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Marty noticed the kid; hard to miss him, preppy little baby like that. Still pretty, despite the fact that it looked like someone had worked him over, and not for fun. Fresh meat, and he’d bet his never-going-to-happen firstborn that the ID the kid showed the bartender was fake. If he was looking to fuck, he’d probably get it. Not from Marty or his crew, but there were a couple regulars skeezy enough to go for a guy who looked young enough to be jailbait.
Marty took a long drink of his beer, wondered if the kid would listen if Marty tried to warn him off doing anything stupid. He wouldn’t have listened at that age, for damn sure. He made eye contact with Ryan, who had the same conflicted expression. This wasn’t the kind of place where you got in folks’ business, but damn. The kid looked like he could still be in high school. Marty was pushing fifty, and these babies looked younger and younger every year, hand to fucking god.
He was still waffling when one of the creeps approached the kid. Marty didn’t know his name; didn’t know many names in this bar. Marty checked the guy’s back pocket; flagging for a blowjob, nothing too extreme. He took another pull of his beer; tried to figure out if stepping in would do anything but start a fight.
The kid smiled at the creep; looked like he was trying for charming, but overshot somewhere between hard and mean. Yeah, Marty was pretty sure interfering was going to get him a giant fuck you. From the aggravated sigh at his right, Ryan was thinking the same thing. Sometimes--hell, most times--you couldn’t save someone from stupid. The kid and the creep stood up; Marty looked away. They came back from the bathroom ten minutes later, the kid a little more rumpled, a little glassy eyed, a little shocky. The creep ditched him before they even made the bar, the kid’s eyes tracking him as he walked away, and that lost look killed Marty a little.
Yeah, like fuck he was going to let the kid be a revolving door tonight. Marty stood up; knew without looking that Ryan would be on the same page. He went over to the kid.
“Hey, man,” he said, easy, friendly. The kid looked over, suddenly blank and wary. “You like pool?”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I like pool.” It wasn’t what he was expecting, that was obvious.
“You know cutthroat?”
“I can learn,” he said, steadier.
Marty put a hand on his shoulder, slow enough to telegraph it, and steered him toward the empty pool table. Ryan already had a pool cue off the wall, handing it over with a smile for the kid. The kid clutched the pool cue like a lifeline for a second, then obviously relaxed his grip.
“So what’s cutthroat?” the kid asked. Marty started racking.
“We’ll divide the balls in thirds by number instead of strips and solids. We each get a set; you want to get our balls in. Go after whatever you want, but Ryan and I will shoot our numbers in order to make it a little more fair. I’m Marty. Got something you want us to call you?”
“Steve, I guess,” he said.
“Alright, Steve,” he said, “Go ahead and break.”
Steve shot pool like someone who learned from watching movies, which was about what Marty expected. He lost pretty handily, but Marty and Ryan had been playing pool probably longer than he’d been alive.
“Want some pointers before our next game?” Marty asked casually.
Steve bit his lip. “Yeah, that’d be great.”
Marty walked him through how to use the cue first, because it was easy to think you had to hit a lot harder than you did and fuck up your aim. Then how to aim, how to control the cue ball to set up the next shot, and how to look at the table as a whole instead of a single shot. It was the same stuff Marty’s dad had taught him, back when they were still speaking and Marty wasn’t a degenerate sinner, and it added a lot of sweet to the bittersweet to pass it on to the next generation of gay boys. He kissed Ryan’s neck as he moved around to rack again, gave a playful little lick as he pulled away. Ryan swatted at him with a grin.
“Anyone shown you the right way to rack?” he asked Steve, who shook his head. “C’mere.”
He could see Steve focus in the next game, trying to use Marty’s tricks. The first time he stopped the cue ball cold in front of a pocket with backspin, he grinned at the two of them. Actually, really grinned, like the fucking kid he was. They played until bar close, and Steve looked between the two of them.
“Are you going to take me home?” he asked, and didn’t sound like he was sure if he wanted that or not.
“We have a spare room if you need a place to stay,” Ryan said. Steve nodded, still looking a little torn. “You need a ride, too?”
“I got a car,” he said. “I can follow you?”
Steve’s car was a sweet little BMW that the almighty himself must have blessed because not even the hubcaps had been swiped, and he stayed a safe distance behind them all the way to their apartment. He parked the BMW by their bikes, and hopefully that’d be enough that folks would leave it alone. It wasn’t like they had a garage to stash it.
They waited for him by the front door, and Steve almost looked like he was going to bolt when they opened it. Marty wanted to reassure him, but that wasn't a doorstep conversation. He settled for a warm smile. Steve shoved his hands in his pockets and followed them in.
“How’s this work?” he asked when they got inside, and Marty gave him credit for having brass balls.
“Ryan’s going to get the spare room ready, and you’re going to sleep. In the morning, we’ll figure out how long you need it for.”
“I--what?”
“Steve. You are young enough to be my kid, and that is not a kink that does it for me. Come on, sit down.”
Steve sat slowly, looking like the rug had been pulled out from under him. Marty grabbed them both beers, popped the tops, and handed one over as he sat down.
“Look, did you enjoy what happened in that bathroom?”
“I like men,” Steve snapped, defensive.
“Never said you didn’t. You can like men and not like what happened in there. I’m not making any assumptions either way. I’m just asking.”
Steve looked down at the bottle in his hands, thumbing a nail at the label. “At first, a little.”
“Did you know what you were getting into?”
“It wasn’t my first time,” Steve said.
“I didn’t think it was. I’m asking if you know about flagging.”
“Oh.”
Marty walked him through it, got up to get a pen and paper to write down the most common colors and handed it over.
“Burn it once you know it,” he cautioned Steve. “It’s only good as long as no one but us knows it.”
Steve nodded, tucking the paper in his wallet.
“Alright, last one, then I’ll let you get some sleep. You know there’s something out there killing us. GRID, AIDS, whatever they call it. You’re an adult; I’m not telling you what to do. But think about what’s worth dying over, and if it’s giving some asshole a blowjob when he won’t give you the time of day. If it’s what you want, that’s one thing, but if what you really want is company, my boys and I spend a fair bit of time in that bar. You’re welcome to come play pool or shoot the shit.”
Marty felt like a goddamn babysitter, and he was probably going to get a ton of grief from everyone, but he knew which consequences he could live with.
“And if what you really needed was a roof over your head for the night, we can figure something out.” Because Steve had showed up young and roughed up to a gay bar, blew the first person who approached him, and nothing about that screamed either a good mental place or options. Asshole parents kicked out their gay kids often enough that it wasn’t a surprise. Gay folks had to look out for gay folks; no one else was going to.
“Oh!” Steve said, and sounded genuinely surprised. “No, I, uh, have a place.”
“A safe place,” Marty pressed.
“Yeah. I mostly live alone.”
“Ah,” Marty said. Lonely enough to maybe go home with two men you didn’t really want to fuck. “If you just need a place to crash overnight sometimes, that’s fine, too.”
He put his arm gently around Steve’s shoulders, squeezing slightly. Steve’s chest trembled as he inhaled. Marty took the beer from his hand and set it on the table before he spilled it.
“Shit,” he said vehemently, rubbing a hand over his face. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Not a bad thing to cry. Not a bad thing to talk about it, either, if you want.”
“Can’t really,” he said, looking away. They sat there quietly, but Steve slowly relaxed against his side. “It’s just everything’s shit,” he said at last. “I got outed. My dad freaked. My friends bailed or,” he gestured at his face. “No one wants to be seen with a fag. It could be worse, right? I’ve got a place to live, food to eat, whatever. I’m not on the fucking streets.”
“But the loneliness gets to you,” Marty said.
Steve exhaled. “Yeah. It’s getting to me. I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
“You in Indy?”
Steve shook his head. “About two hours out. That perfect small town life, y’know?”
Marty squeezed his shoulder again. “That’s rough. Offer stands, though. I can ask around, see if I can help you find a job. You can crash on the couch until we find a place for you to stay long term.”
Steve curled over into himself and pressed his palms into his eyes. His shoulders shook.
“We can figure this out,” Marty promised, rubbing his back.
Steve shook his head.
“Alright, walk me through it.”
Steve said something too soft to hear.
“What was that?”
“I don’t have a diploma yet,” he admitted. Marty paused. Fucking revised his age estimate down.
“How soon do you graduate?” he asked, voice neutral, like this wasn’t a real fucking problem. He kept rubbing Steve’s back.
“Just started my junior year,” he admitted. Fuck. Fuck. How old were juniors? Sixteen? Seventeen?
“And you live with your folks?”
Steve laughed harshly. “When they’re home. They bailed after dad--” he cut himself off, and Marty hated every possibility his mind filled in. “They bailed. I’m looking for a job, but I look like a train hit me, and unless my asshole ex-friends lay the fuck off me, this is probably my new face. What am I supposed to do? Where can I even go?”
If a couple of forty-eight-year-old fags kidnapped a sixteen year old boy, jailtime was the best case scenario. Ryan was going to murder him. He looked over to where Ryan was standing in the door, just outside of Steve’s line of sight. Marty got a lopsided smile and a shrug from him, because Ryan was with him that no way in hell were they taking it back because Steve needed more help than they’d realized.
“Offer’s still open. You live on our couch for a few years. We’ll find you a job, someplace that does cash under the table. You study for your GED. As soon as you turn eighteen and get your diploma, you’re free and clear.”
Steve lifted his head. “Are you fucking serious? You just met me!”
“We did,” Marty agreed. “I know there’s a lot about being gay that seems terrible. The world tells you to be ashamed, tells you you’re wrong. They don’t care we’re dying, and plenty of them would help us along if they could. But what you get back is community; you get people who know what it’s like to have the whole world after you. We take care of each other because no one else is going to. Reagan will let us die, but our lesbian sisters are in the hospitals doing their best for us. Anyone takes a swing at me, I know Ryan and my boys have my back. Your dad kicks you out, you come here. It’s not perfect; there’s plenty of assholes who are gay, too. But if we want it, we have to build it, even if there’s flaws.”
Steve was quiet for a bit. “Let me think about it?”
“No limit on the offer,” Marty said. If he pushed too hard, Steve would run. All they could do was offer good company and a safe place to land and hope it was enough to lure the kid back. Marty and Ryan might catch hell for it, but please, let Steve make it to graduation instead of into a column of statistics.