Hobbled Read online

  As soon as Danny was hit by that feeling you get when you just know you’re the only person left within spitting distance, he peeled the bathrobe off his body like Velcro. It made an audible schleechking sound, since it was by now pretty well glued to his skin with fossilized come. Naked, he clumsily struggled to his feet. Just getting out of a chair was a major undertaking, thanks to all the extra hardware he had strapped to his lower legs. He looked down at himself and made a face. “Ick.” The dried come splattered across his body now looked like felt, thanks to the lint from the black bathrobe that was stuck all over it. “Jesus God,” he said.

  Ignoring the crutch leaning against the wall because he hated the damn thing, Danny headed to the bathroom, arms akimbo, legs stiff, broken leg thumping, walking like a zombie because he felt so damned funky. Once there, he looked at himself in the mirror, said, “Jesus God,” again, and peeled off two trash bags from the roll now perched by the sink. He slipped his left leg with the cast on it into one bag and his right leg with the ankle monitor strapped to it into the other. Then he secured them both with rubber bands to make them watertight, and clomped his way into the shower like Frankenstein’s monster.

  While the water washed all the little dead babies away, he contemplated spending the next three weeks alone. His two best friends, straight friends, Spike and Tim, were back in Indiana where he had left them, so Danny was on his own. It was the start of a new life, or supposed to be. This was the summer he had planned to come out. Shed that “virgin” label once and for all. Get laid. Get laid by a guy. Come out to himself, out to his family, out to the world. Become the gay man he had always known he was meant to be.

  But now, of course, his coming-out party would have to be put on hold for a while. He wouldn’t be able to start a new life or turn over any new leaves for at least six more weeks. He’d have to get out of the house first, and that wouldn’t be happening anytime soon, thanks to this piece of machinery screwed to his ankle and the six-week sentence of house arrest the judge had slapped him with. And the broken leg. He’d have to contend with that. Not that it much mattered. He didn’t figure anyone would want to have sex with him, anyway, as long as he had an anchor strapped to each leg, weighing him down.

  Actually his new life in California had gotten off to a stuttering start, what with the trouble at the restaurant and all, but Danny was determined to turn things around. He’d show his dad. He really would be good from here on in. He had arrived in San Diego barely a month ago, exactly two days after his high school graduation, determined to get as far away from the farm as he could get. It dawned on him that maybe he should consider this six-week period of house arrest as his last good vacation before a lifetime of adulthood drudgery began. He should take advantage of the fact he had nothing to do and be grateful for the fact he had six long weeks to do it in.

  Geez, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. He had waited eighteen years to have sex with a guy. A few more weeks wouldn’t kill him.

  Lint-free and come-free, he clumsily clomped out of the shower, dripping and snorting, tugged the wet garbage bags off his legs, and patted himself down with a towel. He dabbed on some deodorant, gave his shoulder-length hair a good headbanging by way of styling it, and headed back to his room, where he pulled on a baggy pair of cargo shorts. He donned them commando because the leg holes of his underwear wouldn’t fit over the cast. Then he slipped a T-shirt over his head. There. Clean and dressed for the day.

  Now, then. What to do first? Ah, yes. Eat.

  He clomped downstairs like Long John Silver, every other footstep echoing through the house like a gunshot. Fucking cast.

  In the kitchen, he rummaged through the freezer until he found two TV dinners that looked promising, peeled off the wrappers, and tossed them in the microwave. He poured himself a tumbler full of milk, drank it down in four seconds flat, then poured himself another. He nibbled cookies while he waited for the dinners to cook. When the microwave beeped, he fished the things out, stripped off the cellophane, slid them onto the kitchen table, and dug right in.

  It took him exactly four minutes to consume them both, right down to licking the tray clean like Frederick the cat might have done.

  Satisfied for the moment, he moved to the living room, collapsed onto the sofa, and switched on the TV. He surfed his way from Channel 2 all the way back to Channel 2 again and couldn’t find one damn thing that caught his fancy. It was all daytime crap. Dr. Oz. Ellen. Nate. Judge Judy. (Judge Judy was the last thing he wanted to watch. He’d had enough of judges to last him a lifetime.)

  He finally switched the TV off, heaved himself up off the sofa, passed through the kitchen to grab a soda and what was left of the bag of cookies, and headed back up the stairs to his room, clunking up the steps one by one. Once there, he threw himself into his recliner, switched on his own TV and settled in with a video game he had been slogging away at for the past couple of weeks. It wasn’t the best game in the world, but it was good enough.

  He killed off his character about fifteen times trying to make one simple move and finally gave up. He wasn’t in the mood. He switched off the game, laid the empty cookie bag aside, and stared morosely out his bedroom window until the afternoon sun began to dip behind the houses across the street.

  As darkness fell, somewhere in the bowels of the city, someone pulled a lever or flicked a switch or slapped a button and streetlights began popping on all over town. Shortly after that, lights in the houses along Danny’s street began to blink on as the darkness deepened: a kitchen light here, a porch light there. As the city started waking up for the night, portholes were illuminated into lives up and down Walnut Street. Being just about bored silly, Danny decided maybe he would do a little snooping.

  He turned off his own bedroom light so no one could see what he was doing and snagged the binoculars off his desk. Since Danny’s room, and the bathroom adjoining it, were actually a remodeled garret, and made up the entirety of the second floor, Danny had windows on three sides. These windows offered him a commanding view of the surrounding area. Positioning himself at the east window first, he scanned the street to see what was happening in the hood.

  Not much apparently. Two little kids, one black and one white, were arguing over a basketball in the driveway four houses down. Danny didn’t know why they were bothering. It would be too dark to shoot hoops in a minute anyway. In the house next to the two little kids, a woman was standing over the kitchen sink chopping onions. Danny suspected they were onions by the way the woman was holding her head and squinting her eyes and aiming her face off in another direction as if she was holding her breath. Danny figured she was either chopping onions or dissecting a skunk.

  Farther down the street in the same direction he couldn’t see much because of a tree. He moved to a side window and swept the binoculars in the other direction, sliding over the vacant house next door because nothing was happening there, obviously, since the lady who previously owned it had kicked the bucket and the place had been for sale for months, or so Danny’s dad had told him the other night at dinner.

  Danny focused on the houses across the street. Some old guy watching the news. Another old guy watching the news. Two kids playing Tomb Raider on their PlayStations while their mother set the dinner table and screamed at them to turn down the volume. Danny could actually hear the woman’s strident voice from a block away. Oddly enough, it seemed her kids, who were less than eight feet from her flapping mouth, couldn’t hear the woman at all. Poor things must be deaf.

  Danny heard the clink of glass, and sweeping his binoculars around, he spotted Mrs. Trumball, three doors down. She was wearing her ever-present flowery pink housecoat and pink fuzzy slippers and sneaking gin bottles into the trash can by her kitchen door now that it was good and dark, just like she always did. You would think someone being that sneaky would take the trouble to turn off her porch light. But no. She might as well be on stage with a baby spot aimed right at her head. Her hair was in rollers, as usual. Danny
had never seen her hair out of rollers, and he had known the woman since he was nine years old. Danny grinned. Mrs. Trumball had been hiding her gin bottles for a decade, at least. One would think she would be tired of sneaking around by now and would just lean out her kitchen window and scream to the neighbors, “Yes, I’m a drunk! So what! Mind your own business you goddamn pack of nosy-assed jackals!” Then Danny imagined her carefully scooting her African violets aside, tugging an Uzi out from under her housecoat, and spraying the neighborhood with bullets, all the while screaming, “Snoop on this, you miserable pack of poopheads!”

  Danny giggled at the thought.

  Moving to the south window that overlooked the pool at the rear of the house, Danny could peer over the back fence from his high vantage point. From there he could see the house that abutted his father’s in the back. It faced the next street over. This house was ranch style. One story. It was stucco, painted in a Southwestern ochre, with Southwestern crap scattered around the yard. An old wagon wheel. About a thousand cacti. A couple of cow skulls. Artfully broken pots overflowing with lush succulents filled up the corners.

  At that particular moment, the guy who owned the house was in his driveway by the open garage out back, working on his car. It looked like he was changing a headlight on his station wagon. He was wearing raggedy blue jeans with no shirt and no shoes, and Danny had to admit that for an old guy, he looked pretty darned good, with those slim hips and fuzzy chest and two little dimples just above his snugly blue-jeaned ass. Since Danny’s cock had just given a little lurch inside his cargo shorts, Danny could only assume his pecker agreed the guy was indeed a looker. The man’s name was Mike Something. Mike Childers, that was it.

  Mr. Childers had lost his wife a couple of years earlier, and now he spent his time puttering around his property, keeping to himself, waving when he was waved to, but that was about all the socializing he did. Danny had to admit he really was a good-looking man, maybe around forty, which was old to Danny, and Danny didn’t blame the guy one little bit for keeping his nose out of the neighborhood’s business.

  Actually, Danny should probably be following in the guy’s footsteps and minding his own business, too, rather than standing here snooping on everybody, especially since they were all so damned boring anyway.

  The fact was, Danny was starting to feel like a perv. Here he was in a darkened house staring out the windows with a pair of binoculars, spying on the neighbors from a room that still smelled like multiple squirts of jism. Next thing you know, he’d be whacking off in the bushes while he listened to Mr. and Mrs. Dinkens have marital relations in that Victorian monstrosity next door. This was not good. This was not healthy. Mr. Dinkens was a bean pole, and Mrs. Dinkens weighed about three hundred pounds. Danny didn’t want to hear that.

  Maybe now would be a good time to gauge the limits of his electronic leash. It would be good to know how far he could move in every direction just so he wouldn’t be tripping the alarm every five minutes and bringing nine million cops down on his head. It was nice and dark outside, so none of the neighbors would be able to see what he was doing. He was sure they were all talking about him being under house arrest. It was probably the lead story on the neighborhood grapevine. They might very well be watching his every move, like he was watching theirs, just to make sure he didn’t try any funny business, what with him being a bona fide criminal and all.

  Hmm. Danny wondered if he should borrow Mrs. Trumball’s Uzi. Give himself some cover fire. Nah. Too dramatic. He’d just sneak around and do what he had to do on the sly.

  It was completely dark outside now, except for the streetlights out front, which cast enough light through the windows to let Danny see what he was doing. With all the house lights off, including the porch lights, Danny slid through the front door like a ninja, except for the damn noisy cast on his leg thumping all over the place. Hunched over to make a smaller target just in case anyone did happen to be watching, he moved down the front walk, plucking the solar night-lights out of the ground that bordered the walk as he went along, like some deranged flower picker. They were about a foot high, the night-lights. One end was pointy to stick in the ground and the other end had a tiny solar panel that powered a wee light bulb inside. They gave off just a speck of white light, not really enough to see anything by, but enough to be able to follow the sidewalk and not take off in the wrong direction and end up in Portland. The little lights were mostly just ornamental, but for what Danny wanted to use them for, they would be more than sufficient.

  When he had his arms full of night-lights, he saw the flaw in his plans. Hell, everybody could see him now, with this bouquet of night-lights cradled in his arms like Miss America clutching a spray of radioactive roses. From a distance, he probably looked like he was glowing. He quickly scooted back through the front door and dumped the night-lights in the foyer. Then, carrying only one light stick this time, and shielding the white light at the tip of it with his hand, he set off down the front walk again, watching his electronic monitor with every step, waiting for the light to go from green to red.

  At the very end of the walk, the ankle monitor flashed red. Danny’s heart did a somersault, and he stepped hastily backward, hoping to God the light would go back to green before every cop in California descended on his ass. And it did. Thank God.

  Danny stuck the night-light he was carrying into the ground right next to the last square in the sidewalk, then he did an aboutface and went to fetch another. With this one, he took off across the grass to the west, and just as he reached the hedge and picket fence that separated his property from the vacant house next door, the light flashed red. He stepped back, poked the night-light in the ground and headed back for another one.

  It didn’t take him long to realize that the police apparently knew what they were doing. Every time he reached the edge of his property, be it front yard, or side yards, the light flashed red just before he crossed the property line. It was only in the back, behind the pool at the six-foot-high fence that separated his backyard from Mr. Childers’s backyard that the monitor did not flash red. And with Mr. Childers still working on his car in his driveway by the open garage just on the other side of the fence, Danny couldn’t scale the fence to test the limits in that direction. He’d have to do it some other time. Or never. Chances are the light on his ankle monitor would flash red just a couple of feet past the fence line anyway, so maybe he wouldn’t even worry about it.

  He stuck the last light stick in the ground on his side of the back fence, and called it quits.

  His reconnaissance hadn’t really accomplished anything, but at least he had a clearer idea of where his prison walls were. He knew exactly where he was allowed to go during the next six weeks. He wouldn’t be tripping the alarm by accident, at least.

  Just before he clunked his way back to the house, Danny dared a brief peek through the back fence, thinking a closer look at Mr. Childers’s naked chest would give him something to think about later if he found himself in need of a little sexual stimulation.

  With his eye pressed to the wooden fence, right at the point where two boards didn’t quite come together, Danny gave a little gasp when he realized Mr. Childers was only a few feet away. He was still putzing around with the front fender of his car, and he was still looking pretty darned good in those faded blue jeans and nothing else. The skin of his back was smooth and well-muscled, with a little patch of dark hair just over his ass that Danny found very attractive indeed. When he turned, Danny saw a nice bulge in the crotch of his neighbor’s jeans. Danny swallowed, looking at it. God, it was beautiful.

  Danny’s heart did a little stuttering tap dance when Mr. Childers stopped what he was doing and turned, as if he could feel a pair of eyes on him. He looked around in every direction, his gaze sliding over the fence where Danny was crouched. After a minute, he seemed satisfied he wasn’t being watched after all.

  He turned his back to Danny once again, and returned to whatever the hell he was doing to the front
end of his car.

  Breathing a sigh of relief that he hadn’t been caught snooping, Danny sneaked off through the grass, dragging the damn cast along with him, to the kitchen door, where he ducked inside.

  Before turning on the house lights, he went around and closed all the drapes.

  Finally, cocooned safely in his house with all the drapery closed and all the house lights switched back on, he wiped a patina of nervous sweat from his forehead. Yep. He really did feel like a perv.

  No more peeping through windows and fences, he told himself. No more snooping ever.

  Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen.

  He went off in search of sustenance, trying his best to ignore his half-hard dick as it flopped around inside his shorts striving to get his attention, which it was managing to do quite well, thank you very much. Lord, he always did have trouble with boners when he went around without underwear staring at half-dressed men. Of course, there wasn’t much he could do about finally coming out of the closet for the next six weeks. He’d just have to muddle through, bone hard and horny. And try to stay away from the back fence. Too much temptation in that direction.

  Still trying to take his mind off sex and the hunky older next-door neighbor, Danny built a sandwich with every ingredient and condiment he could lay his hands on. Then he tore into a family-sized bag of potato chips. Two seconds later the phone rang.

  It was his dad, wondering if everything was okay and telling Danny his flight had been on time and he had arrived at his destination all in one piece.

  While they chatted, Danny made all the appropriate responses, but his mind was still on that little patch of hair over Mr. Childers’s ass. It looked so—welcoming.

  Gee, maybe he really was a pervert.

  On top of being gay, of course. Which was a whole different ballgame.

  A ballgame Danny was all too aware he had yet to play.