Geekspeak: Cruft

Definition: Junk; unnecessary, obsolete, or dysfunctional sections of computer software; bad code.

When the furious man burst into the room, Alex instinctively took a step back—Jesus, never back up in drywall stilts—and lost his balance. He dropped his mudding knife and managed to save himself by bracing one hand on the ceiling and another on the scaffolding next to the wall.

Once his heart was convinced he wasn’t about to fall on his ass, it slowed down enough for him to get royally pissed and ready to tell the asshole off. Because who the hell charged into a place uninvited like that?

He glared down at the guy, and—

Holy fucking shit. Gideon Wallace.

Although he’d never officially met his sister’s roommate, Alex had seen Gideon once at Lin’s twenty-first birthday party while she was still in college in Eugene. The guy was exactly the type that Alex always made a fool of himself over: Gideon had that extra spark, that gleam in his eyes, the flirty wiggle in his ass that said You know you want to tap this.

They’d stood next to each other in the kitchen for about ten seconds. Alex had been loading the last of the beer into the fridge before he took off to let Lin enjoy her party with her friends. Gideon had excused himself and grabbed two beers, hardly glancing at Alex, but their arms had brushed. There’d been a definite tingle, at least on Alex’s part. He’d almost broken his resolution never to interfere with his sister’s life in order to follow Gideon across the room.

Then Gideon had handed one of the beers to a guy who could have been his double, going by size and clothing, and Alex had given it up as a no-chance-in-hell thing.

Gideon was way out of his league.

Not long after that party, Ned had been diagnosed, Lindsay had left school to get a job in Portland, and their lives had become all about their dad’s illness.

Even though Gideon had moved in with Lin after he’d graduated, she’d kept her life with him and Charlie compartmentalized, careful to shield their dad, and by extension the rest of the family, from any contact that might go south. But Alex had never forgotten that tingle. Whenever he’d had an errand to run at the Pettygrove house—a minor repair or something to drop off for Lin—he’d hoped for another glimpse. Nada. Not in four fricking years. What were the odds of that?

Lin had a ton of pictures of the guy, though, and she’d shared them—not with him, for some reason, but with their mom, who’d shared them with Alex.

From the pictures, he’d been able to tell that Gideon still had that wicked glint in his eyes, that don’t-shit-with-me attitude with an overtone of princess that had made Alex laugh at the same time it’d tightened his groin.

Face-to-face with Gideon now, it was clear the pictures hadn’t done him justice. He’d put on a little more muscle through the shoulders and arms since that long-ago party. Not that he was beefy or anything. More like . . . matured. Back then, he’d been barely twenty-one. At twenty-five? Hot damn, Skippy.

“Hey.” He gave Gideon his best grin, the one his first boyfriend had claimed was his finest above-the-waist feature.

Gideon glared at him over the top of glasses with frames the color of basketballs. “It’s barely seven o’clock. Do I need to remind you of tenants’ rights?”

“Uh—”

“You’re required to notify us twenty-four hours in advance before engaging in . . .” He flicked his fingers at the stilts. “Death-metal role-playing. My roommate happens to be the daughter of the landlord, and if you don’t desist, we will report you and you’ll never work for him again.”

Alex’s grin faded. Gideon didn’t remember him.

Granted, it had only been ten seconds at a noisy party, and they hadn’t been introduced. For all he knew, Lin had never told her roommates that she had a brother. Not like anyone could tell by looking at them, given Lindsay’s blue-eyed blonde cuteness, and his own dark skin, broad cheekbones, and skull trim. Oh, yeah. Twins.

“Sorry.”

“I’m sure.” Gideon turned around and zoomed out of the room as fast as he’d entered it.

Alex stared after him for a full minute, the back of his throat burning. Why did it bother him so much that he didn’t rate at least a shard of Gideon’s memory? By now, he was a fucking expert at being forgotten.

Anger welled up from his belly to his chest like lava about to blow. He slammed his hand against the scaffold frame, and a box of drywall screws skittered to the edge of the staging plank and fell, exploding all over the floor.

“Fuck.”

He sat on the plank to take off the stilts so he could sweep up before he slipped and broke his neck.

No matter what his mom said, decompressing—if she meant letting his temper loose like this—never made him feel better. It only gave him more shit to clean up.

Gideon hustled down the stairs as if the zombie hordes were on his heels, locked the apartment door behind him, and nearly sprinted to his room. He locked that door too.

God. Size absolutely matters.

Last time he’d been alone with someone that large had been on the holiday-that-must-not-be-named when he was a senior in high school, right after he’d turned eighteen. He’d learned his lesson after that debacle: stay far, far away from any man orders of magnitude bigger than himself, no matter how hot.

It had been two years after his father had announced his bankruptcy while hacking away at overcooked turkey. One year after his mother had taken the pumpkin pies out of the oven and hightailed it into the sunset with a personal injury lawyer.

He should have known that after that track record, T-day would never treat him right.

But despite his mother’s abandonment, despite his father’s descent into alcohol-soaked apathy, he’d been determined to make the day special that year, the way it was supposed to be. He’d staged the whole dinner—and his turkey was not dry, thank you very much—because his gorgeous boyfriend, polished by half a semester at college on a football scholarship, had been coming home for the holiday.

“I’ve met guys . . . you know . . . like us, G,” Mark had murmured into the phone on one of their late-night phone calls. “They’ve told me everything. Everything. And I . . .” Mark’s gulp had been clearly audible. “We’re gonna do it.”

Gideon’s gawky teenage heart had been thrilled at the news, because Mark was obviously talking about sex. The real stuff. Something other than the clumsy handjobs or mostly clothed frotting that was all they’d managed in the few weeks at the end of the summer when Mark had finally peeked out of his testosterone-fortified closet.

Gideon should have taken time off from his pathetic lovestruck daydreaming to do the research on his own, because unfortunately for him, Mark hadn’t been told enough. Gideon had capped his holiday with a visit to the ER—alone, because Mark had blamed him for the fiasco, and his father had been passed out in front of the TV. And that lecture on the dangers of sodomy from the doctor whose Hippocratic oath had probably been administered by Hippocrates himself? Icing on the disaster cake.

I can’t believe I was ever so stupidly trusting—with an emphasis on the stupid. He’d known his boyfriend’s IQ down to the decimal. He should have realized Mark would have incomplete data, wouldn’t be the expert he claimed, especially since his alleged expertise had been all hearsay. Gideon should have done his own research—after all, it was his ass.

Well, never again. No man could expect to get near said ass without a goddamn gold medal in fucking, validated by notarized affidavits from at least three satisfied partners of Gideon’s exact dimensions.

And that man upstairs? He might have a thousand-watt smile and cheekbones chiseled by an especially talented god, but he was so far outside acceptable comfort parameters that—

WT-actual-F?

Shame sent heat rushing up Gideon’s neck. God, overreacting much, you drama queen? It’s not as if Half-a-Walker had made a pass at him, for pity’s sake. Hell, if they’d met someplace where they weren’t completely alone—in a club, say, or when he had his besties at his back—Gideon might have been the one to make the move. Set flirting superpowers on stun; charm all and sundry, then make a rapid—but fabulously smooth—getaway. Instead, thanks to the safety subroutine hard-coded in his psyche that day in the hospital, he’d acted like a giant douche bag.

Effing knee-jerk reactions. It seemed like no matter how hard he tried to get over the past, it still had a death grip on his balls. To this day—now, for instance—he broke out in an unflattering sweat whenever he remembered what a man that big could do to him. How easily he could be overpowered.

As he blotted the unsightly perspiration off his forehead with the hem of his T-shirt, the ping of an incoming high-priority email chimed on his laptop and phone simultaneously. Please don’t let it be Travis again. He snatched up his phone.

Not Travis, thank God, but HouseMatters, his new client. If they needed to move up the project kickoff meeting any earlier today, Gideon would have barely enough time to shower and dress. He opened the message.

Dear Mr. Wallace,

We regret to inform you that we have decided to postpone our website redesign indefinitely. Should we put the project back in our budget, you will be notified and allowed to submit a new bid at that time.

Wait. What? This was a done deal. Well, almost. He’d hammered out the contract details with the project manager. All that remained were the final signatures. Which now would not be forthcoming.

Gideon’s breath sped up. His knees gave out, and he collapsed onto the edge of his bed. No, no, no. This can’t be happening. This job had been his only option. His last resort. God, he was project-less again, the bane of the self-employed.

As he stared at the email, another message hit his inbox, this one from a referral service he’d used in the past. He opened it immediately. Please, please, please, be something that’ll keep the roof over my head and ramen in the cupboard.

An interview. Yes! As he read the project description, though, a weight settled in his middle as if he’d eaten lead pancakes for breakfast.

Network configuration. Hardware preparation. Server installation. What was the service thinking? He was a web designer and there wasn’t a single— Ah. There.

Upon successful completion of the hardware and networking phase, the contractor may propose on the web redesign and an e-commerce site for the company.

What the effing eff? They expected one guy to do everything—network, hardware, web design, and e-commerce? Good lord, IT wasn’t a one-size-fits-all designation. There were specializations, for pity’s sake, and his specialization covered exactly zero of the items in the main project.

Why had the referral service sent this job to him? Was it because of that one reference to web design, the carrot at the end of the hardware-installation stick?

The looming doom of rent and loan payments prompted him to scan the specification again. So the tasks were a lot more hands-on than his usual jobs—as in his hands on screwdrivers, needle-nosed pliers, and soldering irons—but how hard could they be? Guys who had nothing but vocational-school training did this stuff every day, didn’t they? He’d done a hardware practicum himself in school. Under extreme duress and with a high volume of creative bitching, but he’d done it.

Besides, he was Gideon Wallace, the man who could talk himself out of any given corner. It’d be a challenge, right? He never backed down from one of those. So what if he was a skosh underqualified?

“Close enough.” He crossed his fingers and accepted the interview.