studies on fiber analysis, with all the annoying details like people and backstories and drama nicely eviscerated. Emery was deep into the chapter titled “Polyester Polycule: The Curious Case of the Double Garter” when the voices from the living room finally reached him.

Not TV voices.

He tried to keep reading. Then he thought of John, of those damn compression shorts. He dropped the book on the bed and went to see what was happening.

John sat on the counter in the kitchen area, and he was laughing quietly at something Auggie was saying and shaking his head. The younger man wore nothing but a tank that said—if Emery’s eyes weren’t deceiving him—DINOSLUTS and then showed a velociraptor in a compromising position with a stegosaurus. True to form, Auggie’s black trunks somehow managed to look even shorter than John’s compression shorts—they were barely more than briefs.

“Ree,” John said. “Everything ok?”

“That tank is historically inaccurate,” he said. “Stegosaurs lived during the Jurassic Period, but velociraptors didn’t evolve until the Cretaceous.”

“I know,” Auggie said with the kind of easy confidence Emery had learned to recognize, from his husband and his son, as a lie, “but I like it anyway.”

Another door opened. “I’m not going to bother anyone,” Jem said, and Tean made a murmured objection Emery couldn’t quite hear. “They’re boxers, mister.

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