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corner.”
    “And the holes in the floor under the carpet?”
    Carson smiled a little, both in memory of his first apartment and at the dryness in Florida’s voice. “And the shredded wallpaper, and the closet door off the hook and the drapes that wouldn’t close and the Internet that wasn’t there—”
    “Oh, the horror!”
    “Hey!” Carson laughed, recovering his good humor a little. “A boy has to have his porn! Anyway, so, yeah. The place is a dump. The birds freaked me out. But that’s not what drove me away.”
    Florida laughed and rested his chin on his palms, batting his eyes like a little girl in a story circle. “Do tell!”
    Carson sensed a challenge. “Man, the mold was gross, but I stayed. The holes under the carpet were life-threatening, but I stayed. The fumigation smell—”
    “Oh God!”
    “Oh really! The fumigation smell was horrendous, but I stayed!”
    Florida nodded, urging him to drop the shoe, and Carson winked.
    “But when the cockroach, the ant, and the bedbug walked across the spooge stain on the sheets, you can bet your sweet ass I checked into the Hotel fucking 8!”
    Florida had a great laugh. It started from his toes, but it must have lingered around his groin, because when it came out his mouth, it was all sex. Melty and humpty met and mated, and Carson had to take a deep breath to keep himself from searching for any handy broom closets.
    When the laugh was over, Florida just grinned and shook his head. “Yeah, that place got semidemolished by a hurricane a few years back. They had construction crews in here eating, and they kept telling us that it was so frustrating. They needed to be replacing the drywall and the flooring, but they were told to wallpaper and carpet over it. Man, that place is bad news. You’re much better off at the Super 8 or the little Hyatt.”
    Carson grimaced, and Florida held up his hand.
    “Hold that thought. I’ll be back in a minute with your food.”
    Carson nodded and sipped his coffee meditatively. Florida boys. Go figure. Must be the surfing. If he peered past the Bates Parrot, he could see (or maybe imagine) the ocean, and he remembered that moment, right before he’d tried the handle of the door, when he’d looked out into the matte blackness of the night. He’d imagined a sort of freedom in the thick air, and it reminded him of walking through Grant Park in the late spring. The wind had lost its edge by May, but it still smelled like the water, and if you didn’t look too hard for the far side of the lake, you could imagine it stretched over the horizon.
    What would it be like to be able to swim in that water, to be able to surf?
    To look over the edge and know the horizon stretched on forever?
    Carson felt a sudden hunger to do just that, which he tried to tamp down before Florida returned. He was just visiting. Florida didn’t need him mooning over the ocean or whining about not having his freedom.
    Which left Carson sitting, eyes half-mast, gazing across the road, when he saw a figure peek around the corner of the hotel. The hair was a yellow mess instead of a slicked-back coif, and the guy was hunched down, trying to hide his face and his build, but he bore a striking resemblance to…
    “Stassy?” Carson said. He said it out loud but not loudly, and there were cars crossing the road. (Okay, it was a freeway, but not a very busy one. St. Aubrey’s had a population of about ten thousand, and most of those were snowbirds.) Still, something must have alerted Stassy, because he lifted his head and glanced around like a squirrel getting ready to dart into traffic. His squirrel senses must have been tingling, though, because instead of darting into traffic, he slunk backward into the shadow of the hotel and disappeared. “Aw, hey, Stassy!” Carson looked left and right and realized that if he leapt the rail and tried to cross the street in the next few seconds, he’d be roadkill. In the meantime, Stassy was long gone, and Carson was