“Lighten up boy!” Badger chuffed
“Give it a few weeks and I’m sure you’ll be begging for a sniff under one these babies!” the burly mechanic said as he placed a finger against the bottom of his right arm, then slowly brought it down until it was nestled in a thick bush of sweaty armpit hair.
Sitting across the scraggly wood table from Badger, Dusty just sulked. It was cute, Badger thought, how the hunching of Dusty’s chest caused his moobs to press out into his grease-stained t-shirt. Still, Bubba had promised Badger that Dusty would be his new bottom, and Badger didn’t quite feel right with Dusty so down.
The background hum of a football announcer and small talk was interrupted by a loud “Woowee!” from across the bar. Both men turned their heads to see Bubba and Sam sitting at a table against the opposite wall, both raising a beer while they hollered loudly at the new “couple.”
But Badger knew they weren’t a couple – not yet. Badger had tried over and over again to take Dusty out, but he always had some excuse. First it was that he was drained from disposing of trespassers – which was a good excuse given what Badger had heard about how the books drained their user’s energy. After all, they’d had a lot of trespassers in those first few weeks and dealing with them was Dusty’s job, so Badger didn’t want to intrude.
That hadn’t lasted very long though. The police had seemed to lose interest in the shop extremely suddenly, but Dusty always found some reason why he had to go straight home after work. It was only after Badger had, well, badgered Bubba about the situation that Bubba had suggested they all go out for drinks tonight – something that Dusty had no choice but to begrudgingly accept.
To seal the deal, Bubba had cast a little spell on Dusty the old-fashioned way. Somehow he’d managed to evade their scent-based transformations, but the spell should work fine. Dusty had grown younger, barely 21. It was a reality-shift that he hadn’t even noticed, but Bubba said young cubs were very impressionable and all Bubba had to do was be himself. Unfortunately, they underestimated how moody Dusty was at that age.
And now here they were, sitting across the table from another while Badger beamed and Dusty moped.
“Here we go!” Badger exclaimed as a waitress set two freshly opened bottles down on the table, “maybe you’ll cheer up once you get some alcohol in you!”
That’s when Badger noticed a peculiar glint flash through Dusty’s eyes. It was the look of someone who wanted to tell a secret but wasn’t quite sure if the person they were talking to could be trusted.
“Well come on,” Badger said with a smile, “I can see it in your eyes boy, what are you hiding? Tell daddy Badger whatever’s on your mind. I won’t judge.”
“Hmmm,” Dusty grunted as his eyes shifted around the room, “it usually takes a bit more than alcohol to cheer me up, you know?”
“Oh?” Badger replied inquisitively.
“Ya,” Dusty said as he reached into his pocket, stealthily pulling out a small plastic bag filled with blue pills, “I normally take one of these.”
Badger could see Dusty carefully nursing the bag against his chubby gut, holding it just out of sight of the rest of the bar as he took a single pill in his hand and dropped it into his beer, producing an visible spritz of bubbles inside of the bottle, before completely dissolving in the liquid within.
Dusty smiled as he raised the beer to his lips, leaned his head back, and chugged the entire thing in a single go.
“Woowee!” came another shout from across the bar, “you show em how its done Dusty!”
Badger looked over and saw Bubba and Sam drunkenly cheering at the two, either they hadn’t seen Dusty just drug himself, or they didn’t care.
“That ex?” Badger asked.
“Something like that. You want one?” Dusty asked as he palmed the bag, reached over the table, and slyly dropped it in Badger’s lap.
“Feel free to take one, might help me to get in the mood if we were both a bit high, you know?” Dusty said.
Badger picked up the bag and looked down at the blue pills inside. They didn’t have any markings on them, so they weren’t something that Dusty had gotten at a pharmacy. And while that didn’t tell him much about what was in them, Badger had carefully watched as Dusty had taken a pill at random out of the bag and chugged it with his beer. Which meant that this probably was a party drug, rather than an attempt to roofie him so that Dusty could run out on the big night that Badger had planned for them.
Badger slipped a pill between his fingers and briefly rubbed them along it while he pondered what to do. Fuck it, he thought, might as well have some fun.
Mimicking Dusty’s earlier subterfuge, Badger slipped the pill into his beer while two increasingly drunk mechanics howled at him from the across the room. The pill disappeared into a effervescent flood of bubbles as Badger lifted it to his mouth, parted his lips, and let the cool beer flow into his mouth.