Where Do I Start?

by Chase Taylor Hackett

  “You mean it?” I didn’t believe him for a second.

  He kissed me again, he kissed me lots.

  “Absolutely. Is that how you pick up guys? Because that must work like a clock.”

  “No way.”

  “Way. Take my word for it, Dweeb. You play like that, you’ll have like Chris Hemsworth and that hottie from Game of Thrones duking it out over you!”

  “Both those guys are totally straight, I’m pretty sure.”

  “For you, they’ll go gay.”

  “Shut up!”

  Like I had ever picked up a guy in my life. Can you imagine me walking up to some even not sexy guy and striking up a conversation? The way Fletch had done with me at Katrina’s? He could do that because he was ballsy, and stunning. Two things I definitely wasn’t.

  “I mean it. That was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do! And I once went out with a sword swallower at Coney Island, so that’s saying something.”

  “You are so full of it!”

  “I would never joke about something as serious as dating a sword swallower.”

  “Jerk.”

  “He was! A total jerk, but you know, a sword swallower, you can put up with a lot. But he was nowhere near as dreamy as you.”

  He kissed me again.

  “Let me—” I said, raising my hands with the violin and bow.

  “Yeah.”

  He held me from behind with his head over my shoulder next to mine, while I put the violin in its case and relaxed the bow, and jeez Louise it was nice. So much better than Masterpiece Theatre.

  And lest you think I’m completely shallow—it wasn’t just his gorgeous eyes that melted me. Fletch was fun to be around. He was funny and so sweet. I really liked him, and I really liked being around him, even though he made me nervous. I laughed more around him. And when he left, I always felt the room was dimmer, quieter without him. Emptier. I hated when he left.

  And he had gorgeous eyes.

  “You don’t think I’m a dweeb?”

  “Of course I do.” He kissed me and then held me tight against him. “But you’re my dweeb.”

  He took my left hand in his and began to kiss each finger.

  “Don’t,” I said. “My fingers are so ugly—the callouses.”

  “Your fingers are amazing,” he said and kissed them again.

  It was awkward for me, and embarrassing—and wonderful. No one had ever…

  I suppose it was about then that I really started to fall in love with him. To have somebody just plain admire you for what you do, the way that he did that night? Who wouldn’t fall in love with that? He was in awe. Of me. Can you imagine???

  “Thank you,” I said. “I was pretty nervous about playing.”

  “I don’t know why, Dweeb.”

  “Because—I wanted to impress you.”

  “Man-oh-man, you’re this intelligent, educated lawyer guy, who just happens to have huge brown eyes and the cutest freckles, and the best ass ever in in the long and rich history of human assdom, and on top of all that, you have this astonishing talent. And you worry you need to impress me?”

  “Yeah. Pretty funny, huh. Oh, the irony.”

  “And I bet you probably went to law school at like Yale or something.”

  I made an index-finger cross and hissed.

  “Harvard.”

  “Get out. How did I end up in your living room?”

  “You invited yourself in, remember?”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right.” He put his arms around me. “I better behave too, or you’ll toss me out.”

  “Not very likely.” I laughed. “Hey, you want a beer while we wait?”

  “No thanks. I really don’t drink.”

  “I knew that. Sorry. Any reason? Of course you can tell me to mind my own business.”

  “Hey, of course it’s your business if we’re living together.”

  The words suddenly hit me. Living together. Like boyfriends? That’s kinda what it sounded like. Is that what he meant? Is that what this was? Did I just fall into a relationship? Were we a thing now? That was crazy.

  What would any of my friends say, if I told them I was living with a guy I’d sort of dated a couple of times? They’d tell me I was going to come home to find my apartment emptied out. Or wake up in the middle of the night because the police were raiding the meth lab he’d set up in my bathtub. Or I’d just wake up dead.

  And yet I mostly couldn’t believe that I could be so—lucky—that a guy like this—but what if he’s one of those nutjobs you read about who ties up his victims and tortures them for days before finally killing them off?

  “Fletch,” I said, catching myself. “Reality check. We—we hardly know each other.” I sat down. He sat with me.

  “We’ll get to know each other. Ask me anything!”

  “Jeez. Okay. You’re Fletcher…Andrews?”

  “Yes.”

  “Roger Prescott.”

  “I knew that. How do you do. Very nice to meet you.” He shook my hand.

  “Charmed. So.” Thank God we at least knew each other’s last names before we got this far. “Are you a serial killer?”

  “No.”

  “Drug dealer?”

  “No, and I don’t do drugs either. Don’t even smoke. Nothing.”

  “Did you ever tie anybody up and torture them for days?”

  “Just the once, and that was only because he asked me to”—?!—“And if it makes you feel any better, I didn’t enjoy it.”

  ???!!!!

  I could only stare at him. I mean, seriously, what was I supposed to say to that??? The room started to spin.

  “Oh my God, it was a joke!” He pulled me into a hug. “I was kidding! Don’t wig out!” he said, kissing me on the side of the head. “Sh.”

  “Don’t scare me like that.”

  “I won’t. I’m sorry. No, I never tortured anyone ever. Ask me another.”

  “Okay.” I tried to shake myself out of it. “Back on track. So. Do you have—like—a job?”

  “I do!”

  Okay, four questions, three right answers. And one that I needed to forget.

  “Good. Where?”

  “I work for the Nederlanders.” This meant nothing to me.

  “You’re a—houseboy?” I guessed.

  “No! The Nederlander Organization, they own a bunch of Broadway theaters, and I’m an usher for them. These days I’m at the Gershwin Theatre—Gershwin, like your song, I think. They have a nice exhibit about him in the lobby. Anyway, that’s where I am. And, roomie—added bonus here—if you ever want to hear something from Wicked, I know aaaaaaaaall the songs!” I had to laugh. “Most of my days are free, so I can help with the dog and anything else, Laundry or marketing or whatever. Cooking…”

  “Oh wow. You can cook?”

  “Nooooo, but I can learn! Come on. Think how much fun this is gonna be!” He snuggled up against me. “It’ll be like a slumber party.”

  “A slumber party?”

  “With condoms.”

  We looked at each other for a bit—me, trying to think through what the hell I was doing here; him, making those incredibly blue sad-little-orphan eyes again. I didn’t stand a chance.

  “I’ll make you crazy. I practice all the time—”

  “Awesome! Can’t wait.”

  “And I’m sort of…fastidious.”

  “I’m sure, when I look that up, it’ll be one of the things I most admire about you. Look, I really, really like you, Dweeb. I’m not just saying that because I need a place to stay. I keep calling you and stuff because—when I think, gee, what do I want to do today, I think about you, and I realize—I just wanna hang with Roger some more.”

  “And you always do what you want?”

  “Yep, prit-t
ee much.” There was that smile. “So here I am. And you know what? Right now I want to do this.”

  And he pulled me close and he kissed me, and he kept at it, and just as we were both getting pretty-well warmed up—the door buzzed. We both jumped a mile, and Haggis exploded into his usual chorus of Scottish outrage.

  “You know, for a little dog,” said Fletch, “that is a helluva big bark.”

  “You should see his teeth.”

  I buzzed the delivery guy in.

  “Do you need…” said Fletch, reaching for his wallet.

  “No, I got it,” I said as I went to the door.

  “Good, because I don’t actually have…”

  At least he was honest about it and funny.

  We sat down to plates of anchovy pizza and bottled waters on the coffee table.

  “So,” I said as we started. “Tell me about your landlady.”

  Which he did. It basically came down to his living in an illegal apartment, meaning that since it didn’t meet city building code requirements for a rental apartment, his landlady, a certain Mrs. F. Szanko, first name unknown, hadn’t registered it with the city. He told me further that he, for reasons he didn’t share, hadn’t actually been paying his rent, or at least not all of it, for a while, and this greedy bitch-slash-slumlord-slash-scumbag Mrs. Szanko had finally resorted to the age-old stratagem of wronged landladies everywhere—she had locked him out. With all of his things locked inside, as hostage.

  So.

  The next morning I was in my office, majorly underslept after a strenuous night—and morning—with my new roommate—I wasn’t complaining—and I was on the phone with the aforesaid Mrs. Szanko, explaining that I was Mr. Andrews’s attorney.

  I should explain that my firm took a dim view of their lawyers taking on clients independently, paid or otherwise. In fact, we were explicitly forbidden to do so. Had Mrs. Szanko decided to check up on me and had she called my firm, I could easily have found myself—and a filing box of my personal possessions—escorted out onto the Sixth Avenue sidewalk by a nice, burly security guard.

  Knowing all that, I made the call anyway.

  You should further understand that I was actually in the Trusts and Estates Department at my firm—far, far removed from real estate law. On top of that, New York tenant law is its own special area of expertise. People make careers out of it.

  Conclusion: I was way out of my depth.

  My only hope was that once Mrs. Szanko realized Fletch had brought in a lawyer, she’d be intimidated and back off.

  That afternoon, I was in my Manhattan lawyer suit and expensive shoes, standing in a fairly miserable studio apartment in a seedy and seriously inconvenient part of Brooklyn. (I know, Brooklyn is cool, blah-blah-blah, but I really don’t like going to Brooklyn.) And I was doing my damnedest to bluff this landlady into releasing Fletch’s stuff.

  I failed.

  In contrast to me and my ignorance, Mrs. Szanko knew as much as she needed to about the relevant law, and she was not the least bit inclined to back off. This out-of-his-depth little lawyer ended the negotiations by writing a personal check for Fletch’s back rent. All of it. Every dime.

  I was the world’s worst attorney.

  Mrs. S., grumbling the entire time, removed the giant padlock—with the stipulation that Fletch get his things and go. Whatever he had said and/or done, he had burned his bridges with La Szanko. He was homeless. Unless my apartment was home. I was stuck with him.

  I tried to scold myself. I should have felt like the chump of the year for shoveling out a bunch of money for a guy I hardly knew—but I found I just couldn’t care about the money and all I felt was—sort of giddy.

  I could have danced back to Manhattan. Instead, I sat in the back seat of a livery car, staring out the window at the East River, with the biggest, stupidest grin on my face that I couldn’t get rid of.

  It was the last thing I expected, but I was ecstatic thinking about what drawers I could clear out for Fletch’s stuff.

  Fletch was moving in.

  When I got back to the apartment, I told Fletch that I’d gotten the lock taken off his door and that he could retrieve his things—he looked at me with those blue eyes like I was a superhero. You can imagine how many times that had happened in my life—exactly zero point zip. But to Fletch, I was a great lawyer and a staunch defender of the rights of man, I was Clarence Darrow, Atticus Finch, Abraham Lincoln, and Captain America.

  I know it’s pitiful, but I never told him that all I’d done was paid his back rent. I just couldn’t.

  I had my blue-eyed reasons.

  Chapter 5

  The Morning after the Opera—The Hell’s Kitchen Edition

  Fletch

  “Fletch! You look totally wrecked, my man,” said Marco at the door yawning. As I’d expected, I had gotten him up.

  After I’d ducked out of the opera house, I’d walked for a while, gone back to Darwin’s to have it out with him, and then I’d walked some more before I turned up at Marco’s. I’d lost the bowtie somewhere along the way, the shirt collar was open, but I was still wearing the tux, now considerably worse for wear.

  By contrast, Marco stood in the door in nothing but a pair of tighty-whities, scratching his junk.

  “Thanks,” I said, pushing my way in past him. “Sorry I woke you up.”

  “Nah, I have to get up anyway. ’Sup, bro?”

  “Can I crash here for a bit, man? It won’t be long.”

  “That rich guy toss you out?”

  “No, I left.”

  “Dude! That was a sweet setup you had. Are you crazy?”

  “Probably. I’m gonna make some coffee, okay?”

  “It’s set, just hit the ‘on’ button.”

  I had screwed everything else up, but I figured I could probably manage to hit the on button.

  “Wow,” said Marco, yawning again. “I bet that suit was really something before you slept in it.”

  “Haven’t slept,” I growled. Totally true. And by now I hated the damned suit.

  “Whatever. I’m gonna shower, bro.”

  He went into the bathroom and left me with my thoughts, which was where I’d spent the night, alone with my miserable self. I pulled the jacket off and tossed it on a stool at his kitchen counter and pulled off those ridiculous patent leather shoes finally. The bubbling sound of the coffee maker was comforting at least, as was the smell. I needed something to do, so I rolled up my sleeves and started breaking some eggs to scramble.

  Marco and I went way back, so it was only natural I’d land here.

  For a while, as a teen, things had been kinda tough for me. I was actually homeless for a good bit, sleeping in shelters or train stations or wherever, eating out of the trash bin in front of McDonald’s. I met Marco, and he smuggled me into his house—not easy in a big Italian family—and at least I had a place to shower and sleep where I wasn’t going to get beat up. Even after his mom caught on a couple days later, they let me live here, eat here, they gave me a job in the fish shop.

  Of course one thing led to another, two randy teenage boys, sharing a bedroom.

  But the thing is—I had been desperate, really desperate. I honestly don’t know what might have happened to me or where I’d have ended up. There’s only one reason my life got any better, and that reason is Marco Campobasso.

  I would always owe Marco.

  He came back a few minutes later, dripping and toweling himself off.

  “So tell me what happened,” he said, as I shoveled some eggs onto plates.

  “I went to the opera, bro, and it changed my life.”

  I pulled the ketchup bottle out of the fridge for him.

  “Get serious,” he said.

  “You’ll never guess who I bumped into at the Met.”

  “Enrico Caruso?”

 
; “Roger.”

  “The hell you say. Your Roger? From way back? He didn’t make a big scene or anything, did he?”

  “No. No, he hardly said a thing.”

  “So?”

  “He saw me, and he saw Darwin—and I felt like my amateur standing was suddenly in question.”

  “Bro?”

  “You know that little dog that Paris Hilton carries around in her purse?”

  “Yeah…”

  “My career model.”

  “Fletch, what are you talking about?”

  “I just couldn’t anymore. The only difference between me and that dog is that I had to earn my puppy chow.”

  “Wow. So whaja do? Howja leave it with the designer?”

  “He was still up when I got in—the guy never sleeps—and I told him I was done.”

  “He didn’t cry, did he? God, I hate when they cry. Or did he just get all cunty?”

  “Just a little. Not bad, considering.”

  When I’d told Darwin I couldn’t go on with him any longer, he’d sighed.

  “It’s just-as-well-just-as-well, Fletchy,” Darwin had said. “I’m not going take umbrage or have a hissy. The opera gala was the big thing I wanted you for, and—until you walked out and left me there, and I should be totally put out with you—until then, you were fabulous-fabulous-fabulous, and besides, I just can’t be put out with anyone with eyes like those. And think of it—tomorrow, your gorgeous picture will be everywhere-just-everywhere.”

  It was all I could do not to groan at the thought. I was not just a boy toy, I would soon be a famous boy toy.

  “Right there next to Sarah Jessica and that godawful dress.”

  “I hope you can return the tux?” I offered.

  “Keep-it-keep-it-keep-it! It looked so good on you, it would be churlish of me to take it back. Besides, Toots,” he said, smiling grandly, “you earned it.”

  When I thought about what I’d been doing to earn a four-thousand-dollar suit…

  He leaned to me, kissed me on the cheek, and he whispered sweetly—while casually groping my ass—“I’ll have your things packed and left with the doorman.”