Upon the sight of the seashells of red hair, a delightful shock broke through Dimov, but the delight quickly faded—perhaps triggered by his fever headache—with a sickening afterglow of déjà vu. Even the room’s staid faux-paneling walls and its circumambient thrum of a sluggish design reiterated his cramped sense of the week. In the space of five days he had seen Alex three times. And abandoning himself to the window—a panoptic of sea and sky undulating in viridian hues—he was, not unlike a man awakened to metaphysical fervor, surrendering to Gilda’s eldritch musings about Universe and its plans for inconsequential him.
“I used to think it was great to work by the beach,” Dimov said, “Ocean waves are supposed to be calming. Being close to the sounds of toddlers, gay and giggling, over beach castles is nice right?”
Alex, dispassion stoning his face, repositioned himself in his chair, for a more—Dimov would guess—manful stance. Dimming himself to resignation, Dimov, flipped open his binder and glanced at the twelve-point Arial font name on the resume.
“So Frederick Stanton—”
“Let’s stick to Alex. Alexander is my middle name.”
“All right. If you’re cool with this, I’ll be cool about this.”
“I’m Okay. Just shoot.”
Alex did not smile Dimov noted with a quirk of a grimace. Nothing reminiscent of the ridiculous fellow who had boasted about flipping guys; if anything the charcoal grey suit and the salmon shirt clad the granite of a man nursing a lupine stare and a rictus of unconcern. And then a triple succession of sneezes stopped all thought.
“The summer internship at New York last year was good?” asked Dimov fumbling with a handkerchief.
“Yes, it was. I learned a lot.”
“Must have fucked a lot.”
“Goes without saying.”
Leaning against the windowsill, Dimov laughed dryly. “I bet you’re fielding offers from New York.”
“My focus has been on the SoCal area.”
“Los Angeles is not the starting point for a finance career. Makes me wonder about your goals and ambition.”
Dimov snapped the binder shut; unease flickered across Alex’s face.
Alex said carefully, “Personal reasons force me to stay in Socal.”
“What could be so personal to a twenty-three-year old boy slut?”
“That was inappropriate.”
The dry grit in his tone tickled Dimov with the hints of victory, even lightened his feverish pall as he chuckled his way to the desk and sat across from Alex. The desk was bare save for the pens resting atop a stack of blank sheets.
“For sure, Frank isn’t the personal reason. At least not after you ditched him the other day.” Dimov took a moment to savor the crimson shading Alex’s brow. “A sweet guy like him doesn’t deserve that.”
“He’ll get over it. He always does.”
Dimov allowed Alex to gloat for a valiant minute before opening his binder and glancing down the rows of A’s on his transcript.
“You took physics,” Dimov said too cheerfully, “You can tell me all about Hooke’s law.”
Alex took over a sheet of a paper and a pen and began drawing a graph of a sloping line. “The force exerted on a spring is proportional to its linear displacement. Sure, if you apply too much force on the spring, you will reach the elastic limit, and the spring becomes damaged and no longer obeys Hooke’s law.”
YOU ARE READING
Blind hearts-ManxMan-boyxboy
General FictionAlex is lost in love with his straight best friend. College graduation is around the corner, and he despairs of losing him. He hooks up with the sexy stoic Dimov, all in good meaningless fun. But unlucky for him, Dimov is a man who bites and never l...
