Page 16 of Two for Charging

Chris paused his bike to look at his friend properly. Howie stared straight ahead. His shirt slid down again, revealing a definite trace of glitter on his collarbone. Served him right for cutting the necklines out of his T-shirts. “Howie?”

“Promise not to tell anyone?” Howie whispered.

A sinking feeling overcame Chris. “Of course.”

“I went to a place in the Castro.”

“Oh.” Chris knew enough about San Francisco to understand Howie meant a gay bar or something. But people went to gay bars for all sorts of reasons, probably. Maybe. Chris had never been, so how was he supposed to know? “Did you. Uh. Did you like it there?”

Howie looked down at the monitor on his bike. Chris wondered what his heart rate was doing. “Yeah,” Howie muttered.

“Thanks for telling me,” Chris said. Ever since the last time this had happened to him, he’d been researching the right things to say. So far, the kids at the Pot of Gold shelter had told him a lot of wrong things. “Thank you for telling me” was the only one they agreed on being right.

“You’re not…I don’t know…mad I said the thing to Luca last year and then…this?”

Chris scratched his head. He hadn’t forgotten Howie calling Luca “queer” in the locker room fight that caused Hayes and Vanderbilt to split off from the team the way they had. It was the whole reason he’d suggested working with a charity, out of which the team’s sponsorship program with the shelter had emerged. He had assumed everyone had gotten over it when Howie apologized.

Apparently, Howie hadn’t.

“Was it a trick to make sure no one figured you out?”

Howie snorted. “Really? I can’t cook pasta, and you think I’m out here double bluffing? I hadn’t figured myself out yet.”

Chris blinked. “You kept it a secret from yourself? I thought you just, like, knew.”

“If you try hard enough, you can be a dumbass about everything. Trust me.”

Having been a dumbass about everything for his entire life, Chris nodded sagely. “Well, do you feel better about it now?”

A little smile stole across Howie’s face, self-satisfied and kind of sleazy, which meant he’d gotten laid. Ew. Not that Chris thought gay sex was gross, only Howie having it.

“Um, yeah,” he said.

“I’m glad,” Chris told him, and he forced himself to mean it. So what if four guys on the team—or three, with Phil coaching—were into other dudes? So what if the media would eat them alive for it? So what if Hayes and Vanderbilt would hop on the first trade train out of San Francisco if they found out?

Chris forced himself to breathe. Howie was his friend, and this made him happy. He wanted his friends to be happy.

“You’re still doing the shelter thing, right?” Howie asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe I’ll come and help out more this year?”

Chris gave him a real smile, wide and beaming. The kids could always use more help and more role models who weren’t Chris. “Awesome! Hey, I’m headed over there after this. Wanna come?”

He liked having someone tag along. Chris hated driving alone. It was always better to have a friend to chat with, even if Howie called his music selection “a tragedy” and put on some pop singer Chris had never heard of who sang demented cheerleader chants. Better yet, when they got there, they found Mooney hanging out with the kids in the multipurpose courtyard Jax had gotten landscaped over the summer.

“You weren’t scheduled today.” Chris gave him a backslapping hug.

Mooney grinned bashfully. “Nah, I’m waiting on Mara. We’re going out later.”

“Ooooh!” Jayden, a fourteen-year-old with an attitude twice the size of his very impressive Afro, crowed.

“Jayden,” Chris admonished. “Don’t make fun of them for being super gross and in love.”

Mooney punched at Chris’s arm, but he was too slow, and Chris ducked away.

“Who’s up for some street hockey?” Chris asked so loudly anyone milling around could hear him. Within a few minutes, he had two teams of five complaining about the shade of orange on the vests he’d brought.