Capt vs Goofball - 17. Chapter 17

Seventeen

Monday morning at South Carleton High was less a day of classes and more a theatrical spectacle. The three boys responsible for spreading the photo—Mark, Alex, and Ben—were serving their zero-tolerance punishment, forced to pick up trash around the school grounds in bright orange community-service vests. The other students were taking great delight in the "Ex-Con" jokes, while Mrs. Albright, wearing a whistle on a lanyard, blew it every time the boys tried to speak or lean on their grabbers.

Kenny and Steve watched the miserable trio from a nearby concrete bench, but their attention was continually diverted by the overwhelming, unexpected social fallout.

The school’s reaction was the polar opposite of the persecution they had anticipated. Instead of shame or bullying, they were met with an almost dizzying amount of gushing. Girls sighed blissfully at them. Hockey players, veterans of the old toxic jock culture, now offered winks and flashed Kenny sincere thumbs-ups when they thought Steve couldn't see. Two Japanese exchange students had started circulating beautiful, highly detailed anime-style drawings of the "Kawaii Boy Love" couple, placing Kenny and Steve at the center of a very public, very bad rom-com drama.

"It’s like being in a spotlight," Kenny murmured, sinking further onto the bench, his blush reaching his ears. "It’s so much worse than being teased."

"You're getting exactly what you deserve for being so barfingly cute with each other," Lydia commented from where she was leaning against the cafeteria wall, scrolling through a new feed of fan edits.

Kenny sighed, extending his neat, organized lunch box toward Steve. Inside, a slice of pound cake was nestled in a handkerchief, a special gift from his mom. The accompanying note was carefully taped to the top of the box: "Stevie with love – Mother Jensen."

Steve simultaneously extended a brown paper bag toward Kenny. It held a soggy, asymmetrical sandwich, wrapped haphazardly in wax paper, with a greasy note scrawled on the outside: "4 Kenny, don't eat it STEVE!"

The two exchanged their lunches, their relationship utterly commodified for other people’s amusement.

“KISS HIM! KISS HIM!” chanted a pair of junior high girls, sitting on the grass nearby, sighing and tittering with their knees tucked up to their chins.

Steve scowled at the chanters and was about to tell them to get lost, but they just laughed and ignored him. One of the girls was furiously writing in a notebook, occasionally showing the page to the other, who would then swoon blissfully—Kenny was certain it was slash fan fiction with a definite 'lemon' bend.

Kenny looked with quiet despair at the sandwich Steve’s mother had sent. He really hated peanut butter. He gingerly sniffed the bread in distaste, contemplating how far he could throw it when Steve's back was turned, hoping his disgust wasn't visible.

Steve, meanwhile, opened the lovely, napkin-wrapped piece of fruit cake. His woes instantly disappeared. The cake—moist, rich, and dense with jam and cream—was a slice of bakery perfection. His own mother never baked; she just used box mixes and prayed. This was heavenly, a true gift delivered by an angel. A tear actually welled in his eye.

Overwhelmed, Steve leaned over and kissed Kenny's cheek as a thank you.

Kenny blinked, prim and proper, surprised by the public display. "Steve, not at school," he reminded his boyfriend, his voice a tight whisper. "And not in front of... them, please."

Steve ignored him, having achieved total inner peace through sugar. Lydia, for her part, tried her best not to laugh at the ‘bitches’ being overtly cute in her opinion. She’d break them of that, after her amusement at their discomfort dissipated a little.

"Did you do your math homework?" Kenny reminded, his voice slipping back into his familiar tone of dictatorial guidance.

"I'll get to it," Steve waved dismissively, already taking another bite. It was cake from the Gods, a slice of heaven… it took him to a new plain of existence… he was sure there was a Nirvana, now, and this cake was definitely there.

"Now, Steve!" Kenny tiredly insisted.

Steve grumbled, hauling out his chemistry book. "This really isn't fair, it's like being boyfriends with a dictator."

Kenny set the sandwich down and pulled out his thermos, pouring two small cups of tea. He set them neatly on the handkerchief he had laid out, adjusting them just so. "Stop complaining and get on with it. I don't need you getting detention as well—you'd look awful in an orange vest smelling like trash."

They watched the miserable "Ex-Cons" cleaning the yard. Steve nodded, agreeing that would suck balls.

"Have you seen Mister Wolochowski today?" Kenny asked, quietly.

"We have him this afternoon," Steve reminded him. "I hear he's in full tyrant mode. Extra homework for the first years this morning—he made the freshmen cower in fear when they tried to tell him he was sweet with your dad."

Kenny glanced at the junior high girls, who were now sketching a highly inappropriate picture of him as the uke (the submissive partner) being explicitly molested by a seme (the dominant partner) version of Steve, who had impossibly defined muscles.

"I wish I could make freshmen cower," Kenny mourned, wondering why he was always the uke in the pictures.

Steve looked at the artwork and smiled grimly. "We're far too... not him to be like that." He paused, studying the sketch closer. "Though that one looks like a really good idea..." He gestured with his pen toward a particularly intriguing sexual position.

Kenny looked at him, scandalized. "You are not doing that to me!" he insisted.

Steve, seeing the attention, the high quality of the fan art, and the commercial potential, suddenly began to smile—a large, entrepreneurial grin.

"What?" Kenny asked, blinking at the look he didn't quite understand, but somehow knew meant he was about to get into serious trouble.

***

Mister Wolochowski, for his part, was having a dismal day.

Students, students were idiots. He had already torn three separate, inappropriate, if supportive, cartoon drawings off the door to his classroom. One was a rather impressive pencil sketch of the photo Jason had shared—the younger version of them after their High School Hockey game. It truly captured young Jason's spark.

He grumbled about Jason’s impulsiveness at posting the photo. Jason thought he was being brave by posting the high school photo, but all he'd done was trade their manageable shadow for an unblinking, blinding spotlight. Trying to head off a full-blown scandal by dragging everything into the light. The problem was Jason didn’t understand students in 2025, they were… muppets. Give them something, anything, to distract them from the mind-numbing boredom of homework, hockey practice, and maths and they’d pounce all over it. Blake preferred they continued to think that any attention, mention, or reference to his love life was very much a taboo.

Though, he mused, he might get the original pencil sketch framed and put it on his wall at home. It really was quite good, and he liked the way Jason looked in it, like he had back…

Blake glowered; he hated the attention.

He gathered his things together, getting ready for his afternoon lecture on Twelfth Night. He wondered if there was a particularly vindictive lesson, he could craft out of the four-hundred-year-old play. He could make the students put on tights and perform it for an impromptu school assembly... but then Steve was in that class and would enjoy the codpieces entirely too much. And then there was Kenny and the ruffs... He sighed, dismissing the thought. The last thing he needed was for those two idiots to draw more attention to things.

Of course, there were adjustments. Jason was now camped out on his sofa at home while he sorted what was happening with his new divorce. As if things weren't complicated enough, now Blake had to put up with Jason's snoring on top of everything else. It was one thing listening to it when they were teenagers, sleeping curled up in the back of the Volvo, stealing a moment together. It was another entirely to have a fully grown lump of a man invade his space and be so... devastatingly handsome while he slept, shaking the rafters of Blake's house each time he drew a breath. He needed to have a word with Jason about sleep apnea and invest in industrial-strength earplugs. It was all so... domestic.

He groaned when he came up on Kyle, waiting outside the auditorium for him, neatly combed, holding a rather pathetic-looking bunch of gas station carnations, and looking hopeful.

"No, Kyle!" Blake intoned, ignoring the student's eager and hopeful look, as he marched past him and into the theatre, grumbling about students being idiots.

***

Lydia was tapping on her laptop in the back of home economics class, listening to the teacher explaining to future happy home makers the advantages of ETSY and home made wire jewelry.

Sighing to herself, she dismissed the teacher's lesson as yet another idiotic idea crushed by the school system trying to seem hip by peddling a fad dead by about a decade.

She was finalizing the Independent buy out with her lawyer, Mrs. Patel. A rather shrewd old woman up on Main Street who, along with her accountant husband, were gainfully employed by the Hickey Siblings to plug holes in their business empire.

Lydia loved Client-Attorney privilege; it meant she could wield the full weight of her business empire from behind anonymity and several layers of protection.

Of course, those two weren't cheap. She had chosen them because they were remarkably susceptible to the power of fiscal lubrication. Opportunists, Lydia understood, and could control. And those two were as greedy as they came.

Of course, she didn't trust them an inch, not with the money and not with the contracts. And Lydia had them both locked down with iron-tight NDAs, contracts, and enough blackmail to ensure they would never step out of line.

She knew she was going to make one hell of a CEO one day. The problem was, she knew it.

One of her classmates, a jock-turned domestic savant, Brian, was baking cookies over at one of the kitchen stations. He was wearing a tee-shirt with a giraffe flashing a thumbs up looking goofy. One of Kenny’s teammates, a goalie she thought. The guy was well on his way to becoming a legendary baker, and she was already figuring out a way to exploit that to her benefit, maybe she’d talk to Steve about him setting up an on-demand cookie delivery service. Steve was good that that side of things, the ideas.

For Lydia spending much of Sunday afternoon onboarding poor Kenny into supply chain and logistics management had been a godsend. His organizational OCD was a dream for her. It freed her from the mundane side of managing the day-to-day of the business and allowed her to focus on other areas.

Steve, for all his genius at generating capital, was woefully bad at the operational side of things. She went out of her way to keep him, his bad decisions, and his accident-prone, disastrous choices away from the business. She kept a tight rein on the money.

One of the benefits had been that she had bought the house her parents rented and immediately lowered the rent. The Hickeys’ rent had been frozen at pre-pandemic levels, and given the insane cost of living increase, this action was keeping her family afloat.

She was in the process of helping the Jensens with a similar scheme, not that she would ever tell Kenny. He was remarkably puritan, and some things, she reasoned, were best to keep him ignorant of.

Once she had secured the Independent Grocers, she planned to give Mister Jensen a nice raise, to be fair. He would probably have to be brought into the secret soon, like the other business owners.

Steve's one rule for their Empire was simple: Be fair.

She had grumbled that Capitalism didn't work that way. But Steve was always insistent on his one rule.

Take Mister Thompson and 'Steve's Steak House'... how no one had picked up on the fact that the Steve of 'Steve's Steak House' was her brother, she had no idea... but yes. Mister Thompson's steak house had been close to shut down when they had acquired it—a strategic purchase. But Mister Thompson's complicity in their grand scheme had come at a simple cost: no one lost their job. Ten people depending on the Steak House for their livelihoods had been spared the unemployment line, and as a result, their loyalty had been locked in.

Madam Chao's had worked much the same way. Of course, the 'Madam Chao' in question was Lydia's nom de guerre. Chao—Chaos... what, she'd been ten when she'd come up with it, sue her.

"Lydia, what do you think of this fabric?" The teacher asked in a particularly vapid fashion.

Lydia glanced up from her business empire, looking about her at the future housewives of Canada and at the particularly garish floral pattern.

"Ick," she said, rendering judgment before getting back to her real work. Some people had zero taste.

***

A few minutes later, Steve was standing hesitantly in the doorway to Mrs. Albright’s lemon-scented office.

"Come in, Steve," Mrs. Albright sighed, gesturing in weary resignation.

"What did I do?" Steve grinned at his favorite teacher.

Mrs. Albright just shook her head, tapping a finger on a document. "You set up a merch store on the school website, Steve."

"Oh, that," Steve dismissed with a casual wave. "Just commodifying and providing supply for demand. That’s good business."

"The merch is of you and another student in... err... compromising art form," she sighed, calling up one of the T-shirts that was a particular best-seller on her screen.

"Yaoi is popular," Steve smiled at her. "You want to see how much money I raised for the 'Feed the Steve' fund?"

"Take it down, Steve," Mrs. Albright instructed, rubbing her temples. "You can't use the school website for your personal... money-making endeavors."

"It's got a strategically placed CENSORED bar!" Steve pointed out, defensive of his artistic integrity.

"That's not the point, Steve."

"Fascist! Censoring art! Censoring OUR LOVE! Not to mention crushing entrepreneurial spirit, and... and... capitalism!"

"Steve!" she warned.

"Fine!" Steve complained, grumbling as he stood up to leave, muttering darkly about communism under his breath.