Best Gay Romance 2012, page 4
I caked on makeup to cover the bags under my eyes and tried not to cry during the love songs. The Sunday evening performance was a significant improvement. Bambi stopped me in the hall after curtain, grabbed my arms and said, “Better. Now go home, sleep until Tuesday afternoon, and come back in here reborn. You got it, Ashe?” I nodded and slinked away.
Bayani was waiting for me in the hallway in his street clothes.
“There’s a package back there for you.” He jerked his head in the direction of my dressing room.
“My walking papers?” I asked.
“I’m thinking, no,” he said.
There was a rectangular package wrapped in royal purple with an extravagant blue ribbon. There was a card tucked under the bow. I pulled out the envelope with trembling fingers and read the note.
Best show all week. If the shoe doesn’t fit, the shop’s open ’til midnight—Fletcher.
I pulled the top off the box, revealing a pair of the blue running shoes Fletcher had not bought at the shoe store on the day we met.
I arrived at the store at ten minutes to midnight. The place was packed with tourists scooping up last-minute deals to take home to Scranton or Cleveland or Baltimore.
I had the box tucked under one arm and I was looking for Fletcher. Courtnei approached me and said, “Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’d like to return these,” I said.
“Oh, it’s you. Where’s your protest sign?”
“I retired the sign.”
“Change of heart?”
“You could say that.”
“Did you steal these?”
“No.”
“Do you have the receipt?”
“I’ve got it,” a voice said from behind me.
I turned around. Fletcher was wearing jeans and a tight white T-shirt. In the very center of his chest, nestled in the gentle slope between his pecs, was a cartoon frog wearing a jeweled crown.
I handed the box to Courtnei without looking at her. Fletcher handed her the receipt, took me in his arms and kissed me.
We came up for air when Courtnei nudged Fletcher with a clipboard. He scrawled his signature on the return slip and handed her his American Express Black card.
“Should I expect drama every time I uncover an inconsistency in your character?” he asked.
“Probably,” I said. “Does that scare you?”
“I guess not. How many can there possibly be?”
“There are a lot of them, I’m afraid.”
“So it could take years to work through them all.”
“Decades, maybe.”
“It sounds exhausting.”
“Oh, I’ll definitely exhaust you.”
“I don’t doubt that for a minute.” He said. “And the drama?”
“I am an actor,” I said. “A master thespian, you might say.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Not this week anyway,” he said, laughing.
I dug my knuckles into his rib cage.
“You came to the show?”
“Seven times.”
“You missed one?”
“It was a matinee.”
“Still…”
“I have a life,” he said.
“Got any pointers for me?” I asked.
“Yeah, try reining it in a little when you do that thing you do with your left hand. You know, the thing with the flick and the bow and the kiss.” He demonstrated, exaggerating my flourish, making it look outrageously effeminate. “I mean, you’re kissing Cinderella, not Lady Gaga.”
“I worked hard on that move,” I said, but I was laughing.
“Right.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“Kinda gay.”
“Ya think?” I slid my hand across his chest, tweaking his right nipple through the tight cotton.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Way gay.”
“Any other notes?” I asked.
“Don’t run away from me.” He put his hands on my arms, suddenly serious.
“Never again.”
“Never again,” he said. “Because I’ll just follow you.”
“There’s no escaping a happy ending,” I said.
The overhead lights flashed and the manager made an announcement that the store would be closing in three minutes.
Fletcher wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me close, kissing me hard on the mouth, recreating in exact detail the final kiss from the show.
“And curtain,” he whispered, his lips warm against my cheek.
TO BRANDON WITH LOVE, JUSTIN
Ron Radle
Me and Justin Thulon grew up together in a little town called Bolt, Texas, about thirty miles outside Arlington. Little ol’ place. I mean, there couldn’t been more than five hundred or so people lived there (and it ain’t done nothing but shrink ever since then). Me and Justin were next-door neighbors, so it was natural we took up with each other. Beginning at nine years old we were buddies and did everything together. Went fishing. Rode four wheelers. Played little league football and baseball, too. But we liked fishing the best. It was a way to get away from other folks and be to ourselves and talk about things or just not say anything at all and enjoy that.
But it didn’t last for long. Well, not long enough. When I was twelve my daddy announced we were moving to South Carolina because he was taking a new job. He had family there too. In fact that’s where his mama and daddy were living at the time, so we would be moving close to them. Daddy said he had found a job there on purpose because he wanted to get back close with his mama and daddy. They were getting older and were not in the best of health, and they needed him. Well, I didn’t have anything against that. But I sure didn’t want to leave Bolt, because leaving Bolt meant leaving Justin Thulon, and I couldn’t stand the thought of that. I even asked Daddy if there wasn’t any way I could stay in Bolt and live with Justin and his mama and daddy, but Daddy shook his head firm in response. No way. I had to go to South Carolina with them. So I went.
But I didn’t like it. I cried and cried all the way out there—I was a twelve-year-old boy just sniveling and going on so much my mama turned around and threatened to whup the tar out of me right there in the car. But all I could think of was Justin and our good times together. Man, you should have seen how far me and him could jump them gullies on the four-wheelers, and us little fellows and all! We’d fly like birds and just scare the yellow tee-tee right out of our poor mamas. There was the fishing. The sports. The jokes we played on girls with rubber snakes and plastic lizards. The way at night we’d lie under the great big Texas sky and make patterns out of the stars with our fingers. We’d decided we were brothers in a way, not blood brothers, but brothers of the heart and spirit, although I am not sure that’s the way we worded it back then. But it was the way we meant it. And we vowed always to be buddies and brothers, and then, durned if my daddy didn’t go and get that job in South Carolina and make me be the one to break our promise.
Well, the years passed in South Carolina. I got used to things. Me and Justin talked on the phone and sent emails and text messages and such, and then all of a sudden communication quit between us. I got involved in high school football and baseball; I dated girls; just the usual stuff in teen years. And I reckon Justin did the same. And when you get busy it’s awfully easy to lose touch with people, even your best friend and brother of the heart and soul. That’s what happened, and pretty soon I turned eighteen and was out of high school and in college. I attended a small community college in town but had plans to go to the big school in Columbia eventually.
So everything was settled or seemed to be. Then something happened to turn it all upside down.
One day in spring I was leaving my statistics class, headed for my car, when who do you reckon comes roaring into the school parking lot on his big Harley-Davidson but Justin Thulon? That’s right. He came in with a roar, doing wheelies and turning that hog round and round so everyone would see him. That was his style. Show-offy. Grand. Big. Just like you’d expect of somebody from Texas. He landed that monster right at my feet and through his black Ray-Bans, said to me, “What’s happenin’, partner?”
“What’s happenin’ with you, you crazy sumbitch?” I asked him and just laughed, ’cause he was there, in South Carolina, and ’cause of the way he had made his entrance. Just classic Justin.
“I’ll have you know, buster boy,” he answered me, “that I am now a resident of the state of South Carolina. Yes, sir. I done knocked off the Texas dust from my heels, and I am now a Carolinian!”
Well, that just all seemed too crazy to me. I needed an explanation. He told me to get on back of him, and I did, and he roared us out of that parking lot and cut up and down main streets and side streets until we came to an apartment complex just a little ways out from downtown, a brick place with two stories and cement columns and cement steps. He cut off the engine of his hog and held out his arm in a dramatic way. “That’s my residence now, Brandon Bobo. That’s my abode. My castle.”
“What the hell, Justin? And how?”
He led me up the steps to his apartment and into the place, which had some unopened boxes on the floor and such. He was still unpacking. He closed the door and held out his arms again, this time to receive me in them. I went to him. We hugged big and long. I stepped back. In all the crazy confusion of his arrival, I hadn’t noticed the physical change in Justin. I mean he was buff! My eyeballs just bulged out at how muscular he had gotten. When we were growing up and all, Justin had always been skinny and had stayed that way up to the time I left Texas. Now he had big shoulders and a wide chest and guns with healthy looking veins. This was all apparent through his blue T-shirt and the black leather vest over it. He had grown him a little goatee too to go along with his moustache, and he kept his light brown hair cut short, almost military style but not quite a buzz cut. All in all, he was pretty impressive.
“You’ve turned into Superman, ain’t you? Where’d you get all them muscles, boy? You just rentin’ them or what?”
He laughed. “Rent to own. They’re mine. Hit the gym when I turned fifteen. Been at it ever since. This is the result.” He made a muscle with one arm so the bicep stood up, hard and meaty.
“You a stud now!” I told him, and that made him laugh again.
“Damn right!”
We cleared space off the couch. His folks had come with him from Bolt with a U-Haul to help him move. He said he just decided he wanted to be back close to me, that he missed me, that he was tired of Texas, and he was old enough to decide if he wanted to make the move. His mama and daddy weren’t thrilled about him wanting to move so far away, but what could they say? He was eighteen. A legal adult. He didn’t have a job yet, but he was scouring the want ads. Did I know of anything? I told him I had a work-study job at the school helping out in one of the administrative offices. He wanted to know if I could get him one. I laughed and told him he had to be enrolled in school first before he could apply. That made him frown, which made me laugh again. Justin was no fan of higher education. He was lucky, he said, to have gotten a high school diploma.
Our talk went on like that for a while. I asked him if he had left a girlfriend behind in Bolt, and he said no, he hadn’t been seeing anybody steady. “Just playin’ the field.” I told him it was the same for me, that I had other things on my mind right then, and other goals. We wound up back at the college to get my car, and then we went over to this Mexican restaurant in town for supper. It was nothing like the TexMex you could get in Arlington, but it wasn’t bad. I had the enchiladas rancheros, and Justin had a plate of steak fajitas. When we got done with supper we stopped by the house, so Mama and Daddy could see Justin, and they were just as shocked and happy as I was that he had moved to South Carolina. It was late by the time all the talk was through, and Justin was heading out the door for his apartment when he stopped me at the door and whispered, “Why don’t you move out of here and in with me? There’s room. And you’re old enough to be on your own, don’t you think?”
It was a thought, one I turned over and over in my head in bed that night and one that kept me from getting a good night’s sleep. But that wasn’t the only thing. I couldn’t get over how good Justin looked, just popping out with muscles and everything. Another thought occurred to me right out of nowhere, one I hadn’t been looking for that surprised me: I would have loved to have seen the shape of Justin’s muscles outside of his clothes. Naked. Head to foot. Wow, that idea just knocked the breath out of me. Where had it come from? I tried to shoo it away and go to sleep, but I couldn’t. In fact, the desire got more and more dirty. I could see Justin not only naked but touching himself. Yeah. One hand was squeezing one of his nipples, pinching the tip, and the other had hold of his dick, and he was giving it a good, hard jerking too, making his whole body shake and his face bunch up in concentration, just like the dudes do in the porno flicks. And pretty soon he was emptying his load into the air, just spurting white juice all over the place. Again I tried to get the image out of my head. And I found myself just soaking wet, man—I mean, just hot from head to foot, and drenched. Had the fantasy of my buddy pulling his pud got me into such a state? That worried me.
I got out of bed and went to the window and stared out at the dark. Didn’t think of anything. Didn’t want to. But my hands thought for me. They unbuttoned my pajama top, whipped it away from my arms and let it drop to the ground. Then they went for the bottoms. Pulled ’em away from my hips, pushed them down my legs, until I was at the window stark naked, or almost. Then it occurred to me how close Justin was: just a few miles away, not hundreds or even a thousand. He was right across town in his new apartment, probably as naked as me. My hands found my dick hard and standing straight up, touching the windowsill. I moved some till the head ran into the window itself, and I began to rub it back and forth. I was tracing Justin’s name into the windowpane. I grabbed hold of my dick, and a wave of tingly heat shimmered over my skin. I closed my eyes and thought of me and Justin together like this, naked, coming close, each taking the other into his arms, embracing, running our hands over each other’s bare skin, arms, chest, bare butt. The image got me so excited I jerked my dick the way I’d pictured Justin jerking his, going at it real hard, playing with my tits the way he had in my fantasy, moaning, until I couldn’t take it anymore, and the white stuff just hopped out of me and hit the windowpane, one, two, three shots of it, big globs running down the glass. When the good feeling had passed and I was calm again, I took my dick and smeared it in the goo, again trying to write Justin’s name.
Mama and Daddy weren’t crazy about the idea of me moving in with Justin. I didn’t think they would be. They loved Justin and all, but they knew he wasn’t the most responsible human being in the world. Too fun-loving. They worried he might not get a job and would stick me with the bills while he just played around. I told them I thought he had changed, even though I didn’t have one bit of proof of such a thing. It was just that I wanted to live with Justin, to be as close to him as possible, and I didn’t really need their permission. I was over eighteen. Still, I wanted them to approve. I told them that I’d look out for myself. I wouldn’t let Justin or anybody else hoodoo me.
But after I settled in with Justin, I wondered if they didn’t have a point, because Justin sure didn’t seem in any kind of hurry to get a job. Oh, he didn’t bum money off me or anything. He seemed to have his own cash. I’m not sure where he got it, but he paid his share of the rent and the utilities. I was just worried that money, wherever it came from, might run out in a hurry. The bulk of it he spent in socializing. He wasn’t twenty-one yet, but that didn’t stop him from going out to some of the local clubs, the ones in town and a little bit out of town. He couldn’t drink, but he could go in and shoot the bull with total strangers. A lot of bull. Justin was a master of bull-slinging, and sometimes he went too far and got other folks mad. He had opinions about everything, whether he knew anything about it or not, and he liked to show off and talk real big. I guess he figured that was a trait of being from Texas. He was always like that, even when we were young boys, and he was all the time getting into fights. Most times I didn’t accompany him because I had homework. But on the weekend a couple of times I went with him, and I saw him in action, just a-bragging or putting some other fellow down, and he got this close to getting into a big-time fight with some big-time boys. I warned him about it, but he shrugged me off, said it was all just for fun, and he could handle some drunks if he needed to.
But what really got on my nerves was when Justin stayed home. Then he would lounge around in nothing but his underwear, and it was awful hard for me to keep from staring at him. He was awesome, just this solid block of smooth tanned muscle! He would sit in the den watching TV, his legs spread, and sometimes, almost like he wasn’t thinking about it, he’d reach down and dig into his crotch. I don’t know if he did it on purpose or to get my attention, but it was awfully distracting. We lived in a small apartment with only one bedroom. Justin slept on the couch, all the time promising he’d get a rollaway bed. There’d be times I would stay up late doing homework at the little kitchen table, and I’d glance at him on the couch in the dark, sleeping in nothing but those BVDs, and I swear on a couple of occasions I’d see him playing with himself. His eyes looked to be closed, but there was no mistaking that motion! I’d eventually have to get up and go in the bedroom to study.
Other than those two things, it was good living with Justin. It was almost like we were a…I don’t know…a married couple or something. All we needed was each other. Nobody else crowded in on the picture. We’d talk about girls and things, sure, but we never went out with any, and we didn’t seem to feel the lack. We were okay as long as we had each other.
