Author's Note: As promised, a longer story in time to give you all something to read over the holiday (given that it posts in a timely manner). This season, I am thankful that I did not lose my eyesight. I also give thanks to all of my readers, and a whole heaping of thanks to Nelle1022 for beta reading, editing, and providing much appreciated input.
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"STOP! STOP! STOP!" Craig shouted excitedly, leaning forward between the front seats and pointing in the direction that he wanted Mitch to go.
"Stop yelling in my ear, dickwad!" Mitch barked. "You nearly made me wreck my car!"
Craig lowered his voice, but he was still excited. "It's a carnival!"
"Holy fuck," I bitched. "How fucking old are you? Ten?"
"Come on!" Craig whined. "You guys wanted to do something. Let's go. Look! They have beer!"
"It's probably fifteen bucks an ounce," Mitch grumbled but pulled into the grassy makeshift parking area of the traveling carnival.
"If it sucks, we'll just go to the bar like we planned. No harm, no foul," Craig replied, flinging open the back door before Mitch had even finished engaging the parking brake.
Mitch and I just looked at each other for a second before getting out of the car. "Come on," he sighed, opening his door. "They have beer!" he mocked Craig in an affected falsetto voice.
Mitch and I headed straight for the shack with the huge, neon, beer sign over it while Craig bounced around us like an excited puppy. It wasn't fifteen bucks an ounce, but it was close: Ten bucks for a plastic cup of cheap, watered down beer that tasted like warm horse piss. But at least we didn't have to worry about who was the designated driver. None of us had enough cash on us to be able to buy enough of those tiny ass cups to even get a nice buzz going on.
Once we had our beer, we walked around the carnival grounds, checking things out. Mitch and I were cutting up and making fun of everything we saw and annoying the shit out of Craig.
"What's your problem, Adam?" Craig grumbled. "You used to love carnivals. You and Trina used to go to them all of the time when we were in high school."
"That was ten years ago!" I retorted.
"It was eight years ago, douchebag," Craig shot back. "No wonder you had to take algebra three times."
"Fuck you." I reached over and smacked him on the back of his bleached-blond head, forcing him to jump back in order to avoid spilling his beer down the front of his shirt.
Craig glared at me.
"All right!" Mitch intervened. "Break it up, girls. We're here. Let's make the best of it."
Craig continued to glare at me. I smirked at him. He'd never take me on in a fight. Craig, with his bottle-blond hair and childish exuberance, was the smart one of the group. And I outweighed him by a good fifty pounds.
I was the bruiser of the group. I was only 5'11, but I had played football in high school, and I'd worked construction ever since. I'd kept myself strong, and Craig, being 5'6 and somewhere around 130 pounds, wasn't stupid enough to instigate a physical confrontation with me.
"And speaking of girls..." Mitch continued. "Check that shit out."
Craig broke off giving me the evil eye long enough to glance over at what had caught Mitch's attention. I turned my head more slowly.
The carnival was fairly large, and pretty crowded, but it wasn't hard to figure out what Mitch was looking at. There was a small clutch of scantily clad girls at one of the midway games.
"And look," Mitch added. "There's three of them and three of us. Even someone who failed Algebra twice can do that math." He smirked at me and started walking.
I glared daggers at the back of his head but said nothing. I wouldn't take Mitch on in a fight either but for a different reason. He wasn't bigger than me. In fact, he was smaller, with dark brown hair and the build of the runner that he'd been in school. But Mitch and I had fought a lot growing up. Best friends do that. I knew, from lots of experience, that he was vicious, and he fought dirty.
"Come on." I wrapped my arm around Craig and roughed up his shaggy hair. He smirked at me, hostility forgotten, and we followed Mitch toward his game of choice.
By the time we caught up to Mitch, he was already trying to impress the girls by winning them a toy. Craig stepped in and joined the fun immediately. I held back. This was all fairly standard behavior for us. Mitch was the outgoing one. Craig was his wingman. I was the shy one. Except that I wasn't the slightest bit shy. They just didn't know that. Letting them believe that I was shy was better than the alternative. There was only one person who knew the truth about me. Well, one person whose name I knew. Trina. She was my girlfriend all throughout high school and beyond, when she went to college, and I stayed behind to complete my makeup year of school. I graduated a year later than the rest of them due to that unfortunate algebra issue that kept me off the field and sitting on the bench for most of two seasons.
Our relationship had been one of convenience. She was a cheerleader, and I was a football player, although I wasn't a very good one. It seemed natural that we'd hook up. Except we weren't hooking up. She had been molested as a child and was terrified of sex. She didn't want anyone to know that she wasn't having sex like all the rest of the girls. I kept her secret. She kept mine.
She finally got past her issues while she was in college and moved on to a real boyfriend. I had been single ever since. The guys thought I was heartbroken over the breakup. Shy and heartbroken. It was as good of a cover story as anything else, I suppose.
I stayed on the periphery and kept quiet. I still joined in the fun, I just wasn't as boisterous as the rest of them. We all ended up having a pretty good time. Even being compelled to feign interest in one of the girls didn't spoil the evening. I was used to it, and trying to win a stuffed tiger gave me a perfect excuse to hang out at the Spill the Milk game. I wasn't nearly as interested in the giant stuffed tiger as I was in the carney working the booth. He was exactly my type.
He was young, probably somewhere around twenty, with black hair pulled back into a short ponytail, and bright blue eyes. I couldn't tell how tall he was because I didn't know how high the rise behind the counter was. I knew that he was shorter than me because the lift put him right at my height. He was thin and pretty but not effeminate. He wasn't flirtatious, with me anyway, but based on the sly looks he was shooting my way, he was definitely interested.
When I finally scored the coveted tiger, and gave it to the girl whose name I'd never bothered to learn, it earned me a kiss and her telephone number, which I would definitely not be using. We left the carnival as it was closing down at midnight. After Mitch dropped me off at home, I waited just long enough to be sure he was well away before I pocketed some necessary items and headed back to the carnival grounds in my own truck.
**
"We're closed." The guy walking up to me as I got out of my truck in the deserted parking lot was about my size and was wearing a blue t-shirt that said 'Security' in white, iron-on letters. "We open at ten in the morning."