Blind hearts-ManxMan-boyxboy

Paralysis

“Would you put on a shirt already?” Gilda screamed at Charles, who was flexing his flabby muscles at the kitchen sink. She snapped shut the clamshell of her vanity mirror and arose from the dining table, with a dour expression pinching in the newly farded eyebrows.

Charles kept on with his schoolboy poses while Dimov, still in his work suit and tie, yawned idly at the dining table.  He thought it was about time to commit the ultimate sacrilege to the gods of the Friday Evening and spend the rest of the night huddled over his laptop, dispensing poker philosophy on poker forums. But glinting in there with Charles’ prideful smirk at the muscles hiding under the quarter-inch layer of fat, was an assertive glaze, warning Dimov that he would not get away with sacrilege.

He made to retire away quietly, but there was Gilda removing her satin haltertop like she was auditioning for a b-grade porno.

Her blue-lined eyes swung over to Dimov’s gimlet-eyed stare. “If he can be half-naked, I too can.”

The logic was nowhere self-evident to Dimov absorbing sight of the falling rolls of her love handles.

“Come off it, you’re scarring Dimi,” Charles said. 

“Then, get a shirt on,” she growled.

Charles rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting drinks with girlfriends?”

“In another twenty minutes,” she said triumphantly.

“You two work it out. I’m heading inside,” Dimov declared, but he made ready for his disappearing act, Gilda cried back to him, “Wait, wait, what’s happening tomorrow night? Are we going to Miguel’s party?

“If Charley doesn’t care for it, then there’s no point,” Dimov said.

“Well then, Charley boy, make up with Miguel already!”

Queenly and rudely perturbed, Charles pulled the phone out of his jeans pocket and marching to the balcony, quipped, “the things I do for fat women.”

“Of course you balding fuck,” she shot back.

He flipped her off, like it was his last battle cry before going down to do what loyalty commanded, and then dashed open the screen doors.

“Mi’jo, why do you have to be the generalissimo? Pedro and Joachim have a say you know … I know, I know, but it won’t work out,” came Charles’ rapid lilt on the phone, not quite apologetic, but hopeful for understanding, “Yeah this love, you sure about that? I fall in love almost every day. It’s healthy for you, I hear, but it never quite sticks .... Plato had something about love in The Symposium. Love is so good that you just have to love everybody …”

Gilda shook her head, shined incredulous eyes onto Dimov, miming, “What the hell,” and chuckling, danced back to her room, leaving him with a full view of the love philosopher’s behind. Dimov thought he might as well as he took his seat again. The shoulders, not broad, not narrow, had the width weighty enough for him to wrap his hands around. Charles, rather girlish about unnecessary exertion, had superstitious ideas about fitness, and Dimov would concur that it was showing. There glimmered a faint definition of shoulder blades; one or two slats of muscle petered in there. One could forgive the less than precise muscle-to-fat ratio, as Charles’ buttocks swelled deliciously beneath the loose jeans.

Charles turned back sharply, twinkling an eye for Dimov, as though to cheer on the preternatural violation.  Miguel seemed to have tired him because he paced back to the table, and flumped onto a seat next to Dimov. The phone call dragged out with more wearied assurances, “I know, I know, mi’jo,” while Dimov wandered over the less disturbing spread on the table: Gilda’s sequined purse, the chrome salt and pepper shakes, the folded up trapezoid of the newspaper looking ready to spring like a loaded up jack-in-the-box. Dimov moved to get up, but Charles stamped down on his thigh, stabbing up there a shard of pleasure. And he surrendered to the grassy, gratingly arousing scent of his old, old friend.