In Flesh and Stone

by Hal Bodner

  “Around the world, my precious. Around the world.”

  Corey frowned. “Around the world? You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Charles looked at him blankly.

  “It’s an old hooker’s term. It means, well, why don’t I just show you?”

  He grabbed both sides of the front of Charles’s shirt and yanked it open, ripping a couple of buttons off in the process. Looking down at his lover’s exposed torso, he marveled again how much different it was than the tightly muscled, gym-toned bodies he’d shared beds, floors and hotel rooms with for so long. Charles was by no means decrepit, or even out of shape, but he was practically Social Security age and in spots, it showed. His stomach was still flat, but his waist had pleasing handles – Corey loved grabbing onto them when they were having sex. True, his skin was not supple, his face was lined, his balls were even a little bit saggy – but his cock! If he’d known how large an older man’s cock could be, how comfortably it could fit into all those special places, and how many interesting techniques a lover could learn with age, he’d have long ago sworn off taking anyone under the age of sixty into his bed.

  For years, Charles had been there for him, patiently waiting in the wings for Corey to get himself into some awful mess and need his help. No matter how screwed up Corey had gotten, no matter how many evictions, how many repossessed cars, empty bank accounts or, a couple of times, no matter how many tequila shots he’d had before pounding on the multi-millionaire’s door in the middle of the night looking for someplace to sleep, Charles had always taken care of him. Nor did Corey ever feel like he was being “kept.” Charles’s bounty did not come without a price. Sometimes, it was a lecture on responsibility. More often, it was only through Charles’s insistence that Corey was forced to own up to whatever mistakes he’d made and, with his older lover’s guidance, he would try his best to make amends.

  In the beginning, and probably for quite a few years afterwards, Corey would have had to honestly admit to himself, he’d looked upon Charles as a mere convenience, as a familiar port in which to take shelter from whatever storm was brewing around him. But Charles was ever kind and always supportive without ever being indulgent. Though he spoiled him utterly with clothes and jewelry and fancy dinners, Corey didn’t have an entitled bone in his body, and he never became uppity or demanding and he never even came close to becoming a spoiled brat.

  It was one of the many reasons Charles loved him.

  And to Corey’s surprise, during the past few weeks, he’d realized how much he loved Charles in return – how much he’d always loved him without knowing it or truly understanding what the emotion was.

  It took inheriting Alex’s fortune to bring him to that conclusion. With so much money of his own, he had no monetary reason to stick around in Charles’s house. He could easily afford one of his own – perhaps with a swimming pool so he could have round-the-clock parties with gorgeous young studs in swimsuits which barely covered their dicks lying out around it or lined up at the twenty-four-hour open bar he’d always imagined would be part of the scenario. But he’d delayed moving out; even after he’d gotten the keys to both the old townhouse and the new condo, he’d stayed with Charles.

  He enjoyed the older man’s company, and he adored the sex. The thought of coming home at night without Charles there, the idea of sharing those expensive meals in restaurants with anyone else, the prospect of not having Charles tucked into his favorite armchair reading his boring financial papers when Corey was stricken with the impulse to share some incredibly profound thought – well, profound to Corey – filled him with a sense of deep sadness and loss. Irrespective of the financial security he represented, Charles was good company. He was comfortable to be with. He was safe. He adored Corey and, above all, Corey finally accepted, he was loved.

  He rested his head against Charles’s bare chest and sighed with contentment. His fingers explored lower until they reached his lover’s belt. Impatiently, he began tugging at it to remove it.

  “We have company, you know. Won’t we feel like voyeurs?”

  Corey stopped, puzzled. Realization dawned when he saw Charles was looking at the statues, all of them gazing fondly down at them.

  “They are beautiful, aren’t they?” Corey commented.

  Charles’s only response was a grunt of agreement.

  “I don’t think, no matter how much Nadine would have wanted them, I could have given them up. I don’t know why, or what it was, but they meant something to Alex. The minute he saw them, I could tell he thought they were special.”

  “Which is your favorite?” Charles wanted to know. “I’m partial to the Capricorn, of course, but perhaps that’s just because I own the painting.”

  “Dunno. The guy with the ring in his nose and the one with the horns have the biggest dicks, don’t they?”

  “You’re obsessed, child. Do you know that? But yes, I agree that Taurus and Aries are particularly well endowed.”

  “I think the slender guy with the long hair – that would be Leo, right? I think him and Scorpio are probably the winners for plain old raw sexiness. But the young boy in the corner?”

  “Virgo, I think.”

  “Yeah. He’s supposed to be a virgin, isn’t he? There’s something about him that just sort of makes you wanna lick him all over and make his eyes go all bulgy when he gets turned on for the first time. I guess...” He paused, considering. “I don’t have a favorite. I like ’em all.”

  He snuggled in closer to Charles and the two lay in silence for a few moments, each lost in their own thoughts. They were sad for their loss, but the wounds had grown less ragged during the past weeks. Their pain wasn’t quite as acute and they could look back on the two men they had known and loved with fond remembrance and not a little melancholia.

  “Alex had a favorite, though.” Corey’s voice, low and almost sleepy, broke the quiet.

  “Did he?” Charles was intrigued. “Which?”

  “There.” Corey pointed and Charles followed his finger. “The Twins.”

  “Gemini? That’s not what I would have thought. They’re stunning, of course, but...Gemini wasn’t Alex’s birth sign, was it?”

  “Dunno. All I know is that he was always kind of taken with them. He told me the day I helped him move in. He said that even though they were twins, he didn’t think of them as brothers. Well, not birth brothers anyway. He thought they were more like lovers who were a single soul split up into two bodies.”

  “Perhaps a little overly romantic for my taste,” Charles said without criticism. “But I understand what he meant. Go on.”

  “ ‘Romantic’ was the word he used. The two of them, always together. See how their hands are on each other’s dicks and somehow, the fingers sort of sink in? When Alex got up on a ladder to fix the skylight, he took a closer look. You can’t see it from this angle, but each one’s arm goes into the other one’s shoulder where they’re sort of holding on to each other. And their hips and thighs are joined, too.”

  “Always together. Captured in marble forever.”

  “That’s exactly how Alex put it!”

  “Like you and me, eh, youngster?”

  “I dunno,” Corey teased. “What happens if some even older man comes along and I fall madly in love and he steals me away from you?”

  “We will cross that bridge, my love,” Charles kissed Corey deeply before continuing, their tongues playing tag with each other, “when we come to it. And, if such a thing ever happens...”

  “Yeah?”

  “I will use every last penny I have to hunt down this stealer of lovers and haul you back to me, making sure in the process that his body is never found.”

  Corey giggled for a moment and then grew somber. “Speaking of never being found, do you ever wonder...”

  “All the time, my dear. All the time.”

  Corey looked back up at the Gemini. “I never really noticed it before, but don’t you think it’s strange?”

  “W
hat?”

  “The Twins. One of them seems lighter than the other. I’ll betcha if they were real, he’d be a blond. And d’you wanna know the oddest thing? For some weird reason, they remind me of Alex and Tony. It’s not that they look anything like them. There’s just something about them that seems, I dunno, familiar. Don’t you think?”

  “I think,” Charles said, “since my shirt is already open and my pants half undone, that it’s terribly unfair that you are still fully clothed.”

  In scant moments, the two men lay naked in each other’s arms.

  Above them, each melded to the other, the shadows across the faces of the Gemini gave them the flickering appearance of life. Their handsome faces seemed to smile down upon the lovers with approval. Unnoticed by the two on the bed, the marble statues moved, almost imperceptibly, closer together and the air surrounding them shimmered. Their heads turned slightly so it seemed as if they were gazing deeply into each other’s eyes.

  Neither Corey nor Charles looked up, so absorbed were they in their explorations of each other’s bodies. Even if they had, they would have been likely to have missed it. There, on the chest of the young man Corey had thought would be blond, a small splotch of blue paint appeared momentarily and then faded. A similar speck of red graced one thigh and a tiny speckle of yellow marred one marble arm. For several moments, colors appeared on the statue’s skin, glistening as if they were still-wet oils from a painter’s palette, absently wiped from a hand too busily absorbed in creation to bother using a rag.

  By the time Corey and Charles were finished, lying in drowsy surfeited repose, and thought to cast their eyes up once again, all traces of paint were gone. The marble was as smooth and white and unblemished as they had thought it had been.

  Alex and Tony stood, looking down on them fondly. Though they shared in the joy of their friends’ newfound romance, they could not spend much time on it.

  They were too absorbed in other things.

  In loving each other.