Blind hearts-ManxMan-boyxboy

Beautiful stars

Embarrassed could be the word for what Dimov felt when Frank demanded him, “What the fuck did you say to Alex? He’s gone!” Alex apparently had left Richard’s house without tell the supposed boyfriend.  Dimov colored in his seat, blinked over the dying dregs of a poker game. But Frank, cheeks pale, temples glistening, stared.  Dimov donned him an old trickster fox waiting for the final twilight to eclipse its tired eyes. Diagnosed fragility had a way of rising surfs of aggression, and he said, a hardness thinning his voice, “I told him, you’re a closet case.” Murmurs squalled with Frank’s eyelids widening and then falling in a coda of rational resignation.  And Frank slunk away to beautiful feet of Miss Janet in sultry black qipao and sang supplications for a ride home.

Dimov drove home, anxious in an immiscible mixture of vindication and industrial reserve.  Tomorrow work would start sunless and harried at 3:30 am, and he still had to finish errands that would eat into his bedtime.  Irritating still was the feeling of something awry in his judgment of Frank. It whiffed of unfulfilled desires. Maybe there was nothing. Maybe it was his own need for something that colored his perceptions.

Immoral, corrupted the world must be indeed if devotion between two men necessitated an erotic undertone.  Really, David loving Jonathan meant exactly just that, he loved Jonathan, not he wanted Jonathan to fuck him silly. But this also glinted of a childish insistence on purity.  Who knew the whys and wherefores anyway?  Dimov, exasperated at his own blind heart, stepped on the gas pedal. And so circled and circled those thoughts in a search of a center that would hold, a heft of an anchor within.

When he arrived before his door, the interior sounds of Charles’ rapid lilt dominating Gilda’s soft drawls halted him. His hand hardened over the keys body-warm in his pocket.  Down the blurred lengths of the corridor he looked, and up at the stippled ceiling inching lower and lower still. A few minutes more he thought, a few more minutes before he would find the repository of strong smiles and a strong voice needed to face them. What should he say about Alex?  The party? Frank? Nothing. Yes nothing, because Alex did not matter anymore. The solution dazzled him with his own decisive pride even taunted with hints of him becoming more comfortable with Charles leaving.  At last he could open the door.

The living room was sprawling with camping gear, coolers pressurized with questionable contents, and the gladsome back and forth about the Universe’s bounteous graces in granting Gilda a lead part in an opera. Charles and Gilda, like drooping palm fronds, crowded the kitchen entrance. Dimov, frowning determinedly, stepped around the trash bags bloating with empty water containers, and refusing furiously not to name the ripening reek in the air.  By the time he made way to them, he had forgotten everything of cheery resolve and was feeling ill with the cluttered disorder. 

“And no we didn’t miss you any,” Charles said by way of greeting.

Dimov grunted a greeting. It took a few moments through his muddled irritation for his eyes to shape the hairy board of Charles’ chest, his belly’s modest rise and pink fall over the puckered bands of his sleep shorts, his fingers flicking daintily into the air. And of a sudden Dimov’s heart swelled to the point of acrid hurt.  The beautiful idea was ballooning in him of Charles lithe and rosaceous, soft and smiling. He firmed his mouth and sought more calming vibrations in Gilda’s frowsy tracksuit.

Her hair had probably been a regal French roll earlier, but now its coarse waves slopped over the ears and flopped with her every giddy gesticulation at her good fortune. 

“Can you believe it? Cosi Fan Tutte.” Her kohled eyes were shining.  “I got the part! I got the part!”

Dimov smiled through internal cringing at her stratospheric octaves. “We need to have dinner next weekend or some time to celebrate.”