Upside Down [mxm] [editing]

Chapter 3

Since the very beginning of his life, Alexander had been particular about his appearance.   As a small boy, he worried about which clothes matched and which didn't.  As a young man, he learned what worked with his body as far as shape and structure went.  And as an adult with much more disposable income, he fell head over heels into the lifelong affair which was line, fabric, and fashion.   There was nothing particularly effeminate about this passion of his, just a dedication to present himself and his masculine body in the best manner possible. 

The same went for his in-depth skin and hair care routines.  He knew that no long-lost city with a fountain of youth existed within the swamps of Florida.   Instead, it was bottled by La Mar and sold at Neiman Marcus.  Any man who didn't know the difference between face cream, eye cream, and sunscreen just wasn't paying enough attention to what their body needed. Or how they'd look in the next ten years. 

For all the normalcy of his daily ablutions, and the care he took in picking out what to wear and what it would gain him (power, position, attraction) Alex hadn't put this much time into an outfit in many, many years.  There were standard selections and special ones, but none that had seemed to hit the Goldilocks spot for his early evening plans.  

It was just coffee.  It wasn't dinner, it wasn't drinks, and it most certainly wasn't a date.  Just a cup of coffee.  Coffee between two men who had done their undergraduate studies together.  Two colleagues and peers who hadn't seen one another in a decade.  Two past lovers who apparently couldn't leave well enough alone even though they were both old enough to know that what they were doing by drinking those boring cups of coffee was not what grown men should be doing. 

Oh, wait. 

Catching a glimpse of himself in the reflection of the coffee shop's window, Alex straightened his tie (Hermès), smoothed down his trousers (bespoke Savile Row), and brushed an imaginary speck of dirt from his handmade Italian oxfords. People could say that it was the inside of a person which mattered, and they might be right, but it mattered a whole hell of a lot less when your outside looked as good as he did. 

With a final tug to straighten his lapel, Alex pushed in through the door, being hit with the sharp and acrid scent of freshly brewed coffee as he strode over the threshold.  He had worried he'd be there first, having to wait for Julian to arrive, but there'd been no need to spend the energy in or concern on it.  It had been the same way a decade ago.  Julian had always been the punctual one, the responsible one, aka the one who remembered to mop the floors. 

Julian was sitting with his back to the door, fingers tapping on the table (there went those nerves of his again) and Alex took a moment to just drink the sight of him in.  Even from across the room, without seeing his face, there was an unmistakable pull towards the other man, a need to be closer to him, to reach out and touch him, to be touched by him.  Alex had hardly been a nun since they'd separated, but he'd never found anyone else who'd affected him the way Julian had.  He hadn't wanted to.  That affectation had been where all their problems had begun.

Problems which had seemingly only been paused, problems which seemingly only managed to sprout new ones.  It wasn't as if Alex was magically out of the closet or open, and he had no intention of making that change any time soon if ever at all.  And Julian, he was married.  Married with children and a four-story brownstone. How much closer to Stepford could he get? 

But Stepford husbands didn't go for coffee with their ex-boyfriends. They didn't turn, either, when they felt the gaze which had settled upon their neck, smiling that slow smile which in a time long before meant a night filled with tangled arms and legs.   No, that smile was all Julian.  It spoke volumes, especially paired with the flush which rose to his cheeks.  His lips were parted just a little, making them damnably kissable.  Those lips had always been fuller than most men's, and for a moment Alex was frozen in place as he tried to will himself to breathe again.