I swallowed down the emotion in my throat and met his gaze. “You are that person, Scotty.”
He dropped his forehead against mine and whispered, “Good. That’s all I want to be.”
Chapter 7
INTRODUCTION
Charlie (“Chase”) Rhodes
SHOES. Pregnant pause while you read that one-word sentence and wonder what the fuck I’m talking about. Okay, that was fun.
Now, here’s why I’m bringing up footwear. First off, I like it. I don’t waste a ton of money on clothes, but I don’t enjoy looking like a slob, so I probably spend more than I should, and that includes investing in a nice pair of loafers. I have a friend who jokes that you can tell a guy is straight by looking at his shoes. Basically, his theory is that if a man’s shoes are awful, he likes boobs. It’s pretty funny watching him point people out and make his assessments, and I’m going to admit that he’s pretty spot-on most of the time. Now, my guess is that right about now you’re wondering where I’m going with this little anecdote. The answer is: nowhere. I just think it’s a funny story and talking about shoes made me think of it.
Back to my reason for this topic, I’m a size eight and a half. Scott is a thirteen. You stopped paying attention, right? At this very moment you’re thinking about our dicks and if the old adage about dick size being related to shoe size is true. Cut it out. That’s a bunch of bullshit perpetrated by NBA stars. And I’m not just saying that because I measure in at barely five feet six inches.
Anyway, I’m smaller than Scott. He is taller, broader, thicker, just bigger, and his shoes are no exception. Now, I know some guys might be intimidated by someone who is a solid nine inches taller, someone whose body can wrap around theirs so completely that almost no part of them, front or back, is exposed. I’m not one of those guys. I have always found Scott’s size a huge turn-on. And that (finally) brings me to the next photo in the album.
At eighteen, I wasn’t quite brave enough to venture into sex videos or pictures, but one evening, when Scott went into the hall to talk to his father on the phone, I noticed our shoes. They were in a pile in the corner of his room where we’d kicked them off before sprawling in front of the TV and playing video games—my All Stars and his Nikes. Seeing the difference in the sizes of those shoes immediately brought to my mind the difference in the sizes of our bodies.
I ignored my sudden erection, grabbed my camera, and snapped a picture. And that’s the next picture in the album—our shoes standing proxy for our very different body types. Almost twenty years later, I still get hard looking at it.
(By the way, going back to that whole shoe-size-dick-size thing, Scott has a good three inches on me in the dick department. Three long, hard, satisfying inches. Just saying.)
Charlie (“Chase”) Rhodes
THE shouting woke me up. My mother and my sister were being so damn loud, they probably woke up the whole building. They fought a lot, had always fought a lot, but not like that night. I was about to put the pillow over my head to block out the worst of the noise when my door slammed open so hard it bounced off the wall.
I shot up, gasped, and said, “What’s going on?”
Rachel was standing in my doorway; the low light coming in from the front room let me see her face, so I knew she had been crying. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up, but I wanted to say good-bye.”
We both flinched when we heard my mother’s bedroom door slam. Wow, looked like we were the drama family that night.
“What do you mean good-bye?”
She walked over and sat down on my bed. “I’m moving to Vegas with Rodney.”
“But you guys broke up last year. And he’s married. And Vegas?” I sort of screeched the last one.
“Well, his divorce is going to be final next week, he’s moving, and he wants to take me with him.”
“But… Vegas?”
Rachel bobbed her head. “There’s no snow there, lots of jobs, he already rented a nice house with a yard and trees. I’ve seen pictures; it’s perfect. I just know I’ll like living there.”
Great. She saw pictures of some house on the other side of the country and the next thing you know she was going to drop everything and go there with a guy who had done nothing but lie to her, the woman he was married to, and probably everybody else in the greater tri-state area, which was why he needed to move out west. No wonder my mother had been yelling. I wanted to do the same thing but forced myself to act calm.