Page 6 of Ruining His Smirk

“Wow… you’ve been really distracted lately.” Dexter was studying me with open curiosity. “Unusual for you.” He accepted the mug and slurped happily, but he was studying me. “Is this a socially appropriate time to quiz you why you’re distracted or do you need a reasonable time to deal with it yourself first? Or is this going to be me-da-man-me-rock type of thing?”

I punched him lightly on his shoulder before I sat down on another upturned crate next to him. “Shut up. Show me what you’ve got.”

“Hmmm.” He pursed his lips. “Okay, you have chosen avoidance I see. Fine. We will circle back to that later.”

During that mega celebration, the organizers had arranged lots of different games. One of them involved strangers from different stations being paired together under anonymous call signs, encouraging them to exchange coded Christmas and New Year’s messages throughout the season. It had been a clever way of making one of the loneliest places on Earth feel just a little smaller.

I didn’t sign up. I wasn’t a text or email type of person. I preferred meeting people in person, but my brother hadbeen delirious with excitement. It was exactly the kind of thing he loved. Secret messages, anonymous, no face-to-face interactions.

For almost everyone, the game had ended when the decorations came down, but not for Dexter. He and whoever sat behind a keyboard somewhere else on the continent, the messages had continued. Twelve months later they still didn’t know each other’s names, faces or stations, but they knew more about each other than normal spouses did.

I worried in the beginning. My brother was super sharp. IQ of some genius range, but he could be naive sometimes. I didn’t like that I didn’t know who was the other person. Dexter, though, had no secrets from me. He showed me all the messages anytime I asked. It soon became apparent the other person was someone like Dexter. Their emails were innocent in a way that made my heart ache.

He rotated the little computer toward me, tapping the screen with a finger. “It came through about twenty minutes ago.”

I sipped my coffee and looked. Dexter and his friend had set up some kind of private server for just the two of them. There had to be hundreds of conversations by now. Eventually, I stopped reading the messages. It was their private space. Every now and then, though, a thought still crept into the back of my mind.

What if the other person was a woman?

Not because I thought there was anything romantic between them now. There wasn’t.

But people didn’t spend a year becoming this important to each other without the possibility lingering somewhere down the road.

We were both gay, but we experienced attraction differently. I’d met Nate and the attraction had hit me like a hammer to the anvil. Dexter had never been like that. I’d never seen him look atanyone that way. As far as I knew, he’d never had a crush, never chased anyone, never even hinted at wanting sex.

If he ever did fall for someone, I doubted it’d happen all at once. It would probably happen exactly like this. Of course, I had no clue if any of this was true for Dexter. But the fear still sat unpleasantly in my stomach.

“Garrett.”

I blinked and looked up. Dexter was watching me over the rim of his mug, one eyebrow raised.

“Sorry. I’m being an asshole.”

He cocked his head to the side, not offended, but more curious. After a moment, his eyes widened. “Oh! Is it about that awful guy?”

I sighed and looked down at my coffee. “Yeah.” Dexter knew about Nate.

“I don’t understand how can you hate him and yet be attracted to him.”

“I know. I wish it wasn’t like that.”

There was a moment of silence while the cold air blew through the open doors of my workshop. I could hear the faraway voices of men and women working to launch a Zodiac.

“Is this a wrong time to share my findings? You seem preoccupied. But then again, you’ve been really distracted since last week. Since you learned about he-who-shall-not—be-named.”

I turned the screen toward me and shook my head. “No, not at all. Go ahead and show me what you’ve found.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Recently, Dexter and his pen pal had started a new game. They were trying to identify each other without giving themselves away. Every message was scrutinized for accidentalclues. Judging by the grin threatening to split Dexter’s face in half, he thought he’d finally found something.

He tapped a paragraph halfway down the newest message. “Read that sentence.”

I leaned closer.

"...and to make matters worse, our entire stock of tater tots got contaminated. The kitchen had to throw all of them away. No tater tots for the rest of the season..."