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looks like you’re the sun’s favorite.
what the fuck does that mean?
grady’s eyes were narrowed. it was funny, how he managed to catch the sun’s wrath, and how, even at his age, he still neglected to use sunblock. wes had been by his side a long time, perhaps far too long—though wes would be the first to say no, it’ll never be long enough—and he’d been through it all: pimples, stretch marks, blackheads. just about any minor epidermal malady a person could experience, grady had gone through it, and whined and bitched the entire time.
they were sitting in the living room, the door open to the porch so that a breeze would dance through the house. sometimes, wes liked to turn the A/C down and let the system rest. grady was trying to watch some house-flipping show that he liked to mumble through with a disdainful look on his face. wes was on the opposite end of the couch, flicking through his new secondhand copy of shane.
wes laughed, mischief setting him alight.
fuck off. grady struck up his middle finger, shooting wes a half-serious glare.
this happens all the time, wes said. thirty years and you still don’t know how to put on sunblock.
“i do!” grady said. wes rolled his eyes.
it’d happened the previous day. it was a good day, hot but not stifling, the kind that grady liked in the summer. grady fell asleep in the shade on the back porch listening to one of his old jazz records, and when he woke, he was no longer in the shade. wes kept pressing on his cheeks until grady batted him away, signing for him to stop, that it hurt and, more than that, it was annoying. wes just poked him harder.
he’d start peeling in another day or two. until then, he was red as anything—a tomato, a stoplight, or even…
wes snickered. yeah, i’ll believe it when i see it; ‘til then, c’mon, let’s get you back to that lobster tank you escaped from.
excuse me?