Overboard Read Free

meeting the lumberjack had convinced him to start trying to figure out how to be a human.

2
Duncan
    T otal waste of time .
    Duncan had seen the ad for the speed-dating service in the newspaper and known it would be a waste of time, but it had been so long since he had met a man that he had shown up anyway to give it a try.
    He had even worn his nice flannel.
    Damn, I need some new clothes.
    Most of the men there were too old or too shy.
    Duncan was already quiet enough. He needed a man who could bring him out of his shell.
    That pretty boy, Sebastian, had looked promising until the timers had started and Duncan had watched him give everyone the silent asshole bad-boy treatment. It would have been better if he had done the same with Duncan. He could have called the guy mysterious.
    But the guy wasn’t mysterious. He was just an asshole.
    A gorgeous, sexy asshole with blond hair and blue eyes. Eyes he wanted to swim in. He looked like the kind of pretty boy who waxed every hair on his body. Just imagining his own callused hands rubbing against the jerk’s smooth skin almost made him go back and tell the sexy bastard his real name and ask if he wanted to go get some coffee.
    What was the point, though?
    Sebastian clearly just wanted to claim Duncan for a fuck. Guys like him weren’t looking for more than that. Duncan was. He wasn’t getting any younger and he needed someone to break up the long silences that haunted his apartment when he was there alone at night.
    Besides, Duncan couldn’t afford to buy the coffee.
    Mounting debts had forced him to sell his motorcycle the previous week. He would have preferred to sell his piece-of-shit pickup but if he ever got another job, he would need the rusty truck to haul the lumber and supplies to the worksite.
    Drywall and motorcycles were a horrible combination.
    He should have taken a shot with the pretty boy. He looked rich. Duncan could never let himself be tied to a sugar daddy, but some days it felt good to pretend he could.
    His phone rang. It was Jason. They had talked a few times about possible projects but each had fallen through. Duncan hadn’t even met the man yet, but answering his call was Duncan’s only hope of paying his mounting bills.
    “Hey. One sec. I need to pull over,” he shouted into the phone before setting it on his lap so he could work his way from the left lane of the highway to the shoulder on the right. Duncan hated rush-hour traffic. He preferred driving late at night when there were just a handful of people around.
    It wasn’t that he hated people. He just got flustered in crowds. He was too huge and always felt like he was going to crush someone. Plus, he hadn’t told his family he was gay yet. He lived in Miami, a few hours’ drive from them. Every time he saw them, it was as part of a large family crowd, and he worried that he might accidentally out himself.
    He almost wanted to be outed. At least the pain of not telling them would be replaced with the pain of being yelled at and ostracized.
    Please let this be a job.
    “Still there?”
    “You don’t have a hands-free headset?”
    “If you have a job for me, I promise that will be one of the first things I buy with the money. Right after the rent, the credit card bill, and something better than Ramen and macaroni for groceries.”
    “Damn. You sound like a mess,” Jason said. “But, I have some good news. Are you interested?”
    “If there’s money and I get to keep my clothes on...actually, if there’s money... What do you got?”
    “Some rich dude hired me for a fucking, monster basement remodel. The basement itself is like three thousand square feet. He wants me to be the general contractor, but I’m tied up. I’m willing to pretend to do that while you do all the actual work behind the scenes. I’ll let you keep eighty percent of my cut. Plus, you’ll do all the drywall and other finish work and get paid for that too. Choose your own plumbers and electrical.”
    “Yes.”