Chapter 11

Hephaestus had just finished grocery shopping, and was riding back to his house. The sidecar was loaded with beer, meat, beans and various packaged foods which required minimal preparation effort and kept for a long time in the pantry. Long shelf life was important when one tended to leave on an extended trip on short notice, as well as when a certain roommate had a tendency to move things and forget about them.

Hephaestus had once found a five year old can of fruit and two boxes of pudding mix hidden behind some books in the living room. He was ninety eight percent sure he was not the one who had put them there.

The weather was brisk, but sunny as always. Hep and Scroat loved the desert climate anyway, but comfortable riding all year long was a big perk. Automobiles cramped Hep’s style.

He reached his house and pulled in to the driveway, where he saw Scroat’s motorcycle parked. The front door of the house was half-open, which was unusual, but he figured Scroat had probably just made a huge mess of something, and was airing the house out.

Hep shut down the bike, and that is when he heard the noises emanating from the house. Again.

He rolled his eyes, and muttered, “Shit.”

Scroat had been bringing his girlfriend over to the house a lot. As in, every time Hep left. Ordinarily if he got back to the house and realized Scroat and his girlfriend were inside he’d just leave again, but he had a bunch of food in the sidecar just waiting to spoil. He really preferred not to buy food twice, so he was going to have to brave the chaos within the house and make a break for the kitchen.

Hep grabbed the most perishable items, the steak and bacon, locked his eyes forward and hustled in the front door hoping he wouldn’t have to see anything unsightly. He was halfway through the living room and nearly in the kitchen when he realized Scroat and the girl were back in his bedroom, so there was nothing (apart from the too horrible to contemplate noises) to worry about. He put the meats in the refrigerator, and went back to get the rest of the food out of his sidecar.

Apart from the beer, which went straight into the refrigerator, he left everything else out on the counter and beat feet out of the house. Hep wasn’t shocked or embarrassed by sex, per se, but these two kept finding new ways to make sure he knew they were fucking. Particularly because both of them announced exactly that, or some variation of it, very frequently. That, and he didn’t want to be sitting under anything when it fell off the wall. This was a distinct possibility at any time, and the probability of something heavy falling increased every minute.

So he left.

Scroat, for his part, had not been this happy in years. He and Sarah Johannson were nearly on the same wave length, at least when it came to communication styles and sexual preferences. She was the only woman he’d ever met who could be as crude as he was, and Scroat was, frankly, greatly impressed by this.

Despite Hep’s impressions of their relationship, the two of them did quite a bit more than have noisy, vulgar sex at every opportunity. For one thing, they both greatly enjoyed messing with other patrons in sleazy bars. Recently, they had been in a bar and Sarah had approached a table full of young guys.

She said to one of them, “I bet twenty bucks I could drink two beers before you could even finish a single shot.”

“Yeah, right. You’re on,” said the guy in a KMFDM t-shirt.

“Ok, here are the rules. First, I can’t touch your glass, and you can’t touch mine. Touching the other person’s glass means you lose. Second, I get a one beer head start,” Sarah said.

Scroat watched all of this with keen interest. He knew how the scam worked, but it was rare to see someone else pull it off. It was even more rare for his date to pull off a scam.

The waitress brought out two glasses of beer and a shot of Jack Daniels.

“Are you ready?” Sarah asked the sucker.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Sarah chugged the beer as quickly as she could and slammed the glass on the table upside down over the sucker’s shot of whiskey.

“OK, you can try to drink your shot before I finish this beer now,” she said sweetly, and took her time finishing the second beer.

The other guys at the sucker’s table had a good laugh at his expense. He gave Sarah a twenty dollar bill, moved her glass from over his shot, and drank it.

Scroat was reasonably certain they were made for each other just because of that experience. And it didn’t hurt that she looked like one of his attractive cousins.

Wait. You didn’t read that. Scroat felt no shame about what happened with his tease of a cousin in the distant past, but he also had no desire to spread the story around. It might make his seem undiscriminating. Which he is, but a fellow can pretend, can’t he? So just forget that part.