by John Inman
“I-I guess she did. I never asked.”
“Gee, and I thought I was a bitch.”
“You’re not a bitch,” he said. “You’re the nicest guy I’ve ever met.”
He stared at me while chewing on the inside of his cheek. His eyes were wide open, as if he was surprised he had just said what he said. The fact is, I was even more surprised than he was.
“Well, th-thanks,” I stuttered. “Uh, you’re nice too.”
It was an odd silence that settled over us then. We sipped our beers, both of us sort of concentrating on the dog because it was the only way to conveniently not gape at each other.
When Cory spoke again, his words were so soft I could barely hear them.
“I didn’t come to California to get away from Susan,” he said. “The truth is, we broke up months ago.”
“Oh. Then, why did you come?”
Cory’s ears were almost aflame, they were so red. “I came because I needed a change. I couldn’t do it in that little town in Missouri where Beth and I grew up.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “Just couldn’t.”
“You’ve lost me again, Cory. I don’t understand.”
He gazed down at his hands. “I know. I’m not sure I understand it either. Well, I do but….”
Since that first touch, all I could think about was touching him again. So I did. I reached over and tapped his arm with a fingertip. “Just what was it you thought you needed to change?”
He stared down at my finger resting on his arm where I had left it. He stared at it so long, I pulled it away, thinking I had overstepped my bounds again.
“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” he said softly. “I won’t bite.”
“I know. I just… I just don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
At long last his smile returned. It was a weak one, sort of self-deprecating, but at least it was a smile. “You don’t make me uncomfortable. I think….”
“You think what?”
He took a deep breath. “I think, Malcolm, that I’m more comfortable with you than I’ve ever been with anybody.”
I wasn’t sure how to take that. “W-well, good. I’m glad you feel comfortable around me. It can’t be easy being thrust among people like me when you’ve never been exposed before.”
“You mean because you’re gay? You make it sound like you’re a germ.”
I didn’t grin back. “You know what I mean. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the whole gay thing. You’ve never been around gay people before. Right?”
“Well, yeah. I guess that’s right. But it’s also one of the reasons I left Missouri. I… I had to live a different life.”
“What sort of different life?”
He finally succeeded in pulling the label off his beer bottle in one continuous, unbroken strip. He stared at it in surprise, as if amazed he’d managed it. Then he wadded it up and tossed it on the table.
“Just… different,” he said, looking more uncomfortable by the minute.
It appeared a chore for him to get those words out. I was about to ask for further clarification—this was really getting interesting—when Rosemary leaped to her feet suddenly as the front door screeched open and Beth came stomping in, fresh off her shift in that hellhole called Jack in the Box.
“Oh, good. A beer,” she said, stealing my Budweiser out of my hand. “Just what I need.”
Cory and I snatched a final glance at each other. The shine of his eyes was unreadable. Was he glad we were interrupted just when it seemed we were about to break fresh ground in our burgeoning friendship, or was he already sorry he had said as much as he had?
“I’ll get us all a beer,” he said.
I held up my hand. I needed to be alone. I needed to think things through. I needed to try to understand what the hell Cory and I had just been talking about. “Not me,” I said. “I have to get some sleep before tomorrow. You guys stay up if you want. I’ll see you in the morning. G’night.”
Beth simply waggled her fingers and said good night, not caring if I left or not. Cory, on the other hand, looked disappointed, which caused my heart to give a quiet thud.
“Good night, guys,” I said again and headed straight for the bedroom where I shut the door quietly behind me.
SOMETIME LATER I was awakened by a stirring in the bed beside me. I peeled my eyes open and stared at a gibbous moon hanging in the star-laden sky outside my window. I reached down my hand to pet Rosemary since I figured she was the one who had jarred the bed. Instead of feeling Rosemary’s soft coat, I felt warm skin. A fuzzy forearm. It was Cory. I knew it by the feel of him. Startled, I blinked myself fully awake.
“You all right?” I asked. “Did you want something?”
Cory’s voice was lazy, his words a little slurred. “I’m drunk.”
“That’s okay. Maybe you should go to bed.”
He didn’t respond. The darkness remained silent around me. I couldn’t see a thing except the rectangle of silver stars twinkling through the window.
“Cory?”
I sat up and reached out in the shadows. My hand brushed his bare shoulder. He had his shirt off. I wondered what else he was wearing. If anything.
I could feel a shudder go through his body when my fingers lingered over his skin. I almost gasped.
“You’re… you’re trembling,” I said.
“I know.”
I sucked in a deep breath to calm myself, then asked again. “Did you want something?” My hand was still on his shoulder. Somehow I couldn’t seem to pull it away.
I felt him tilt his head and lay his cheek over the back of my fingers. His face was bristly for lack of a shave, and his breath blew warm on my wrist. Heavy and comforting, his head pressed my hand into his skin, trapping it against him.
“Cory?” I asked again. “What is it?”
He sighed and lifted his cheek from my hand. He rose and stood at the side of the bed, looking down at me. My eyes had adjusted to the shadows by now. I could see he was naked, but the light was too dim to make out particulars. I only saw the silhouette of his form in contrast to the nightlight burning in the bathroom behind him. Still, he was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever woken up to.
“I’d better go to bed,” he said softly. The words entered my chest like a knife.
“If that’s what you want,” I said.
He remained standing for a moment, gazing down at me, then turned and approached his own bed in the darkness. I heard the creak of bedsprings as he climbed into his crappy folding bed.
“Good night, Malcolm,” he said from the shadows.
“Good night,” I answered back, hating the words even as I spoke them.
I waited as silence hovered over us. “Cory?”
Only his breathing answered. I closed my eyes and tried to push out the night and everything I thought might have almost happened. I tried to remember everything we had said to each other, and while I did that, I tried to ignore my cock, pulsing beneath the bedclothes.
I tried to forget the drunken need I had heard in his voice. I could have had him then, as he stood there naked at the edge of my bed. I knew I could. I could have sat up in the bed and pressed my face to his bare stomach, and he would have let me. He would have offered me everything I asked for. In that one particular moment in time, he could have been mine. All of him. I was sure of it.
But I knew instinctively that was not the way I wanted him. Come morning, he would have been ashamed, and I would have hated myself for taking advantage. As much as I hungered for him, I didn’t want him like that. I didn’t want to risk our friendship either.
He was drunk. That’s all it was. I rolled over, placing my back determinedly to the room and to Cory as he lay naked beneath his covers only feet away. I tried to hush my breathing as I stared at the shimmer of stars outside my window.
Later I fell asleep and dreamed. I couldn’t remember what the dream was about, but I woke up late in the nigh
t with tears on my cheeks. Cory was snoring softly on the other side of the room.
I sighed, hearing him there.
Touching myself beneath the covers, I bucked once and came almost immediately.
I wiped myself clean with a fistful of tissues from the nightstand, and while my pulse thudded in my head, I tried to relax, tried to stop thinking so much, tried to find sleep again.
But sleep was a long time coming.
Chapter Eight
BETH’S TAP-DANCE teacher was as good as his word. The restaurant audition turned out not to be an audition at all. Since there were no other auditioners around, Beth and Cory and I were shoo-ins for the parts from the very start. He already knew me, of course. He was my tap-dance teacher too, although my lack of rhythm had no doubt made him question his career choice more than once. Still, it didn’t stop him from making an occasional pass as I butchered his choreography during our private weekly classes. More than once I found his hand on my ass while I stood there sweating and grunting and trying to look graceful as my legs ached all the way up to my neck. Tap dancing isn’t easy. His passes, of course, were always roundly ignored by me. Mr. Bonneville bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Bean.
On this day, it was Cory who Mr. Bonneville was most interested in, or so he had told Beth earlier over the phone. It wasn’t Cory’s talent Bonneville was worried about. He simply wanted to see if Beth’s brother was photogenic. Needless to say, that was the last thing he should have worried about.
Mr. Bonneville was a slut from the word go, of course, since he even made passes at me. But the minute he laid eyes on Cory, he became more of a perv than I could ever hope to be. While he took a few perfunctory photos of Beth and me, he shuffled us off to the side of his studio quickly enough before proceeding to wear his camera out on Cory. He posed Cory front, sideways, from above atop a stepladder, and from below while lying on the floor between Cory’s legs with his face in Cory’s crotch, which I wouldn’t have minded doing myself.
Bonneville even went so far as to ask Cory to remove his shirt so he could take a few beefcake shots as well. I suspect that if Beth and I hadn’t been present, he would have asked for pecker shots. Bonneville was practically salivating by the time he finished.
To be completely fair, I have to admit Cory ate it up. His previous stage fright went the way of the dodo the minute Bonneville’s camera got him in its sights. He accepted without question every pose Bonneville requested, and he did it with a smile. His ears didn’t even get red. Mine did, but his didn’t.
Beth, on the other hand, while watching it all with disdain, was getting redder by the minute. As Bonneville stood over Cory, while Cory lay shirtless on the floor with his gorgeous muscled arms flung wide and Bonneville aiming his camera directly at the fly of Cory’s jeans, Beth tapped her foot impatiently. (Not in a tap-dancing sort of way either, but more like the Aunt Mildred way after you’ve trampled her petunias while playing in her yard.)
Beth loudly cleared her throat. “Ahem. I said, ahem. Excuse me, Bonnie, but are we shooting porn or a restaurant commercial? Malcolm and I are feeling like a couple of side orders of spinach nobody wants over here. Are you casting us or what?”
Bonneville snapped one last photo, this one while holding his camera six inches from Cory’s furry belly button, then stepped back and set the camera aside. I thought I detected a disturbing bulge in the front of his trousers that hadn’t been there before. I almost gagged. Mr. Bean with a stiffy. Yikes.
“Yes, of course,” he said, appearing slightly embarrassed and wiping the sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand. His eyes kept drifting to Cory, who was still on the floor in the klieg lights but sitting up now looking all excited. I mean show-bizzy excited, not sexually excited. Or at least I hoped he wasn’t.
“So we got the parts?” he asked. “All three of us? Really? We’re gonna be in a commercial?”
Bonneville gave Cory a doting smile, which I had the sudden urge to rip off his face. He stepped up to Cory and pinched his cheek (another Aunt Mildred moment), all the while smiling down at Cory and simpering like a twit. I also wanted to rip his simper off, which was a strange reaction even for me.
“Yes, of course, son,” Bonneville cooed. “Don’t you worry your handsome little head. You, your sister, and what’s his name will be perfect in my commercial. I couldn’t be happier with how the casting has gone.”
“Excuse me?” I snarled. “Did you just call me what’s his name? For Christ’s sake, you’ve been teaching me tap for two years. You make veiled obscene remarks and grope my ass every Friday afternoon and you can’t remember my name?”
Beth laughed. Cory grinned. Mr. Bonneville looked wounded. “I’ve never groped your ass. I’m merely trying to align your glutes while you dance. You’re remarkably clumsy, you know. You have all the grace of a floundering water buffalo. Your glutes need aligning constantly. And I didn’t forget your name. You’re, uh, wait a minute. It’ll come to me. Oh, yes, it’s Malcolm! Your name is Malcolm something or other.”
Before I could make another snide comment, Beth dragged me away, obviously afraid I would say something to lose us the commercial. If Bonneville noticed the drama around him, he certainly didn’t show it. It would have taken a nuclear strike to drag his attention away from Cory, who was still sitting there on the floor with his shirt off.
Bonneville finally managed it, however. He clapped his hands together and cried, “All righty, then! Let’s shoot this fucker!”
All three of us jumped in surprise. “You mean now?”
“Yes. You three go home, change into chic but casual clothes, and meet me at the Top of the Cove in one hour’s time. You know where it is, right? La Jolla Boulevard, just off Sunset Cliffs. I’ve got the address somewhere if you need it. I’ll have my cameras set up and the hairdresser and makeup lady will be there waiting for you. Try not to be inordinately disruptive when you go inside. We’ll be working among actual diners. Wouldn’t want them to think actors are a bunch of animals.” He gave me a theatrical wink and a smirk, as if it were all he could do to say that with a straight face. What an ass. “We’ll get this baby in the can, and then I’d like to ask Cory to have dinner with me, if he’d be so inclined. I think I could further his career.”
Yeah, right.
But I needn’t have worried. Cory claimed an unshakable place in my heart when he jumped as if someone had stuck him with a pin. “What? Oh, no. Sorry, sir. I-I don’t—”
Beth helped him out. “My brother isn’t gay, Bonneville. Take Malcolm instead. He’s a flaming fruit. He’ll let anybody screw him.”
“Thanks,” I growled.
Beth gave me a saccharine smile. “Think nothing of it.”
Bonneville had the good grace to blush. “I was joking, Beth. Surely you didn’t think I was serious about asking your brother out to dinner. My goodness, that wouldn’t be kosher, now would it? I try to be professional, you know. I truly do. And besides, he must be ten years younger than me.”
Thirty, more like it, I thought. And if you were trying to be professional, you wouldn’t have a boner.
But I bit my tongue while Bonneville shot one last lingering glance at Cory, still parked half-naked on the floor in a circle of light from an overhead spotlight. Poor Bonnie heaved a rather put-upon sigh. Then he got hold of himself and tried to look businesslike while glancing at his watch.
“Okay, people, I’ll meet you at the Cove in one hour. Dress appropriately, please. Try to look classy.” At me, he added, “Fake it if you have to.”
“Fuck you, Bonnie,” I mumbled under my breath, but Cory was all smiles.
“We got the part? We really got the part?”
Beth tossed him his shirt. “Try to catch up, bro. Now let’s go get changed. Everybody, back to the apartment! We’re actors again. We’ve got a gig. In the inspirational words of our illustrious director, let’s shoot this fucker!”
SHOOT IT we did. Bonneville proved to be a competent director. Beth look
ed lovely in a black cocktail dress with her hair pulled back in an elegant bun. Cory was a god, as always, in his one and only pair of black dress slacks and a cashmere sweater he borrowed from me. The sleeves were too short, but he rolled them up over his muscular forearms, which made him even sexier than he already was. I had donned a sport coat with a turtleneck under the jacket so I wouldn’t look any dressier than Cory. We gave the impression of being exactly what we were supposed to be—three friends out for a congenial dinner, which, after all, was the point of the whole thing.
Now that filming had ended, we were headed home.
It was late. The traffic was light, and we were buzzing down the freeway at a fair clip. My crappy Honda Civic had been running remarkably glitch free since Cory started poking around under the hood, tweaking this and adjusting that. The three of us were packed in it now. With the shoot over, the mood was celebratory. Cory, especially, was keyed up.
“I did it! I’m in a commercial!”
He was sitting in the backseat. Well, he wasn’t really sitting. He was actually hopping around like a basketball, that’s how excited he was. I watched him through the rearview mirror. He was so cute sitting back there in his best clothes, his white teeth glowing in the dark through a smile that was about a foot wide, his hair neatly combed for once in his life. He was the happiest, handsomest tower of macho manhood I had ever seen.
Beth, on the other hand, was getting a little tired of his enthusiasm.
“It’s a lousy local commercial, Cory. It’ll only be seen by a handful of couch potatoes who are lounging around staring mindlessly at their TV sets while slurping beer and scratching their butts. And those creeps will only see it because they are too lazy to get up during the commercial breaks from their favorite TV show—CSI Buffalo Shit, Wyoming—and take a pee. It’ll probably run at three in the morning on the Tijuana channel every other Thursday except in months ending in R. Trust me, little brother, any hopes for a Clio award are pretty much out of the question.”
