Hornet's Nest Ch. 06

Darren and Tyler came over for a dinner, as if in celebration, which just meant Wesley had the shit lovingly ripped out of him. He could handle the banter quite fine.

"It's plucking the eyebrows," he said to Zack. "It's the secret."

"Well I didn't pluck my eyebrows for my job," Zack replied.

"No, you just fucked Mum instead. That's next level, Dad." Amongst the laughter, his eyes shot to Tyler. "Don't know why you're laughing, you did the same."

Tyler yelped again. "I got my job before I fucked Darren, you little prick."

"Okay, sure."

"Jesus Christ, why do I always get the blame for this? It was Darren who started it." He looked straight across the table at me. "Do you know what he fucking did?"

"Tyler-"

"He got me, the poor little newbie employee who'd only been there a month, alone in his office under the disguise of fixing his PC. And started making moves on me. Sexual harassment in the work place, that's what it was."

Darren bounced with a chuckle and rubbed his brow. "And you weren't up for it at all, were you?"

Zack gestured at Amelia with his fork. "She mostly did the same to me."

"What? You flirted with me first."

"Yes, but what you did is as Wes calls, 'next level'."

"I didn't fuck you in my office! Good God!" She sought my gaze. "Don't listen to a word he says, I'm not a slut."

"I did nothing of the sort either," Darren hurriedly added.

Tyler chuckled. "Yeah, apparently these rich white people had a thing for the little brown boys whose lives were a mess."

David barked with laughter, throwing himself back in his chair. "Holy shit, still not letting this 'brown' thing go?"

"Kid, I'm gonna keep saying it until people stop reacting like I said the word 'nig-"

"Oh my fucking God-"

"Tyler, please-"

"Fucking hell-"

The table took a good minute to recover from that. Everyone set each other off again any time they made eye contact. Tyler just sat there grinning, head turning side to side to look between them, then shrugged at me as if these people had the issues, not him.

Poor little Hanna. I think, half the time, things went over her head. Just as well.

The conversation finally got back on track as Tyler waved a hand at Wesley. "Kid, let's see your license. How bad is your picture?"

"It's not bad," Wesley said, dropping his wallet on the table so Tyler could look through it. He leant across his plate and tried to pull his cutest face at Amelia the far end of the table. "All I need now is a car."

She tutted. "We'll get you on insurance for ours, but you buy your own car, Wesley."

"I'm only working weekends."

"Good, that means you'll be here to look after Hanna when her holidays start."

"I don't need to be looked after," Hanna protested.

"Can you cook? No?"

"I can make pot noodles."

"You're gonna be surviving off those once you go to uni," David said. "You don't need to start now."

Wesley chuckled and looked back at Tyler. "Are you sorting the pool for summer?"

Tyler sat back in his chair and grunted as though he'd just been asked to exert an unfathomable amount of effort.

"Fuck the pool," David said. "What about the race track?"

Darren grinned. "Maybe."

David's gaze shot around to me. "You want to see what happens when my uncles get their sports cars on a race track?"

I glanced between them, then back at David. "Yes?"

"Do it, Darren."

He chuckled and shrugged. "We'll see."

Apparently, 'we'll see' meant, 'yes I would like to show off', because it was organised for the next weekend. Wesley didn't have a shift that Saturday. He wasn't fussed about the race track, though - he said that last time he 'threw up all over the dashboard of Darren's car'. No, he mostly cared about the pool.

I didn't even own any swimwear, but David took me to buy a bikini. A girl who worked at the shop went to school with him, and recognised him. David immediately tried to get away but she wouldn't stop talking, asking him about university, about Wesley, then about me. That frustrating 'she's-right-here-so-I-could-talk-to-her-myself-but-I'll-just-keep-asking-you'.

"Fuck sake," David said, once we were finally walking out. "Why didn't these girls show any interest in me when I didn't have a girlfriend?"

I grinned and locked my fingers with his. "That's just how it goes, isn't it? Also, you're hot." I'd finally gotten him in one of those tank tops, and his face and shoulders had been catching the sun, bronzing his skin even further.

He tossed me an unimpressed look. Why did I have the only boyfriend in the world who reacted as though I'd insulted him when I called him attractive?

"Some guys in physics only started paying attention to me once I was with you," I continued. "Or maybe they were just trying to figure out what the hell you saw in me."

"Shut up. You're fucking beautiful."

"But Chanice is queen bee in physics, isn't she?"

"Yeah, so? You're way prettier than her."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. The guys in physics are fucking desperate."

I cracked up. He was so loyal, so cute.

We waited on Saturday for Tyler to pick us up sometime in the afternoon. "You know I basically can't swim?" I said to David.

"You think anyone's actually going to be swimming?"

I had an irrational hatred of pools, which I blamed on mandatory school swimming lessons, so that didn't sound much better to me.

Tyler pulled up to the house but didn't bother down the driveway, letting us know he was there with his typical engine revving.

"Shotgun," Wesley called as we walked out.

"No," Tyler said. "Lady sits in the front. Get in the back."

"Oh my God. Tyler, there's no room."

"Don't start."

"I will break my knees. Tyler please."

"Get in the back you little shit."

I clambered into the comfortable passenger seat, tossing a cheeky smile over my shoulder at Wesley's misfortune. The backseat of that sports car really didn't look designed to fit anyone over six foot.

The amount of banter squeezed into a short drive was incredible. I guess Wesley started it with his whining. Tyler ripped into him instantly. In a mockingly spiteful response, Wes made a comment on how the model of the car was 'some years old by now', which led to David starting on Tyler.

"And how old are you now?"

"Thirty-nine."

"Yeah, but you're not. You're fucking forty, Tyler."

"Shut up, kid."

"You're old, Tyler."

"Kid."

"I like how you call him 'kid'," I chipped in, "when his voice is twice as deep as yours."

Tyler let out a little yelp of laughter as if to prove my point. "Girl, you should've heard him years ago. He had the cutest, squeakiest voice you ever heard."

"'Uncle Tyler!'" Wesley tried to imitate, as shrill as he could go, and David guffawed.

"Jesus Christ," Tyler chuckled. "Nailed it. When kid's balls dropped they didn't just drop, they crashed through the floor. He went from that, to this, in about the space of a week."

"It was pretty amazing," Wesley agreed.

I saw David's grin in the rearview mirror. "It used to annoy me that you wouldn't stop calling me 'kid', Tyler. Then I realised it was only because you didn't want to accept that I'd grown up, 'cause that makes you old."

"I'm not old."

"I think I can see your first greys, in your beard."

"Fuck off, kid."

David only had a couple of subjects that could work in winding Tyler up, and he was putting them to good use. When Tyler had quipped his way out of the harassment over his age, his sexuality was under fire next.

"... Yeah, but kid, the thing is, I'm not gay."

"But you are."

"But I'm not."

David leant forward, against the back of my seat. "You married a man. That's pretty fucking gay, Tyler."

"I'm not gay."

"Why do you always argue against it?"

"The same way that if I'd married a woman I'd be arguing if you called me straight."

"Tyler. You're gay."

We braked into a long line of cars waiting at some traffic lights.

"I'm not gay."

"You're so gay."

"Fuck your shit, kid."

"Fudge packer."

Tyler reached back, grabbed a handful of David's hair, and smacked his head against the back of my seat. He let out an ear-splitting guffaw.

"Oi!" Wesley barked. "We don't need a kitchen incident in the car."

I grinned, looking over the seat as if I needed to check David wasn't hurt. "What's a 'kitchen incident'?"

Tyler pulled up the handbrake. "Kid tried to break my nose a few years back."

"I'm not even surprised."

"Yeah," David said. "And then Tyler clobbered me twenty times in the head and gave me a concussion."

"You deserved it," he quipped.

"So did you."

Wesley's exaggerated sigh rang out. "So much hate."

"I'm sorry. I love you, Tyler."

"I love you too, kid." Then he flashed me a grin. "I don't know why you're shagging this prick."

"He's a good shag," I replied.

"Wow. And you gag him to shut him up?"

"I sit on his face."

You knew Tyler thought something was funny when he fucking squeaked. I don't know why he laughed so much, as if I'd caught him off guard - he'd walked right into that one. He was gasping for breath and could barely drive, and David and Wes were straight in on it, not giving him any respite.

"Yeah, you laugh, but she's telling the truth, she shuts me up good."

Wesley hooked an arm over the back of Tyler's seat, patting his shoulder. "It's just too much for you, isn't it? Little Dave ain't a virgin anymore."

"It's like I said. He won't accept I've grown up because that means he's old."

"Jesus Christ," Tyler chuckled, wiping at one of his eyes.

"Tyler," Wes said, gesturing at me with a thumb. "I'm fucking warning you. She's got a mouth on her. She tricks you, 'cause she's quiet. You think she's shy, right? She's fucking not. She'll rip you apart if you try it on. Mate, stop laughing, I'm not even joking."

He shook his head and managed a much-needed inhale. "Kid, put a ring on it."

David scoffed. "Yeah, all right. Don't scare her off."

Tyler's giggle fit was perpetual, even swearing at himself with a squeaky 'for fuck sake' when he just couldn't stop. We pulled up to a driveway, blocked by metal gates. He finally gathered his composure, winding down his window and leaning out to enter a code on a number pad. "I missed you, kids."

"Yeah?" Wes asked. "Glad we're home for summer?"

"Yes."

"Well it ain't a holiday without a sleepover round the uncles', is it?"

I stopped paying attention to the interior of the car, studying the enormous house we approached through the open gates. The tyres crunched on gravel as Tyler steered past what wasn't a front garden, more like grounds. Oh God, it stretched everywhere. Fucking rich people.

The car stopped and we waited for a door of some oversized garage extension to roll up. Tyler swore at it in impatience, making the car edge forward an inch at a time with more engine revving. I took a glance around once we were rolling inside, then my gaze snapped to Tyler's face.

"Why the fuck have you got like six sports cars?"

David and Wesley burst into laughter, but Tyler held up a dismissive hand like he'd just been accused of a crime.

"It's not me. Everyone always fucking thinks it's me, but it's not. It's Darren."

"But why?"

"Because he's allergic to money. As soon as he has it, he has to do something with it."

"So he collects cars?"

"What he buys is a fucked up mess destined for a scrap heap, and hands it over to a mechanic we know."

"Right."

"He hardly even drives them, because he thinks it makes him look like he has a mid-life crisis. So he uses that Jaguar instead. Because, you know, a fifty-K Jag isn't a flash car."

"Mid-life crisis," David repeated. "So what the fuck happened to you?"

"Quarter-life crisis," Tyler replied.

Darren wasn't home for whatever reason. I half expected to be greeted by butlers and servants when we went inside the house. Its interior was spacious, almost tranquil, shattered by the voices and bodies bundling through. I followed, as much as I wanted to break away to snoop around.

Tyler gave me a brief explanation of the pool. "This end, eight foot. That end, five foot. Don't go fucking bombing in the shallow end."

I had no intentions of doing anything of the sort.

With the house being up a slight hill, the view from the patio showed stretches of fields and trees from the surrounding countryside. I pulled my phone out and took a picture, catching the pool, the view, and half of David's back, stripped down to his swimming trunks. I sent it to my mum, just in case she needed proof of how well I was getting along.

She mustn't have been busy, because her response came unusually fast. "#richpeople," it said, with a thumbs up.

I was grinning to myself when David started to harass and grope me, trying to undress me to the bikini beneath.

Distant gravel crunched to accomodate more tyres, followed by the faint sound of a slammed car door. Not more than a minute later Darren appeared through the house, dumping two crates of drinks on the table beneath the parasol. When David approached he gave him a bemused scowl. David looked down at himself, equally confused.

"What?"

"Are you fucking surprised, Darren?" Tyler asked. "He's Zack's kid. He gets a sixpack because he sits up to get out of bed every morning."

David went sheepish. "I've been working out."

"It shows. Fucking hell."

"Look how fuckin' hairy he's getting," Wesley said.

"Yeah," Tyler agreed. "He's getting there."

Instead of being embarrassed further, David seemed to take that as an outright attack. "What? I don't have a hairy chest?"

"It's a chest with hair on it. It's not what I'd call a hairy chest."

Wesley was in the midst of lifting himself out the edge of the pool, and blurted with laughter. "Tyler's masculine beauty standards again. Fuck me."

"What?" Now Tyler looked attacked. "I'm just saying. Your dad was hairier than you at your age."

"Fuck off, Tyler."

Darren clasped his brow. "Gentlemen, please."

"They've been like this since the moment we got in the car," I said.

He chuckled and gave me a grin. "I'm so sorry."

"All right, because miss innocent never joins in." Tyler leant an arm on Darren's shoulder. "Are you getting in for once?"

Darren gave the pool a disdainful look, as though it were something his highness could never possibly want to touch. Tyler responded by giving him a boisterous shove, then shrieked with incredulous laughter, as though he expected Darren to shove back, or stand his ground, or only stagger a step, anything other than lose his balance and faceplant the water.

He surfaced with splashing and gasping, then a deep bellow. "Pillock!"

Tyler dove in after him. To rescue him? No, to bully him. He dragged Darren underwater, distorted colours wrestling beneath the choppy surface. Darren broke through with more gasping. Tyler stalked him like a shark, dragging him under twice more before he finally made it to the edge of the pool, clinging on for dear life in a coughing, swearing, and chuckling mess.

When they'd recovered from their own laughing fits, David and Wesley leapt into the pool and launched a similar attack on Tyler. Darren pulled himself out, collapsing on his back in the bedraggled state of his clothes and shoes. So much for dignity. Luckily, he'd had nothing important in his pockets.

That was pretty much how the afternoon went. After Tyler enacted his drowning attempts on me three times too many, fought by all the kicking and screaming and splashing I could muster, I fled from the pool to join Darren - showered and in dry clothes - beneath the shade of the parasol. I told him all about my nightmare experiences with swimming lessons at school. He chuckled through it.

"Once I was a bit older, swimming days always miraculously landed during my period," I said.

"Well, I never got that excuse."

"Sucked to be you."

He chuckled again. "It was traumatizing. I don't think there was any effort to teach anything, they threw us in the deep end and told us to swim to the shallows if we wanted to survive. And if you tried to get out at the sides before you made it, they shoved you back in with the end of a broom." His stories were always aided by generous arm movements and hand gestures, to ensure you really pictured it.

Whatever was going on in the water, Tyler was being ganged up on and losing. There were splashes, yelling, and barks of laughter galore.

"So you had one of those nightmare private schools?" I asked.

"Strict Catholic," Darren replied.

"Ouch. All boys?"

"Yes." He gave me a humorous, but sharp look. "Before you ask, no."

"Hey I-"

"What actually happens at all-male schools, is that everyone is quite aware of the stigma, and makes an extra effort to prove how straight they are."

I held my hands up. "You keep accusing me of all these things before I open my mouth."

"It's a very common question."

"I know I'm a commoner, but come on."

That got another chuckle out of him. "Yes, is that what you are? A peasant?"

"I honestly have no idea what I'm doing here, with all these flashy cars and big houses."

He smiled and sipped his drink. "Money means nothing."

As much as I was starting to like Darren, hearing a rich person say that was incredibly annoying.

Once everyone was showered and dried off, it was dinner time. Tyler cooked, or rather, tried to cook while being harassed and bullied by Darren. Payback for the pool, I guess. He was tugged and shoved all over the kitchen, yelping with laughter, and Wesley did his sigh.

"Want to save your domestics for when we aren't here?"

Because Tyler looked so abused, repeatedly hugged and kissed.

Just like at home, David had to make himself useful, helping with cutting vegetables, then laying the table. Wesley and I sat on the island counter doing fuck all.

Evening time was movie time. Wesley searched through the DVDs, very specific in his tastes. "Let's watch an old one, from your time."

Tyler scoffed. "From 'my time'? How fucking old do you think I am?"

"Transformers, yes. Which is the one where Optimus rides the T-Rex?"

"You want to watch braindead explosions, okay kid."

"Man, you've been in those labs long enough. Where are our Transformers, Tyler?"

"Do you know how many rules and regulations there are surrounding AI already?"

"Yeah, so?"

"Do you know what an absolute fit the planet would have if we turned out something even close to a Transformer?"

"Mate, I believe in you. You'll get there one day. If you don't, the bad guys will."

Tyler sat back on the sofa with a little grin, stopping himself from bothering to continue the conversation. Apparently, making light of his work was the third thing that succeeded in winding him up.

"Tyler," Wes continued, waving a DVD in the air. "There's Chevy's everywhere in this. You love this shit."

"Okay, kid."

Everyone talked all through the movies anyways.

And kept talking afterwards. The banter and testosterone finally died down, and things took on a much calmer, perhaps 'normal' feel. The conversations weren't all entirely interesting. They covered typical life stuff, some discussions about the differences between what university was like for us, and how it had been for Tyler and Zack years ago. Darren's education record was bland - no college, no university. He came from a family that had always run business, so him inheriting and finding himself in his position was no surprise. "Monkey see, monkey do," was his explanation.

Mentions of Darren's family were noticeably brief before things moved on. He preferred to talk about Amelia as if she were actually a blood sister, about how their families had been friends, about how they'd literally known each other since babies. He seemed to know more about her parents than his own. I wanted to probe with questions, but saw no way I could do it without being outright rude.