“Nice,” Ronny said, and settled under the sheets.

“You still scared of me?”

“Maybe. Sometimes.”

“When?”

“In the dorm sometimes. When you’re with a lot of guys from the team. You guys are pretty rough.”

After a moment he brushed his mouth on Ronny’s ear. “Nothing I can do about that. That’s the way it is to play football.”

“I don’t really mind.”

“Don’t let this soft shit fool you, that’s still who I am.”

“The way you change up, never a dull moment.”

“Can’t let things get dull, babe. I’d knock you around every day before I’d let that happen.” He was grinning, but there was something harsh in the words, an edge that made Ronny wary.

“You keep me on my toes all right.”

“You need to leave yet?” Low, in Ronny’s ear. Pulling their bodies together, his hands on Ronny’s back.

“I can always cut my shower short,” he answered. “It’s not like they’re expecting me at any certain time. I just want to look eager.”

“You look pretty eager right now,” Ben said, and took him in, engulfed him, and they were tangled up again and that was the whole world.

Turtletrack

SO IT WAS LATER INSTEAD OF earlier when, in the Chapel Hill Newspaper office, he met Amber Twayne Gibbs, the composition shop supervisor, and within a few minutes he had the job—because he already knew how to do it—and she was showing him the setup at the worktables. A feeling of relief pervaded even as Amber told him about his duties. “Oh, man, so cool you did stuff before. Training new people is a bitch.”

She was shorter than Ronny, her hair colored red from a drugstore hair dye, freckled across the nose and cheeks, earnest, dressed like an old hippie; but that didn’t mean much, since there were so many hippies in Chapel Hill. Her eyes were red and he wondered whether she was stoned. Maybe she was another student who had come to the university and found the town so comfortable she never left. But she was his boss, so he decided not to ask any questions.

Typesetting computers on one wall, a headline machine, layout tables made of cheap particle board, grimy carpet patched with duct tape, reporters stepping in and out of the room—a newspaper back shop, familiar enough. The lights blared and buzzed a bit. He could get used to it.

He would work Thursday and Friday afternoons and evenings, assembling the sections of the Sunday edition that were printed ahead of time, then he would come in Saturday nights for the news and sports sections for the Sunday paper. Sometimes he might be called in to help with the weekday work. The hourly wage was all right. He could live on it.

“This Thursday?”

“Yeah. Come about one, dude. That’s when we get the daily pages off and you can have the boards.”

When he walked back to the boardinghouse his room was empty, a curious letdown. On the desk lay a scrawled note: “Done an gone owt for vittels. Git packt.” Part of Ben’s dumb jock routine. Ronny got out his suitcase and filled it with clean clothes.