Readers love the Belladonna Arms

series by JOHN INMAN

Serenading Stanley

“A little gem that glittered for me just like that magenta apartment sign.”

—Sinfully… Addicted to All Male Romance

“I was completely won over by this book… I totally and completely recommend you read this book when you’ve hit angst overload and need to remember how to smile.”

—Love Bytes

“The romance was sweet, and the characters were absurdly entertaining, which made Serenading Stanley an all-around great read.”

—The Romance Reviews

Work in Progress

“I, for one, hope that Mr. Inman continues to add more stories to this sweet series… In the meanwhile, please enjoy Work in Progress. It is a well-deserved five star read…”

—The Novel Approach

“…this book is guaranteed to tickle your funny bone from the beginning to the end.”

—MM Good Book Reviews

“…this one is going into my re-read pile for when I need a pick me up!”

—Prism Book Alliance

By JOHN INMAN

Chasing the Swallows

A Hard Winter Rain

Head-on

Hobbled

Jasper’s Mountain

Loving Hector

Paulie

Payback

The Poodle Apocalypse

Shy

Snow on the Roof (Dreamspinner Anthology)

Spirit

Sunset Lake

THE BELLADONNA ARMS

Serenading Stanley

Work in Progress

Coming Back

Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS

www.dreamspinnerpress.com

Copyright

Published by

DREAMSPINNER PRESS

5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886  USA

www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Coming Back

© 2015 John Inman.

Cover Art

© 2015 Aaron Anderson.

aaronbydesign55@gmail.com

Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

ISBN: 978-1-63476-231-1

Digital ISBN: 978-1-63476-232-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015907249

First Edition August 2015

Printed in the United States of America

This paper meets the requirements of

ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Leo and Max, although they’ll never know it.

Chapter 1

THERE’S AN old Polish proverb that goes something like this: Not my circus, not my monkeys. Funny thing, but that proverb kept bouncing around inside my head on that Saturday morning as I strolled through the yard sale in front of the Belladonna Arms, a decrepit old apartment building in downtown San Diego.

I grew up in San Diego, so the apartment building wasn’t a new discovery for me. I had seen it there my whole life, hovering in the background of my existence. And in case you’re wondering, on that particular day, my existence added up to the sum total of twenty-six years, three months, two weeks, and approximately a day and a half.

The building sat perched on the only hill in downtown, crouched there like a disheveled old man, hunkered down waiting in front of his mailbox for his social security check to arrive. The building was run-down and needed attention. Paint blistered on crumbling stucco walls. The window frames were cracked and misshapen from the constant battering of the California sun, season after interminable season, which can pretty much eat up a collection of two-by-fours like an army of hungry termites if you give it enough time.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the apartment building’s facade was the rusty old sign perched atop the roof. That sign came alive, exploding its way into the San Diego skyline, at sunset every single day of the year, and when it did, it read Belladonna Arms, in flashing orange neon. I had seen that blinking sign a million times. Shining bright and cheerful on starlit nights. Looking hazy and dim and mysterious on foggy ones. Always there. Always beckoning.

The lawn in front of the Belladonna Arms (I use the term “lawn” charitably, since there wasn’t one blade of grass on it) was packed with table after table of yard-sale junk from a crowd of different vendors. The vendors, I presumed, were tenants.

The sale was obviously a hit. People were waving money around and shouting and schmoozing with each other all over the place. I, of course, was there on different business, so I held myself aloof from the buying frenzy around me. I had barely enough money for what I was about to do without wasting my hard-earned cash on a bunch of junk. Besides, I had bagged my limit on junk a long time ago. I didn’t need any more.

Today an ocean breeze was blowing across the city, temporarily easing the heat of another scorching California summer. As I stood on the dead lawn in front of that shabby-ass apartment building, I could hear the old neon sign clanking and rattling above my head, buffeted by the cooling gusts blowing in from the San Diego Bay.

The wind carried with it the briny scent of the sea, which I had loved since childhood. I stared out across the bay from my vantage point on the hill, and less than a mile away, past the strip of land comprising Coronado Island, I could see the grand Pacific Ocean snoozing on the horizon. Like the Belladonna Arms, the Pacific too had always been there on the edge of my life for as long as I could remember, but I had never seen it from this angle before, and for a moment the sight took my breath away. The Belladonna Arms might be a dump of the first magnitude, but the view it afforded its tenants of the sprawling Pacific Ocean was nothing short of spectacular.

I stood there for a moment, enjoying the view and sucking in the heavenly scent of ocean air.

The salty wind also carried to my nose a reek of Opium. Not the kind you smoke in a hash den, cowering from the authorities, but the kind you pay sixty dollars an ounce for and present to your great-aunt Maisie for Christmas.

Following the scent of Opium cologne, I turned to find the biggest woman I had ever seen in my life hawking a tableful of cast-off feather boas, tiaras, and what looked like a truckload of ball gowns. The ball gowns hung on a rack behind the chair where she was holding court to a mob of yard-sale shoppers, who were hovering around her, eager-eyed and salivating. Oddly, considering the feminine nature of the wares being offered up for sale, each and every one of the shoppers was male…

…as was the woman holding court.

You see, it had taken me a minute to realize that under the culottes and the flowing silk blouse and the rouged cheeks and swinging blonde wig with the Veronica Lake bang obliterating one gaudily painted eye, was a man who could have quite easily been the best argument yet for why aging, overweight men should never, never, never dress in drag to begin with.

At the moment the man was modeling a silver tiara for one of the customers, carefully stabbing it into his platinum wig at the proper Miss America angle, striking a pose with one massive meatloaf of a hand on one beefy hip. His other hand cradled the back of his watermelon-sized head as in an old ’60s studio glossy of Mamie Van Doren trying to appear fetching, which Miss Van Doren had done magnificently, by the way. The drag queen’s attempt at being fetching was a little less successful.

The customer, a young man in pink hot pants, a see-through muscle shirt with no discernible muscles underneath, and sporting white go-go boots on his feet (believe it or not), apparently disagreed with me. He clapped his hands in glee and reached eagerly for his wallet. The sale had been made.

Tearing my eyes from the transaction, I spun 360 degrees to take in all the other yard-sale tables and booths spread out around the crumbling apartment complex. It didn’t take me long to realize there weren’t many women present. Not real women, at any rate. There was, however, a plethora of gay men. And since I’m a gay man myself, I had to admit the array was fascinating.

A young couple, one stunningly handsome, the other cute in a Narnia-faunish-whimsical sort of way, were selling antique dishes at a table next to the drag queen. By their stances alone, I could tell they were lovers—the one with the strawberry-blond hair softly framing his bespectacled, elfin face, and the other with his buzz-cut brown hair and gorgeous green eyes. The stunning young man with said gorgeous green eyes smiled a thousand-watt smile at a passing customer, and his beauty was such that he damn near stopped the customer in his tracks. Yet not once did he take his hand out of his boyfriend’s back pocket while he did it.

When the old drag queen next door squealed in delight and waved to the two to snag their attention, I learned the two young men’s names, for the old drag queen had a stentorian voice that stabbed through the crowd like a burglar alarm.

“Squee, Stanley! Squee, Roger!” the drag queen screeched. “I made another sale!”

The two young men laughed and gave the old queen a thumbs-up before turning back to the customer who was standing in front of them. At the moment the customer was squinting at the manufacturer’s mark on the bottom of a porcelain serving dish as if maybe he was hoping to find it had been crafted during the Ming dynasty and next week he’d be a contestant on Antiques Roadshow, explaining to the world how he’d turned a fifty-cent yard-sale purchase into a million-dollar bonanza.

Fat chance.

A little farther on, I spotted two more young men. They too were obviously in love. They stood behind a table filled with individually wrapped baked goods. Cookies, pies, breads. One had short reddish blond hair and a really beautiful ass tucked into a pair of old, faded jeans. The other towered over him, looking Mediterranean with his swarthy skin and black hair. Both were truly handsome. All the time I stared at them, the tall dark man kept his hand resting at the nape of his partner’s neck, while the recipient of that affection continually leaned into the strong, loving hand and smiled a secretive little smile. A fool could see the two were an item. Being naturally nosy, I wondered how long they had been together. Was I jealous? You bet.

A little sign perched on an easel at the edge of the table read “Baked Goods by Milan and Harlie.” So those were their names, then.

Back at the other table, the customer with the upside-down serving bowl in his hand said, just loud enough for me to hear, “Stanley? Roger? How much?” A moment later, the customer had to ask the same question again because the two men, Stanley and Roger, were so lost in each other’s eyes they seemed to have forgotten they were in the middle of a sales transaction at all.

The customer, a tall geeky guy with screaming red hair that shot straight up off the top of his head and resembled a frazzled pencil eraser, seemed to have lost interest in the purchase since the two salesmen only had eyes for each other. He turned away and began to saunter off nonchalantly into the crowd, eyes rolling unconcernedly skyward as he casually hummed a gentle tune. But the bowl was still in his hand.

I had lifted my hand to warn the two vendors they were being robbed when Roger whistled through a mouthful of fingers like a New Yorker hailing a cab. The shoplifter turned, blushed in embarrassment, and scurried back to humbly return the bowl to the table from whence it came.

“Charlie, Charlie, Charlie…,” the green-eyed Adonis chided.

“Charlie, Charlie, Charlie…,” his strawberry-blond boyfriend tsked.

I smiled as the would-be thief hemmed and hawed and shuffled his feet while his face grew redder and redder and redder. Then a pudgy little guy in a ten-gallon cowboy hat and Tony Lama boots swept in and, with an apologetic bow to both Roger and Stanley, dragged the redheaded shoplifter away with a giggle and a friendly pinch on the shoplifter’s ass.

I had turned away, after watching this little melodrama unfold, when the sound of my name coming from somewhere in the crowd grabbed my attention. The voice that called out to me was familiar. I turned and spotted Pete Ingersol waving at me from a couple of tables over. It wasn’t hard to spot Pete, since his tall, lanky frame stood a head taller than anyone around him. Pete and I worked together at Century Bookkeeping. We had two of the most boring jobs on the planet, yet somehow in the midst of all that boredom, we had managed to strike up a friendship.

And that’s why I was here. A kind act from a friend. According to Pete, there was a vacancy. A vacancy in the Belladonna Arms—the old rattletrap apartment building at my back where Pete and his recent bride, Sylvia, lived. It was a vacancy I sorely needed to claim for my own, and Pete had taken it upon himself to help me snatch it up.

“Barney!” Pete cried. “Barney Teegarden. Get your tired ass over here!”

Yep. Barney Teegarden. That’s me. Five seven. Hazel eyes. Mouse-brown hair. A little scar on my chin from a bicycling accident when I was twelve. Kind of skinny. And bookish. Very, very bookish. Today I was wearing baggy shorts, battered tennies, and a T-shirt that said Save Your Receipts. I had opted for contacts rather than glasses since my best pair of glasses were being held together by Gorilla Tape after another biking accident just a few days before, which also accounted for the Band-Aid on my bare knee. Since the Gorilla-Taped glasses made me look even dorkier than I already did, I didn’t mind shedding them, although in truth I am dorky, so there is not much I can do about looking otherwise. In fact, most bookkeepers are dorky. It seems to be a prerequisite of the trade. Hell, my good friend Pete was dorky too—in a long, handsome, sexy sort of way.

I spun to weave a path through the crowd toward my friend. In the course of spinning, I managed to tangle one sneakered foot with the other and damn near fell flat on my face. A passing gay person (the guy with the white go-go boots, still wearing the tiara he had bought from the obese drag queen) grabbed my arm and kept me from falling.

Once I regained my footing, the cute gay guy smiled sweetly at the words on my shirt, gave me a gentle chuck on the chin, then readjusted his tiara and skipped off with a friendly wave.

“Thank you!” I called after him. “Love the boots!” But he didn’t seem to hear. Cute gay people never hear what I have to say. If you’re a dork yourself, you’ll know what I mean.

I turned to see Pete watching me with a broad grin spread across his face. He was shaking his head. He had, after all, been watching me stumble and trip and bump into things for a couple of years now at the office, so my clumsiness was no surprise to him.

As I approached him, I tried not to ogle. I sort of had a crush on Pete, not that it would ever go anywhere. Pete was so over-the-top in love with his wife, my attraction to him didn’t show up as so much as a blip on his gaydar screen. Pete’s wife, by the way, used to be a guy, so Pete himself, although he was married to a woman now, hadn’t entirely disembarked from the gay train himself.

Anyway, he scooped me into his long arms and crunched my face to his chest like an old war buddy. Then he pushed me to arm’s length and looked me up and down, focusing especially on my bare legs.

“First time I ever saw you out of a suit. You’ve got legs.”

“Uh… yeah.”

“Cute ones.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, Barney. Cute, fuzzy ones. Nice Band-Aid. It’s got little blue rocket ships on it.”

I looked down at my knee and tried not to pout. “They only had kiddie Band-Aids at the drugstore.”

“Arthur’s gonna love you.”

“Who’s Arthur?”

“The landlord.”

“You think I’ll get the apartment?”

“Don’t see why not.”

Pete took my hand and dragged me toward his table of secondhand goods, which seemed to include an inordinate number of calculators, unused ledgers, and an astonishing collection of pocket guards with logos from a score of different businesses. Perks of the job. Told you being a bookkeeper was dorky. A broad array of makeup items cozied up to the geek collection, and I suddenly remembered that Pete’s wife had of late assumed the mantle of Avon representative. Pete had been trying to sell the crap at the office for the past month or so to help her out. He did it so energetically that now when any of the office personnel saw him standing at the water cooler, they immediately made a U-turn and headed off in the other direction, clutching their wallets. I already had a stuffed panda with a bottle of cheap cologne tucked inside its belly I didn’t know what to do with, a pair of candelabras filled with aftershave, and enough body spray to make me smell nice until I was old enough to retire, which was about forty years down the road. I was determined not to buy any more Avon for as long as I lived.

I had met Sylvia before, of course, and now here she was again, sitting at the table, applying pancake and rouge and lipstick and false eyelashes to a man who would never be pretty no matter how much camouflage and concealer she slathered over his face.

“Look who I found!” Pete cried out, and Sylvia’s lovely face spread wide in a smile when she laid eyes on me.

“Barney!” she said. “You made it!”

She said a polite “excuse me” to the potential customer, who didn’t notice since he was spellbound by his own reflection in a handheld mirror he had glommed onto and was staring raptly at, obviously pleased by what he was seeing. Which made a grand total of one.

With the customer put safely on hold, Sylvia popped to her feet and flounced over to give me a hug. “It’s lovely to see you, Barney.”

I blushed. There was something about Sylvia that always made me blush. Sweetly honest people almost always do. Today she was barefoot and wearing cutoff blue jeans. She also wore one of Pete’s dress shirts, tied at the waist, exposing a trim expanse of midriff.

“You too, Sylvia,” I stammered. “It’s lovely to see you too.”

Pete looked on with a proud grin while Sylvia leaned in and whispered in my ear. “Now back to work. God forgive me for what I’ve done to this man.”

I laughed and whispered back. “He’s lovely.”

Sylvia rolled her eyes so far up into her head only the whites were left showing and said, “Aren’t you sweet,” as if she didn’t believe me for a minute. With that, she hustled back to her customer.

Pete immediately grabbed my arm and hauled me off through the crowd in the opposite direction.

“Golly, I love your wife,” I said.

“Everybody loves my wife.”

I looked Pete up and down as he dragged me along. “Pete, you’re gaining weight.”

He growled. “I know. It’s the goddamn Toll House cookies. That’s the only thing Sylvia can cook.”

I smiled. “If you don’t want her, maybe I’ll see what I can do about taking her off your hands.”

He growled more menacingly and said, “That’s what you think, Barney, although I’d be more than happy to fork over a few cookies.” Then he gave me a wink.

We laughed. But my laugh quickly crawled back down my throat and hid behind my spleen when I realized where Pete was leading me.

Straight back to the overweight drag queen with the Veronica Lake wig and the culottes.

I tugged on Pete’s arm to slow him down. “Holy moly! That’s Arthur?”

Pete kept dragging me along. I was five seven, Pete was six four. You do the math. I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

“Yep,” he said. “Ain’t he grand?”

“Does he always dress like that?”

“No. He’s usually more queenly, if you know what I mean. Today I think he’s shooting for casually chic.”

I couldn’t imagine Arthur looking any more queenly, or any less casually chic, than he already did. “A big girl,” I said.

Pete smiled fondly at the man we were approaching. “Yes. Yes, he is. And he has a big heart to go with it.”

This time when I tried to pull Pete to a stop, I put a little more back into it. When he realized I had become a veritable anchor he was having to drag along the ground, he stopped and looked back to see what the hell the holdup was.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I’m not sure I’ll fit in here,” I said, surveying all the gay men milling around. I couldn’t spot one lumberjack type in the whole bunch. Not that I was particularly lumberjacky myself, to say the least, but overly gay gay people always made me a little uneasy. Probably from some unconscious fear that deep down inside I was as overly gay as they were. Not that I didn’t know I was gay. I did. I just always sort of hoped I was a little butch about it. Although I knew I wasn’t.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, neuroses and I go way back.

Pete stepped closer and hovered over me like a mother prepping her six-year-old son for the first day of school. He straightened my collar, ran his fingers through my hair to get it back off my forehead, then licked his shirttail and washed what was apparently a smudge of dirt off my nose.

“Poor little guy,” he said. “You’re a nervous wreck.”

“I’m always a nervous wreck.”

“I know, but this time it actually shows. What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure I’ll fit in,” I said again.

Pete cocked his head to the side and studied me. “You’re gay, aren’t you?”

“Y-yes.”

“You need a place to live, don’t you?”

“Y-yes.”

“You want to fall in love, don’t you?”

This time I didn’t answer. Not right away. Then I found the words. “No,” I said. “I want someone to fall in love with me. There’s a difference. Hell, I fall in love every other day. It’s the reciprocal part that needs a boost.”

Again Pete licked his shirttail and polished my nose.

“Stop that,” I snapped, squirming out of his grip.

He grinned and said, “Oh, hush. You have glitter on your nose. I’m washing it off.”

“Glitter? Where did I get glitter on my nose?”

Pete arched an eyebrow and gazed around for my benefit. “Look where you are. Glitter central.”

“Oh, yeah.”

He gave me a further appraisal and finally rested his hands on my shoulders, looking down, searing me with his eyes. “Barney, everybody who moves into this building falls in love. And they are also fallen in love upon. I’m not sure why it happens, but it does. You’re just going to have to trust me. You need a new apartment anyway since yours is going condo, and you can’t afford to buy the damn thing on what you earn at the office.”

I groaned. “Not even close.”

“So here you are. Not only will you have an affordable place to live that is way cheaper than what you’re paying now, but in no time you’ll find the romance your life has been sorely needing. I promise. It’s the strangest thing, Barney, but it’s true. Everyone who lives under this roof finds love. Even Sylvia says so. And Sylvia is never wrong. Besides, we’ll be able to carpool to work. We’ll both save money on gas.”

The heat of another blush crept onto my face, but I tried to ignore it. “Don’t tell any of the other tenants how pathetic I am. Okay?”

Pete dragged a fake zipper across his smiling mouth. “Not a word,” he said, tossing the imaginary key into the crowd bustling around us.

I took a deep breath and stared at him. Like a tree, my feet were still rooted to the earth. I wasn’t ready to move yet, and Pete knew it.

“I’m your friend, Barney.”

“I know.”

“I wish you’d trust me.”

“I wish I did too.”

He laughed. “Come on. Let’s get this over with. I’ll introduce you to Arthur, we’ll get you settled in after the yard sale is over, and then I’ll wait for the day when you come pecking at my door to apologize for ever doubting me. And when you do come pecking at my door to beg my forgiveness, I hope you’ll bring your new lover with you. I’d like to meet him.”

“My new lover….” I liked the sound of that. I really did.

“Okay,” I finally said, drawing in a big gulp of courage from the sea-and-Opium-scented air. “Lead on, Pete. You pushy prick.”

He gave me a bracing smile and began to lead me forward, but I reached out and yanked him to a stop one more time.

“What now?” he asked with an exasperated huff.

“Don’t ever wash me with spit again. It’s unsanitary.” Not that I would have minded sampling a few of his other bodily juices.

“Oh, hush, Barney.”

The next thing I knew, I was face-to-face with the gigantic drag queen in the platinum Veronica Lake wig. At the moment, he had four feather boas draped around his tree-trunk-sized neck, each gaudier than the next. He was waving them around, trying to attract a buyer, until Pete shoved me into his face, and said, “Arthur, I want you to meet Barney. Barney needs a place to live.”

Arthur slipped ham-sized hands into my armpits and lifted me a foot off the ground to stare directly into my eyes. I hung there like a Christmas ornament, wishing the fuck he would put me down.

“You’re a cutie,” he said in a booming baritone that rolled through lips saturated with peach-tinted lip gloss. “And you’re a friend of Pete’s?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, ma’am. I mean, sir.”

His lips spread wide in a grin. He gave me a little shake, as if he were trying to dislodge some fruit from my branches, then gently set me on the ground.

“Done,” he said.

“What’s done?” I asked.

“Your apartment. It’s ready for you to move into whenever you’re ready. There’s a vacancy right next to Pete and Sylvia.”

I blinked. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“I’m a tenant?”

“You’re a tenant.”

Pete slipped in between us and gave Arthur a peck on the cheek. Then he gave me one.

“See?” he asked me. “Didn’t I tell you not to worry?”

He turned and pumped Arthur’s hand up and down for about ten seconds. His face was aglow with happiness, and not for the first time, I wished Sylvia didn’t have such a stranglehold on Pete’s heart. I wouldn’t have minded taking a crack at it myself.

“Thank you, Arthur!” Pete cried. “Barney will be your best tenant ever.”

Arthur pinched Pete’s cheek and ruffled his hair. “I’m sure he will.” Then he turned to me. “Got a lover?”

“Uh… no.”

Arthur pulled me into his massive, hairy, Opium-scented arms and squeezed me so hard I thought I felt an organ burst. “Well, don’t worry, honey. The building will take care of that.”

“The building,” I grunted, trying to draw a breath.

He eyed me with his one visible eyebrow cocked high. “That’s right. The building. Ever hear of love pollen?”

“Uh, nope.”

He blessed me with a secretive smile. “You will. It simply rains down from the walls in this place. And when that pollen touches you, you’re lost.”

I gazed over the feather boas draped across Arthur’s shoulders, tried not to sneeze because one of them was tickling my nose, and stared up at the homely old edifice standing in front of me. “Love pollen,” I whispered beneath my breath, wondering what the hell the guy was talking about.

I gave myself a shake to dislodge any droplets of insanity that might have drifted down upon me like the ever-present glitter, and thought, Oookay, not my circus, not my monkeys. But since the Belladonna Arms was apparently my circus now, and since I would soon be one of the many monkeys inhabiting the joint, I found myself grinning in spite of myself. Because I suddenly knew—I just knew—this particular circus was going to fit me like a glove.

Love pollen or no love pollen, for one of the first times in my life, I felt as if I’d come home.

I blushed one last time when Pete planted a kiss on one of my cheeks and Arthur planted a kiss on my other. Both men loomed over and around me, patting and cooing, making me feel safe and loved and welcome.

Embarrassed by the sudden surge of emotion welling up inside me, I plucked one of the boas from around Arthur’s neck, and draped it over my own. “How much?” I asked in a ragged voice.

Arthur gave the boa a theatrical flourish, fluffing it beneath my chin and flipping it rakishly over my shoulder so the end trailed down over my ass. When he was satisfied I was properly adorned, he gave me another peck on the cheek.

“For you, honey? Nothing. It’s a housewarming gift. Welcome home.”

Chapter 2

THREE DAYS later I was in.

As one might guess when signing a lease in a building such as the Belladonna Arms, there weren’t a lot of amenities attached to the signing. Let me put it this way—Architectural Digest wasn’t chomping at the bit to do a cover shoot and a twelve-page spread on the joint.

My new apartment didn’t come with a gym membership or a bevy of hot personal trainers to lead me through my workouts. I didn’t have free access to the pool on the roof or the tennis courts in the back, mainly because there wasn’t a pool or a tennis court within a mile of the place. I didn’t even have an assigned parking space for my POS Kia Rio, except for what I could find on the street, and since the Arms was practically in the heart of downtown, there usually wasn’t an available parking space within a mile of the place either. Nor did I have a concierge to hold an umbrella over my head at the front door when it was raining. But then, this was Southern California. How often did it rain?

What I did wind up with was a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor next to Pete and Sylvia, a rust-stained, claw-footed bathtub older than I was, and a refrigerator older than the tub. I had faded linoleum on the kitchen floor that looked like an army of iron-shod orcs had been tromping across it on their way to war for the past millennium or two, and the windows could only be opened all the way with a screwdriver and a hammer and a lot of cussing and screaming. Still, these negatives were counterbalanced by a couple of positives I found charming as hell. On the one hand, I had a pretty good view of the Pacific Ocean if I looked through my kitchen window at just the right angle while I pressed my cheek to the glass and squinted along the side of the building to the west. On the other hand, I was paying three hundred dollars a month less than I had been paying for my last apartment, and my last apartment didn’t have any amenities either.

Of course, I could be carried up to my last apartment in an elevator. After a few months slogging up and down four flights of stairs at the Belladonna Arms, I figured that was one amenity I’d sorely miss. But I’m a resilient guy, or so I continually tell myself. I would make do. At least I was on my own and among friends. Well, three friends, actually. Pete and Sylvia and, surprisingly, Arthur, who had wormed his way into my heart almost immediately. Nothing is more important than having friends.

Except maybe having a lover to share my new digs with. If everyone could be believed, however, that would come later. I would have to trust the magic of the Belladonna Arms’ love pollen to bring me one. Was I honestly buying into that fairy tale crap? No. I wasn’t that crazy. But it was nice to contemplate.

So there you have it. At twenty-six, my new life was beginning. Well, not really. I still had the same old boring job. I still didn’t have very many friends, but counting Arthur I had one more than I did three days earlier, so that was a good thing. I was still too short and too poor. And after putting the last of my belongings in place, parking my used Cannondale in the entryway by the front door, and stepping from a much-needed shower to stare at myself in my new bathroom mirror (which had a crack in it), I realized I still looked fairly dorky. Although I had to admit, I looked a little less dorky naked and dripping wet than I did in my bookkeeper suit and tie, with an array of ballpoint pens protruding from my pocket guard, and my Gorilla-Taped glasses perched on the end of my nose.

As I might have mentioned before, I’m a little guy. Always have been. Studying myself now with a critical eye, I had to admit my body was nice enough. With a respectable cock and (as Pete had noticed) nice fuzzy legs. The same fuzz softened my arms, and a teeny patch of it also lay splattered across my chest. There wasn’t an ab or bulging muscle in sight, but then there weren’t any scars, moles, misspelled tattoos, or bulbous overhangs of extraneous flesh either, so I had to be happy about that.

I dried myself off and shook my head for about two minutes to dry my mousy brown hair. Once that chore was accomplished, I stood stock-still in front of my cracked bathroom mirror and cocked my head to the side to listen. Except for the roar of an airliner descending toward Lindbergh Field from somewhere high above my head in the California sky, and the sound of my alarm clock ticking by the bed on the other side of the bathroom door, the apartment was dead silent. That was okay. Having lived alone for the entirety of my adult life, silence was a sound I was used to.

I cocked my head in the other direction. Wonder of wonders, more silence.

I recalled a conversation I’d had with Arthur, my new landlord (and friend), on the day I signed the one-year lease. We were sitting at the kitchen table in his first floor apartment at the foot of the building’s staircase, just off the lobby. It was early in the morning, and Arthur was wearing a chenille housecoat with white marabou feathers around the collar and cuffs and hem. He had a white satin snood on his head and marabou-feathered house slippers on his size thirteen feet. He looked somewhat akin to an overweight chicken pumped to the gills with growth hormones and suffering from a debilitating case of split ends. His lover—a tall, elegant man with gentle eyes and a calm manner who was pretty much the polar opposite to Arthur—was standing behind Arthur’s chair, watching the proceedings. I guessed both men were in their fifties.

The lover’s name was Tom. He stood there, smiling down congenially, giving me the occasional friendly wink, sipping from a coffee cup he was holding in one hand while resting the other on Arthur’s massive marabou-feathered shoulder. Tom was wearing dress pants, a white shirt, and a spiffy little bow tie, neatly knotted at his throat. With nary a marabou feather in sight, I was led to believe that Tom, unlike Arthur, was basically sane.

Arthur was tap-dancing his long, red, press-on nails across the tabletop as he watched me go through the lease, signing and initialing every time a big black X popped up in the document. He was eating from a huge bowl of M&M’s while he waited. Breakfast of champions.

He twisted around to gaze up at Tom. “Isn’t he too cute to be alone?” Arthur asked, meaning me, I presumed.

Tom chuckled and thumped a fingertip against Arthur’s snood like he was checking a melon to see how ripe it was. “Don’t get any ideas. You’re spoken for.”

Arthur grinned. “I know that, silly. Who do we know Barney might like? I think some blind dates are in order.”

I groaned and commenced humming the matchmaking song from Fiddler.

Arthur slapped my hand good-naturedly, jarring my last signature, and said, “Stop it.”

“I hate blind dates,” I said. “Or I should say, blind dates hate me.”

Arthur moued. “No, they don’t.”

“Yes, they do.”

“No, they don’t.”

“I’m sure they do.”

“I’m sure they don’t.”

“Well, they might not.”

“Oh, trust me, they will.”

Tom rolled his eyes and checked his watch. “Well, this could go on all day. I have to get to work. Delis don’t run themselves, you know.” He tucked his cup in the soapy water in the sink, leaned down to give Arthur’s cheek a peck, then reached across the table to tousle my hair. “Welcome to the Arms, Barney,” he said on his way out the door.

I smiled at his retreating back. “Thanks, Tom.”

Arthur watched him go with so much love in his eyes I felt a tug of emotion somewhere down among my inner workings, somewhere around the heart, I thought it was. Or it might have been a kidney. I’m not well versed in anatomy.

Arthur saw me staring at Tom as he smiled and waved his way out the door.

“You’re wondering how I caught myself such a handsome fish.”

“No, I’m not,” I said, although I was.

Arthur grinned. “Liar.”

“Well, okay. Maybe I was wondering a little.”

“Actually, Barney, I didn’t catch Tom at all. He caught me.”

“How’d he do that?” I asked, matching Arthur’s simpering smile with one of my own.

“He caught me by being himself. I love men who know how to do that.”

A fat black cat suddenly leaped onto the table between us, causing us both to jump. He must have snuck in the front door when Tom toddled out.

“Jesus, where did you come from?” Arthur moaned, scooping the cat into his arms and carrying him back through the door to dump him in the hall. “Go panhandle from someone else,” he said as he closed his apartment door in the creature’s face. The cat gave a long, plaintive “Meoooow!” that sounded remarkably like “Fuck you.”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Depends on who you ask,” Arthur answered. “And if you find out who he belongs to, let me know. They’ve got some ’splaining to do.”

As he passed by me once again to take a seat at the table, he too reached out to tousle my hair, just as Tom had. I was beginning to feel like a favorite corgi.

And speaking of corgis, I suddenly asked, “What about pets? Can I get one?”

Arthur shrugged. “Sure. As long as it’s not a rhinoceros or a narwhal or another freeloading black cat, go for it.”

He squeezed my cheek between thumb and forefinger, carefully so as not to mutilate me with his three-inch nails, and very sweetly informed me, “We’re your friends now, Tom and I. If you need anything, let one of us know, and we’ll see what we can do. Okay?”

I gulped back a sudden throat blockage. I always was an old softy. “Thank you, Arthur.”

He tapped the end of my nose with a fingertip. Then he fluffed the marabou feathers at his bosom, patted his snood to make sure it was properly aligned, and reached out to drag me into his arms. With a powerful squeeze that was almost fart-inducing, he welcomed me to the Arms, told me not to worry because a blind date would be forthcoming whether I wanted one or not, and ushered me out the door with a hearty laugh and a kiss on the cheek, eventually dumping me in the hall sort of like he’d done the cat.

A little breathless, I found myself standing outside his door, wondering what I had gotten myself into. Now, as I stood in front of my cracked bathroom mirror and thought about it all, I had to smile. I had never in my life felt as welcomed. I was eager to get to know some of the other tenants, which was sort of astonishing, since I’m not exactly outgoing when it comes to socializing. Perhaps knowing everyone in the building was gay had something to do with the ease of my transition into life at the Belladonna Arms.

Or maybe I really was at the point in my life where I was tired of being alone. So tired of it, in fact, I was finally willing to actually try to do something about it.

With the silence of my new apartment still thundering around me, I stood naked in the kitchen and ate dinner—a platter of Toll House cookies, compliments of Pete, who had been so eager to get rid of them he had damn near thrown them at me through the door. Since it was Friday night and the stores would be open for a few more hours, I dressed and set off into town to buy a few things for the apartment. It was the beginning of a weekend away from work and my first weekend in my new home, and since I was in no hurry to get things done, I decided to walk. After all, the downtown stores were only a few blocks away, so I wouldn’t need my car. Might as well get some fresh air instead.

As I bounced down the front steps on my way into town, feeling fatter already from the fifteen cookies I’d scarfed down for dinner, I stopped long enough to give that same black cat a rub between the shoulder blades as I sailed past him on the stoop. He arched his back into my hand and very sweetly said good-bye.

Apparently, I had just made another friend.

AFTER AN hours-long shopping jaunt, I dragged my ass home with a ton of goodies—two bags of groceries, a couple of throw rugs, a new shower curtain, a new mouse pad for my computer, a new laundry basket, one sack of cleaning supplies, and a really heavy tote bag packed to the brim with books. I had passed an unexplored bookstore on the way home, and I have yet to walk by a bookstore without whipping out a credit card and buying everything in sight. (The tote bag was free because the owner of the bookstore knew a good thing when he saw one.)

Since my new apartment was furnished, I didn’t need anything major. I already had my own linens, my own microwave oven and TV, my own dishes, silverware, and pots and pans. I also already had a gazillion books, but hey, you can never have too many books, right?

As the sky outside my kitchen window began to brighten with stars, I heard a scratching at my door. I peeked through the peephole to see who was out there, but saw no one. Confused, I pulled open the door and found the black cat that had come to visit Arthur earlier. He was sitting on the mat licking his more-than-ample butt.

“Hello there,” I said.

He stopped licking and gave me a yawn, as if to say, “Yeah, yeah. Enough with the niceties. You gonna let me in or what?”

I smiled and ushered him inside. He accepted my invitation with royal indifference, although he was kind enough to bump my shin with his head as he strolled past, purring loudly. He headed straight for the kitchen, leaped onto the kitchen table, and sat there waiting to be served like the king of Liechtenstein.

Feeling lonely on my first night in the apartment, I grandly plucked a can of people tuna from the cupboard, opened it, and served it to my houseguest on my best china, with a teeny sprig of parsley to pretty it up. I then built myself a ham and cheese sandwich, tore open a bag of chips, and poured myself a glass of milk. Arranging everything neatly on the kitchen table, with my guest and me facing each other from opposite sides, we partook of dinner. Together.

The cat, who I was beginning to think of as Wilbur, ate faster than I. I was barely halfway through my sandwich when his plate was shiny clean. Even the parsley was gone.

Purring more loudly, which I took to mean he’d enjoyed his meal and was grateful for the company and exceptional service, he carefully wended his way across the table and slipped down onto my lap, where he promptly curled into a tight little ball and went to sleep. While I finished my own dinner, I laid my hand over his face and felt his gentle breath stir across my fingertips as he softly snored his pleasure. So as not to disturb him, I sat there long after I had finished eating, watching the apartment darken around me and savoring the sight of the San Diego skyline blink itself, one building at a time, into glorious beauty outside my kitchen window.

Just as my legs were beginning to go numb (Wilbur weighed enough for three cats and maybe a small anvil), the beast shook himself awake, clawed his way up to the tabletop again, and pushed his forehead against my chin to say good-bye. With that courtesy out of the way, he waddled off toward the front door and waited for the doorman to see him out. Which I finally did.

“Toodles,” I said as he sashayed off down the hall. He didn’t say good-bye, but I thought I heard him burp. Good enough.

I closed my front door and found myself alone once again. I sighed and turned on every light in the place, hoping to chase away the lonely shadows.

Beer in hand, I watched TV until I couldn’t stand it another minute. Digging through my bag of new books, I finally selected one and settled onto the couch to lose myself in it.

When I awoke, still on the couch, the Saturday morning sun was peering through the living room window, blinking me awake. The first coherent thought that wormed its way into my head was of me sitting at my kitchen table the night before, gobbling up a second platter of Sylvia’s Toll House cookies right down to the last crumb. I wondered if by now those sixty thousand calories had already attached themselves to my ass.

I rubbed the sleep boogers from my eyes and, ignoring the fact that my morning wood was doing a rather impressive job of tenting out my underpants, I raced off to the bathroom for my first pee of the day. I brushed my teeth in front of the mirror—all the while staring at my hair, which had somehow poufed up to twelve times its normal size as I slept—then threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, laced up my running shoes, and pulled a baseball cap over my head to control the hair. Before I knew it, I was outside, jogging down the hill toward the bay and wishing I was back in bed.

I don’t know why I run. I hate running. Okay, I’m lying. I do know why I run. I run because I’m the only one in my family who isn’t forty pounds overweight, and I would really like to keep it that way. Plus standing five seven, it doesn’t take many extra pounds to carve substantial inroads into your sex life if you are a single gay man. Not that I had a sex life anyway. I mean, other than the recurring three-way I had with myself, my right hand, and the bottle of cinnamon-flavored lube I kept stashed in my nightstand by the bed.

I probably shouldn’t have told you that.

Clomping up Broadway, the street all Twilight Zonish and empty at this early hour on a Saturday morning, I sped past Beaumont College, then made a left toward Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres, which was also Twilight Zonish and empty except for all the homeless people camped out around the edge of it with their rusted grocery carts stacked high with battered belongings and propping up dirty blankets serving as tents. Unfriendly eyes followed me as I sped past, the overriding emotion in those scattered, lidded eyes seemed to be anger more than shame, which I suppose I couldn’t blame the homeless people for since they were in their makeshift beds trying to sleep while I was running past with my Reeboks noisily slapping the sidewalk mere inches from their weary heads.

Past the stadium the homeless disappeared and the streets widened, giving me a glimpse of the bay up ahead. While I was eyeing the bay, I ran smack into a parking meter, performed what felt like a couple of awkward somersaults, and landed flat on my ass with a grunt. Three quarters fell out of the meter, so it wasn’t a total loss. I picked myself up, pocketed the coins, then turned to enjoy the view of smooth gray water and the masts of a thousand pleasure boats bobbing at their wharves. Here in the ritzier part of town, I spotted new sets of eyes studying my progress as I recommenced my jog. These eyes were less resentful than the others, but just as unfriendly as they looked out from deck chairs and cabin windows at the early morning fool trying to outrun his own ass, which at this early point in the game of life, was still fairly attractive despite Sylvia’s damn cookies. Or so I hoped.

I tromped along the boardwalk, my footsteps echoing across the bay like gunshots. I thought about extending my jog all the way to the airport, a couple of miles away, but decided I’d rather dig my lungs out with a melon baller than run any farther. That executive decision made, I immediately headed back to the apartment at a walk, limping slightly from my fall and dragging my cookie-enhanced ass behind me like a reluctant dog on a leash. Halfway there, I narrowly missed being clipped by a passing trolley, and it so rattled my nerves that I stopped at a sidewalk café and ordered bacon, eggs, cheesy fries, and a latte. While I waited for the food to arrive, I berated myself up one side and down the other for not ordering pancakes to go with it.

An hour later, I was home. The minute I walked through my door, I kicked my shoes off and stripped down to nothing. Climbing on the scales, I learned I had actually gained two pounds during the course of my run.

Probably should have skipped the cheesy fries.

AFTER ANOTHER lonely night in my new apartment, during which even Wilbur the cat didn’t come to visit, I awoke Sunday morning with a wee hangover from having drunk three glasses of wine while reading a gay romance novel, which was a big mistake because the sexy love story had made me feel lonelier than ever.

I carried my aching head into the shower and tried to wash away the pain.

Moments later, just as I was thinking about lathering up my morning boner and whipping up a load of Barney juice, if you know what I mean, I heard a knock. Hurriedly toweling off, I padded on wet feet through the living room, with said boner bobbing along in front of me, still untouched and in a snit about it, to find a note on the floor someone had slid under the door.

I’m desperate, darling. Meet me in the lobby and try to be discreet. Arthur.

I couldn’t imagine why Arthur was feeling desperate or what being discreet had to do with it if he did. Sartorially speaking, Arthur was probably the most indiscreet man I’d ever met. But the note was mysterious enough to make me wonder what it was all about. So a few minutes later, dressed in cargo shorts, a tank top, ball cap, and tennies with ankle socks, and still horny, I met Arthur in the lobby as requested. To my utter surprise, I found Arthur waiting for me in regular men’s clothing with not a bead or feather or sequin in sight. No high heels, no ball gown, no wig, nothing. Never having seen Arthur without a wig before, I was rather alarmed to find the top of his head as hairless and shiny and round as a bowling ball. Leaning in closer, I did spot a wee strip of eyeliner accentuating his eyes, and somehow this brought order back from chaos. I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing now it really was Arthur after all.

I smiled a greeting and said, “Whassup, bwana?”

Arthur peered over my shoulder, first in one direction, then the other, and then he whipped hurriedly around to peer over his own shoulder as if he thought someone might have been sneaking up behind him. When he was satisfied we were alone, he grasped my hand and tugged me across the lobby and out the front door.

“These walls have ears,” he said in a stage whisper. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Uh, okay. But why are you whispering? And why aren’t you in a dress?”

“I’m incognito.”

“Incognito from what?”

“Oh, shut up, love.”

“Gotcha.”

I let a couple of beats of silence pass, then asked, “So what are we doing, then?”

Arthur emitted a huge sigh, sort of like a blue whale clearing his blowhole. “If you must know, we’re looking for a friend.”

“My friend or your friend?”

“My friend.”

“Why? Is he lost?”

Arthur gave me a sad glance. “More than you’ll ever know.”

“So you want to help him, then.”

Arthur ruffled my hair. Why do people insist on doing that? “Yes.”

“Then I hope we find him,” I said.

Rather than head for Arthur’s car, wherever and whatever it might happen to be, we traipsed down the hill afoot, once more headed for downtown. As we walked along on Broadway, Arthur chewed at a thumbnail and looked worried. His behavior was so mystifying, I finally grabbed his arm and dragged him to a halt in front of a donut shop.

The first thing he said was “Good idea. A donut is just what I need.”

“Fuck the donuts,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on. Who are we really looking for?”

“A friend. Like I said.”

“Why are we looking for him?”

“Because I think he needs help.”

“No, I mean, why don’t you just call him?”

“I don’t think he has a phone.”

“Well, then, where does he live?”

“I don’t know.”

I blinked back my surprise, and while I did I tried to ignore the smell of fresh donuts. I gave myself a Three Stooges face swipe. “If you don’t know where your friend lives, how do you think we’re going to find him?”

Arthur had pressed his face to the bakery window and shielded his eyes from the sun to peer inside. When he spoke I could see his breath clouding the glass. “I got a tip. Ooh, look at those caramel logs.”

“From who?”

He finally dragged his eyeballs out of the bakery window and focused them back on me. “What? Oh. From Tom. He saw my friend walk past his deli a couple of days ago. At least, he thinks it was him.”

“How do you think that’s going to help us find him? You still don’t know where he lives.”

Since the day was a hot one, Arthur plucked a lace handkerchief with daisies embroidered on it from the back pocket of his blue jeans and blotted his face. Apparently his incognito butch drag didn’t extend to his nose linens.

“Are you always this annoying?” he asked, carefully refolding the bedaisied handkerchief and tucking it back into his pocket. “Tom saw our friend pushing a shopping cart with all his belongings in it. That means he’s homeless. And that means he’s close. I figure if we stroll around, we might spot him.”

I considered that. “Poor guy,” I said. “But then what do you need me for?”

Arthur looked surprised I would ask such a question. “Moral support. What else?”

I blinked again. I seemed to do a lot of blinking when Arthur was around. “Oh. Well. Okay, then,” I stammered. “Lead on.”

Arthur hooked his thumb at the bakery door. “How about a couple of—”

“No.”

“Or maybe just one of those—”

“No.”

Arthur harrumphed and said, “Well, aren’t you just a testy little shit.”

“I’m on a very strict diet,” I said, lying through my teeth. I wanted a donut as badly as he did, but I knew I still had one more stack of Sylvia’s Toll House cookies waiting for me back at the apartment. The last thing my ass needed was donuts.

“Fine, then,” Arthur snapped. “Let’s keep looking.” Then he mumbled something less than polite under his breath. I ignored it, figuring his waistline, not to mention my own, would thank me later.

We took three steps down the street when Arthur pulled me to a stop. “One more thing,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone in the building about this.”

“I couldn’t explain it if I wanted to,” I answered truthfully.

“Good.”

Three blocks up Broadway, Arthur pointed to a restaurant by the bus stop. The sign above the door read Broadway Deli. The place appeared to be a booming enterprise, with tables packed with diners even at this early hour. The place was huge, the storefront covering half a city block.

“Tom’s business,” Arthur proudly explained. “The best corned beef in town.”

“Wow,” I said, truly impressed. “He must be rich.”

Arthur patted the back of his head, a la Mae West. “Of course he’s rich. He has me. Come on.”

We hurried past the deli and turned at the corner. Then we were ducking through an underpass at the side of the college. Running along for more than a block, the tunnel was dimly lit and kind of spooky at this early hour in the morning.

Arthur tugged me into the shadows, and we were immediately surrounded by a darkness only faintly eased by the morning sunshine beating down at either end of the underpass. As soon as my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I spotted a sea of humanity splayed out along the walls on both sides of the street.

The homeless were densely packed, and their trappings completely covered the sidewalk, so Arthur and I were forced to walk in the gutter at the edge of the street. Few people were actually visible at this early hour, but we could hear them snoring and coughing and rustling about beneath makeshift tents and under refrigerator boxes and bright blue tarps.

I tugged at Arthur’s sleeve and whispered softly. “Arthur, it’s too early. These people aren’t up yet. We could walk right past your friend and never know it.”

Arthur nodded, and in the dim light, I could see a grim glower darkening his face. “You’re right. We’ll have to come back later.”

I mouthed the word “we” but didn’t actually say it out loud. I merely nodded, figuring if Arthur really needed me for moral support, the least I could do was give it to him. He had, after all, trusted me at first glance to be an upright tenant and friend. The least I could do was be one. After all, Arthur was doing that as well, trying to be a friend, trying to find this mysterious lost soul to lend him a hand and drag him up from the desperate predicament he had apparently landed himself in.

Arthur and I were silent as we strolled back up the hill to the Belladonna Arms, both of us lost in thought. At the base of the stairs in the lobby, before Arthur ducked into his own apartment, he turned to me and gave me a quizzical look, filled with sad hope and determined optimism. There was a gentle pleading in his eyes.

I smiled, reading his mind, and said, “Of course I’ll go with you. When do you want to try again?”

Arthur’s face lit up like a road flare. “I’ll slide a note under your door,” he said with a conspiratorial wink. “Thanks, Barney.” With that, he gave my cheek a tender pat and ducked through his door.

Upstairs on four, I found Wilbur purring on my doorstep, waiting to be let in. I was rather surprised to realize how happy I was to see him there. While he had a dish of tuna and I polished off the rest of Sylvia’s cookies, I thought of Arthur’s unnamed friend and wondered if he had enough to eat on this beautiful Sunday morning. Poor guy. Whoever he was.

Chapter 3

THERE WERE twelve of us perched in various locations in Pete and Sylvia’s tiny apartment, which was the same size as mine and should have been bulging at the seams entertaining six. Of the twelve people there, I suspected ten of us were wondering if we would be having Toll House cookies for dinner. There was certainly no smell of anything else cooking on the premises.

Pete stood in the kitchen doorway, watching Sylvia unwrap a large tray of hors d’oeuvres on the kitchen table. The hors d’oeuvres consisted of tiny cookie squares, each one stabbed through the gut with a toothpick, and piled high into a precarious pyramid. When Sylvia proudly carried the tray into the living room and set it on the coffee table, I—and most likely every other guest present—wondered if dinner had just been served.

Arthur was dressed in a knee-length June Cleaveresque petticoated floral creation with matching heels and a petite little matching apron tied around his waist with a big fluffy bow at the back, not to mention a brunette wig that was swept up into a Dear Abby flip on one side and tucked back on the other side with a bigass rhinestone barrette that overpowered everything else he had on, believe it or not. He warily eyed the platter of cookie morsels and tried to smile. “Well, now, I wonder what this could be.”

As if everyone didn’t already know.

Sylvia gave him a playful slap on the hand. “They’re Toll House hors d’oeuvres, sillies. And don’t be mean. I’ve changed the recipe.”

A look of alarm crossed several faces, including my own, and Pete muttered, “Oh, dear God.”

When Sylvia explained, “I added raisins,” everyone breathed a sigh of relief. It’s hard to fuck anything up by throwing in a few raisins. But then with Sylvia, one could never be entirely sure. Her cooking skills were minimal at best. At worst, lethal.

Charlie and Bruce, the Belladonna Arms’ two resident kleptomaniacs, who were presumably on their meds and thus wouldn’t try to steal the very toilet paper out of Pete and Sylvia’s bathroom, sat huddled together on the recliner in the corner, looking very lovey-dovey indeed. Bruce’s ever-present ten-gallon hat was currently sitting on top of Charlie’s elongated head, and the two of them had secluded themselves under the broad brim for a quiet smooch.

Cute little Stanley, wearing geeky black glasses remarkably like my own, and drop-dead-gorgeous Roger, who lived together in 5C directly over me, were sitting side by side on the floor in front of the coffee table. They were the first to grab toothpick-stabbed cookies and make complimentary grunts and yummy sounds as they choked them down, which showed what kindhearted souls they were.

Tom sat roosted on the arm of the sofa beside Arthur. He and Arthur were holding hands and sipping wine. Obviously in conjunction with Arthur’s tout ensemble, Tom was dressed in what appeared to be Ward Cleaver’s best suit. He wore argyle socks, and his wingtip shoes were polished to a high shine. A thin, retro necktie was knotted neatly at his throat. On the back of the sofa rested the fedora he’d arrived in. I kept waiting for Wally and the Beav to pop in and join us.

Harlie and Milan—Milan being Tom’s son and the baker at the deli, and Harlie being Milan’s assistant who had recently been promoted to Milan’s lover—the two of whom were still on their honeymoon if all the fawning looks and lingering snuggles were any indication, were sitting on two kitchen chairs they had dragged into the living room and parked next to Tom. They were dressed like normal humans in slacks and shirts, which, situated as they were next to the imitation Cleavers, made them look rather out of place.

I sat on the love seat, which Pete and Sylvia had ushered me onto when I first arrived. I sat there diligently chewing a raisined hors d’oeuvre and sipping a bit desperately at a glass of wine. I was in my best jeans, my best dress shirt, neatly tucked, and a brand-new pair of shiny white Reeboks.

Next to me sat a young man who was drinking more determinedly than I was. He had been parked on the love seat when I arrived, rather like a spider waiting for a fly. Sylvia had introduced us with an inflection in her voice that suggested the guy might be the Catch of the Day I’d been praying for, which proved Sylvia couldn’t matchmake any better than she could cook.

We had been in the apartment for almost an hour, and I had already forgotten my blind date’s name three times. His hand kept sidling up my leg, and I kept surreptitiously squirming away to avoid it. I couldn’t help wondering if Pete had told the guy I was a slut, since he certainly seemed convinced I could be had with a minimum of effort, which on any other night might have been reasonably true. But not here. Not with everyone pretending not to be watching every move we made. Or I should say, every move he made, for I couldn’t have sat any stiller if I had been doused in concrete and left to harden overnight.

I suddenly remembered the creep’s name was Arnold something. He worked with Tom and Milan at the deli, which was understandable since he reeked of garlic. He wasn’t bad-looking, I suppose, and he apparently didn’t think I was bad-looking either. Either that, or he was flat-out indiscriminate and would stick his dick in a warm calzone if it lay still long enough. So far during the course of the evening, and we weren’t long into it by any stretch of the imagination, he had leeringly requested an invitation to my apartment to see my etchings, had sweetly asked if I liked having my brains fucked out by a bareback power top, which he seemed to think was romantic repartee, and inquired into my availability for a fisting party, assuring me he had just had a manicure and his nails were nice and short. Through it all I sat there like Helen Keller, pretending to be as deaf as a stump. I was beginning to entertain the thought of plucking one of the stiletto heels off Arthur’s foot and stabbing Arnold in the fucking forehead with it, because I thought it might be fun, when Roger interrupted our battle of wills to ask me how I was adapting to life at the Belladonna Arms.

I all but flew to my feet in my eagerness to answer. “It’s great! Couldn’t be happier! Love the place! Just love it! Love the apartment. Love the view! Love the stairs! Love the mailbox! Love it!” Of course, I would have loved it more if this hadn’t been the third blind date I’d been dragged into since I’d moved in two weeks earlier. On the first blind date, I had rather liked the man I was paired up with. Unfortunately he was so bored with me, he boogied out before I could think about being a slut. The second blind date had come down with a horrendous cold, and I wouldn’t let him within twenty feet of me or my dick. Now there was the lecherous Garlicky Arnold. I was beginning to think the Belladonna Arms love pollen had lost some of its potency, at least where little old Barney Teegarden was concerned.

Everyone was staring, a little aghast at my manic response to Roger’s question, when I jumped in my seat because Garlicky Arnold had slipped a couple of surreptitious fingers under me and pinched me on the butt.

“Oh, dear me,” Arthur muttered as I pulled Arnold’s hand out from under my ass and twisted his trespassing fingers all the way back to his wrist, making him thrash around in pain and scream like a little girl, which I found extremely satisfying.

Apparently I was the only one.

Everyone else in the room froze in horror when Garlicky Arnold leaped to his feet, his face the color of an adobe flowerpot. I was rather surprised to see a little tendril of steam spiraling up from the top of his head, or was that wishful thinking on my part?

“Are you nuts?” he screamed down at me.

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” Arthur said, shaking his head and making a sad little O with his cherry red lips, while everyone else in the room sat motionless like they’d been zapped with a stun gun.

Garlicky Arnold swung toward Tom, trying to control his anger but doing a piss-poor job of it, and announced grandly, “I’m sorry, Mr. Berger. I have to go home and soak my fingers. One of them may be irreparably damaged.”

“Pity,” Tom said, but he didn’t look too heartbroken when he said it.

A chorus of blasé “See yas” and “Toodleses” and “Maybe some other timeses” echoed around the room. Before the echoes pealed away to silence, Garlicky Arnold barged through the front door to make his grand (and prissy) exit after one final “Harrumph!” aimed in my direction.

Everyone watched him go, and the second the door slammed shut behind him, ten heads swiveled back to stare at me.

“He pinched me on the ass,” I explained. “What was I supposed to do? Marry him?”

Before anyone could say a word, there came a knock on the door.

“Oh no,” Stanley said, “the masher’s back.”

But he wasn’t. Pete answered the door to find a deliveryman there holding four pizza boxes, six orders of lasagna, a huge cardboard bucket of spaghetti, and enough veal parmesan to feed the road company of Les Misérables.

Sylvia happily clapped her hands, she too perhaps a little manic considering the way the evening was turning out, and announced, “Oh, thank God! Dinner’s here!”

But Sylvia wasn’t nearly as happy as everyone else (with the exception of Arnold). At least now we all knew we wouldn’t be partaking of Toll House cookies alone for our evening repast.

Pete and Sylvia arranged the food on the kitchen table. Everyone grabbed a plate from a stack on the counter and served themselves. Then we carried our meals into whichever corner of the apartment we thought we would be most comfortable dining in. I found myself ensconced on the living room floor near the stereo. Harlie and Milan sat on one side of me, and a plastic rhododendron sat on the other.

The first thing Milan said as we lit into our food was, “Sorry about the blind date, Barney. Arnold didn’t seem like such a Neanderthal at work.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Ordinarily I don’t mind Neanderthals. Just that one. You know,” I added, after a moment of reflection, “sometimes being single doesn’t seem so bad.”

Harlie burrowed his hand into Milan’s. “That’s because you haven’t met the right guy yet. Just wait. You’ll change your tune one of these days.”

I lifted my glass of wine and drily toasted, “Here’s hoping.” We all laughed. At least they did. I merely went through the motions of laughing. The truth was, I was beginning to get a little dispirited about the whole “let’s find Barney a boyfriend” campaign. Despite the legendary Belladonna Arms love pollen, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. And these blind dates were wearing me out. I mean literally wearing me out.

After a few minutes of silent eating, Harlie nudged me with his elbow and asked quietly, “So what’s with you and Arthur?” Milan had a sneaky grin on his face too as Harlie waited for my response.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing already what they were getting at. Knowing too I had promised Arthur not to say a word about it.

Harlie gave me a wink. “We’ve seen you guys three or four times through the deli window, walking along Broadway looking furtive. You’re like a couple of spies, peeking into doorways and behind dumpsters. Milan and I were sort of wondering what it is you’re looking for. Gnomes?”

I offered up an insincere chuckle for their listening pleasure. “Yep. That’s it. Gnomes. Seen any?”

Milan chimed in with, “And Arthur’s not even in drag. What the hell is that all about? The guy wakes up in evening gowns and high heels, but with you he’s being macho. Very suspicious, I’d say.”

“You think?” I asked, all innocence, batting my eyelashes like Elsie the Cow.

“Hmm,” Milan intoned. “I guess you’re not telling.”

I took another bite of pizza, and with a mouth so full I could barely say anything, which was pretty wily of me, I thought, I said, “Nothing to tell. We just be walking. You know. For our health.”

“Uh-huh,” the two said in unison, not believing me for a minute. Harlie added, “Arthur’s never done anything healthy in his life. I seriously doubt if he’s starting now.”

“What does Tom say about it?” I asked, chewing on a glob of lasagna—which was delicious, by the way. I already knew Tom was in on Arthur’s and my little secret, although I saw no reason to let Milan and Harlie know I knew he knew.

“That’s even more mysterious,” Milan groused. “Pop won’t talk about it either. Just said maybe we should mind our own business.”

“Sage advice,” I said with a smile, which I could tell they wanted to rip from my face and throw out the living room window.

But they forced a smile in return. It tickled me to realize they weren’t any more convincing at being duplicitous than I was. One would think between three gay guys at least one of us would have perfected duplicity by now. Most gay men I meet are simply wallowing in it.

Harlie leaned in and whispered, “I’m pretty sure you and Arthur aren’t the only ones with a secret around here. Did you get a load of the looks passing between Pete and Sylvia tonight? Something’s up. I’m sure of it.”

Milan laughed, bending in to chew on Harlie’s neck. “You always think something’s up. Everything’s a conspiracy with you.”

Harlie tapped the side of his nose and hooded his eyes. “Well, I know what I know is all. Look at ’em.” Then he giggled. “Stop that. It tickles.”

Our three heads swung toward Pete and Sylvia, who were sitting side by side on the sofa, squeezed in next to Arthur’s billowing petticoat. Both Pete and Sylvia were having a hard time eating from their plates because it appeared they could not bear to let go of each other’s hand long enough to do it. Reduced to stabbing food with one free hand each, their plates were teetering precariously on their knees. Still their eyes kept drifting to the other’s face, and a look of love and devotion—and yes, Harlie was right, a glimmer of mystery—was burning there as well. They might as well have had the word “secret” stamped across their foreheads in purple ink.

“Hmm,” I hummed, and at the same time Milan said, “Good Lord, Harlie, I think you’re right.”

Even Arthur appeared to be mesmerized by his inscrutable host and hostess. In fact he seemed to be grilling them pretty hard.

Milan and Harlie and I sat with our forks poised in midair so as to better eavesdrop on the conversation.

“Well, something is up,” Arthur teased. “You two look like a couple of canary-eating cats.”

Sylvia said, “Pooh.”

Pete said, “Puhlease.”

They were both blushing and looking incredibly guilty while they did it. Tom hovered over Arthur’s shoulder to chime in with “Arthur’s right. I’ve never seen you two look unhappy, but tonight you’re practically glowing in the dark. What gives?”

Pete turned to Sylvia and asked with a grin, “Should we tell them?”

Sylvia’s response was to chew on her bottom lip, looking worried. “We might jinx it,” she said.

Pete nodded. “You’re right. We’d better not risk it.”

“Risk what?” Tom and Arthur asked in unison, perched like pouncing vultures, trembling with curiosity.

Pete gave a huge sigh, and as he was turning back to Arthur and Tom to obviously lie through his teeth, he suddenly spotted Milan and Harlie and me also hanging on to the conversation like a trio of barnacles stuck to the keel of a ship. He tore his eyes from us, took a deep breath, and said to his audience in toto, “Sylvia and I are just happy to be sharing the evening with friends.”

“Horseshit,” Arthur grumped, and Sylvia coughed up a laugh.

“Oh, all right,” Pete groaned. “If you must know, we’re so in love and so danged happy about it, we’ve decided to share our good fortune. Give a little back, as the saying goes.”

Arthur patted his Dear Abby flip and adjusted his pearls. “Share your good fortune? Give a little back? What does that mean? Are you getting a goldfish?”

Sylvia giggled again. “Something along those lines. You’ll just have to wait and see.” Then she turned to the three of us. “And that includes you boys too.”

“Is it a puppy?” Harlie asked.

“A kitten?” asked Milan.

“An aardvark?” asked Charlie from across the room. He was no longer smooching under the ten-gallon hat, but rocking in the recliner with Bruce as the two of them gobbled up spaghetti from a common plate. “They’re really cute, you know! Plus with an aardvark roaming around the apartment, you’ll never have to worry about ants.”

Everyone stared at Charlie as if he’d beamed into the room from another dimension.

“Oh, hush up, all of you,” Sylvia finally said, but she was smiling broadly when she said it.

I suddenly noticed all the other guests lurking on the sidelines, hanging on to every word.

It was Roger who had a different opinion on the mystery. “You’ve decided to adopt our resident freeloader. Is that it?”

Resident freeloader? That must mean—

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Oh God. You mean Studly.”

“Studly?” Charlie the klepto asked. “That’s not his name. His name is Ralph.”

Harlie smiled fondly. “Milan and I call him Gizmo.”

For some reason a few eyes turned to me. “Wilbur,” I stammered, taken by surprise. “If you’re talking about the black cat who comes to visit, I call him Wilbur.”

“Cute,” Arthur droned, obviously unimpressed. He crossed his legs and tapped the toe of his high-heeled shoe in midair. “Don’t tell me you are all feeding the old reprobate. What a con artist that cat is. No wonder he’s so damn fat!”

Tom whispered in Arthur’s ear, though loudly enough for all of us to hear, “Mustn’t throw stones, dear.”

Arthur gave him a playful slap. “You’ll pay for that later.”

“Oh, goodie,” Tom crooned with a lascivious grin, looking sexy as hell in his Ward Cleaver drag. “I can’t wait.”

“Beast,” Arthur muttered, trying to sound appalled, but smiling in spite of himself. He reached out and straightened Tom’s tie, then sidled a little closer and gave Tom a virginal peck on the cheek, which left a tiny smudge of cherry red lipstick on Tom’s jawline.

I turned to Milan and saw him sweetly eyeing his father and his father’s odd, odd lover, while his own hand rested comfortably on Harlie’s knee.

Looking back at Arthur and Tom, I was surprised to see Arthur staring at me and making little jerking motions with his head in the direction of the kitchen. I had no idea what he was trying to convey, so I simply smiled back and bobbed my own head back and forth like he was doing.

“Jesus,” Arthur huffed under his breath. Handing his plate to Tom, he took a more forceful approach and hooked a thumb toward the kitchen door. “Ahem, Barney, can I see you for a moment in the kitchen?”

“Oh, uh, sure.”

I followed Arthur across the room while everyone else resumed eating and jabbering and being sociable. Arthur penned me into a corner by the kitchen sink and hovered over me like an encroaching glacier. Only warmer.

“Honey, I got a tip about that person we’re looking for.”

I groaned. “You’ve said that before, Arthur, and every time we go traipsing across the city to follow your lead, we turn up nothing. We’ve been out four times, walked God knows how many miles, and still we’re no closer to finding this mysterious friend of yours than we were the first time.”

Arthur buried his fist in his hip. “Well, aren’t you Miss Grumpypants tonight.”

“No, I—”

He gently harrumphed, straightened his ridiculous little apron, and commenced tapping his toe on the kitchen linoleum. His Dear Abby flip vibrated with indignation as he stood there in front of me, waiting for an answer.

I heaved a humongous sigh and said, “Fine. What time?”

Arthur instantly lit up like a Christmas tree, all merriment and light and bubbling good humor. “Great, sweetie! I don’t know what time. Early. Meet me in the lobby as soon as you’re up. I’ll listen for your footsteps on the stairs. This time will be different, Barney. You’ll see.” Once again he did his spy routine, casting leery glances all over the place, although we were the only ones in the room. He tapped my lips with a bloodred press-on nail. “Remember now, snookums, don’t say a word to anybody!”

“Yes, I know.”

“And dress casual.”

“Don’t I always?”

“And don’t say a word to anybody.”

“You said that already.”

Arthur scooped me into his arms and smashed my face into his bosom. When he did, I heard the rustle and crackle of what sounded like a couple of bags of dried chickpeas. I wondered if that was what he was using to augment his already ample chest. Not that I really wanted to know.

He pushed me to arm’s length and smiled upon me with angelic indulgence. “You’re a good person, Barney Teegarden.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m a pip.”

He laughed. “So I guess Arnold wasn’t your cup of tea, huh?”

“You think?” I snidely asked.

He pinched my cheek. “Well, don’t worry. We’ll get you married off yet.”

I shrugged as if I didn’t care, although if the truth were known, it broke my heart a little bit to face the fact that another blind date had pretty much blown up in my face. “Let’s find your poor friend and get him off the street,” I said. “I’m worried about the guy, and I haven’t even met him yet.”

Arthur nodded, suddenly solemn. He lowered his voice another notch until I could barely hear him even though he was only standing six inches away. “I’ll tell you a secret if you want.”

“It’s not about another blind date, is it?”

Arthur blinked his long false eyelashes, and I imagined dust bunnies tumbling across the floor behind me. “No. It’s about the apartment next to yours.”

“You mean this one?”

“No, pudding. The one on the other side.”

“What about it?” I asked. “It’s empty.”

“That’s where I’m putting my friend.”

“You mean the one we’re trying to find?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But Arthur, if he’s homeless, how is he going to afford an apartment?”

“It’ll be a little gift from me and Tom until he gets on his feet. He’s a good person, Barney. You’re going to like him.”

I made a noncommittal grunt. “Well, I’m sure I—”

Arthur rested his fingertip on my mouth, hushing me. “Don’t think badly of him because he’s homeless, Barney. It could as easily be me or you out there.”

“Yes. I—I know. I’ve just never known any homeless people before.”

Arthur released me, took a teeny step back, and adjusted his chickpeas. “He wasn’t always homeless, you know. Nobody ever is.”

“That poor guy,” I muttered for lack of anything smarter to say.

“Yes,” Arthur said softly. “Poor guy indeed.” He slipped his arm through mine and nudged me back toward our friends in the other room.

“I still don’t understand all the secrecy,” I whispered before we stepped back into the throng of guests.

Arthur smiled benignly down on me and with a wink said, “Yeah, and I never understood the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. What the hell is that all about?”

Chapter 4

WHEN I trundled down the stairwell at the crack of dawn, the morning outside the Belladonna Arms was hazy with a layer of moist air that blanketed the silent, sleeping city. I had an ache between my eyeballs from all the wine I had consumed at Pete and Sylvia’s the night before, and about the last thing I really wanted to do was go gallivanting across San Diego looking for Arthur’s friend. But a promise is a promise. Plus, in my mind, I had begun to give this friend of Arthur’s a mythological status, since we had been searching for him for a couple of weeks now and I had so far not been offered so much as a glimpse of the man.

Arthur must have broken into Charlie and Bruce’s apartment to dress himself this morning. He was wearing blue jeans, boots, a western shirt with mother-of-pearl snap buttons, a bandana around his neck, a white cowboy hat with a mirrored hatband, and—holy mother of God—fringed leather chaps open at the ass and crotch.

He saw me gaping at his outfit and asked, “What? Too much?”

I stumblefucked over a couple of insincere compliments, then realized I would be the one walking down the street with the guy. Wondering if he would ever speak to me again, I said, “You might want to lose the chaps. At least until you acquire an actual horse.”

Arthur’s chin gave a tremble. “I love these chaps.”

“You asked.”

His eyes narrowed to mean little slits. “Fine. I’ll lose the chaps.”

“And the hat,” I said.

This time his mouth fell open in mortification. “The hat too? What’s wrong with the hat?”

“It’s got mirrors on it.”

Arthur huffed and flapped his arms in the air like an octopus. “Okay. Fine, Barney. I give up. Is there anything else about me you’re unhappy with? Should I pry the fillings out of my teeth?”

I ignored that, suspecting it was a rhetorical question, and a rather sarcastic one at that. Arthur peeled off the chaps, and after a moment of inner turmoil, also ripped off the hat and flung both items through his apartment door before banging it closed. Under his breath he mumbled, “Nobody in this building has any sense of style whatsoever. They wouldn’t know an accessory if it crawled out of a Gucci bag and bit them on the ass.”

For purposes of self-preservation, I ignored that too. Trying to heal the wounds I had inflicted on the poor man, nagging about his ensemble and all, I reached up high and draped my arm over his massive shoulder as we headed out the front door.

“You’re a good man, Arthur. And a good friend. I hope this guy we’re looking for appreciates all you’re trying to do for him.”

Arthur’s face softened as he gazed down at me. His eyes sparkled with rising tears. “Thank you, Barney. You’re so sweet.” All was forgiven, apparently, for he gave me a hug in return that made my clavicles pop.

“Of course,” I added, “I still don’t know why you chose me to be the one accompanying you on this rescue mission. Don’t you think it’s time you filled me in?”

Arthur considered the question for a moment. He gently shooed a flock of strolling pigeons out of our path as we veered off the side street where the Belladonna Arms was located, and headed up Broadway toward downtown. The streets were empty of traffic and pedestrians. The rising sun was still lost in the marine layer hovering over the city, and the air had an actual nip in it that felt kind of good for a change. Off in the distance, I spotted a jogger puffing and panting his way down the boulevard, but other than that, Arthur and I were alone.

Arthur hemmed and hawed around for a minute, then said, “My friend doesn’t know you, Barney. You won’t be a threat to him. You won’t bring back—bad memories.”

“Bad memories?”

“Yeah. In other words, you won’t scare him off.”

“And what about you, Arthur? You don’t think you’ll scare him off?”

“I hope not.”

I offered him a lopsided grin. I knew it was lopsided by the way it felt on my face. “You do realize I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, don’t you? Why would anybody other than me scare him off? What’s he so jittery about? What did he do? Why is he living on the street? Is it just people in the Belladonna Arms he’s wary of, or would he be paranoid around anybody?”

“He’s not paranoid, Barney. At least he didn’t used to be. It’s just, well, I think he’ll be leery of anybody from the building. There’s kind of a history there.”

“A history?”

“Yeah. Not a very good one, I’m afraid. I think my friend would feel… ashamed… if I tried to track him down with any of the old tenants he used to know.”

“You mean he used to live in the Arms? He was one of your tenants?”

Arthur gave me a sad little nod. “It’s a heartbreaking tale, Barney.”

“Why? Why is it a heartbreaking tale? What happened?”

Arthur reached out and laid a hand on my arm to silence me. We were approaching the tunneled street that ran alongside Beaumont College—the long underpass where so many homeless people sheltered during the night.

“You heard he was here?” I whispered, nervously peering into the shadows ahead. “This is where he’s living?”

Arthur shook his head. “No. But if the tip I got was correct, we’ll find him on the other side of this tunnel and down the hill by the freeway. He has a yellow tarp. Keep your eye peeled for that.”

“Yellow tarp,” I breathed. “Okay.”

I felt cold sweat gathering in my armpits. I’m not sure why I was suddenly so nervous, but I think it had a lot to do with the look of intense concern on Arthur’s face. I had a pretty good hunch that Arthur was nervous too. He was gnawing at his plump lower lip like a starving man chowing down on a burrito.

“You love this guy a lot, don’t you, Arthur?”

Arthur gave me a sidelong glance. Sad and full of hurt. “He’s been through a lot, Barney. Guilt is a terrible thing to live with, you know.”

“Why?” I asked. “What’s he got to feel guilty about?”

Arthur didn’t answer. We were walking down the middle of the street because the sidewalks were covered with the detritus of the many homeless citizens living in this dark and creepy place. I could hear scurryings and hushed mutterings in the makeshift tents erected along both sides of the underpass walls. Beneath one of the flimsy hovels erected there in the shadows, I heard a racking cough. It was the sort of cough that sounded painful. I wasn’t surprised to hear it. The air down here was chilly and damp. I wondered if those sleeping here were right this minute lying shivering in their filthy blankets. Were they riddled with arthritis from sleeping night after night on the seeping cold concrete? Did their lungs ache from the damp, frigid air? Did they suffer through every single hour of darkness, praying for the sun to come out and warm them once again? Even here in San Diego, in one of the most clement cities in the world, the nights were sometimes raw and inhospitable. I suspected being homeless was not an easy existence, no matter where you lived.

What could happen to make people end up like this, I wondered, gazing around. How could people become as downtrodden and lost as to find themselves living beyond hope at the very edge of civilization? A chill coursed through me, and it wasn’t entirely from the bleak surroundings.

I stepped closer to the mountainous bulk of Arthur’s body there beside me. Reaching out, I laid my hand on Arthur’s arm, surprised by how much comfort that simple touch gave me. “What does he have to be guilty about?” I asked again in a nervous whisper, trying not to wake any of the sleeping homeless around us. “Your friend, I mean. What was it he thinks he did?”

Arthur shook his head. “Shh.” We were approaching the end of the underpass. Ahead, we could see the hazy morning waiting for us to step once again into the dawning light. It didn’t look particularly welcoming, that misty light, but still I would be glad to leave this heart-numbing, joy-smothering tunnel behind.

We both breathed a sigh of relief when we stepped out into the morning. Arthur pointed toward a barren hillside of bushes and weeds that tumbled down from the edge of the street. Down there, somewhere in the fog, I could hear the hum of freeway traffic. It was the same freeway I could see from my apartment window. Where we stood, the city streets were empty, but already down the hill, the freeway was crowded with people going about their day, heading toward the city or away from it, living their lives, hurrying off to meet someone, or to leave someone, or to go to work, or simply driving mindlessly to escape their own weary journey through life.

“Here,” Arthur said with a grunt, ducking under the twisted-up corner of a chain-link fence, built to keep people out but now hanging limp and rusted and pretty much useless at the edge of the sidewalk.

With the wire fence rattling behind us, we found ourselves on the edge of a steep decline. Arthur chose his steps carefully, slipping and sliding along an eroded gully where the winter rains had dredged a ditch in the hillside.

“Thank God I’m not wearing heels,” Arthur panted, clutching a sapling that had somehow sprouted through this barren soil and was miraculously clinging to life in the dusty earth beside the washout.

I scurried along in Arthur’s wake, trying to keep my footing in the rocks and scree. A little avalanche of rocks and pebbles preceded us down the hill. Every footfall of Arthur’s produced a teeny cloud of dust. When my legs almost flew out from under me, I immediately grabbed the same lifeless sapling Arthur had used to balance himself. It was then I saw the narrow trunk of the sapling, not much bigger around than a broom handle, had been worn smooth by countless hands at the very spot where Arthur and I had both grabbed it. My God. How many people live down here?

I pulled up short when I spotted a splash of color farther down the hill amid a sickly stand of palm trees. There beneath the trees lay a tiny city of haphazard tents. There were no cast-off shopping carts here. I don’t suppose anyone could have manhandled one down the eroded hillside. There were perhaps a dozen shelters pieced together from old blankets and tarps and cheap plastic drop cloths, erected among the brambles overlooking the freeway. Some people, the less fortunate ones, lay snoring atop slabs of cardboard, exposed to the elements, their heads wrapped in filthy blankets. I wondered if these were the poorest of the poor. Those without even a makeshift tent to call their own.

Away from the litter of the cluttered squatters’ camp, a little farther down the hill where the freeway sounds rolled louder up the embankment, the ground was a bit more cultivated, a bit more groomed. Here Caltrans had planted a few beds of greenery to please the eye of passing motorists down below.

While Arthur stared up the hillside behind us, as if getting his bearings or maybe catching his breath, I stared down the hill in the direction we were still headed. And there in the distance, all by itself, I saw a lean-to constructed from a tarpaulin and held in place at the ground-level side with big rocks rolled into place to resist the wind whipping up the hill.

The lean-to appeared newer and cleaner than the others farther back up the trail. There was no trash cluttering the ground around it. A pair of jeans hung from the entryway like a door flap. The jeans were damp, as if they had been recently washed, and only then did I notice a battered bucket sitting against the trunk of the palm tree the lean-to was attached to.

The lean-to, by the way, was a bright screaming yellow.

I clutched Arthur’s arm, making him jump. “Look, Arthur. A yellow tarp.”

Arthur spun and looked where I was pointing. He nodded. “That must be it.” He was chewing his fingernail and looking worried. “Oh God, Barney, what if he rabbits? I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to find him again if he gets away from us.”

“You don’t even know it is him,” I said, trying to soothe Arthur’s fears and all the while beginning to tremble with my own tiny surge of adrenaline.

“Come on,” Arthur whispered, taking my hand. We walked as quietly as we could toward the yellow lean-to. Every scuttering pebble under our shoes sounded like a gunshot.

“Stay close,” he said, and he didn’t have to tell me twice. I was already a nervous wreck. I guess I’m not cut out for clandestine operations.

When we were within five feet of the blue-jeans-covered door, Arthur cleared his throat as if delicately interrupting a conversation at a cocktail party. “Ahem,” he said, projecting his voice toward the lean-to and clutching my hand so tightly he was cutting off the circulation to my fingers.

We both flew three feet straight up into the air when a voice from behind us said, “Hello, Arthur.”

Arthur and I whirled so quickly I lost my balance. Arthur saved me from falling flat on my face by clutching my hand all the tighter. When I heard my fingers crunch, I gave a tiny cry of pain.

Then I forgot about the pain completely.

Behind us, having just stepped out from the bushes by the trail, stood a young Hispanic man of perhaps my age. The tips of his black, overlong hair were tinged with red as if his color job had grown out. He had a scraggly beard that didn’t look like it would ever amount to much, no matter how much he might want it to. His eyes were a luscious brown, the color of cognac. And sad. They were, in fact, the saddest eyes I thought I had ever seen. The pain in them literally took my breath away.

Tearing my gaze from the young man’s face, I realized he was standing there in nothing but a black T-shirt and white Jockey shorts. Maybe he had just come from taking a pee in the bushes when he found us trespassing on his little corner of the world.

His legs were beautiful, covered in a pelt of dark hair, the skin as brown as his eyes, his thighs hard and strong and lean. He was obviously in the prime of his beauty. Only the eyes tore a hole in the illusion.

My heart gave a lurch as I stared into his eyes yet again. He looked back at me with no emotion on his face at all. There was no curiosity there, no anger, nothing. And once again, I found myself lost in those cognac-colored eyes.

The three of us stood silently, staring at each other. I finally turned to see what Arthur was thinking. When I did, I was surprised to see a tear leaking down his cheek and a gentle, heartbroken smile twisting his lips. His hand lay atop his chest and fluttered there like an injured bird.

“Barney,” he said to me in a gentle voice, never taking his eyes from the young man before us. “Say hello to Ramon.”

STILL LOST in those wounded, weary eyes, I moved forward to shake the young man’s hand. In doing so I stepped on my untied shoelace with one foot, which stopped all momentum from the other. With a horrible sense of impending cataclysm settling over me, a feeling I wasn’t altogether unfamiliar with, being such a klutz and all, I found myself pitching forward into the dirt smack in front of the guy.

I lay there in a billowing cloud of dust and, to my horror, saw Ramon gazing down at me with a glimmer of a smile on his handsome face.

“Walk much, señor?”

I stammered something that made no sense whatsoever, and the next thing I knew, Arthur was there, hauling me to my feet, tsking and “oh dearing” and brushing me off like a rug.

“He’s new at it,” Arthur chirped, lifting me by my armpits and giving me a good-natured shake to remove any residual rubble. He blessed me with a heartening smile and added, “Cut the man some slack, Ramon.”

I tried to grin but was so embarrassed—hanging there by my armpits with my toes dangling in midair—my cheeks seemed nailed in place. The blood surged through my neck like a tsunami, rushing in to paint my face a bright cherry red.

“Put me down,” I hissed, so Arthur did. Although I must say he looked a little hurt about my attitude.

When I was free of Arthur’s grasp, Ramon lifted his hand tentatively as if to touch my arm, then withdrew it as quickly. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

I nodded, too mortified to speak.

Again Ramon gave me a wry smile. “Don’t be embarrassed. I’m the one standing here in his underwear. Not you.”

With that he released me from those heavenly eyes and turned his attention to Arthur, who immediately scooped him into his arms. Ramon accepted the hug, but barely. He stood ramrod straight and unresponsive as Arthur embraced him. Arthur finally let him go, and Ramon took a step back to gain some distance, as if he was embarrassed to find himself so close to another human being.

“What are you doing here?” Ramon asked, all friendliness suddenly gone from his face.

I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me all that remained in its place was… fear. Staring at Ramon’s face now, as the blood began to recede from my own, I had to remind myself to breathe. His was the most stricken expression I had ever seen. I felt my heart give a tug of pity. Then it was I who was reaching out to touch. I laid my fingers warily to the side of Ramon’s arm, just below the sleeve of his T-shirt. His skin was electric. I gave a tiny gasp at the feel of it, which I quickly covered by clearing my throat.

Arthur had stepped aside when I approached. I glanced at him now to see him staring at the two of us with an odd expression on his face. It was the sort of expression one sees on a person first witnessing an eclipse. Breathless. Awed. A little amazed.

When Arthur didn’t say anything to counterbalance the awkward silence, and since Ramon was frozen in expectant stillness as well, it seemed to be up to me to lay the cards on the table.

“We’ve come to help you,” I said, my fingers still resting on his arm. Burning there so I could barely form the words to speak at all. I had never in my life seen a soul so in need of compassion—and so reluctant to accept it.

Nor had I ever been so ensnared by my first glimpse of a fellow creature. When he moved slightly, the hair on his arms brushed my fingertips. I closed my eyes for a second to trap that feeling in my memory banks so I might drag it out later for a closer inspection.

Then Ramon pulled away from my touch completely. I too stepped back from him, drawing my hand away, embarrassed now by what I’d done. Yet even embarrassed, I dropped my eyes from his face and immediately rested my gaze on his beautiful, strong legs as he stood there in front of me in his Jockey shorts. I imagined how the skin of those legs would feel against my fingertips, how the brush of the hair there would scrape my skin, and once again blood surged toward my face as a shudder of desire coursed through me.

Arthur laid a hand on my back and stepped past me to confront Ramon on his own.

“Barney’s right, Ramon. We’ve come to help you.”

“Why would you want to do that?” Ramon asked, his eyes hooded and suspicious now, where before they had been mostly confused and disconnected.

Arthur looked around at the yellow tarp tied to the palm tree. The wet jeans hanging in the doorway of the makeshift shelter. The battered bucket on the ground beside a pair of ratty sneakers.

A pained look crossed Arthur’s face. “I can’t let you live like this another minute, honey. We’re here to take you home.”

“Home,” Ramon echoed flatly. The word lay on the air like a dead thing. For a split second, Ramon’s eyes shifted to me, and in that split second I saw a world of emotions roiling in those cognac-colored eyes. Of all the emotions, shame was the one that clawed its way to center stage. I again found myself longing to reach out and comfort Ramon. I was suddenly furious with Arthur for not letting me know Ramon’s story. Not letting me in on the secret of how Ramon had come to be here on the edge of this freeway, alone, hurt, frightened.

And so goddamned ashamed. Ashamed of what?

Ramon’s hands were clenched. I detected the slightest tremble in the tense line of his back, in the stilted tilt of his head. Again he let his eyes slide to me, and just as quickly slide away.

“This is my home now, Arthur. It isn’t much, but the rent’s cheap.”

He twisted his lips into a self-defacing smirk, as if a smirk was all he could muster. He stepped around us and snatched up the blue jeans hanging from the lean-to door. With his eyes burrowing into mine with what I could only describe as defiance, he tugged them on. When they were zipped and buttoned, he grabbed the filthy sneakers off the ground, upended the bucket to make a chair, and sat and pulled the sneakers over his feet. He didn’t bother with socks. Perhaps he didn’t have any. I watched all this with a growing anger settling in my gut.

That anger was something I hadn’t expected at all.

While Ramon still sat perched on the battered bucket, Arthur strode forward and kneeled in the dirt before him. Ramon tried to back away, but Arthur wouldn’t let him. He grabbed Ramon’s hands and held them in a tight grip. Ramon eventually stopped resisting. All he did instead was close his eyes, as if shutting it all out. Me. Arthur. The shame. Everything.

The day was lighter now, but the sun was still buried behind that marine layer of moisture hovering over the city. The nip in the air was gone. The day was warming up. I figured the sun would burn through the haze any minute now. Arthur’s voice eased into the air, slightly louder than the hum of freeway traffic rolling up the hill.

“Ramon, please listen to me.”

With his eyes determinedly shut against Arthur’s pleading, I had my first chance to unabashedly study the contours of Ramon’s face. He really was breathtakingly gorgeous. And so breathtakingly wounded on top of it. I draped my arms across my own chest to hold in the thundering of my heart as I gazed at him. Listening to Arthur’s words as he gently tried to break through Ramon’s wall of anger and shame, I found myself swallowing back emotion. All the time I was doing that, I was fighting the urge to get good and pissed off. He needs help. Why won’t he accept it?

Arthur still held Ramon’s two hands captive—they lay caged between Arthur’s massive paws. Arthur’s usually booming voice was now as soft and benign as I had ever heard it. He was pleading. And he was pleading from his heart.

“Ramon, honey, what happened wasn’t your fault. You can’t shut yourself off from the world and throw your life away like this. I won’t let you. Barney and I have been looking for you for weeks. Did you know that?”

Ramon didn’t open his eyes or acknowledge the question at all. Arthur sadly accepted his silence, and all the while I had to remind myself to breathe as I stood there studying Ramon’s perfect face, closed off now from the world, from Arthur, from me. By the simple act of closing his eyes, he had shut it all out. Everything.

“Baby,” Arthur crooned on, giving Ramon’s hands a tiny shake to get his attention, “there are some old friends at the Arms who would love to see you again.”

At this, Ramon did open his eyes, and for the first time, I saw them blurred with tears. “Do they know about this?” Ramon spat out the words, yanking one of his hands free from Arthur’s grasp and waving it in the air, encompassing the squatter’s camp, the pitiful lean-to.

“No, honey,” Arthur said, recapturing Ramon’s hand. “No one knows. Only Barney. And Tom.”

At the mention of Tom, the anger left Ramon’s face, if only for a moment.

“You and Tom?” Ramon asked, his eyes lit with the first spark of hope I had yet seen there. “You’re still together?”

Arthur nodded, and to my amazement, a blush rose to his cheeks. “Tom loves me,” Arthur said. “He tells me every morning. We’ll always be together, I think.”

I watched as Ramon sat there on that ridiculous bucket and studied Arthur kneeling in the dirt before him.

“I’m glad,” Ramon said, his voice gentle. Kind. But a moment later, the softness had bled from his face like rainwater sluicing down a pane of glass.

Ramon coolly turned and looked along the edge of the hill parallel to the freeway. I followed where his eyes had traveled, and there in the hazy distance I saw it. The Belladonna Arms, perhaps a little less than a mile away. From here, the Arms seemed to have experienced a much-needed makeover. The window frames didn’t look as sun-blighted as they did up close. The stucco didn’t appear so desperately in need of a new coat of paint. Even the metal neon sign, unlit now in the light of day, didn’t seem to lean so precariously into the breeze rolling in off the ocean.

Ramon cleared the emotion from his voice before speaking. Arthur and I remained motionless, waiting for his words. We were so silent I could hear the thwap of a bird’s wings as it gave itself a dust bath somewhere back on the path. Insects hummed in the brambles. The scent of honeysuckle filled the air.

Ramon still stared at the Belladonna Arms in the distance. When he spoke, his voice sounded long unused. Fragile. “Every evening I sit here, Arthur. Every evening I sit here and wait for that sign to blink into life. When I see the words written in orange on the horizon, the Belladonna Arms, I remember what it was like to live there. How wonderful the people were. How nice it was to have friends.” His eyes darkened, and his lips grew thin in his face. “But I remember the other stuff too. You and I both know I can never go back there. Who would want to be friends with me now?”

“Everyone,” Arthur said quietly, carrying Ramon’s hands to his face and pressing them to his lips. “You are still family, Ramon. You will always be family. What happened to you could have happened to anybody. You can’t lock yourself away from the world because of it.”

Ramon shook his head and cast his gaze to the ground. “I’m not going back.”

All the while this conversation was going on, I found myself growing angrier and angrier. Ramon’s obstinacy was really starting to piss me off. And I was mad at Arthur too, for leading me into this without explaining what it was all about, what events had led us all here.

“You have to come back,” Arthur pleaded, once again clutching Ramon’s hands. “Please, Ramon. Everyone misses you. They do. Stanley, Roger, Sylvia, Pete, Milan, Harlie. Everyone. They worry about you constantly. They want you to come home.”

Ramon cleared his throat and finally wrenched his hands from Arthur’s grip. He swiped at the tears on his face, gave me a cursory glance as if still unsure what this stranger was doing here. Then he inhaled a great, shuddering breath of air.

“I want you both to leave now.” His voice was cold. He pointed to a trodden path I could see trailing off to the west. “If you go that way, it is less of a hill to climb to get back up to the street.”

“Don’t do this,” Arthur pleaded. “I have your apartment ready. We’ll get you back in school. We’ll get your life back in order. We’ll—”

At that, Ramon’s eyes opened wide. He stood, and when he did, he politely helped Arthur to his feet as well, but his voice was still icy. “My life is exactly where it’s supposed to be, Arthur. It’s exactly what I deserve. Please just go away and let me live it.”

“No,” Arthur said, clearly determined not to let it end this way. His tears were flowing freely now. If he had been in drag, he would have had makeup dribbling onto his shoe tops. Arthur seemed to be so overcome with emotion that, for the first time since I had known him, I saw him grope for words that wouldn’t come.

I had no such problem. Ramon’s anger had somehow given a shot of adrenaline to my own. It was like I had ducked into the emergency room for a transfusion of fury juice.

“Get your shit together, Ramon,” I said with a quiet menace in my voice I had never heard there before. “We’re taking you home now.”

Both Arthur and Ramon stared at me as if I had erupted into magnificent flames. Arthur was the first to appear to make some sense out of what I’d said. He straightened his back and girded his more-than-massive loins.

“Yes, Barney. You’re absolutely right.” With a glare of stubborn determination on his huge round face, he turned back to Ramon and began barking orders. “We’re leaving now, Ramon. All of us. Pack up whatever you want to keep. It’s time for a little do-over as far as your living arrangements go, and Barney and I are going to make sure it happens. If you don’t go of your own free will, we’ll roll you up in that fucking tarp, sling you over our shoulders, and carry you back to the Arms like a carpet.”

“You can’t do this,” Ramon stammered. A renewed flare of anger glimmered in his eyes. But I thought I detected something else there as well. Relief, maybe? Or was that wishful thinking on my part?

Anyway, it didn’t matter, for by now Arthur had taken the proverbial bull by the horns, and in one grand operatic explosion of activity, he tore the yellow tarp from the tree and tossed it aside. He began gathering up everything he thought might be important enough for Ramon to actually want to keep. I could see with the merest of glances, there wasn’t much anybody would want to keep, but Arthur was undeterred.

As Arthur and I began throwing Ramon’s belongings onto the tarp so we could tie it into a manageable bundle, while Ramon looked on as if he couldn’t believe what we were doing to his stuff, I whispered to Arthur so Ramon wouldn’t hear.

“You owe me the truth. I want to know what he did.”

Arthur nodded. “All right,” he said. “But not now. Later.”

“Fine,” I growled back.

In less than five minutes, the three of us were shuffling along the path Ramon had pointed out earlier, headed for the street above. Arthur and I had Ramon’s yellow tarp cradled awkwardly between us. Wrapped up inside it was everything Arthur thought Ramon couldn’t live without, which amounted to very little indeed.

Ramon, as if too weary or too humiliated to argue anymore, simply followed silently along behind us. As we reached the street and turned to head down Broadway toward the Belladonna Arms, I heard Ramon softly crying behind us. The sound brought Arthur and me to a stumbling stop.

“I can’t pay the rent, Arthur,” Roman sobbed, breaking my heart a little bit. “I don’t have any money. I don’t have—anything.”

Arthur smiled back at him and anchored his place in my heart for all eternity when he said, “You have friends, Ramon, and sometimes that’s better than money.”

I fought the urge to drop the tarp and scoop Ramon into my arms to make his tears stop flowing, but somehow I couldn’t do it. This wasn’t my show. Not really. This was between Arthur and Ramon. I was just here for the grunt work.

Turning to me, Arthur beamed. “Come on, Barney. Let’s get Ramon home. He’ll feel better with a hot meal inside him.”

I nodded, sniffed, and felt my heart swell up to twice its size looking at the determination on Arthur’s face. The determination to do what was right. To do what was needed.

Perhaps Ramon saw it too, for a moment later he stepped closer and grabbed one end of the tarp Arthur and I were carrying between us. He stared at Arthur and then at me, through eyes swimming with tears.

Ramon nodded, shaking a tear loose. I watched spellbound as it skittered a path down his cheek. “All right,” he said, brushing the tear away with the heel of his hand. “I’m ready.”

“Come on, then, honey,” Arthur gently said. To me he added, “Come on, Barney. Let’s finish doing what we set out to do and get this boy home.”

Together the three of us climbed the rest of the way up the hill to the Belladonna Arms. We arrived there as the sun peeked through the haze and sparkled off the neon sign above our heads.

As we stepped into the lobby, I saw Ramon’s tears had started flowing again. Suddenly so were my own. I shifted the tarp in my hand, and gently taking Ramon’s arm, I led him toward the stairs.

He humbly followed.

Chapter 5

“HE’S SLEEPING,” Arthur said. “Poor guy is exhausted.”

I sat at Arthur’s kitchen table and nibbled at the massive platter of bacon and french toast Tom had placed on the table between us. I could hear Tom now, moving around in the bedroom, getting dressed for work. He had a catering job later in the day.

Arthur looked weary, now that our mission had been accomplished. It still seemed odd to sit with my landlord in his own apartment without him being dressed in drag, but if Arthur thought anything about it, he didn’t let on. He had a fistful of bacon strips in one hand and was gnawing them down like a weed whacker tackling a stand of ragweed.

“Did he eat?” I asked.

Arthur nodded. “Tom took him a huge breakfast. He said Ramon gobbled up every bite. Then he showered and crashed. We shouldn’t bother him for a while. Let him rest.”

I reached across the table and laid my hand over Arthur’s. “You did a wonderful thing today, Arthur. You’re one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. Tom’s lucky to have you.”

Tom cried out from the other room, “I tell him that all the time!”

Arthur smiled, first at the bedroom door, then at me. “We did a wonderful thing. You and me, Barney. It feels good, doesn’t it? Finally doing something right?”

I nodded. “Yes. It really does.”

Memories of Ramon filled my head. The way he stood on the trail in his T-shirt and Jockey shorts, his hair too long, his legs so strong and beautiful. The feel of his arm on my fingertips. The color of those incredible cognac eyes. The gentleness in them. The shame they were forever trying to hide.

“What happened?” I asked softly. “What happened to him, Arthur?”

Arthur glanced into my eyes, then wiped his hands on a napkin, all the while forking up three more slices of french toast and dropping them on his plate. As he smothered them in maple syrup, then sprinkled them liberally with powdered sugar, he began speaking as softly as I had.

“Ramon lived on six with his lover, ChiChi.” Arthur’s eyes lit up, thinking back. “One was just as cute as the other. And so head-over-heels in love with each other it was a blessing to look at the two of them together. Ramon was going to beauty school.” Here Arthur laughed. “The worst hairdresser ever.” He brushed a happy tear from his cheek, remembering. “ChiChi was studying to be a masseur. I really thought they were going to make it, those two.” He gave his head a sad little shake.

“What happened?” I asked. “What went wrong?”

Arthur sighed. “Drugs. ChiChi got hooked. To this day, I’m still not sure what drug it was. Crystal meth, maybe. Cocaine. I don’t know. But it changed him. It made him—hard. And mean.”

“Poor Ramon,” I said.

Arthur nodded. “Yes. Poor Ramon. He did everything to keep it from the rest of the tenants, but we knew, of course. ChiChi was out of control. It’s hard to disguise something like that. Especially in a place like the Belladonna Arms, where everyone is friends with everyone else.”

Arthur fell silent. His eyes saddened. The food lay forgotten on his plate.

I gently urged him on. “So what happened, Arthur? Did they break up?”

Arthur sighed and looked down at my hand still covering his. He scooped it into his great paw and stroked my fingers with his thumb. “You have pretty hands,” he murmured.

I gave a teeny grunt of exasperation. “Thank you, Arthur. So what happened?”

Arthur bobbed his head up and down as if he knew I was impatient to hear the story. “I know, I know. It’s just so sad is all.” He gulped in a deep breath, then slowly let it out, hissing like a tea kettle. “Okay. It’s like this. Ramon was cooking dinner. Chopping vegetables in the kitchen. ChiChi was high and being combative. Then for some reason, ChiChi took it into his head to attack Ramon.” Arthur stared out through the kitchen window as if distracting his eyes would somehow make the story less painful to tell. “It was an accident, of course. Even the police immediately knew that. It might have happened to anyone.”

“What?” I asked, gripping Arthur’s hand a little tighter. “What might have happened to anyone? Jesus, Arthur! You’re driving me nuts here!”

Arthur heaved one more massive sigh. “The knife,” he said. “Ramon moved to protect himself when ChiChi attacked, and somehow the knife—”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

The kitchen fell silent around us. The silence lasted upward of a minute before Arthur found the inclination to speak again.

“It was Harlie and Milan who found Ramon on the front porch. Bloody. Disoriented. He was in shock, I think. Who wouldn’t be? Ramon told them enough to make them investigate, and that’s when they found ChiChi dead on the kitchen floor in Ramon and ChiChi’s apartment. It was only one stab wound, and an accidental one at that, but the knife nicked the aorta. ChiChi didn’t stand a chance.”

Again the silence boomed around us. With my free hand, I pushed my plate away, no longer hungry.

“No charges were filed?” I asked.

“No.”

“Poor Ramon.”

Again Arthur’s thumb idly stroked my fingers. The heat and weight of his hand over mine was comforting. I thought of the young man lying asleep in the bed up on four in the apartment next to my own. I considered all he must have gone through, reliving that moment over and over and over again while he lay in that horrible, crappy lean-to out there on the bank of the freeway. All alone. Given up on life. Maybe hating himself more with every new dawn, every new sunset.

“One day,” Arthur said, “Ramon was gone. His apartment was empty. This was six or seven months ago. Between then and the day you moved in, I never heard a word about where he had gone. Then one of the workers at the diner said they saw him pushing a shopping cart past the deli. That’s when I commandeered your services, and, well, the rest is history.”

“History,” I echoed mindlessly, still aching with the knowledge of all Ramon must have gone through in the aftermath of his lover’s death—at his own hand.

Arthur finally released my paw and began playing with his food again. Well, more than playing actually. Nobody can scarf down food like Arthur can. He took an unsyruped slice of french toast from the platter and folded it around six or seven bacon strips, making a sandwich. A six-thousand-calorie sandwich.

While still staring at the culinary masterpiece in his hand, he heaved a great sigh. “Be his friend, Barney. I didn’t put him next door to you by accident. It will be hard for him to face the people he knows here, but you’re a clean slate. You’re new. He’ll trust you, I hope. We need to get him back to school, back to being the wonderful Mexican spitfire he used to be. There’s a lot of happiness inside Ramon. He used to be a vivacious little shit; he really did. We need to find a way to bring it out again.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said, unsure exactly what it was Arthur was asking me to do. But I also knew there was nothing I’d rather be a part of. I had felt a connection to Ramon the moment I saw him standing on that hillside in his underwear. Not because he was sexy and beautiful. It was something else. Something—deeper. At least I kept telling myself that.

With a sudden twinkle in his eye, which was the last thing I expected to see, Arthur said, “Check out the bedroom closet in your apartment, Barney.”

I had no idea what he meant by that. “Did you say…?”

“Your bedroom closet. Check it out.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. And don’t lose the key.”

“Excuse me?”

As if letting me know the conversation was pretty much over, Arthur shoved half the french-toast-and-bacon sandwich into his mouth like a gardener cramming a bundle of branches into a wood chipper. While he gnawed on that, he grabbed a fork and started sawing at the mound of syrup-laden french toast heaped high on his plate.

Ignoring my roiling stomach, I turned to stare out the kitchen window.

Bedroom closet? Key? What the fuck is Arthur talking about?

AS ONE might expect in a building full of gay dudes, the word that one of their own had returned to the fold spread like wildfire. Jesus’s reemergence into Jerusalem was small potatoes compared to the fact that Ramon had found his way back to the Belladonna Arms. Not merely found his way back—oh, no—but had been carried back on a holy jackass over streets strewn with palm fronds by none other than the Belladonna Arms’ Queen Dowager herself and her minion, who had rescued Ramon from the wilderness, or so the story began to be told. The Queen Dowager, of course, was Arthur. The minion was that new guy on four. What was his name again? Oh, yeah. Barney Teegarden.

I sat in my kitchen and watched Wilbur devour a can of salmon.

“You’re getting really fat,” I said conversationally.

Wilbur kept eating. Apparently he didn’t like to chat during meals.

“I mean really fat.”

Wilbur’s motor kicked in. Purrrrrr.

I remembered Arthur’s words and turned my attention to the bedroom closet. I could see it from where I sat. Okay, so I’d only occupied the apartment for a few weeks, but I’d been in the closet enough to know it consisted of one light bulb with a string hanging down to turn it on and off, a pole to hang clothes on, and three shelves in the back, where I stored my sundry and pathetic assortment of mismatched sheets and towels. That’s it. What the hell was Arthur getting at?

Wilbur nudged the now empty plate across the table toward me, pleading for more.

“Sorry, kid. Your hips look like the front fenders on a ’51 Nash.”

Sensing he’d been cut off, Wilbur, never one to hold a grudge, chucked me under the chin with his snoot, climbed down into my lap, then onto the floor, and headed for the living room, where I watched him stretch out on my best chair for an afternoon siesta after a thorough perusal of his nether regions, no doubt to reassure himself they were still there.

I headed directly for the bedroom closet and pulled open the door. I stuck my head in. Yep. It was a bedroom closet all right—a wooden pole slung across the middle, three shelves in the back, a shitload of my stuff I hadn’t got around to unpacking yet piled high in the corner, a laundry basket full of dirty clothes on the floor. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling with a filthy string dangling down for turning it on and off.

I pulled the string. Yep. The light bulb still worked.

Suddenly I froze, listening. There was a stirring of background noise I hadn’t noticed before. A gentle rise and fall of sound, like maybe the seepage of water, flowing in and flowing out of a pipe.

I stuck my head into the closet a little farther. Not water, I realized. A snore. The sound of Ramon snoring!

I tried to imagine the schematics of the next-door apartment in relationship to mine. The bedrooms would be back to back. Okay, it was definite, then. The sound I heard was Ramon’s weary snoring. Well, why wouldn’t he be snoring? The poor guy had to be exhausted. After all he’d been through. Living on the street. Ravaged by guilt. All alone. Then kidnapped by me and Arthur and dragged back to the last place he really wanted to go. What must it feel like now to suddenly have a roof over him, an actual pillow beneath his head, and good friends trying to salvage him from the slag heap, whether he wanted to be salvaged or not.

I remembered Arthur practically ordering me to check out the closet, so I stuck my head in even farther. I didn’t see anything of much interest until I nudged the hanging clothes aside and plucked a stack of linens off a shelf in the back. Holy shit. What was that? A doorknob?

It was. A really old brass doorknob. And protruding from the keyhole beneath the doorknob was a really old brass key. Well, damn.

I listened to be sure the snoring had not stopped. It hadn’t. Ramon was cutting some serious logs over there. As quietly as I could, I scooped up the remaining piles of towels and sheets and other flotsam of my own personal existence off the three wooden shelves and stacked the crap behind me on the bedroom floor. With all my stuff out of the way, I tested the shelves. As I suspected, they were just boards perched on brackets. I lifted them away and leaned them against the bedroom wall.

Now it was me and the door. And a really big moral dilemma.

I reached out to grasp the key between my thumb and forefinger, not sure even now what I was about to do. Before I could decide, I heard a snort, and the snoring suddenly stopped.

I froze. Then I pressed my ear against the door. I could hear what sounded like someone thrashing around on a bed. There were frightened mutterings. A gasp.

“Lo siento,” a low voice murmured. Followed by a sob.

A chill went through me. As I had emptied out the bedroom closet a few minutes earlier, I now started tossing crap aside inside my head, unearthing layers of memories from year after year until I found myself back in sophomore Spanish class.

Lo siento. It took me a minute, but I finally remembered what it translated to—I’m sorry.

Ramon was having a nightmare. He was apologizing to the man he killed. That had to be it. I wondered if this was SOP for the poor guy. Nightmares every night. Waking in cold sweats. Gnawed by guilt he couldn’t escape even in sleep.

Again, when I thought of Ramon suffering these demons, I felt what was now becoming a familiar tug inside my chest, as if someone’s prodding finger had gently nudged my heart to get my attention.

After a couple of minutes, the snoring resumed. I waited until the cadence of it was regular and deep. When I was sure Ramon was once again sound asleep, I chewed my lip and reached for the brass key.

As quietly as I could, I gave the key a turn to the left. Nothing. When I twisted it to the right, I heard a metallic click. Grasping the knob with trembling fingers, I rotated it clockwise. The door immediately unlatched.

With my heart hopping around like a basketball bouncing down a flight of steps, I pushed ever so gently at the old wooden door until I saw a sliver of light blink on around the edge of it. Again I froze, listening for the sound of Ramon’s snoring. It was still there. I could hear it. And the sobbing too. He was once again sobbing in his sleep.

That gentle nudge to my heart became a wrenching ache. Poor, poor guy.

Refusing to think about what I was doing, knowing it was wrong but not really giving a shit, I eased the door open wider. Then wider still.

I could now see through the four-inch crack that there was no equivalent closet on the other side of the door. It opened directly into the bedroom of the adjoining apartment. I could see a beat up old dresser standing against the far wall. At the foot of the dresser, I saw Ramon’s filthy sneakers. One of them had a broken shoestring and could only be tied about halfway up the instep. I hadn’t noticed that before, and my heart broke a little more at all the young man had suffered through living on the streets alone.

As I pushed the door open a smidgeon wider, the old hinges gave a horrific squeak, which made my sympathetic heart shoot up into my throat in terror. I waited, listening over the thunder of my heartbeat, but the snoring had not stopped. I breathed a sigh of relief, and suddenly fearless, I pushed the door open all the way.

Across the room, I could see the bedroom window. The flimsy curtains were drawn closed, but the fabric was so sheer it did little to block out the light. I could see things in the room clearly. An old wooden chair stood in the corner with the clothes Ramon had worn when we brought him back to the Arms—black T-shirt, jeans, white Jockey shorts—draped across the back.

The yellow tarp, still wrapped around the rest of Ramon’s belongings, lay beneath the window. Unopened. Untouched.

Peering around the edge of the door a little more, I saw a corner of the bed. The bedspread had been swept to the floor, and now the bed was covered with only a sheet.

Leaning out a little more to see deeper into the room, holding my breath for fear of being discovered, I saw the bed in its entirety. There, beneath that white sheet, with one brown leg protruding out into the air, lay Ramon. He was flat on his back with his head turned to one side on the pillow. For a heart-stopping moment, I thought he was looking directly at me. Then I realized his eyes were closed and his chest, with one arm slung across it, was rising and falling as he lay lost in sleep.

I clutched my own chest. He was so beautiful. A sudden burning in my eyes told me tears were threatening to make an entrance into the proceedings, but with a glower of impatience and an ultimatum to myself to stop being such a wuss, I forced them to retreat back into the wings.

Determined now, and still scared to death at the same time, I stepped out into the room. I couldn’t believe I was doing what I was doing, but somehow I couldn’t not do it either.

There was a second wooden chair placed at the side of the bed against the wall. On silent footsteps, like a cat burglar, I oiled my way across the room, plucked the chair up, and placed it directly beside the bed.

I stared at Ramon’s face for a moment, once again assuring myself he was sound asleep, and when I was convinced he was still out like a light, I eased myself down onto the chair.

The sheet covered Ramon to his neck. Of his body, only one arm and shoulder and his leg were exposed. His butterscotch skin was the color whiteys like me spend entire summers baking in the sun to attain, but still never manage to acquire. For me his coloring was breathtaking, especially against the white sheet. The dark hair on his arms and legs was the most erotic thing I had ever seen, and it took every ounce of willpower I possessed not to scrape my fingers through it.

But it was his sweet face, lying in repose on the pillow, that truly took my breath away. He had shaved, presumably when he showered. I knew he had showered because I could smell the heavenly scent of soap and clean skin. His too-long hair was more of a mess now than it had been back at his camp, for he had obviously gone to bed with it still damp from the shower, and now it was a tangled mop on top of his head, framing his face and hanging in snarls almost to his shoulders.

As I watched, a furrow appeared between his closed eyes. His chin puckered into a pout. His hand tensed across his chest and his fingers worked themselves into a fist.

“No,” he gasped from whatever well of pain his mind had taken him to. “No, Cheech, no.”

His lover’s name was ChiChi, I remembered. ChiChi. Cheech.

Ramon shook his head sharply, as if in a spasm. “No,” he said again, and I could see a tear leak out from beneath his closed eyelid.

“Shhh,” I soothed. “Shhh.”

His hand relaxed, his fist unclenched. Once again he began to snore softly.

Knowing it was wrong, I still couldn’t stop myself. I reached out and laid my hand across his forehead with a mere feather’s weight of contact. To calm him, or so I told myself. But I knew I was lying the moment I thought it. I simply had to know. I simply had to know right that minute how his skin would feel against the palm of my hand.

As my hand eased down onto his brow, he turned his head into it, as if welcoming the touch. The faintest of smiles softened his mouth. His breathing deepened.

I studied his face for what seemed like hours but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. I let the warmth of his forehead radiate into my hand and comfort me as (hopefully) I was comforting him. I inhaled Ramon’s clean scent and told myself repeatedly what I was doing was wrong. I should get the hell out before he woke and found me there pawing him like a pervert. Still I couldn’t leave.

This was all Arthur’s doing, I suddenly realized. He’s the one who told me about the bedroom closet. He’s the one who mentioned the key. He wanted me to do what I was doing. But wanted it for whom? For me? Or for Ramon?

I looked around the room. On the back of the door I had entered was a full-length mirror. There was no doorknob on this side. It could only be locked or opened from my apartment.

“Lo siento,” Ramon murmured again in his sleep, and this time I knew I had to leave. I carefully lifted my hand from his forehead and took the supreme risk of pushing some of his tangled locks away from his face. He didn’t wake.

I stood, and standing for a last moment beside the bed, looking down, I ran a fingertip along the line of Ramon’s wrist to feel his heat once more.

With that final touch, I turned away and moved quietly to the mirrored door. Stepping through, I eased it closed behind me, but just short of where the latch would catch.

With my heart pounding like a tom-tom, I stood in my eviscerated closet with a smile on my face and waited for my pulse to slow. It took a while.

Somehow I knew it would.

HOURS LATER, after spending the better part of the day tiptoeing around, trying not to disturb Ramon’s sleep and fighting the urge to peek in on him every five minutes, I heard a gentle tap at my front door.

I pulled it open to find Sylvia standing in the hall.

Looking furtive, she quickly stepped inside and closed the door behind her. “Is it true?” she asked. “Is Ramon really here?”

I pressed a finger to my lips and shushed her. I whispered back, “He’s asleep in the apartment next door. We need to let him rest. He’s exhausted.”

Sylvia was so happy she practically yanked me off my feet when she pulled me into an embrace. “Oh, I’m so glad, Barney! Did you see him? How does he look?”

The question caught me by surprise. How did he look? Is that what she asked me? He looked like the most gorgeous man ever! But I sure as hell couldn’t tell her that.

“He looked… fine,” I stammered.

She studied my face. “Fine? That’s it?” She clutched my hand and studied my face even closer. “You look a little shell-shocked, Barney. What is it?”

“N-nothing.”

A teeny smile began to play at her mouth. “You like him. Don’t you?”

I battled the urge to shuffle my feet. I straightened my shoulders and tried to appear astounded at her statement. “Like him? I just met him. How could I like him?”

She looked anything but convinced. Her eyes were all knowing, dammit. She was seeing through me like a cheap shower curtain. “He is sweet, isn’t he?”

I fought the urge to clutch my chest, for it was at that precise moment my heart spontaneously performed what amounted to a fucking cartwheel. I tried to cover it up, but my powers of duplicity apparently still sucked. I suspected they always would.

Sylvia laid a hand to my cheek and said softly, “I’ll bet he liked you too.” Then she tried to bite back a laugh. “Oh, Barney, you’re blushing.”

I flailed around for something to say that wouldn’t make me sound like a twit. “It’s warm in here,” I finally said, which I knew right away had failed spectacularly in the “try not to sound like a twit” department. Sylvia’s grin told me as much.

She must have decided to take pity on me. With a last hug, she said, “Thank you for bringing him home. It was a sweet thing to do, helping Arthur like that.”

Again, I tried not to shuffle my feet. “Well, you know. We all need to chip in once in a while.”

She planted a kiss on my forehead. “Yes, Barney, we do.”

She stepped out into the hall and turned at the last minute before I could close the door behind her.

“You’re one of the good guys, Barney. I’m glad you’re here.” Her words were gentle and kind and obviously from the heart. She leaned in one last time to give me a peck on the cheek. And with that she was gone.

I closed my door, and with a smile I didn’t seem to have any control over creeping across my face, I turned and stared at my closet—and what lay behind my very own secret door.

“I’m glad I’m here too,” I whispered into the empty room.

I whirled around at the sound of a thump at my back and yanked the door open, figuring it was Sylvia once again. Wrong. It was Stanley, sans his hunky green-eyed partner.

“Is it true?” he asked before I could say hello. “Is Ramon really back?”

I nodded. “He’s sleeping next door. Keep your voice down.”

Stanley hunched into himself as if that way the sound waves emanating from his voice box wouldn’t travel very far. “Is he okay? How does he look?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “And he looks….” I still wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. If I said he looked good enough to eat, Stanley might get the wrong idea. Good enough to eat. A sexy little shudder bounced through me at the very idea. “He looks, um, fit.”

Stanley gripped my shoulders and gave me a friendly shake. “That’s great, Barney! Ramon’s a swell guy. Wait’ll you get to know him.”

“Okay,” I mumbled, wishing I was back in the other bedroom right now, sitting at the side of Ramon’s bed and stroking his forehead like a lusting goose rather than standing where I was, watching an excited Stanley vibrate like a tuning fork on my threshold.

“Ta-ta,” Stanley said with a little wave. “You and Arthur did a good thing today, Barney. Don’t ever let anybody tell you different.” The moment I closed the door behind him and took two steps toward the kitchen, thinking I’d place a glass of juice on Ramon’s nightstand for when he woke up, there came another rapping at the door. Geez, I’d never been this popular in my life.

I yanked the door open and there stood Charlie the klepto. He had a zit on his chin that made me cringe. “Where is he?” he barked.

“Who?” I barked back because I was feeling stubborn.

“Ramon, dammit! Where’d you stash him?”

“He’s next door, sound asleep. And don’t go knocking on his door. He needs to rest.”

Charlie threw his hands up in submission, “Sheesh, what are you, his doctor? Well, tell him I was asking about him if you see him. You know. Me. Charlie.”

“Charlie,” I blandly echoed. The kleptomaniac, I didn’t add.

He punched me lightly on the arm. “Oh, and thanks to you and Arthur for rescuing the poor guy.”

“I guess the word’s out, then,” I said. “No secrets in the Arms, huh?”

Charlie grinned, and it was rather astounding that this goofy looking guy with the horrendous zit on his chin could suddenly transform himself into a decent-looking dude with no more effort than twisting his mouth into a smile. “Nary a secret indeed,” he said, his eyes flashing happily.

He shot me a final wink, and with that, he started to leave.

“Wait,” I said, and running to the bathroom, I snatched a tube of Clearasil from the medicine cabinet, ran back to the front door, and handed it to him. “Try this,” I said.

He looked at the tube, said, “Ooh, thanks, Barney. You really are a hero.” And with a shy grin, he backed out the door.

He dorked his way to the stairwell and headed down. The top of his carroty head was no more than out of sight when the top of another head appeared climbing up.

The sound of puffing and panting, the reek of cigar smoke, and a goodly amount of cussing and bitching and whining told me it was Arthur. He hated climbing stairs.

He saw me standing in my doorway and stopped in the middle of the flight, as if he was determined not to climb one step higher than he had to.

He was wearing a voluminous leopard-print muumuu that must have had enough fabric in it to gift wrap the Empire State Building. Earrings the size of hubcaps were screwed onto his earlobes. His bowling-ball-sized head was encased in a turban that perfectly matched the muumuu. A single peacock feather protruded from the top like a TV antenna.

Arthur cupped his hands around his mouth and lightly foghorned up the stairs, “Is he up yet?”

I shook my head.

“Well, shit,” Arthur grunted, and without further ado, he did an about-face and headed back down the stairs.

I puffed out a massive sigh and turned away to close the door behind me once again.

I took one step and froze because I knew what was going to happen before it happened. Sure enough, no sooner had the orders to take a second step traveled from my brain stem down through my spinal column along endless corridors of overwrought nerve endings, I heard an imperative scrape at the door. Muttering a curse, I spun around yet again to fling it open.

“Who…!”

Then I snapped my jaws shut. This was a guest I didn’t mind seeing.

Wilbur haughtily sauntered across the threshold, bumped my shin with his head in passing, walked straight through the living room into the bedroom, padded into the closet, and disappeared through the secret door, which I had left unlatched.

I gasped in horror. “Oh, shit!” I cried, rushing to head him off.

Chapter 6

BEFORE I got there, I saw a bushy head of wildass, red-tipped hair poke through the door at the back of the linen closet. Two huge brown eyes burned brightly among the foliage.

It was Ramon, of course, and he was cradling Wilbur in one arm, while with the other, he held the white sheet from the bed wrapped around his waist. The fact that he was undoubtedly as naked as a jaybird underneath the sheet did not go unnoticed by me. Nope. Not one little bit.

“Thank you,” he said softly, looking shy and sweet and beautifully rumpled from sleep.

His statement so surprised me, I almost forgot about what was hiding beneath the sheet.

“Thank you for what?” I asked. “What did I do?”

Ramon’s luscious eyes crinkled at the edges when his lips molded themselves into a gentle smile. “I heard you through the wall, telling people not to bother me, to let me sleep. I—I want you to know I appreciate it. I do. I’m not ready to face these people yet. Maybe I never will be.”

His voice was husky from sleep. Because of that, the faint Mexican lilt in his speech was like a familiar song sung in a new and different key, with a tempo slightly skewed. It was a sexy voice. Exotic, warm, riveting.

“They’re your friends,” I said, hoping to soothe the fear I saw in his eyes. “They want to see you again.”

He lifted Wilbur higher in his arm, hugged him close to his chest, and buried his mouth in Wilbur’s hair. I could hear the cat’s motor ratchet up a notch from across the room.

Ramon closed his eyes and shook his head slowly back and forth. “I didn’t… I didn’t….” Before he could say whatever it was he “didn’t,” he swayed on his feet, and I rushed over to catch him before he fell flat on his face. I could feel the tremble in his body the moment I laid my hands on him. And I could feel his heat. Too much heat. I led him to the edge of my bed and made sure he was properly sitting before I released his arm.

I stood over him and laid a hand to his forehead as I had done in his bedroom earlier. But this time I did it for him, not for me.

“I think you’ve got a fever, kiddo. Do you feel sick?”

He nodded. “Yeah.” His cheeks flushed redder than they already were. “I just keep finding new and exciting ways to be a pain in the ass. You and Arthur should have left me in the bushes.”

“Never,” I snapped. “Come on, let’s get you back to bed.”

He didn’t budge. Instead he looked up and asked, “Why is there a door between your apartment and the one Arthur put me in?”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I just discovered it myself. Maybe our two places were once a suite.” With a sinking sensation, I asked, “Would you like me to seal it shut?”

“Would you like to seal it shut?” he asked, taking me by surprise.

I lowered myself onto the bed beside him. I studied my hands, my feet, a patch of dirt on the knee of my blue jeans. I cleared my throat. I rubbed my chin, which was bristly since I hadn’t shaved that morning. Stalling for time. That’s what I was doing, of course. Even I knew it.

Finally, I offered up my feelings on the subject, or at least the feelings I was willing to admit to.

“I think we should leave the door as it is. At least until you’re feeling better. Once you’re back on your feet, I’ll lock it tight, put the closet shelves back in place, and pretend the door never existed at all. How would that be?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he said, “I wasn’t sick yesterday.”

I was intensely aware of his nearness, sitting there beside me wrapped in nothing but a sheet with Wilbur still purring in his arms. The fever, if that’s what it was, poured off him, enveloping me with the scent of hot skin and the soap he had bathed with earlier. I could almost physically feel his heat in the air around me. And God help me, I enjoyed feeling it.

I pushed that last thought away and dredged up what I hoped was a nonthreatening smile. I gave his hair a tousle, like everybody always does to me. His eyes opened wide at my touch, and I wondered if maybe I had gone too far.

But all he said was, “I need a haircut.”

He turned wary eyes from me and gazed about the room. With an unexpected flash of insight, which was pretty much a new experience for me since I usually never notice anything, I realized he wasn’t being wary. He was simply trying to cover his embarrassment. What he thought he had to be embarrassed about, I wasn’t entirely sure.

To change the subject, and to hopefully make him less uncomfortable, I once again reached out and laid my hand over his forehead. He held obediently still, as if he thought maybe I actually knew what I was doing.

And since he thought I knew what I was doing, I figured I might as well act like it. “I don’t think you’re sick, Ramon. I suspect you’re just exhausted.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know. I just suspect.”

“Are you a nurse?”

“I’m a bookkeeper,” I said, and he grinned.

“Great. I feel better already.”

“Sarcasm,” I said, “is a very ugly trait.”

Then we laughed, and the first sound of his laughter stunned me all the way down to my socks. His accent was beautiful, but his laugh was a knockout.

“Come on,” I said, heaving myself to my feet. “Let’s get you back to bed. I was about to get you some juice.”

He looked shyly up into my eyes. “Juice would be nice. I….”

“What?” I asked.

“You’re coddling me.”

“Maybe a little.”

“You’re coddling me and I don’t even know your name. I think Arthur introduced us yesterday, but now I don’t remember what it was.”

I jumped. “Oh, geez, I’m sorry.” I stuck my hand out. “I’m Barney. Barney Teegarden.”

He juggled Wilbur around in his arms to free up a hand to accept mine. “I don’t remember you from before.”

“No,” I said. “I just moved into the Arms a couple of weeks ago.”

His arms were beginning to tremble from holding Wilbur so long. Wilbur wasn’t exactly a lightweight. I plucked the cat from his grasp and set him on the bed.

Wilbur’s nose immediately headed for his ass. Bath time.

Ramon’s sheet had shifted, exposing a bronze knee.

I tore my eyes from it and took his hand. “Come on, kid. Let’s get you back to bed.”

He allowed me to lead him back through the closet door to his own bedroom.

At the bed he said, “Turn around.”

So I turned away while he situated himself and arranged the sheet over his naked body. When he was satisfied, he said, “I’m decent,” and I turned back around.

I smiled down at him from the foot of the bed. “Did anyone ever tell you your eyes are the exact color of cognac?”

He frowned. “Uh, no.”

I began to feel the blood creep into my face yet again and thought it might be the right time for a hurried exit. “Well, they are. So… do you want that juice now?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I think I’ll just sleep. Thanks.”

“Okay. But I’ll bring you the juice anyway, so you’ll have it when you wake up.”

“Okay,” he muttered, as if he didn’t really care one way or another but was too polite to come right out and tell me.

Wilbur had followed us in, and he now leaped onto the bed and curled himself into a fat ball at Ramon’s feet.

“Should I take the cat?” I asked.

Ramon didn’t answer. He was lying there studying my face, looking like he was trying to work up the courage to ask me a question.

“Go ahead,” I said kindly. “Say whatever it is you’re wanting to say. I’m being a leech, right? I’m getting on your nerves.”

“No,” he said with a feeble smile. “It’s not that.”

He tore his eyes from mine and stared through the window. The air hung still around us for a handful of heartbeats, then Ramon’s lilting voice, softened by weakness, drifted across the room toward me.

“Do you know about me?” he asked. “Do you know… what I did?”

He would know if I was lying, so I simply said, “Yes, Ramon. Arthur told me everything.”

He nodded as if he figured as much, and then without speaking another word, he closed his eyes, shutting out the room. Shutting out me.

I reached down to touch his foot. “Get some sleep,” I whispered. And with a last twiddle of Wilbur’s ear, I left the two of them alone, but only long enough for me to fetch a glass of orange juice. I returned with it a moment later and quietly placed the glass on Ramon’s nightstand alongside a couple of aspirin.

Satisfied I had done all I could, I pulled the door between our two apartments almost closed, leaving it ajar enough for Wilbur to escape if he needed to get out.

For most of the afternoon, I tiptoed around, trying to be quiet. When the sun was still a couple of hours from dropping below the horizon outside my kitchen window, I curled up on my own bed with a book and tried to read, but the words on the page never quite connected to the functioning part of my brain, if there were any functioning parts left.

No gentle snores came from the room next door, so I suspected Ramon was as wide awake as I.

I slipped out my front door, quietly latching it behind me, and headed down the stairs.

IF ARTHUR was surprised to see me at his doorstep, he didn’t let on.

He was still in his leopard-print ensemble: muumuu, turban, brown satin high heels, hubcap earrings, and a cigar sticking out of his mouth. If I looked up the word “disconcerting” in my trusty Funk & Wagnalls, I’d probably find his picture there.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said before I could open my mouth. He grabbed my wrist and yanked me through the door into his apartment. He tugged me all the way across the threshold and into his arms. I was suddenly encased in a jungle of spotted calico, and one of the hubcap earrings was banging me in the side of the head. I swallowed hard, trying not to puke from the cigar fumes wafting over me.

When he had done as much damage to my psyche as he could, he released me and looked me up and down. “I assume you found the key.”

“Yes.”

“Did you open the connecting door?”

“Yes.”

“Did Ramon mind?”

“Didn’t seem to.”

“Good. Have you spoken to him?”

“Yes. He’s tired, but I think he’ll be okay.”

He nodded as if he’d figured as much. And being Arthur, he surprised the hell out of me by reaching into one of the many folds of his muumuu and plucking out a roll of what looked like twenty-dollar bills. He thrust it into my hand.

I gaped at it stupidly. “What’s this for?”

Arthur adjusted one of his earrings. “Did you see Ramon’s clothes, darling? The poor boy has been reduced to wearing rags. Even his shoes are falling apart. We’ll never get him back on his feet looking like a pauper. You have to take him shopping.”

“Why me?” I asked, honestly baffled. “Why don’t you take him?”

Arthur cocked his head to the side and studied me with a dawning grin on his face. “Are you saying you don’t want to?”

I hemmed and hawed and shuffled my feet. “Well, no. I’m not saying that.”

Arthur laughed. “That’s what I thought. He’s going to need a friend to help him get his life back. I can’t think of anyone who can manage it better than you.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because you like him.”

I tried to get all properly affronted. Then I knew I’d never be able to carry it off. Problem was, he was exactly right. I did like Ramon. I liked him a lot. And Arthur apparently knew it.

“Fine,” I grumped. “I like him. So sue me.”

Arthur laid his huge hand to the side of my cheek and smiled sweetly, the sweetness only slightly sullied by that nasty, reeking cigar poking out of his mouth. “I saw the way you looked at him back on that hillside, Barney. You have a good heart. And this may come as a surprise to you, but I know for a fact Ramon has a good heart too. He’s going to need a friend. Seems to me there’s nobody more suited to fill the position.”

Too embarrassed to acknowledge what he had said, I looked down at the money in my hand instead, fanning it out. “How much is here?” I asked.

“Five hundred bucks, give or take.”

“For clothes?”

“Clothes, food, stuff for the apartment. Whatever he needs. If you run out of money, just ask and I’ll give you more.”

“You want receipts?”

Arthur laughed. “Christ, Barney. Stop being a bookkeeper and think with your heart. We’re doing a good thing here. With any luck at all, we can give Ramon his life back. We might even give your own life a boost. At least the loving end of it. Ever think of that?”

“N-no. I don’t know what you mean.”

He giggled. “I think your pants are on fire, you big liar.” He blew a fat cloud of carcinogens into the air. If there were any mosquitoes in the immediate vicinity, I figured they were toast. “Now, then, Barney. Was there something you wanted?”

I tried to ignore the infusion of blood climbing up the back of my neck and working its way around to my face. I shuffled my feet again. Christ, I hate it when I do that.

“I just wanted to tell you…”

“Yes?”

“…I wanted to tell you you’re a good person. Setting out to rescue Ramon the way you did. Never giving up. It was a kind and selfless act and, well, shit, Arthur, I wanted you to know I’m honored to have been the one you chose to do it with.” My face felt like it was about to burst into flames, but I knew I had to finish what I came to say. “Pete told me you had a big heart, and I can’t wait to tell him he was right.”

Arthur’s fat hand, adorned with a ring on every finger, including the thumb, clutched at his bosom, making me wonder if there were once again a couple of bags of chickpeas under there, since chickpeas seemed to be his tits of choice. Before I could ask, his chin puckered and gave a tremble.

The next thing I knew, he had snatched me into his arms again, smashing my face to his chest, slinging me back and forth in one of those hugs that actually lifts you off the ground and leaves you dangling in midair. I had a horrible image of the fire at the end of his cigar setting my hair in flames, but happily I was spared that humiliation.

When he lowered me back to the floor and I stepped back to adjust all my clothes, which he had managed to disarrange quite thoroughly—one of my shoes had come off and bounced halfway across the room—I saw the glimmer of tears in his eyes as he stood there towering over me, smiling fondly while I practically redressed myself.

He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. To my surprise he gently pushed me into the hall with my shoe still in my hand and closed the door in my face.

Only then did I hear a weeping howl from the other side of the door.

Smiling, I stuffed the money in my pocket, stuffed my foot in my shoe, and headed back up the stairs.

IT WAS approaching sunset when I next heard a sound at the closet door. It was a squeak. A teeny squeak.

Thinking Ramon might be up and about, I peered into the closet and saw Wilbur sprawled out in my laundry basket giving himself a bath. The closet door leading to Ramon’s apartment was still ajar, and hearing a rustling sound on the other side, I tapped lightly to see if Ramon was awake.

“Come in,” he said softly, and I poked my head in the door.

Ramon was sitting at the foot of the neatly made bed. He was dressed now in the same ragged jeans and T-shirt that he had worn when we brought him home. His ratty tennis shoes were on his feet, and beside him on the bed sat the yellow tarp, neatly tied into a bundle. Nowhere else in the room did I see any of Ramon’s meager belongings.

He peered at me with eyes wide with trepidation, and he was fidgeting with the tail of his shirt, twisting it into knots, then unwinding it to twist it in the opposite direction.

I forced a grin to my face, trying to appear unconcerned. “You’re up! How are you feeling? You look better.” In truth, he did. He had done his best to tame his wild mat of hair, and his face was less puffy and tired. He didn’t look happy, though. He didn’t look happy at all.

“I’m leaving now,” he said.

My answer came without a moment of thought or hesitation. It was as if I had been waiting for this announcement ever since the moment we brought Ramon back to the Belladonna Arms, and I had long ago worked out my response to it.

“Like hell you are,” I said.

He blinked in surprise at my tone. Then his eyes narrowed, and the muscles in his jawline tensed.

He patted the bed beside him. “Sit,” he said. So I sat.

When I was situated, he spoke calmly, but not directly to me. He aimed his words at the window overlooking the darkening city outside.

“You and Arthur have done enough. I don’t want to be a charity case. The two of you have already done more than I can ever repay.”

“We’re not asking you to repay us, Ramon.”

A pained look crossed his face. “I know. That shames me even more.”

I scooted a centimeter closer until our shoulders brushed. “You feel ashamed?”

He nodded, and his mouth, so beautiful and lush a moment earlier, thinned to a wounded slash across his face. Gazing at him from the side, I saw a tear well up and grow fat atop his lower lash. A second later it slid down his cheek. With a flick of his tongue, he licked it away from the corner of his mouth.

Trying to ignore the growing ache in my heart, I draped an arm over his shoulder, as much to make sure he didn’t try to run away as to comfort him.

“We won’t let you go, Ramon. Arthur won’t, and I won’t. In fact, if you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to take you shopping. For clothes and for groceries. On Arthur’s nickel. Right now. You’re home, see. This apartment is your home. Arthur loves you. He must or he wouldn’t be doing all this. And I want to be your friend.”

“My friend,” he said softly, as if tasting the word on his tongue as he had tasted the tear.

With our shoulders still touching, I scooped his hand out of his lap and folded it into mine. His fingers were warm and supple in my palm. The heat of them wasn’t as feverish as before. He felt alive.

I’m not one to talk much. Never have been. But for some reason I felt the words pleading to be let out. I couldn’t have stopped them if I wanted, and I wasn’t about to let him leave. No fucking way.

“Yes, Ramon. Your friend. You’ve touched something in me, I think. I want to see you fixed. I want to see you happy again. And more than anything, I want you to want to be my friend as much as I want to be yours.”

He swallowed hard, as if fighting back more tears.

Afraid of what he was about to say, I dove back in and blathered on, trying to dam up his words with my own and cut them off at the pass. “I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never tried to make a difference in somebody’s life. To tell you the truth, I never thought I had anything to offer anybody. But with you—I don’t know—I feel… limitless.”

He turned toward me. Our eyes met. “Limitless,” he muttered under his breath.

I could hear my pulse thumping inside my head. His hand still lay warm in my own. Our knees were touching now. I wasn’t sure when that had happened.

To my surprise, he drew his eyes from my face, and squeezing them shut, he laid his head on my shoulder.

“I’ve missed having a friend,” he said.

I answered, truthfully, “So have I.”

We sat like that with only the sound of our breathing radiating out into the room. I imagined myself swelling up like a balloon. I wasn’t five seven any more. I was six two. I wasn’t a skinny little dorky bookkeeper. I was a superhero. All I needed was a cape.

“Let’s go shopping,” I said again. “You’ll feel better with some nice clothes.”

“Arthur’s paying?”

“That’s what he said.” I leaned in and whispered, “He’s rich you know. He must be to buy all those ball gowns.”

Ramon giggled. “I know.”

He took a long, shuddering breath as his giggle slowly turned to a frown. “I’m embarrassed to go into a store with what I’ve got on.”

“Does that mean you’ll go?”

He shrugged. “I guess, but I don’t want to.”

Lifting his head from my shoulder, he shyly looked away.

I considered the problem. “Ramon,” I said. “You’re no bigger than I am. Let me loan you a shirt and pants to shop in. You might even be able to wear my shoes.” I grinned to see a flash of hope light his eyes. “Will you work with me on this?”

He slowly nodded, still embarrassed but beginning to look determined too. Almost as determined as I was.

“Come on,” I said, rising to my feet but never once letting go of his hand for fear he would bolt. “Let’s do it. Let’s go shopping. I’ll sneak you out of the building before anybody sees you.”

He glanced at the closet door, then back at me. He turned to the bedroom window and took in the deepening dusk as night slid over the city outside. The darkness seemed to comfort him. “You promise?”

And there they were again. Those incredible cognac-colored eyes focused solely on me. Right where I liked them to be.

Lost yet again in their swirl of bottomless brown and gold, I had to go spelunking to find my voice. “Yes,” I finally croaked. “I promise.”

Chapter 7

WITH NEW clothes and a decent roof over his head, Ramon slowly eased his way back into life at the Belladonna Arms. It was painfully obvious the process was torture for him, but he also made it clear he appreciated Arthur’s intervention in getting him off the streets.

While he received dinner invitations almost on a daily basis from his former friends in the building, he turned every one of them down. It was difficult for me to witness his discomfort when he did it. The needle on the guy’s self-respect meter hovered constantly at zero. “I need time to adjust,” he would say to one invitation after another, eyes downcast, his cheeks burning red. And eventually, by the time Ramon had been back for a month, the invitations had pretty much petered out. There were no hard feelings over it, or none that I could detect. His old friends seemed to understand. Being the good people they were, they stoically and generously drew back, giving Ramon the room he needed to find himself again. They still exchanged friendly greetings when they met Ramon on the stairs or ran into him down at the mailboxes in the lobby, but any further attempts at closeness were left unextended. Rightly so, I thought. In my opinion they were giving Ramon exactly what he needed. Of course, the fact that the only person Ramon seemed to include in his confidences during this period was me might have had something to do with my cavalier attitude toward his standoffishness where everybody else was concerned.

Arthur, it must be said, was so generous with Ramon it stunned me almost continually. He slipped twenty-dollar bills under Ramon’s door whenever he thought Ramon might be running low. When Ramon’s birthday came around, which only Arthur seemed to be aware of, Ramon found gift certificates for Macy’s, Ralphs, Banana Republic, and Baskin-Robbins tucked inside his mailbox.

I knew the gifts were beginning to bother Ramon, but in truth there was no way he could have survived without them. (Although he might have managed okay without fifty dollars’ worth of ice cream to nibble on.) So exactly four weeks after his return, Ramon found a job as a telemarketer in a firm downtown. Ramon had, as they say, cleaned up nicely by this time. He wore simple jeans and tees and tennies for the most part because he didn’t want to spend any more of Arthur’s money than he had to on clothes for himself. When he applied for the telemarketing job, he borrowed slacks and a dress shirt from me for the interview. I had to admit, he looked better in my clothes than I ever did.

His only concession to the six months he had lived on the street seemed to be his hair. It was almost down to his shoulders now, and usually he would wear it in a ponytail tied back with a little strip of leather. His lush head of hair waved down the back of his neck, the tips still streaked red from that long-forgotten dye job. Every time I saw it, my fingers itched to pluck away the little strip of leather and let his locks tumble down over his ears and across his shoulders. I would have loved to bury my face in it too, but I tried not to think about that. Thoughts like that wouldn’t do either one of us any good.

At Ramon’s request, the secret closet door connecting our two apartments remained unlocked and ajar. He said it was because he wanted Wilbur to have access to us both, and it must be said Wilbur seemed to agree wholeheartedly. On any given day of the week, he could be found either with me or with Ramon. The old reprobate had even stopped mooching meals all over the building. He rarely left our two apartments. We placed a cat box in the closet and stocked up on his favorite cat foods until some future day when he would decide he’d had enough of us and took off once again for parts unknown. So far that seemed to be the furthest thing from his mind.

While the connecting door was left open, it was seldom that Ramon and I spent any significant time together. Occasionally Ramon would tap gently at the closet door and step shyly into my domain for a chat, or to bring me a plate of something he had cooked. For as it turned out, Ramon was a pretty good cook. Which came as a surprise to me. My cooking skills rivaled Sylvia’s. In other words, they didn’t exist at all.

For some reason, after Arthur and I rescued Ramon and brought him back to live at the Belladonna Arms, the blind dates aimed at finding me a boyfriend ceased. Not that I much noticed. I was too busy waiting for that gentle tap at my closet door.

Two weeks into his new job, there came such a tap. It was Friday night. The weather had grown hotter, and I was sprawled on my couch reading another gay romance. I had my fan blowing the hot air around, but what I really needed were windows that weren’t painted shut. Barefoot, dressed in baggy shorts and a ratty T-shirt I wouldn’t have worn in public without first having a gun held to my head, I called out for Ramon to come on in. So he did.

He was holding a bottle of Hennessy in his hand, along with two snifters. He saw me looking at it.

“I thought we might have a drink and celebrate my new job. Got my first paycheck today. I set some money aside for Arthur,” he said, raising the bottle to eye level, “and I set some money aside for this.”

“Cognac?” I asked, pulling myself to a sitting position and beckoning for him to sit beside me. “I figured you more for the tequila type. You know, the kind with a worm in it.”

He laughed and dragged out his over-the-top, heavy-duty Mexican accent that he sometimes employed when he was being playful, and oh, how I loved it when he did. “Actually, señor, I’m more of the cerveza type. But I’ve had cognac on the brain lately. You want to know why?”

I thought I already knew, but why spoil his fun? “Um, sure. Lay it on me.”

He was wearing yellow sweat pants and a matching muscle shirt that looked to be about twelve sizes too big for him. His feet were bare like mine. I spotted something weighty bobbing around in the crotch of those sweat pants every time he moved, so I figured Ramon had dressed commando, which gave me a heart palpitation or two, don’t think it didn’t. But I tried to stay focused on his face, to be a gentleman. In all truth, it wasn’t that hard to do. Ramon had a face I could have stared at forever.

He plopped down beside me and placed the cognac and the glasses on the coffee table in front of us, but made no move to pour.

He twisted one leg up under himself and relaxed, flinging his arm over the back of the sofa in my direction, offering me a breathtaking view of his fuzzy armpit and several inches of bronzed rib cage. His hand rested inches from my shoulder. But that armpit! God, I loved it when Ramon wore baggy clothes.

He studied my face for a moment, then lifted the cognac bottle and laid it against his cheek. “You were right,” he said, blinking like crazy and grinning at the same time. “My eyes really are the same color as cognac. Remember? You told me that the first day I was back.”

“I remember.”

He blinked again. “Still think you’re right?”

I leaned in closer so he would think I was comparing the color of his golden brown irises and the liquid in the bottle. Of course, what I was really doing was simply breathing in his scent, but he didn’t need to know that. There was a glimmer of sweat on his upper lip I would have loved to kiss away, but I knew that wasn’t about to happen. He wore his hair loose tonight, the way I liked it. It framed his face in dark waves, moving when he moved, catching the light here and there. As time passed, the reddish tips at the end were beginning to fade to orange, but I liked seeing them there. His hair still looked a wee bit damp. He must have just stepped from the shower.

“Yep,” I finally answered, shaking myself back to the present. I made it a point to stare first at the cognac and then into his soulful amber eyes so he’d know I was doing what he asked. “Perfect match.”

He stared silently back at me for a second or two longer than necessary, rendering me pretty much speechless.

Some weird vibe passed between us, and then he gave a little jump as if to spur himself into action and asked, “So are you up for a drink?”

I nodded and smiled. “Sure. Thanks.”

I watched him tear away the plastic seal on the bottle and pour a splash of cognac in each glass.

“Where’d you get the snifters?” I asked.

“Thrift store up the street. Fifty cents each.”

“Is that where you got that bigass shirt too?”

He looked down at himself and giggled. “Yeah. It was only a dollar. Why?”

“No reason.”

He finished pouring and handed me a glass. We had an awkward moment as he seemed to wrestle with himself about what to do next. Finally he shyly clinked his glass against mine and said, with a stutter of embarrassment he seemed determined to overcome no matter what, “This is for everything you’ve done for me, Barney. You saved my life, I think. And you keep on saving it. Day after day. I want you to know I appreciate everything you’ve done. Thank you.”

Moved by his words, I softly said, “That wasn’t me, Ramon. That was Arthur. Arthur and you. Arthur threw you a lifeline, and you grabbed onto it. The two of you saved your life. I was just along for the ride.”

Ramon shook his head and playfully threw another salvo of over-the-top Mexican at me. “No, amigo. I don’t theenk so.”

He rested his hand on my knee, and I was so surprised by the touch of his fingers on my bare leg, I got flustered, and for lack of anything smarter to do, I tossed the entire shot of cognac down my throat.

Since I’m not much of a drinker, it went down like fire. I gasped, my eyes watered up, and just as I was trying to suck in a little oxygen to quell the flames in my gut, Ramon began pounding on my back.

“Jesus, Barney. I think you’re supposed to sip it.”

“I think you’re right,” I wheezed, sucking back a dribble of snot and hoping Ramon hadn’t noticed.

He laughed, and pounded me a little more. “Don’t die on me, or I won’t have a friend in the world.”

I clutched my throat and huffed and puffed for a minute, dying of either asphyxiation or embarrassment, I wasn’t sure which. Then I said, “That’s not true. You have a lot of friends here. One of these days you’ll start letting them back into your life. Then you’ll forget about me quick enough, I reckon.”

My words stopped both Ramon and me in our tracks. I hadn’t expected to say them, and by the horrified expression on his face, Ramon certainly hadn’t expected to hear them.

His voice was a mere whisper, but it was a whisper with an edge to it. It cut through the air like a knife.

“Please tell me you don’t really believe that,” he said, his eyes wide and sad and delving. They were so latched onto mine I couldn’t have torn my own eyes away if I’d tried.

“I’m sorry, Ramon. That wasn’t what I meant to say. It was the firewater talking.”

He gently plucked the empty snifter from my hand and set it on the coffee table out of the way. His own glass, still untouched, he placed beside mine.

This time when he turned to me, he took my hand in both of his. He sat so close I could feel his warm, sweet breath ease over me. It was all I could do not to scoot closer. Way closer. Like maybe collapse in his lap and start dribbling other bodily fluids besides snot all over the poor guy.

He couldn’t see what I was thinking, thank God, and while he had indeed managed to trap my hand in both of his, he now seemed unable to look me in the eye as he had before. He studied the room around us instead. The TV, the desk, the door leading into the kitchen, the book I had been reading, which was now splayed open on the coffee table beside the bottle of Hennessy.

“I never do anything right,” he said, his eyes settling on his untouched glass of cognac. “I only wanted to tell you how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me. And how you’ve always been there for me. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. That’s the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do.”

Knowing I was crossing a line, but refusing to worry about it, I pulled his hands to my face and pressed them against my lips. When I spoke, I tasted his skin on my words.

“I’m not very good at expressing myself, I guess, Ramon. You didn’t hurt my feelings. In fact, you touched me more than I can begin to explain, either to you or to myself.” Suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted to say. Nothing short of a roll of duct tape wrapped around my head could have stopped me. “This whole thing with you and Arthur and me, it’s not the way you see it. You seem to think we helped no one but you. I really can’t speak for Arthur, but I do know one thing. What we did has done as much for me as it’s done for you. I sort of feel like I’ve been rescued too.” I spat up a self-deprecating chuckle I hoped didn’t sound too forced. “You’ve made me like myself again.”

His eyes finally shifted to me, his amber orbs wide and searching as he studied my face. “You didn’t like yourself before?”

I gave an embarrassed shrug. “Not much.”

“But why?”

“Just didn’t. That’s all.”

He stared at my mouth still pressed to his hands. His thumb came out of the clench and stroked a path across my cheek. The touch was so light I leaned into it to feel it more. When I did he blessed me with a tiny smile.

“You are my best friend in the whole wide world, Barney Teegarden. I don’t care what you say, in my eyes you’re my savior. You and Arthur both. Big savior, little savior. I can never pay either one of you back for all you’ve done. The best I can ask is that you be my friend.”

“You know I’m your friend,” I said, closing my eyes as the scrape of his knuckle, hard and tender at the same time, brushed my lips. “And I don’t think you have to worry about Arthur either.”

He let those words soak in, and then he eased his hands out of my grip. He poured another dollop of cognac into my glass and handed it to me before he picked up his own.

Tapping his glass to mine one more time, he said, “Sip it this time, dipshit.”

I laughed. But I also sipped. I had learned my lesson.

By the time three more toasts had come around, one to Arthur, one to the Belladonna Arms, and one to Wilbur, who had finally crawled out of his laundry basket and joined us on the couch, neither one of us was feeling much pain. The Hennessy bottle was half-empty. The air had grown cooler as the evening advanced. And I now sported a hard-on because Ramon’s hand had come to rest on my bare thigh about ten minutes earlier, and although he seemed to have forgotten about it being there, I sure as hell hadn’t. My hard-on horrified me more than it excited me. I somehow instinctively knew if I made a sexual move toward Ramon at this moment in our relationship, he would consider it a betrayal.

I don’t know how I knew that. I just did.

I thrashed around inside my head for a way to diffuse my sexual thoughts and try to get back to the real reason Ramon was here. This wasn’t about me, after all. This was about Ramon being able to bring himself back into the world. He was right. To do that, he needed friends.

We sipped the cognac in tandem. It was probably our fifth or sixth shot by then.

“Tastes like gasoline.” Ramon winced, which somehow made him even cuter and sexier than he already was. My hard-on gave a lurch inside my shorts, and I crossed my legs to make it stop, which of course didn’t work.

“Still?” I asked.

“Still what?”

“Still tastes like gasoline?”

His mouth twitched into a shy grin. “Oh. Yeah. Not unleaded either. The cheap shit. The kind the yard man dumps in his lawn mower.”

His Mexican accent grew more pronounced the more he drank. It didn’t quite reach the Telemundo parody level he had employed earlier, but it was getting close. I thought it was cute before, but now it was sexy as hell. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but when you drink you start to sound like the Frito Bandito.”

He smirked but didn’t seem offended. “Thanks a lot.” At least he smiled when he said it.

I laughed, and thinking this might be a good time to change the subject, I asked, “How’s your job?”

“Sucks.”

“Really? I thought mine was the only job that did that.”

He didn’t respond. Not directly. He waited for Wilbur to climb up into his lap and settle in. I had the feeling Ramon wasn’t listening to the small talk anymore. His thoughts had shifted. I could see it in the sudden sadness of his eyes, the puckered corners of his mouth that no longer held a smile waiting to burst through. Stroking Wilbur’s back, he let his words seep out as if they were simply slipping away unplanned. But I suspected there was more thinking behind his words than there was spontaneity. In fact, I quickly realized he had thought about this a lot. Maybe he always would.

“It’s funny, you know. He never made a sound.” Ramon breathed the words into the room, and they hung on the air around us. To bring myself closer to the man beside me, I reached out and laid my hand over Wilbur too. We stroked the cat in unison, Ramon and I. The cat purred at the sensation of both our hands on his back. My knee touched Ramon’s leg. He didn’t pull away, so neither did I.

I knew exactly who Ramon was talking about. I could tell by the solemn, dazed look on his face. It was as if a memory had resurfaced there for the millionth time, and once again he was unable to push it away. It still hurt, that memory. I could see it in his eyes.

“ChiChi?” I whispered.

He nodded. “I cried over him as he died, you know. I told him I was sorry. He just lay there, watching me. Do you know what he did right before he slipped away?”

“What?” I asked, slipping my hand from the cat and covering Ramon’s hand with it instead. “What did he do?”

“He… smiled. He looked up at me and smiled. Then his eyes closed and that was it.”

I watched as tears began to spill out over Ramon’s long black lashes. His breath caught. A shudder went through him, and seeing it, I pulled him into my arms. Slipping my fingers into his long hair, I pulled his face into the crook of my neck and whispered in his ear, “Let it out, Ramon. Cry if that’s what you want to do. Or scream and rant and rave if you think that will help instead. Just get it out of your system, kid.”

I felt the dampness of his tears on my neck. His shoulders heaved in one brief spasm of misery; then he seemed to relax in my arms. “I’m not a kid any more than you are. We’re the same age, you and me.”

I patted his back, feeling stupid and ineffectual. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

It was then he asked the last question I expected to hear. “Have you ever been in love, Barney?”

Since this was a night of truths, I responded the only way I knew how. “Yes,” I said, “but I’ve never been loved back.”

Ramon rested warm in my arms as we leaned into the sofa cushions. His hand slid up my back and rested atop my shoulder blade. I liked feeling it there. A stillness surrounded us except for a heartbeat that pounded in my ears. I couldn’t tell if it was his or mine. He didn’t move for a second after I pulled him to me, but then he sniffed and twisted his head a fraction to the left. Once there, his lips brushed against my throat, and I could feel the heat of his breath on my neck when he spoke. Almost imperceptibly, his arm tightened around me.

“Then you’re lucky,” he muttered. “I hope I never know love again. I hope I never know love again in either direction. Going out or coming in.”

Before I could respond to such a heart-wrenching statement, he extracted himself from my arms.

“Good night,” he said softly. Avoiding my gaze and leaving the cognac and the glasses where they were, he wearily padded across the room on his bare feet and disappeared through the closet door. I watched as he carefully adjusted the door behind him, leaving it ajar for Wilbur, should Wilbur decide to join him in the night.

I tried to imagine how it would feel to know he was leaving the door ajar for me. That thought was so painful I forced it away.

I sat on the sofa with the cat still at my side. In Ramon’s apartment I heard the toilet flush and water running. He was probably brushing his teeth. A minute later I heard the squeak of bed springs as Ramon retired for the night. The light around the rim of the closet door blinked out.

I sat up until long past midnight, wondering what I was going to do.

For once again, I knew, as Ramon had said, my love was going out and nothing was coming in. Judging by Ramon’s last words, it was apt to stay that way.

I laid my head back and draped my arm over my eyes, hoping to lose myself in the darkness behind my eyelids. Having several shots of cognac coursing through my system helped a little, but not enough. Alone, I could still smell Ramon’s scent on the air. I could still taste his fingers on my lips, feel his mouth on my throat and the heat of his tears on my skin.

I squeezed my eyes shut a little tighter and tried not to think about him. Yeah, I thought, aching all the more. Like that’ll really work.

TRAFFIC ON the freeway sucked. The cars were bumper to bumper, and every face in the vehicles creeping along on either side of my crappy Kia Rio was dour and pissed off. Or just plain sweating bullets.

Except for the face beside me.

Pete was so happy he was bouncing in his seat and headbanging to Cher bellowing from my CD player. I finally had to remove my hand from the wheel and pat his knee to calm him down.

“What the hell has gotten into you?”

He merely laughed. “Big secret. Can’t tell you. Sylvia would shoot me dead if I did.”

Pete suddenly stopped headbanging and turned to stare at me with freaky-ass eyes that looked as big as cue balls. “Did you ever change a diaper?”

I tapped my brakes so I wouldn’t kill us by plowing into the moron in front of me, who had a bumper sticker that said Tailgaters Suck Ass and three ugly kids who were staring out the back window and sticking their tongues out at me. The little pricks. “Uh. No. Not once. And I don’t plan to. I’m not a big fan of poop in any of its myriad forms.”

“Well, huh,” he said. “Thanks, Barney. Good to know.” He cranked the music up a notch and recommenced headbanging. He was giving me a headache and probably giving himself a concussion at the same time. Even the three ugly kids in the car ahead looked vaguely annoyed.

“Ahem,” I said. “Would you mind if I asked you to ride in the trunk?”

He stopped dancing around in his seat and stared at me. He reached over and clicked off the tape deck. “What the hell is wrong with you lately, Bernard?”

I hunched over the wheel, glowering at the traffic ahead. It was snapshot still. Not a car was moving, including my own. Since Pete was perched there beside me like a vulture waiting for an answer, I finally grumbled, “Don’t call me Bernard, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Horseshit,” he said. “It’s Ramon, isn’t it? You’ve fallen for the guy, and he’s not giving you the time of day. That’s it, isn’t it?”

I pushed my chest into the seat belt, trying to peel my sweat-soaked shirt from the seat behind me. My air conditioner was on the fritz. Naturally. It had been on the fritz since the day I bought the car. I had all the windows rolled down, but the only thing flowing through them was the stench of car exhaust and an occasional bug.

I could feel myself deflating in the heat like an old balloon. “Is it that obvious?”

Pete stretched his long arm across the seat back and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Poor guy,” he cooed. “Love’s a motherhumper, huh?”

“Yes. Motherhumper.”

He tapped his fingers on my shoulder like he was thinking things through. Finally he stopped tapping. “You have to be patient, Barney. Look at all Ramon has gone through. He likes you, I know he does. It’ll just take him a while to make that natural progression from knowing you’re a simple friend to knowing you’re the hotass Adonis come-machine that’s missing in his life.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m serious, actually.” Pete had apparently grown tired of the heat as much as I had. He punched the air conditioner button on the dashboard, and when nothing happened for the umpteenth time, as he must have known it wouldn’t, he punched it again and sighed. As a next-best alternative, he dragged a ledger out of the briefcase on the floorboard between his feet and fanned himself with it. Being the good friend he was, and knowing I was about to self-immolate, he gave me a couple of flaps to cool me off. Didn’t work, of course, but his intentions were honorable.

“Have you let him know you’re interested in him that way at all?” Pete asked, wiping the sweat from his neck with a hanky.

“No.”

“Why not? Maybe it’s time to crank it up to the next level.”

“He’s out of my league.”

Pete sat speechless, staring at me. “What does that have to do with anything? You think Sylvia isn’t out of my league?”

I grunted because I felt like grunting. “Yeah, but look what you had to offer her.”

Pete guffawed. “Oh, really? What was that?”

I grinned. “A humongous dick.”

“Well, that’s true.” He grinned back. Then we both giggled.

The traffic moved forward a couple of car lengths, then stalled again. Shit. At this rate we’d never get home.

“He’s so fragile, Pete. I’m afraid I’ll scare him off.”

Pete considered that. “I wish you could have known Ramon before. He was the sweetest, sexiest, happiest guy in the building. And loyal. He put up with shit from ChiChi nobody else would have put up with. But he still loved the guy. He still made excuses for him. He still tried to see nothing but the good in ChiChi. Poor ChiChi had his own demons, but Ramon overlooked those too. If you ever earn his love, Barney, he’ll be yours forever.”

I studied Pete’s somber eyes as he studied me back. He wasn’t joking now. He was dead serious. I believed him too. I believed him because I knew Ramon by now. I knew what a good heart he had. But still….

“Tell me what to do, Pete. Tell me how to begin. How did you go after Syl? What was it about you that finally made her turn the corner and see you for the Romeo you really were?”

He laughed. “I did what you’re doing. I mooned around, whined, drank myself silly, cried, bitched, stalked her when the opportunity arose, lurked in stairwells, spent a fortune on flowers, and pretty much made a general nuisance of myself until she either had to fall in love with me in return or else drag me into the bay and drown my annoying ass. Happily, she chose the former solution.”

“So I should tell him how I feel?”

Pete gazed at me. Then he swiped at the dust on my dashboard. Then he rearranged the pens in his pocket guard. Then he hocked up a loogie and spit it out the window. Lovely.

“I don’t have a clue,” he at long last admitted. “Let me ask Sylvia. She’ll know what you should do.”

I sank lower into my seat, glared at the three ugly kids in the car in front of me, and mumbled incoherently to myself.

Then I turned and asked, “I’m sorry, Pete, were you talking about diapers?”

Chapter 8

A FEW days later, Sylvia came calling with Toll House cookies in hand. This time she came with not one platter of cookies, but two. One for me and one for Ramon.

By some unspoken rule, everyone in the building seemed to have grown accustomed to coming to my door when they wanted to speak to Ramon. I could only assume the reason for this was because Ramon pretty much steadfastly refused to answer his own door. If he heard a knock on it, he would freeze in place and pretend he wasn’t home. A couple of minutes later, while Ramon was still standing next door holding his breath and making like a statue, the knock would be transferred to my door and a message left for Ramon from whoever had come a-calling.

I sort of liked the system. It let me see Ramon more than I would otherwise have seen him, and the more I could see Ramon, the less of a lusting, pining lunkhead I became. And yes, I knew I was being a lunkhead, and yes, I really am that pathetic. But I honestly liked the guy, and everyone except Ramon seemed to know it.

Sigh.

After I relieved Sylvia of the two platters of cookies, she stood in my doorway and silently mimed her way through asking me if Ramon was home next door, and if he was home could he hear us, and if I would mind giving him the one platter of cookies because she didn’t want to bother him by knocking on his door, which she knew he probably wouldn’t answer, and if he wasn’t going to answer his door, what was the point of her knocking on the damn thing anyway, and by the way the other plate of cookies was for me.

It was a lot of miming.

I rolled my eyes and ushered her inside. “Please, God, stop miming. You can talk. He’s still at work. Come on in.”

She breathed a delicate sigh of relief and gave a finger waggle of greeting to Wilbur, who was licking his ass in the kitchen doorway.

She blinked, staring at him. “I think you’re overfeeding that cat.”

Wilbur growled.

“Or maybe not,” she hurriedly corrected herself.

We stepped over Wilbur, who now eyed Sylvia like a leery Sherpa eyeballing an ice-axe-wielding Yeti, and parked ourselves at my kitchen table, where I had been playing a game of solitaire. Told you I was pathetic.

We sat opposite each other, and the first thing she said was, “Put the red six on the black seven.”

“Oh. Thanks.” I moved the card. Then I thought maybe I was being rude, so I gathered up the whole deck, cajoled them into a neat little pile, and set them aside. Folding my arms in front of me, I gave Sylvia my full attention. “What’s up, oh beauteous one?”

Sylvia grimaced and looked at me like I was speaking Ewok. “Please tell me you don’t talk to Ramon like that.”

I blushed. “Well, no.”

“Good.” She reached out and patted my arm. “We need to make Ramon forget about how miserable he is and concentrate on how miserable you are for a change.”

I groaned in the midst of a somewhat doubtful smirk. “I guess I like the sound of that.”

“I thought you might.”

I studied her warily. “So Pete talked to you, huh? He said he would. He’s tired of me mooning around like a lovesick puppy, I think.”

“Yes, he did, and yes, he is. And so am I. And so is everybody else on the planet. Happily I think I know exactly what you have to do. You have to get Ramon interested in something besides his crappy job and his guilt and the terrible memories that keep assailing him every time he turns around. In other words, he needs a purpose. A distraction. A goal.”

“A goal.”

“Yes, a goal.”

“What goal do you think Ramon would be interested in acquiring?”

She smiled knowingly. “Hair.”

I studied her face like a man who had never seen a face before in his life. “My hair or his hair?”

“No,” she said. “Hair in general. Ramon used to love working with hair. As soon as he rediscovers his love for hair, we can talk him into re-enrolling in beauty school, and he can get back on track learning an honest-to-God trade, and he won’t have to work in that crappy telemarketing place, which would make anybody depressed. Once he’s happy with doing what he loves to do, and once he knows he has a goal in life, a future, he’ll be able to take a breath, look around, and realize how nuts he is about you.”

Sylvia sat back in her chair, folded her arms across her chest, and stared sagely at me as if she had just recited the Gettysburg Address from beginning to end without making a single mistake.

“Hair,” I said again.

“Hair.”

I scratched my head. “How do we go about getting Ramon interested in hair again?”

“Simple,” she said. “Ask him for a haircut.”

“Why don’t you ask him for a haircut?”

“I’d rather we start with you.”

I rolled my eyes toward the heavens and saw my hair hanging over my forehead, right where I liked it. “I don’t need a haircut.”

“What does that have to do with anything? It’s for Ramon.”

“Hmmm.”

“We’ll get everyone in the building involved.”

“Everyone in the building.”

“Yes.” She frowned. “It won’t be easy.”

“Why won’t it be easy?”

“Oh, never mind. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“Hmmm,” I said again.

I thought about it. Sylvia was right. Ramon needed a goal. He needed to know he had a future. If he had something to shoot for in his life, a career path laid out before him, it would do wonders for his self-esteem. And Sylvia was right about something else. Maybe the next logical step after discovering a goal for himself might be finding a partner to share that goal with. Like… oh, I don’t know. Me, for instance. Who knew? It might actually work.

“Tell me the truth, Syl. Does he really like doing hair?”

She gave me a playful slap on the back of my hand. “He doesn’t just like it, he loves it!”

“Is he any good at it?”

She glanced at her watch. “Oh, honey, look at the time. My soap is about to start. That’s what we housewives do, you know. We watch soaps. Five days a week. Soaps, soaps, soaps, soaps, soaps. Oh, and speaking of soaps, Avon just came out with a new line of floral and herbal bubble baths bottled in your favorite cartoon characters. I’ve got Mimosa Mickey, Daffy Duck Daffodil, Marvin the Martian Marigold, Elmer Fudd Fruit Fantasy—”

I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. “I really can’t afford—”

But she wasn’t listening. “—Pepe LePew Petunia, Minty Magoo Medley, Roger Rabbit Rose Garden—”

“I think I’m having an aneurysm.”

“Black-Eyed Bullwinkle, Bugs Bunny Basil—”

“Please stop talking. Please stop talking now.”

She laughed. “You’re such a kidder. I’ll bring you the catalog later. Toodles.” She left me after wiping a teeny smudge of lipstick off my cheek and waving good-bye at the door. A moment before she stepped through her own door down the hall, she pointed a finger in my direction and tutted me to obedience. “Ask him for that haircut! He’ll be a changed man, you’ll see. I’ll start spreading the word that the Ramon Barber Shop on four is open for business.” Then she muttered something under her breath that sounded remarkably like “God help us all.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that last remark, but it didn’t matter because she was already gone.

I glanced at the little mirror that hung inside my front door and saw a smile of hope blossoming on my face.

A haircut. What a wonderful idea! Bring Ramon out of his shell. Give him something to shoot for. Get his ass back in trade school. And—dare I hope—maybe even more?

WHEN I heard Ramon rustling around next door, kicking his shoes off and rattling a grocery bag, I knew he was home from work. I also knew he was home because Wilbur bustled off through the closet door with a purr of welcome already rumbling in his tummy, or wherever it is a cat’s purr originates. (Like I said before, I’m not very well versed in anatomy.)

As soon as I thought the getting-settled-in-after-coming-home-from-work sounds had started to taper off, I tapped gently at the connecting door.

Ramon called out, “Come on in, Barney!”

I stepped through the door and froze. Ramon was standing by his dresser in nothing but socks and a snow-white pair of bikini briefs. He was in the process of pulling a T-shirt over his head. With his arms in the air and his head momentarily tangled inside the shirt, I had a precious second or two to take in the beauty before me. Sweet Jesus. I had never seen such a delicious landscape of bronzed flesh in my life. This was my first glimpse of Ramon’s torso (you may have already picked up on the fact that I loved his fuzzy legs). His nipples were two perfect copper coins, stunning to behold. His chest was hairless but for a teeny trail of fuzz dribbling down from above his belly button, which was stretched taut at the moment, what with his arms straining this way and that as he tried to drag the recalcitrant T-shirt over his head. Beneath that deliciously kissable belly button, the teeny treasure trail of tummy hair flared out into a sexy-ass bush of black pubes that spilled over the waistband of his lowrider underwear, promising glories below I could only dream about.

And speaking of the glories below—the healthy bulge in the snowy fabric of Ramon’s bikini briefs, which I could only assume was Ramon’s dick, God help me, made me suck in a hurried breath of air before I passed out cold on the floor from the sudden bombardment of lust that tore its way through me like a bolt of lightning.

If I’d had a needle and thread handy, I’d have slipped into the melee and sewn the neck of Ramon’s T-shirt closed so I could sit back and watch him struggle with it a little longer. But alas, I didn’t. Far too soon for my liking, he managed to poke his head through the damn thing and spot me standing there staring at him.

The smile that spread across his face at the sight of me all googly-eyed in the doorway almost made me swoon all over again. It actually looked… welcoming.

“Hi,” he said through the smile. “What’s up?”

If he was embarrassed to find me watching him struggle into his clothes, he didn’t show it. He merely scooped a pair of lounging pants out of the dresser drawer beside him and slipped his lovely bare legs into them, breaking my heart completely since I really didn’t want to see them go. The lounging pants didn’t do much to cover the bulge in Ramon’s underpants. And while I was considering that wonder of wonders, I also realized the lounging pants had little rocket ships all over them.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ve got the Band-Aids that match your pants.”

He gazed down at himself, then back to me. “You’re so weird,” he said, but the smile was still there when he said it, so I took it as a compliment.

Sifting through my head, looking for a thread of sanity to latch onto, and God knows those threads were few and far between at the moment, I asked, “How was your day?”

He shrugged and his smile faded a little, but it didn’t disappear altogether, which I chose to interpret as a sign of progress. “It was okay. My nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize didn’t come in, but maybe tomorrow.”

It took me a second to realize he was joking. That’s probably because while I had been staring at him in his underpants, most of the blood in my body had sluiced its way down to my dick, seriously debilitating my thought processes. Thank God I was wearing a big, blousy shirt that covered up all evidence of a Barney boner, or I would have been crawling back to my apartment in shame and mortification and waiting for my name to pop up at #1 on the sexual predators list on the San Diego Police Department website.

“Sylvia brought you cookies,” I said. “Want them now?”

“Nah, I’ll get them later.”

“Okay.”

A silence settled around us that I was rather surprised to realize was a comfortable one. At least it was comfortable for me. I hoped it was the same for Ramon.

He pointed to the kitchen. “Come sit with me while I make a sandwich. You hungry?”

“No,” I said. “You go ahead.”

I settled myself at Ramon’s ancient blue Formica kitchen table, the legs of which were rustier than my own kitchen table legs. But like mine, his tabletop was flawless. Not a scratch on it. That Formica shit must last forever. I was, however, one step up on the snooty scale as far as kitchen tables went. At least my chairs matched the table. Well, three of them did. Ramon didn’t have two chairs alike, and even then none of the four chairs—yellow, red, green, and white—matched his fucking blue table.

No wonder Arthur was rich. He certainly didn’t waste money refurbishing his units.

By the time all these weird thoughts had finished gaily tripping through my head, Ramon had built a bologna and cheese sandwich, slathered it with mayo, and poured himself a huge glass of milk. He pulled out the chair beside me and went to town on that sandwich. He must have been hungry.

I watched silently as he ate. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry about wondering what I was doing here, so I let him enjoy his meal. While he happily gnawed away, I felt the table shake beneath my arms. Out of curiosity I ducked my head and looked underneath. He was doing the same thing I always did when I ate—bouncing a knee up and down like a maniac. My mother used to hate that when I was a kid.

“You’re a bouncer like me,” I wryly observed.

He knew what I was talking about immediately. But he didn’t apologize for it. He simply kept on bouncing, first one leg, then the other. “Then you know how much fun it is,” he said, grinning. He plucked a leaf of lettuce from his sandwich and licked the mayo off of it before he popped it into his mouth. Watching Ramon lick away that mayo almost made me fall out of my chair.

“Umm,” I muttered, trying to head off another infusion of southbound blood coursing through my body and into my pecker, “how would you like to give me a haircut?”

He stopped chewing and stared at me. “Why?”

Good question. Why? “Umm, because I need one, and I’m a little short on cash this week, and I heard through the grapevine you used to be a beauty student and liked that kind of stuff.”

He laid his sandwich back on his plate and continued to stare at me. A flame seemed to have ignited in the depths of those heavenly cognac-colored eyes, but I wasn’t sure if it was a flame of anger at people talking about him behind his back, or a flame of excitement at finally getting a chance to do what he had apparently once loved to do.

I began to fathom what he was thinking when his eyes slowly drifted from my face to take in the hair on top my head.

“You don’t need a haircut,” he said.

I smacked my hand on the table with a bang. “That’s exactly what I told—I mean, yes I do! I most certainly do. Yes indeedy. A haircut is exactly what I need. I look like Bigfoot. Well, a little short Bigfoot. Wha’dya say? Please, please, pretty please? Just a trim? Please?”

He grinned at my pleading, and then a flicker of doubt dimmed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t have my good scissors anymore. I lost them.”

I’m not sure why, but a sudden tsunami of relief washed over me. Maybe I wasn’t as sure about this haircut business as I thought I was.

“Oh, well, that’s okay, then. We’ll just forget it.”

He snapped his fingers. “Wait.” He spun in his chair and yanked open a drawer beside the kitchen sink. One look at that drawer and the jumbled-up ton of crap inside told me it was a junk drawer. I knew because I had one that looked just like it.

He reached into the drawer and plucked out a pair of scissors big enough to shear a sheep with. They looked like the Jolly Green Giant’s hedge clippers.

A ball of fear settled into the base of my spine at the same time a look of excitement blossomed in Ramon’s eyes. He hefted Jolly’s hedge clippers in his hand, and said, “Yes, I think these will work just fine.”

He turned to face me, gigantic pair of scissors in one hand, bigass comb, which he also pulled from the junk drawer, in the other, and said, “When’d you wanna do it?”

I swallowed hard. But then I saw the happy look in Ramon’s eyes, and I melted. My fear of those god-awful pruning shears melted somewhat. Ramon’s face was lit with such an eager beauty, his eyes so bright with life, I knew at that moment I would have been incapable of saying no to the man no matter what he asked. After all, it was just a haircut. How bad could it be?

Still, finding my voice wasn’t easy. I seemed to have misplaced it somewhere. Like a wallet.

“How about next year?” I squeaked.

He grinned broadly and chucked me on the shoulder. “Why wait? How about now?”

I choked down an organ or two, internal organs that is, dammit, and garbled, “Oh. Okay, then. Now would work, I guess.”

RAMON SCURRIED out of the kitchen and returned with a wadded-up bedsheet and three San Diego telephone books. He plopped the phone books on the kitchen chair he had been sitting in and told me to park my ass on them since he didn’t have a hydraulic chair to pump said ass into the air high enough to make it convenient for him to work.

I did as he asked.

“Now take off your shirt,” he said.

I gulped. “My shirt?”

“Yeah.” He arranged the scissors and comb on the table and shook out the sheet. “I don’t want to get hair all over it. Take off your shirt.”

So I did that too, trying to ignore the blush I could feel rising in my cheeks. This was the first time I had been even remotely undressed in front of Ramon, and I was sort of wishing I had spent six weeks in a tanning booth, and done three or four thousand pushups before I asked him for the goddamn haircut.

Once my shirt was off, he took it from my hand and tossed it through the kitchen door into the living room. Then, with the sheet hanging in his hand, he stopped what he was doing long enough to look at my chest. He cocked his head to the side and his mouth reshaped itself into a hint of a smile.

“You’ve got hair there,” he said, in a hushed whisper. And before I could die of happiness, or faint in fear, or shit my pants and humiliate myself completely, he reached out and twiddled his fingers through the little patch of chest hair that had sprouted between my tits along about my twenty-first year.

I froze at the feel of his fingers on me, and while I was frozen and trying my best not to tremble with another sudden incursion of lust, I gazed up into his face to see what he was thinking.

“You are beautiful,” he said.

I blinked back my surprise. No, not surprise. Shock. “I am?”

“Yes.”

He twiddled my chest hair a moment longer, then sharply pulled his hand away, almost as if he had felt a sudden burning in his fingertips.

“Back to work,” he said, all business, but his face was troubled.

He threw the sheet around me and secured it at the back of my neck with a kitchen clamp. Standing behind me, he slipped his fingers through my hair and massaged my scalp like a proper barber assessing a new client. I closed my eyes, relishing his touch. And his nearness. Still basking in the glow of those words he had used earlier.

You are beautiful.

It took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to touch myself under the sheet. I was so turned on, my dick was bobbing in my trousers with every thumping heartbeat.

I twisted my head up and gazed at Ramon standing over me. Before I could stop myself, I found myself saying words that, five minutes earlier, I would never have believed I would hear coming from my mouth.

“You’re beautiful too,” I said, trying to throw it out there as sort of a general statement of fact without getting maudlin about it. This time, it was Ramon’s turn to blink. He gazed down at me. His breath caught at the same time mine did, him in evident surprise at what I’d said, me surprised by the fact that I had found the nerve to say it. For the space of two or three seconds, neither one of us took a breath. Time warp.

When oxygen was flowing in and out again, he stepped around to the side of me so he wouldn’t have to see me upside down. His eyes never once left my face. When he reached out to rest warm fingertips along my jawline, it was more than I could take. I closed my eyes. But with my eyes closed, I was suddenly more aware of the nearness of him, of the scent of his skin, the rustle of the fabric of his clothes, the thumping not only of my heart now, but his heart too. Not to mention my own half-nakedness, which was playing head games with me as well. Big ones.

A moment later, I felt the merest brush of air on my face, and with my pulse suddenly thudding in my head like an electronic thumper drawing worms on the planet Dune, I realized Ramon was bending down to give me a kiss.

I popped my eyes open at the very instant he laid his lips over mine, but a heartbeat later my first taste of Ramon closed them again. And closed them tight.

His kiss was almost virginal. As soft as a flower petal. As we explored each other’s lips for the very first time, Ramon pressed his hand to the back of my neck to hold me in place, or maybe to brace himself. I didn’t much care which. He tasted of milk and the sandwich he had eaten earlier. His breath was warm on my face, his hand a burning ember at the back of my neck. I felt my body shudder beneath the sheet. He was so close. His leg touched mine. His elbow brushed my shoulder.

As his kiss burned on and on, I unearthed my hand from the folds of fabric he had draped me in and raised it to pluck away the little strip of leather at the back of his neck that held his hair in place. When I did, his thick black hair blossomed out, spilling over my face as well as his. The scent of it was heart-stopping. I almost gasped at the sensation of falling under the shadow of that wondrous mane of flowing hair. I felt enclosed, protected, safe. Turned on.

Slowly, Ramon’s feather-light kiss receded. With his hand still resting gently at the nape of my neck, he pulled back far enough to gaze at my face. He appeared to be gauging my reaction to his kiss.

“Please don’t stop,” I pleaded. My words were uttered so breathlessly I could barely hear them myself.

But Ramon tensed and stood upright at the sound of them. He gazed down at me with a stricken look on his face. He jerked his hand away from the back of my neck and took a step back.

And I knew I had gone too far.

He stammered something I couldn’t hear, then took a deep quivering breath. “I—I think we’ll have to do this some other time. That okay? I—I need to be alone for a while.”

“I’m sorry,” I began, but he shook his head to silence me.

“No. It’s nothing. I just think I’d better, uh, get some real scissors before I try to cut your hair. You can wait a day or two, can’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t be mad at me,” he said with an imploring look in his eyes.

“Never,” I said, longing to be in the shadow of his flowing hair again, longing to feel his lips once more smothering mine. With a sinking sensation that almost brought me to tears, I asked, “Would you like me to go?”

He nodded, looking down at the scissors and comb in his hand, then reaching out to unclamp the sheet at the back of my neck.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

I stood, pulling the sheet away at the same time. Turning to Ramon, I tucked my fingers into the sides of his hair and eased it back away from his face. I let my fingers linger there for a second; then I stepped back and folded my arms across my chest, suddenly embarrassed by my nakedness.

“Later?” I asked with a feeble smile. Looking away, he nodded. I had been dismissed. Kindly, but still dismissed.

I strode through his kitchen door, snagged my shirt off the living room floor as I passed, and retreated through his apartment to the bedroom wall, where I stepped through the closet door back into my own little corner of the world. Safe. Sound. Sad.

And once more alone. As always.

I eased the door closed, but left enough of a crack to give Wilbur access to either apartment.

Bummed by all that had happened, I collapsed onto the couch, pulled my shirt over my head, and sank back into the cushions, trying to understand what it all meant and where I had gone wrong. Weary and downhearted, I sat there while night slowly fell and the apartment darkened around me.

Later, I moved silently through the shadows diffused only by the light from the city skyline spilling in through my living room window. I took a shower and let the warm water flow over me, hoping it would dispel the emptiness I felt. The knowledge that something irretrievable might have been lost between Ramon and me left me weak and depressed. The silence coming from Ramon’s apartment made me want to weep.

Naked, I slipped into bed, draped my arm over my face, and once again tried to block out my view of the world in the darkness behind my eyelids. Hours later, after sleep had long since taken me, I awoke to a stirring in the bed beside me.

Half-awake, I muttered, “Wilbur?”

And a breathless whisper answered from the shadows, “No, mi hermano. It’s only me.”

Chapter 9

THE BEDSPRINGS squeaked as Ramon lowered himself to the edge of my bed. I had left my bedroom curtains open, and I could see his outline against a scattering of stars that twinkled in the heavens behind him. He was sitting there, not looking at me but staring through the window at that glorious summer sky awash in starlight.

I reached out and touched his back. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. His skin felt silky and sleep-warmed against my palm. I laid my thumb atop the wales of his spine while my fingertips came to rest on the sharp ridge of his shoulder blade. When he leaned his head back into my touch, his long hair, unencumbered, settled over my fingers, as soft as down.

“Are you all right?” I asked, dragging my voice out from under the haze of sleep.

“Yes,” he said. And in this quiet moment, with the night lying silent around us, the musical sway of his accent was more pronounced, more engaging, and in my ears, even more heart-stoppingly beautiful than it usually was. Wrapped inside that luscious accent, his words spilled out lazy and disconnected. Distant. It was as if, with all the barriers down and shielded by darkness, the way he spoke now was more truthfully him. The real Ramon. Unfiltered. Unhurried. Unafraid. It was as if I were hearing him for the very first time.

I let that heavenly Mexican lilt wash over me. It was a pleasant sound to find amid the silence of my lonely apartment, the gentle pitch and warm baritone of his voice a comfort to hear. Especially for someone who was nuts about the guy to begin with.

Ramon cleared his throat, his voice still raw from sleep like mine. “Barney, I suddenly woke up, and for the first time in months, I….”

As his words trailed away. I closed my eyes to better take in the feel of his skin beneath my hand. The simple knowledge that he was here beside me. That he had actually sought me out.

“You what?” I asked gently. “For the first time in months you what?”

He exhaled a slow spate of air, as if deflating a little bit, maybe soothing a case of nerves. Or forcing himself to relax. I could feel the movement beneath my hand.

He spoke so softly I had to raise myself onto one elbow to hear.

“For the first time in months, Barney, I woke up… not wanting to be alone.”

I dragged the sheet around my nakedness and sat up all the way. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I could see now he was wearing nothing at all. He was naked, like me. His hands were tucked between his legs as he perched there on the edge of my bed, peering through the window at the stars pinpricking the sky with teeny dots of light.

I slipped my arms around him from behind and clasped my hands together across his chest. I rested my chin on his shoulder, and together we stared through my bedroom window at that incredible array of stars that almost looked close enough to touch. A full moon hung high in the sky. It was the biggest, fattest moon I had ever seen.

Ramon’s long hair lay warm and soft against my cheek. His delicious scent wafted through me on a wave of heat. But still I made no overt move toward him. Nothing sexual. I merely sat there against him on the bed, holding him in my arms as the silence of the night settled around us. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear Wilbur purring in the shadows. Probably sawing logs in his laundry basket in the closet.

When I thought the silence had gone on long enough, I said, “I’m glad you came in, Ramon. I don’t want to be alone either.” He turned his head toward me, and in the glow of moonlight I could see his lazy smile. With our faces mere inches apart, he pressed his forehead to mine and closed his eyes. I could smell toothpaste on his breath, and I found myself wishing I had partaken of some too. But I wasn’t about to slip off and brush my teeth now. No way in hell.

I lifted my head from his, and in the moonlight I watched his eyes track my every movement.

“Relax,” I said. “Lie down.”

He tensed against me. “I don’t want to—”

“I know,” I hushed him hurriedly. “Just lie next to me. We can talk if you’d like. Or we cannot say anything if that’s what you’d rather do. Either way, neither one of us will be alone. That’s okay, isn’t it? Not being alone?”

He nodded, and again a smile softened his face. “Thank you,” he said, and I gently eased him down onto the bed beside me, covering us both with my sheet.

The sudden explosion of feelings that thundered through me at the very first feel of his naked body against mine made me suck in a gasp of air, but quietly, I hoped. I didn’t want to scare him off. I guess I needn’t have worried. His need for contact seemed to be greater than my own. Not in a sexual way, but something more basic. Something more… needful.

With no fuss at all, he settled in next to me as if he had been there forever. Slipping his arm across my chest, he rested his head on my shoulder and draped one leg over mine. When he felt me tremble at his touch, he whispered into my shoulder, “Are you cold?”

I managed to squeak out, “No,” and after that I somehow persuaded myself to calm down. Once I did, I began to enjoy the moment for what it was, an act of both friendship and loneliness, an attempt to reach out for one and a battle against the other. When I had that all figured out inside my head, I found myself relaxing in his arms. I figured as long as he didn’t brush his hand across Barney Junior, who was poking straight up under the sheet like a tent pole, we might be able to go on feeling relaxed. I hoped so anyway. For Ramon’s sake, not my own. For I knew instinctively he needed this more than I did. Not sex, not a tumble in the hay. Just human touch. A connection. Maybe even acceptance.

That purr in the distance I mentioned earlier suddenly grew louder, and a moment later what felt like a cannonball landed on the bed. It was Wilbur. With his motor brrrr-ing in high gear, he traipsed toward the head of the bed to say hello and see what we were doing. Finding it all a bit disappointing, I guess, which sure as hell wasn’t my opinion on the matter, he waddled back down the way he’d come and flopped into a fat ball at our feet. A few seconds later, he had purred himself to sleep.

I couldn’t have been any further from sleep if I’d had my eyelids stapled open.

Ramon’s breath stirred the hair on my chest and for some reason, my throat tightened. It almost felt as if a sob was coming on. But that couldn’t be right. I mentally shook the feeling away and let my voice ease out among the shadows. “Are you comfortable?” I asked.

He nodded, rasping his unshaven cheek against my skin, which sent another erotic tremor stuttering through me. But I was getting better at concealing them. I’m almost sure Ramon didn’t notice this last one at all.

“I’m comfortable,” he said as softly as I. He hiccupped, and a second later, I felt the moist heat of a tear on my skin. Ramon’s tear. Only then did I realize he was silently crying in the dark.

I pulled him tighter into my arms. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “People love you here. You’re safe. You’re among friends.”

He nodded against me. “I know.” He lifted his head and wiped the tears from my chest with his hand. Then he rested his head against me again. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I think I sprung a leak.”

I forced a laugh and said again, “It’s okay. We all spring leaks now and then.” I failed to mention that I almost sprang one about five seconds ago when I fought back a sob at the mere touch of his body against mine. I didn’t think I needed to tell him that. I had the impression he already knew.

He shifted his hip and I froze to feel his erection brush my leg. He was hard! He quickly drew it away as if embarrassed, so I played the gentleman and didn’t mention it either. I did, however, pull him a little tighter into my arms and, in doing so, forced his cock to once again snuggle up next to my leg. This time he left it there, so I mentally rattled off a quick interdepartmental e-mail to God and told him I would be attending church services Sunday morning. It was the least I could do to thank him for this latest stunning turn of events.

Happily Ramon couldn’t hear these weirdass thoughts whirring around inside my head. Besides, his mind was obviously somewhere else.

“You’ve been a good friend,” he said, his lips brushing against my skin, not in a kiss, but in the simple act of speaking. His hand lay flat atop my chest, dead center, the tip of one finger resting comfortably in the little notch at the base of my throat. If I had tried to explain to him how happy I was to feel that finger there, I’d have been jabbering incoherently for a couple of years.

Instead I simply said, “You’re an easy person to be friends with.”

“Am I?”

“Yeah.”

I let our two heartbeats echo side by side through the darkness for a minute, enjoying the sound of them there, pounding away in unison. Our cocks were both hard, but I didn’t think he knew about mine yet. And besides, my hard-on wasn’t the prime focus of the evening even for me. Somehow our coming together had gone beyond sex. At least for the moment.

“Ramon?”

“Huh?”

I pressed my lips into his hair and closed my eyes, seeking the words to say what I wanted to say. “Ramon?” I said again.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry you had to go through everything you went through. I’m sorry that horrible thing happened to you.”

He didn’t answer, but I could feel his eyelashes tickling my skin as he blinked. A second later I felt the heat of another tear on my skin.

“It wasn’t your fault, Ramon. You do know that, don’t you? None of it was your fault.”

His breath hitched, but he found his voice. “I know. But it’s still there, Barney.”

“What’s still there?”

“That night. It’s still there. No, not there. Here. Right here inside my head. I can’t get rid of it. I can’t make it go away. The feel of the knife in my hand. The way it felt when ChiChi flung himself at me and the blade slipped into his body. The look of surprise and pain on his face. The way he knew, he knew, in that very instant he was about to die. That I had… killed him. Or maybe he had killed himself.”

Ramon turned his head to bury his face in my chest, muffling the rest of his words, but shooting them straight through me too. It was almost like a transfusion of Ramon’s pain injected directly into me.

“Every time I feel an emotion other than grief, Barney, other than guilt, the memory of that night comes back to stop me cold. I can’t get away from it. Sometimes I squeeze my eyes as tight as I can, so tight it almost hurts, but it still doesn’t help. I—I took a life, man. Sometimes I think I didn’t just take one, you know. It’s more like I took two. Mine and ChiChi’s both.”

I stroked his back in a circular motion. He sniffed and once more wiped the tears from my chest before letting his head rest against me again.

“Would you like to speak to a counselor or something?” I asked softly.

“No,” he said. “I’d rather talk to you.”

For the third time that night, I felt my throat constrict until it was a bit of a battle to find my voice at all, but I finally managed it. “You can talk to me any time you want.” I frowned when I suddenly realized how I was about to expand on that sentence. I hoped to God I wasn’t making a huge tactical error, but somehow I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d wanted to. So, like the secret closet door in Apartment 4C at the Belladonna Arms, I opened that other door, the door inside my head, the one I’d kept locked for weeks now. I eased it ajar just enough to set a few words free, hoping for the best, praying I wasn’t screwing anything up.

“Somehow, Ramon,” I said, “when you’re not talking to me, about anything, I feel a little empty inside. I really like you, you know. I like the fact that I’m the one you came to tonight when you didn’t want to be alone. I will always be here for you if you want me to be. I—I hate to see you hurting.”

He lifted his head and gazed at me through the darkness. The hand resting on my chest slid upward and his fingertips cupped my chin. I ducked my head and kissed them. A glancing kiss, nothing dramatic. But he tensed against me when I did it.

“I know you like me,” he said in a gentle hush. “I feel it in you every time we’re together.”

I smiled in the darkness. For his benefit? For mine? I wasn’t sure. “Good,” I said. “I’m glad you know it. But aside from all that, I still hate to see you throw your life away over something that wasn’t your fault.”

“I know,” he said. “I feel that in you too. You and Arthur both care about me. I don’t know why, but you do. You both worry about me throwing my life away. You worry about me… being happy. You’re the best friends I’ve ever had.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him I didn’t want to be friends at all, best or otherwise, that my aspirations rang much louder, but I bit back the words. He didn’t need to hear that now. This was about him, not me. Him. Not me. I had to keep reminding myself of that.

I cupped the back of his head and eased him back down onto my chest. His fingertip slid back to the notch at the base of my throat, right where I was hoping it would go. My cock was no longer hard, I suddenly noticed. And neither was his. Somehow that made the cuddling freer than it was before. I wrapped my arms so tightly around him I felt his heart thumping against my rib cage. His lazy exhalations of air were like heated gossamer against my skin.

“Can I stay here all night?” he asked in a childlike voice.

“You can stay here forever,” I answered back, again pressing my lips to his hair. For the longest time after that, we lay there silently in each other’s arms. Awake but unstirring. A tiny niggle of dread was nibbling away at my subconscious, telling me I was really asking for a broken heart this time, but I didn’t care. Even if Ramon never spoke to me again, I would have this one night to look back on—this one night to know how it might have been if Ramon had ever started to look at me the same way I always looked at him.

So I closed my eyes and savored the feel of him in my arms.

“Ramon?” I whispered into his hair.

“Hmm?”

“You said ‘mi hermano’ when you came into the room earlier. What does it mean? I can’t remember it from high school Spanish.”

“It means ‘my brother.’”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Oh.”

“What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t want to be your brother, Ramon.”

I felt his smile on my skin. “I think I know that already,” he whispered back, tattooing the words onto my chest with his warm breath.

It was long minutes later, just before sleep was about to miraculously claim me once again, that he said the last thing I expected to hear him say.

He whispered the words onto my skin. And through my skin, directly into my heart.

“I’ll never hurt you, Barney.” He breathed the words into the darkness as his body settled against me, relaxing into sleep.

“I know you won’t,” I said, but he was already out. For my ears only, I whispered, “I’ll never hurt you either.”

I lay there unmoving for so long I was able to watch a beam of moonlight slide halfway across the bed. During all that time I lay motionless, breathing in the scent of Ramon’s hair and contemplating what he had meant by those four little words—I’ll never hurt you. I pondered until I drifted off, at long last letting sleep claim me too.

Hours later, when my internal alarm clock shook me awake at the crack of dawn so I could ready myself for work, I found Ramon still nestled there against me, snoring softly.

His long hair lay splayed over his face, but I could still feel his warm breath on my skin. He wasn’t squirming in his sleep or crying out to lost lovers. He was sleeping peacefully, his mouth against my nipple, his chin against my ribs. His hand had slid down from my chest to lie on my stomach, his leg still curled over mine. When I gently dipped my finger into the mass of dark hair covering his face, to ease it aside, I saw a childlike smile bending his lips. Even as he slept.

Once again, I could feel his erection against my leg.

Implementing every blob of willpower I possessed not to wiggle down under the bedclothes and take that hard cock into my mouth, I eased myself out of bed, gently slipping Ramon’s head back onto my pillow as I might a child’s.

I quietly dressed for work and slipped out the door before he ever woke. So as not to disturb Ramon, I would have coffee downtown, then scoot back to the Arms to meet Pete for our carpool into work. It was my turn to drive.

Passing a storefront window on my way to Tom’s deli, I caught my reflection in the glass and saw a smile on my face, which was odd. I hadn’t seen a spontaneous smile on my puss for ages. Hell, longer than ages. I wasn’t sure, in fact, if I had ever seen one there. Before I knew it, I was whistling as I walked along. That was pretty much spontaneous too, and I sure as hell couldn’t remember the last time I had done that. But honestly, how could I not be whistling? I could still smell the scent of Ramon’s hair in my nostrils, still feel the hard heat of his erection against my leg, still feel his gentle fingertip resting in the notch at the base of my throat. They were great memories, every one, but somehow that last one was my favorite.

I knew with a sense of frightening inevitability things were moving inexorably forward. And this time I also knew I wasn’t about to let anything stand in my way. All those other times I thought I had been nuts about somebody were fucking training runs. I knew that now. This time the rehearsals were over. I had my target picked out, and it was time to bring in the heavy guns, and to hell with anybody, including Ramon, who tried to stand in my way.

No more pussyfooting around. If there was ever a time to get serious, this was it.

“Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!” I barked happily at a flock of pigeons spinning past. Little Barney Teegarden was about to go to battle and claim what he now knew absolutely he wanted. What Barney Teegarden wanted was at that moment lying at home in his very own bed, snuggled into his very own pillow all sleep warm and cute. Probably with Wilbur. And they were probably both snoring like fucking lumberjacks.

Ramon. I want Ramon.

As I breezed through the deli door, I realized I wasn’t whistling anymore. I was humming. And this from a guy who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

TEN HOURS later Pete and I found ourselves, side by side, clomping up the stairwell to four. We were worn out from a day of putting up with our ignoramus boss and balancing other people’s budgets, but still Pete knew this was a momentous day for me. I had told him everything, of course. Good grief, I had spilled it all to him before we ever got to work that morning. And I had told him tonight was the night. Unequivocally. When Ramon came home from work, I was going to tell him how I felt.

Pete dragged me to a stop on three. “Wipe that look of terror off your face, Barney. Be confident. March in there and tell him you’re nuts about him.”

“What if he’s not home yet?”

Pete laughed. “Geez, moron. Then wait till he gets there.”

“Good idea.”

He patted himself on the back. “Eh. Brilliant. That’s me.”

“I’m scared to death.”

“No. You’re in love. You’d be surprised how often being in love and being scared to death go hand in hand. They are sort of like chili and crackers. You can’t really have one without the other. It’s some sort of torturous cosmic rule, I think.”

“Did Sylvia tell you that?”

“No, I figured that one out on my own.”

“You don’t think Ramon is out of my class?”

Pete’s eyes softened as he gazed at me. “No, Barney. I think you’re exactly what he needs. And he’s exactly what you need.”

Pete scooped me into his arms, and just as I was burying my face in his chest and getting kind of comfortable (Pete has a very nice chest), we heard footsteps clomping down the stairs from the flight above.

Still in Pete’s arms, I turned to see Roger, the nurse, as gorgeous as ever and dressed in scrubs, heading off to work. He must have been working the night shift.

Roger’s green eyes popped open wide at the sight of Pete and me snuggling on the landing.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “An illicit relationship unfolding before my very eyes.”

“Barney’s in love,” Pete explained.

“So I see,” Roger answered. “Won’t Sylvia be surprised.”

Pete seemed to suddenly realize I was still wrapped in his arms with my face still buried in the front of his suit.

He gently eased me away to arm’s length. “No, no, no. Barney’s not in love with me. Barney’s in love with Ramon.”

Roger’s eyes settled on me. A warm smile spread across his face like a rising sun exploding over the horizon. “That’s great! You’re practically living together anyway!”

“Who’s living together?” a voice chimed in from below. A few hurried footsteps approached, and we saw Milan and Harlie, arm in arm, climbing up from two.

“We were just on the way home from work when we heard you guys talking. Is this about Barney and Ramon? It is, isn’t it?”

I felt the blood creep into my face. “No, of course no—”

“You bet it is,” Pete piped up. “Barney’s going to tell him tonight how he feels.”

“So how does he feel?” Harlie asked, and Milan shot an elbow into his ribs. Harlie immediately backpedaled. “Oh. So it’s like that, is it?” he asked, rubbing his ribs like maybe they hurt.

Milan studied my empty hands. “You shoulda sprung for flowers.”

I sucked in a barrel of air. “My God! Flowers!”

Pete patted me on the head. “Calm down. You don’t need flowers.”

“I don’t?”

“No. What you need is candy.”

“Candy? Shit! I don’t have that either.”

Roger stepped forward and pulled me into his arms, and all the while he was doing that, he was waving an admonitory finger at everybody else. “You guys shut up. You’re scaring the poor guy to death. Barney, trust me.” He held me so tight I could barely breathe, which I have to admit I didn’t mind too much. Roger is gorgeous, or have I mentioned that already? “You don’t need anything but yourself. Just be honest and tell him how you feel. It’s your heart you want to present to the guy, not a spray of posies or a box of pecan turtles.”

“Did I hear somebody mention pecan turtles?” a voice cried down from above. We all looked up through the stairwell and saw Charlie the klepto gazing down from the landing above, sort of like God leaning over the edge of a cloud and checking out the peons below.

Pete, Roger, and Harlie all made frantic shushing noises, telling Charlie to speak softer.

Charlie lowered his voice to a stage whisper that still would have carried a good three miles on a windless day. “I’ve got twelve boxes of chocolate I’ll sell you cheap. It’s the good stuff too. Godiva, Ghirardelli, you name it. I think there are some pecan turtles in there. They fell off the UPS truck at work. I’m sure I don’t know how that happened. No shit. Not a clue.”

“Yeah, right,” Roger groaned, rolling his eyes in disbelief.

I held up a couple of fingers. “I’ll take two of the Godiva. Thanks, Charlie.” I’m not crazy about pecan turtles, not that it really mattered since the candy wasn’t for me. But—you know—in case Ramon turned me down, I might as well be left with some candy I like, right?

Charlie nodded as if he had psychically translated that stupid thought. He hustled off to fetch the candy.

“You’re abetting a criminal,” Roger groused. Then he screamed up the stairs, “Bring me one too! Make mine a Ghirardelli.”

With the eye of God no longer trained on our every movement, but while our heads were still pointed skyward, we saw Sylvia lean over the railing just above.

“What’s all the racket down there? Pete, is that you? Roger, Harlie, Milan, Barney? What’s happening?”

Pete blew her a kiss and hissed up the staircase. “Barney’s going to tell Ramon he’s nuts about him.” He blew a shush into his fingertip. “It’s a secret. Don’t say anything.”

“It’s about time,” Sylvia announced with a huff, much to my surprise. Here I thought I was rushing things. “But he isn’t home yet. You pinheads don’t have to whisper.”

Everyone relaxed at that, although they probably weren’t too thrilled about being called pinheads. It didn’t bother me, of course, because I was pretty sure I really was one. Roger released me, suddenly seeming to realize I was still being held prisoner in his arms, where, if I had never met Ramon, I wouldn’t have minded being captured one little bit. He gently pushed me away, and the second he did, Pete pulled me back into his embrace. I didn’t mind that very much either.

“My little Barney’s growing up,” he crooned over me. And everybody moved in to pat my shoulder, or ruffle my hair, or scratch my back. Another corgi moment.

A chorus of good advice was sprinkled over me like paprika.

“Don’t be afraid.”

“Look him in the eye.”

“You might want to gargle. I think I smell onions on your breath.”

I clapped my mouth shut at that one. I’d had onions at lunch.

“Be confident. Be strong.”

“Act shy. Don’t look bossy.”

“Maybe you’d better gargle twice.”

Sylvia flew down the steps to join us. She hooked her fingers into the back of my collar and yanked me out of Pete’s arms. The moment I was out, she stepped in to take my place.

I grinned, watching her. Pete grinned too.

Now standing wrapped in Pete’s arms where I had been a moment earlier, she announced, “Barney and I are planning to give Ramon a big boost in the self-respect department. We need volunteers to help us in our plan.”

“You bet!” everyone cried out.

“Anything we can do!”

“No problem!”

“Just tell us how we can help!”

“What sweet boys,” Sylvia cooed. “Barney and I want you all to ask Ramon for a haircut.”

The silence on the landing was suddenly so thunderous I thought I could hear the paint chipping off the wall. I didn’t hear a cricket per se, but I was pretty sure I heard a string of ants marching in cadence along the baseboard. They might even have been fleeing in cadence. I wasn’t sure.

As if Sylvia’s last announcement hadn’t captured everyone’s attention completely, she then administered a coup de grace by asking, “Anybody need any Avon?”

Even the ants stopped marching.

“Good Lord, look at the time.”

“Gotta get to work. Ta-ta, everybody.”

“Come on, Harlie. Run for your life.” The next thing I knew, it was just Sylvia, Pete, and me standing in a little clot in the stairwell. All alone.

“Heads up!” A voice cried down from above, and one by one, three boxes of chocolates came raining down from on high. Pete grabbed two in flight, I snagged one out of the air, and Sylvia buried her face in Pete’s chest with a tiny shriek, probably hoping she wouldn’t be bonked in the head by a pound of Ghirardelli.

“I’ll collect later,” Charlie called down. “And I heard about the haircuts. Forget it!” Then it was back to me, Pete, and Sylvia again.

Pete reached out to give me one more pat on the head, and said “Good luck, Barn.” He hoisted Sylvia onto his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, making her shriek with laughter, and off they went up the stairs. Finally it was just me standing on the landing.

I dragged myself up the last flight of stairs, and before I reached the top, I had already unwrapped the box of Godiva and eaten three pieces. Unbridled terror always makes me hungry.

I unlocked my door, stepped inside, and ate another piece of chocolate. I could still hear Sylvia giggling in the apartment next door.

Chapter 10

RAMON USUALLY arrived home from work about an hour after me, so I didn’t have much time.

I did my Tasmanian Devil whirling dervish routine and spun through the apartment with a dustrag, polishing all the surfaces. Then I crawled around from room to room with my handheld Dustbuster (since I didn’t own an honest-to-God vacuum cleaner), sucking the cat hair out of the ratty-ass carpet. Fucking Wilbur. Checking out the bedroom, I found Ramon had made the bed before he left. He hadn’t just made it. He had made it perfectly, folding down the corner of the bedspread into a perfect wedge on my side of the bed and fluffing the pillows until there wasn’t a wrinkle in them. My heart stopped completely when I saw he had left a note on my pillow.

Was it a good note or a bad note? Who the hell knew?

I picked it up with trembling fingers, took a deep breath, and plucked it from the little envelope it came in. It was a standard, run-of-the-mill thank-you card on the outside. I glanced over at my dresser and saw the box they came in. My box. He had borrowed the card from me.

I was about to be disappointed, but I opened the card anyway. It didn’t take me long to realize that on the inside it was more than a borrowed run-of-the-mill thank-you card. Much more.

A tear leaked from my eye as I scanned it once, twice, three times. The words in the note burned through my eyeballs, and I wasn’t sure, but I thought I felt them searing my brain like a branding iron.

I needed you last night and you were there. I’ll never forget how safe you made me feel, or how you listened when I talked your ear off. Poor Barney.

When I woke up this morning my head was still filled with the way you smelled and the way your chest felt against my cheek all wet with my tears, which you didn’t even mind. For the first time in months I woke up with a smile on my face. Thank you for that. You’re the best.

R.

Best what, I wondered? And did it really matter? At least he thought I was the best at something. I was on the verge of breaking down and blubbering like a baby, when I heard a knock at the door. Not the closet door, dammit, but the front door.

I stomped through the apartment and flung it open, only to find redheaded Charlie the klepto standing there. He was holding a ripped-open UPS box in his hands, smiling and looking faintly guilty at the same time.

“Hey, Barney. This fell off the truck the other day.”

I eyed him askance. “Along with the chocolates?”

His cheeks glowed red. “Yeah. That’s right. Along with the chocolates. Funny thing, you never know what’s going to fall off the back of a truck. Or when. Or in what order. Anyway, I thought maybe Ramon could use this stuff if he’s going to start cutting hair again. You know, in case he lost all his other stuff when he was… when he was….”

“Homeless?” I prompted.

“Yeah. Homeless.” He thrust the package into my hands.

I lifted the ripped-open flap of the UPS box and saw a brand-new shrink-wrapped set of barber’s tools. Electric clippers, scissors, a cape, combs, instruction manual. Everything a harried, budgeting housewife might need to trim her family’s hair and save a few bucks.

I lifted my eyes to Charlie’s face, and without a second thought, I scooped him into my arms and gave him the hug of his life. He was so tall my nose barely came to his tits, but that was okay. He didn’t seem to mind. His face got redder. That didn’t seem to bother him much either.

“So I did good?” he asked shyly.

“You did very good, Charlie. Thank you.”

“One more thing, Barney. You know when I yelled down the stairwell and said I didn’t want a haircut? I was kidding.” He gulped like he had swallowed a tennis ball. “Tell Ramon any time he wants to cut my hair, it’ll be jim-dandy with me.”

“Jim-dandy? Really?”

“Yeah. Really. Bruce too, if we can get his cowboy hat off long enough. I may have to bribe him. He’ll do anything for a blowjob.” He grinned wickedly. “So will I actually.”

It was my turn to blush.

Charlie shuffled his feet like maybe he thought he might have said too much, which he sure as hell had. He started to pick his nose, then quickly stopped himself, scratched the top of his head instead, and two seconds later he snapped his fingers and raced off up the stairs muttering something about it being almost time for Bruce to get home and how they were going shopping at Macy’s since it was Monday and Macy’s didn’t have much security on Monday. Good time to shoplift—I mean, browse. At least that’s what I think he said.

I grinned and closed my apartment door. The tenants of the Belladonna Arms never ceased to amaze me. Even the felons were generous to a fault.

I forced myself back into cleaning mode, and I was just finishing up, which took a while because I had to stop every five seconds and reread Ramon’s note, when I heard another knock on my front door.

This time it was Pete.

“What the—” But that was all I managed to squeak before he yanked me through the door, dragged me down the hall to his apartment, and manhandled me through his own door.

Pete and Sylvia’s apartment was packed to the ceiling with boxes and shopping bags. There was stuff stacked in every corner and overflowing onto the furniture. The last time I was here, the place was neat as a pin. Now it looked like Costco was about to open up a new outlet store on the premises.

“What’s with all the packages?” I asked. “You going into business with Charlie?”

Pete seemed a little put out by my question. “Sylvia’s been shopping.”

I waved my hand around like Vanna White displaying the letter B. “But all this?”

“She’s addicted.”

“Clearly. If you had a lick of sense, you’d burn her credit cards. What’s with the rocking horse?” There was a rocking horse standing on the couch.

“Toys for Tots,” Pete quickly answered. “We donate every year.”

“And the teddy bears?” There were teddy bears everywhere. Big ones, little ones, fat ones, skinny ones. One with lederhosen and a little Alpine hat. Another wearing a leather vest and a fez.

“Avon samples,” Pete mumbled, looking more uncomfortable by the minute.

I stared at a bassinet parked inside the bedroom door. “Is that a bassinet?”

“Found it at a yard sale for three bucks. Thought it might come in useful as a laundry hamper.”

This time even I wasn’t buying it. “Okay, Pete, what’s going on? And more importantly, why did you drag me over here? I have a date in a few minutes to hopefully arrange the rest of my life around the man I’m crazy about.”

“Sylvia’s got news,” he said. “She wanted me to—wait, I’ll let her tell you.”

Sylvia poked her head through the kitchen door. She had her hair tied up with a scrunchie on top her head and her forehead was sprinkled with sweat. A dish towel was draped around her neck, a bottle of 409 was hanging from her pants pocket, and a three-foot-long string of paper towels was stuck to the bottom of her shoe and dragging along behind her like a tail. This was obviously what people were really supposed to look like when they’re cleaning house. Clearly I had been doing it all wrong.

“Don’t stand in one place too long,” Pete whispered, “or she’ll spray you with Pledge and polish your head. Nesting period.”

“Nesting period? What the hell does that mean?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Uh, hi,” I said, hoping I could get more sense out of Sylvia than I was getting out of Pete.

Sylvia ignored me completely and shot laser beams at Pete instead. “Don’t you have these boxes cleared away yet? Why is that rocking horse sitting on the couch? What if Arthur comes in? I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet!”

All the blood drained from Pete’s face. He cast a look in my direction that said, “Shoot me, please.” Then he tapped his heels together and gave Sylvia a Nazi salute snapped off with such military precision it actually scared the crap out of me. With that little bit of sarcasm out of the way, Pete gathered up an armload of boxes and carted them off to the bedroom, grunting and grumbling as he went.

Sylvia shook her head and muttered, “That man.” A second later she focused her attention on me, and I looked around for a place to hide.

As she stared at me, the insanity in her eyes ratcheted down a notch. I began to think if I played my cards right, I might yet get out of this alive. She crossed the room and laid both hands on my chest. Her eyes bored gently into mine, and I began to feel a little less like burrowing under the carpet in terror.

“I wanted to tell you something, Barney. Something concerning what you’re about to do.”

“You’re not about to break my heart, are you?” I asked.

She smiled sweetly and patted my cheek. “No, honey. It’s good news. Ramon told me the other day he likes you. We were down in the laundry room.”

“The two of you were doing your laundry and the subject of me came up?”

Her smile widened. “The subject of you didn’t just come up. You were pretty much the whole shebang as far as conversational topics went. You were the only thing Ramon wanted to talk about. He likes you, Barney. He told me so.”

My heart did a triple gainer inside my chest. Three Olympic judges inside my head held up signs reading 10. “He did?”

She nodded. “More than once. Twice during the spin cycle alone.”

“Wow,” I breathed, while little cartoon hearts spun around my head. “Twice during the spin cycle alone. Imagine that.”

Since I was pretty much staring off into space in a moment of uncontrollable bliss, Sylvia had to tap the end of my nose with a fingertip to drag my attention back to her. The cartoon hearts exploded in midair and squirted off into space like punctured balloons.

“That doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods, Barney. You have to be gentle with him. Don’t scare him. Don’t come on too strong, but don’t let him steer you away from what you want to do either. He’s still pretty down on himself. You have to be kind. Take it slow. Don’t make any demands on him. And don’t be nervous. He’ll know you’re being sincere. Just remember he likes you. Okay? Can you keep that in mind?”

I could feel a grin crawling over my face and pulling my lips away from my teeth like a laughing dog. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.”

“Good.” She gave me a hug. “One more thing,” she said, still holding on to my arms as if she was afraid I’d go gaily skipping off into the sunset in a fit of rapture.

“What’s that?” I asked, barely listening.

She waited until my eyes were focused on her again. “Hold off on using the L-word, Barney.”

“You mean love?”

She groaned. “No. I mean lug wrench. Of course I mean love.”

“Think it would scare him?”

“It might. So don’t say it. Promise me.”

“I won’t say it.” I considered that for a minute. “Can I think it?”

She gently pushed the hair back off my forehead. With her eyes misting up, she whispered, “Yes, sweetcakes, you can think it all you like.”

I took a deep breath to calm myself down. It didn’t help much.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“No. That’s about it. Good luck, Barney. We’re all rooting for you.”

“Thanks.” Once again I let my eyes roam around her living room. They came to rest on the rocking horse. “Um, Sylvia.”

“Yes?”

“Toys for Tots only takes donations at Christmas time.”

She pushed me toward the door. “Don’t worry about it. Good-bye. Break a leg. See ya.”

The next thing I knew, I was standing alone in the hall with her front door staring me in the face.

WITH MY ancient Belladonna Arms apartment looking as clean as it was ever going to get (it’s hard to spit shine a battered old shoe), I ducked into the shower before quickly dressing in my usual sartorial splendor. Cargo shorts. T-shirt. Bare feet. My only (questionable) concession to fashion was by way of a pride bracelet made of what looked like a string of Froot Loops, which I slipped around my wrist. I figured if I ever needed to be comfortable, tonight was it. The last thing I wanted to worry about was my attire. Still, a dash of color never hurts.

I stood in the middle of my living room, barely breathing. Not quite trembling. Knees almost knocking. Swallowing hard. Rehearsing the scenario inside my head. The words I’d use. Where we’d sit. Should I offer him a drink? Should I hold his hand?

Giving myself a good shake, I ran through a few rules inside my head. Don’t use the L-word. Don’t use the L-word. Don’t use the L-word. Okay, I guess that was the only rule I could think of. But what the hell was I really going to say? What would I ask him for? Did I have a specific request? Were there options? Like, say, eternal devotion? Mutual exclusivity? Going halfsies on the monthly Netflix bill? Welding the closet door shut and living together in one apartment or the other? Splitting the cost of cat litter? Sex on a regular basis? Hell, sex on an irregular basis? I’m not greedy.

Then I heard it. The sound of Ramon’s shower next door. He must have come home from work while I was over at Pete and Sylvia’s. I should have known. After all, Wilbur wasn’t anywhere around. If I had been the only one home, Wilbur would have been pestering me for dinner. As it was, he must have been next door sitting outside Ramon’s shower curtain, impatiently tapping his paw, waiting to pester him for dinner the minute Ramon stepped out of the tub. Naked.

Ramon naked. With that thought, I’m pretty sure I suffered a small coronary infarction. Damn.

The water stopped running next door, and I heard the bang in the pipes overhead that always heralded such an event. I stood rooted to the living room floor. I heard a muffled voice through the closet door. Ramon talking to Wilbur. The gentle thud of a dresser drawer. A moment later, the whirr of a can opener farther away in Ramon’s kitchen. A happy meow from Wilbur, and the clatter of a dish against the floor. The pad of bare feet crossing the room on the other side of our connecting door.

The squeak of said door as it slowly opened wide.

With my heart crawling up my trachea like a gopher climbing out of its hole, I waited… waited… waited… and suddenly there he was.

Ramon peeked around the edge of the closet door, looked straight through my bedroom, through the door leading from my bedroom to my living room, and into my living room proper, where he saw me standing there frozen in stasis like some sort of lab experiment gone horribly wrong. He was wearing blue jeans, an untucked dress shirt, and white socks. His hair hung loose about his face, just the way I liked it.

He smiled at the sight of me. “Hi,” he said softly. “You practicing for cryogenics?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. No laugh. No “hi.” Not even my usual squeak.

Ramon stuck his head in a little farther. “You okay?”

I nodded.

The first whiff of concern seemed to have crossed his mind. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I managed to say, finding my voice at last.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are those Froot Loops on your wrist?”

I chose to ignore that.

He stepped through the closet, crossed the bedroom, walked straight up to me, and snuggled into my arms without asking permission or anything. He wrapped his hands around my back and rested his head on my shoulder. “Thank you for last night,” he said. “Did you get my note?”

I nodded.

As if working on a different time clock and under different management altogether, my arms came up of their own accord and pulled Ramon closer against me. He slid one of his hands up my back and settled it across my nape, then slipped his fingers into the back of my hair.

I turned my head enough to bury my face in his hair. It smelled fresh and clean from the shower. Still a little damp. Not much. Our cheeks were pressed together. I could feel his eyelashes brushing my temple.

“What’s happening?” he asked softly, more to himself than to me, I think. “What’s happening to us?”

“I’m about to break a rule,” I said.

“What rule?”

But then I remembered Sylvia’s admonishment. Don’t use the L-word. “Nothing. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

He seemed to accept that. God knows why.

Ramon eased back from my arms and stared into my face with those incredible brown eyes of his.

I couldn’t stop myself. I obeyed a sudden urge and reached up to slide a fingertip across one of his long lashes. He closed his eyes and let me. Meanwhile a tiny trace of a smile played at his mouth.

When I spoke, what came out were words I hadn’t rehearsed at all. They just bubbled forth. I had hoped for something earth-shattering, a grand operatic announcement perhaps, but all I said was, “I thought about you all day.”

“Did you?”

Why am I being so mundane when my whole goddamn future is at stake? “Yeah. Did you think about me?” How needy is that? The moment I asked the question, I closed my eyes, trying to shut myself off from the answer. But he wouldn’t let me.

“Please, Barney,” he coaxed. “Open your eyes and look at me.” His fingertips were still at the back of my head, his chest still pressed to mine. His cock—damn, his cock was hard against my own.

My God, I had been so lost in Ramon’s arms I hadn’t noticed either of the two erections in the room. And one of them was mine. Jesus, can I be dense or what? I opened my eyes at last, and he laid both hands to the sides of my face and held me there, forcing me to gaze straight at him. I couldn’t have looked away if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. Which I really, really didn’t.

“I think something happened last night,” he said. “I think something happened between us.”

“I know.”

“You felt it too?”

“Yeah.” To say the least.

His voice was soft, his lilting accent barely marking his words, but still a song in my ears. Lord, how I loved listening to it. “Barney, can I ask you something? Can I ask you something, and when I do, will you tell me the truth?”

“Always,” I said.

He smiled at the way the word fell from my mouth. Always. He stared at my lips, trailed a thumb across them as if curious as to how they felt, then lifted his eyes to gaze into mine once again.

“Barney, if… if you didn’t know about my past… if things hadn’t happened like they did… do you think—I mean, is there any possibility that maybe… maybe…?”

“Yes,” I said. “There’s every possibility.”

His smile faltered. His eyes grew sad. “You don’t know what I was about to say.”

It was my turn to trace a fingertip over the line of his lips. When I did, he parted them slightly, offering me a glimpse of the snowy teeth beneath, the tip of a pink tongue. But still there was no smile there. His eyes were worried. I could see actual fear shining out of them. It was probably the same kind of fear that was shining out of mine.

I resurrected my voice from the well of emotion it was treading water in. “I know what I hoped you were about to say.”

“Do you?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. Instead, I asked a question of my own. “Ramon, if your life hadn’t turned out the way it did, if you hadn’t fallen into the trap you fell into, if things had worked out differently and you hadn’t been with ChiChi… would you—” I swallowed hard. “—would you have ever looked at me the way you must have looked at him?”

“I don’t have any money,” he said, shame darkening his face.

I blinked in surprise. “Huh?”

“I don’t have any money. I don’t have anything.”

“Oh. I know.”

“I don’t want you to be ashamed of me.”

“I could never be ashamed of you.”

“I have a shit job.”

“So do I. So does Pete. So does everybody. Except maybe Brad Pitt.”

He tried to smile at that. At long last the fear fell from his eyes. He seemed to understand now where the wind was blowing. Where this whole awkward scenario was heading.

He leaned in and laid his forehead to mine. I watched as he closed his eyes, and when he did, I closed mine too.

I asked the question again. I was trembling so badly I could barely speak the words, but I finally got them out. “Could you, Ramon? Could you ever look at me the way you must have looked at Cheech?”

In the darkness behind my eyelids where I always go to hide, I suddenly found myself no longer hiding. I was simply there to better hear the words Ramon was about to speak. I had to hear them. No matter what they were. I had to know. My heart was already racing in anticipation of them. Pumping out adrenaline. Pumping out fear. Pumping out hope.

“You mean the way I’m looking at you now?” he asked gently.

I nodded, once again using the darkness behind my eyelids as a shield, afraid to look, afraid to even consider looking. “I think so. I hope so.”

He placed his hand on my cheek. “Then open your eyes and see,” he coaxed gently.

And ever so slowly, I did.

His cognac eyes were studying me as no eyes have ever studied me before. My breath caught.

“I’m nuts about you,” he whispered.

“I’m nuts about you,” I whispered back.

“Really?” we both asked in unison.

When I realized he had just asked the same question I had just asked, I blurted out, “Jesus, Ramon. Look at me. I’m shaking. I’m about to pass out. My blood pressure just peaked at 400 over 210. You have to ask really?”

Before I could find something even dumber to say—before I could do anything—he laid his lips gently over mine. Probably to shut me up.

Heart thumping, I melted into the kiss.

“I got you chocolates,” I mumbled, his lips still on mine.

“Don’t care,” he mumbled back.

“I ate half of them already.”

“I know. I can taste them.”

“I thought this would be harder.”

“So did I.”

Seconds passed. The kiss went on. And on. Our tongues shyly touched. My knees started knocking.

“Mmm,” I said, still savoring that eternal kiss.

“Barney?”

“Hmmm?”

“Can we go to bed now?”

“You want to cuddle again?”

“Among other things.”

My first thought was, Uh-oh. My second thought was, Oh boy.

Nodding, unable to speak, still clenched in the kiss, I grabbed the waistband of his jeans and dragged him awkwardly toward the bedroom.

Grinning, he stumbled along in my wake. Kissing me from one room to the next.

Chapter 11

OUR LIPS still locked together, we collapsed onto the bed. Our teeth clacked.

“Ow,” Ramon said, and we both laughed.

I broke the kiss and buried my face in his throat. He craned his head back and let me forage over his Adam’s apple. While I foraged, I took a handful of the dress shirt he had on and tried to pull it over his head.

He giggled. “It has buttons, you know.”

“Too slow.”

We sat up on the bed, and while I pulled the shirt over his head, he did the same to mine. Our chests finally bare, we once again fell back on the bed. He gripped me under my armpits and dragged me up so that my chest hovered over his face. He took my nipple into his mouth, and while he went to town on that, his fingers dipped under the waistband of my shorts and ran a gentle reconnaissance on the untapped terrain of my ass. Untapped by him, at least.

I gasped when a finger dipped into my butt crack and almost instinctively wiggled around on the bed until I was facing the other direction. Ramon scooted down in the bed to accommodate me, and at the same time, I squirmed along his torso until his head was even with my stomach. He planted his mouth on my belly button and darted his tongue in, sending sparks up and down my body. Ramon worked his fingers around to the front, beneath the waistband of my shorts, and I shivered in anticipation.

Now it was my turn. I buried my face in the heat of Ramon’s stomach, loving the way the little treasure trail of hair tickled my chin when I dipped my tongue into his belly button.

I laid my hand over the bulge beneath the fly of his jeans, and with that same hand trembling like crazy, I plucked at the little tab on his zipper until I caught it between my thumb and forefinger. Sliding it slowly downward, taking my time and applying the same principle that people employ when not gobbling down a hot fudge sundae too fast—hoping to make the enjoyment last, don’t you know—I slid the tab downward to expose a forest of dark pubic hair peeking out at me from the shadows beneath.

At the other end of the bed, Ramon shifted and pressed his face to the crotch of my shorts. He gently nipped with his teeth at the outline of my cock beneath the fabric, which didn’t allay my trembling much. He dipped his fingers once again into the back of my shorts, dragging them slowly down over my ass.

“Oh, God,” he muttered. “I love this.” And a second later, he had stripped my shorts away completely, dragging them down my legs and over my feet and sailing them across the room, where they landed atop a floor lamp standing in the corner.

He nuzzled his mouth into my forest of pubes, and I felt the length of my cock, free as a bird now, not to mention as hard as a hammer handle, bump up against his cheek. He laid his warm hand over it and tilted it up in the air until it stood erect. I could sense him pulling back to appraise it while I lay there shivering at his touch.

“Beautiful,” he breathed as his lips returned to kiss me beneath the rim of my corona, making me vibrate all the harder.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” I gasped when his tongue flicked out and snagged a drop of moisture spilling from my slit.

“Yummy,” Ramon murmured, smacking his lips for my benefit.

Using both hands, I pushed Ramon’s jeans past his hips, and his erect cock sprang out and bonked me in the nose. It was a beauty too. Fat, uncut, veiny, and just as hard as mine. Fighting with his pant legs to get them over his feet, I decided ambidextrous was the way to go, so I sucked that beautiful dick into my mouth to free up both hands in my quest to get his trousers off. It was actually fortuitous, because the moment his dick slid between my lips, his back arched and his ass came off the bed. Fortuitous because with his ass in the air, he gave me a little more leeway to tug his trousers down his legs and pull them over his feet completely. They sailed off on the same flight path as my shorts had taken a moment earlier.

Both of us naked at last, except for my stupid Froot Loops bracelet, we rolled on the bed until we were lying side by side and began seriously exploring each other’s genitalia, if you want to be snooty about the nomenclature.

Ramon slid his tongue up the length of my cock and over the head, lingering there for a second to delve into my still-leaking slit. Then he traveled down the other side until his lips met my balls. Once there, while I rattled and shook and banged around beneath his attentions like one of those machines at Home Depot that mix your paint for you, his mouth circled my testicles, first one, then the other, and the moment he did that, it was my turn to arch my back like a drawbridge.

Jesus God, I had never felt anything like it in my life.

When he released my balls and slid his tongue back up my shaft to take my dick into his mouth in earnest, I let my hands range over him everywhere at once while I drew his cock as far down my throat as I could get it.

“You’re dripping,” Ramon whispered around the head of my dick. I simply nodded in answer because comprehensible conversation was well beyond me at the moment.

I released Ramon’s cock and slid my lips over his balls, since he had put the notion into my head by doing it to me, and it was the best move I’d made in about six years. My God, Ramon’s nuts were lovely.

His fuzzy thighs lay to either side of my face like big, warm earmuffs as I slurped and gobbled and slavered over his balls. And while I slavered, Ramon gasped and giggled and ground his hips into my face until I was so turned on I wasn’t sure if my heart could take the pressure.

With my dick buried in his hot mouth, his tongue lapping at the head of it like a kid savoring a Tootsie Pop, I once again climbed that long stretch of Ramon’s fat cock and popped it into my mouth.

With each of us sucking on the other now, and both of us trembling and squirming and trying not to go into cardiac arrest, I had a sneaky suspicion it wasn’t going to be long before the fat lady sang. I was right.

“Baby, baby, baby,” I muttered around his straining cock, and on the third “baby,” Ramon’s hips arched skyward yet again. My dick slipped from his mouth as his hands came down to grab the sides of my head, and he latched onto my noggin like a vise to hold me in place. In the meantime his cock swelled up bigger than it already was, and it was all over.

While Ramon gasped and thrashed around, his seed shot out like hot, delicious lava shooting from a volcano. It filled my mouth, poured down my throat, dribbled over my chin, and one particularly energetic squirt banged against my uvula, making it swing back and forth in my throat like a church bell.

The moment I tasted those delicious gouts of come on my tongue and heard Ramon crying out like a banshee as he delivered them, my own come roiled through my cock and exploded across Ramon’s face.

“Oh, shit,” he quickly muttered under the spray, and he immediately stuffed my spurting cock into his mouth before he lost any more of the precious cargo.

We worked each other over, hungrily, insistently, as our bodies relaxed and our juices slowly ceased flowing. As my dick began to soften in Ramon’s mouth, and his did the same in mine, we sort of melted against each other. Less urgently now, and infinitely more gently, we stroked each other’s bodies, learning the lay of the land, relishing the smooth heat of barely explored territory. I thrilled at the feel of new hands on my body as they caressed places long bereft of touch by any other hands but my own. From Ramon’s soft humming, I knew he felt the same.

As my drained cock slid from between Ramon’s lips, he pushed his face gently into my stomach and inhaled my scent. I felt his smile against my skin.

When the final drops of come had oozed from Ramon’s cock, I let him slip gently away from me. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the sensation of his cock, more flaccid now but still thick with blood, lying familiarly against my cheek. The weight of it was a wonder; the texture like heated satin against my face. The mass, the girth, the scent of his dick were even now driving me crazy with longing.

While I trailed my lips over the softness of his tummy, I slid my hand up his chest and laid my fingers over his mouth. He kissed me there, and sucked in my fingers, tasting them as he had tasted my cock moments before.

We lay like that for the longest time, exploring each other, savoring the memory of what we’d experienced, still breathing in the scent of each other, still tasting the heady flavor of juices spilled in passion, still sharing and enjoying the mutual hunger that had brought us together to begin with. Our thirsts slaked for the moment, we still offered without reservation the essence of each other, to be done with as the other pleased. Even now, after all we had enjoyed, we continued to share, to savor. To need.

For me, I knew, it would never be enough. With everything he gave, I would always want more.

“You’re so beautiful,” I whispered, my face still pressed to the heat of Ramon’s stomach. His cock, fully flaccid now and at rest, nuzzled against my chin where I could conveniently plant a kiss on it when I felt the urge. And the urge came often. Ramon slid one arm between my legs to scoop me close. My balls against his bicep, his forearm nestled in the cleft of my ass, his hand against my back, he cradled me in a way no one had ever cradled me before.

I ranged my hands over his beautiful legs from ankle to thigh, amazed by the trifecta of bronzed skin, shadowy hair, and endless, endless heat.

His lips were still exploring along the length of my sleeping dick, occasionally, even now, licking away an errant drop of come that seeped out into the light.

“I could stay here forever,” he said softly, his voice hushed by the expenditure of passion.

“Me too,” I answered back. “I’ve wanted you since the first time I saw you.”

His other hand, the one not on my back, slid up my stomach. Once again he laid it squarely in the middle of my chest and rested the tip of his index finger in the little triangular notch at the base of my throat.

“But why would you?” he asked quietly. “I don’t understand that. I’m not exactly a great catch. I’ve got nothing to offer anybody. I’m not being maudlin, it’s the fucking truth.”

I rose up on one elbow and gazed down at him. His face was still against my stomach, but his eyes were on my face. Frightened again. Worried.

“Please don’t talk like that,” I said. “Don’t sell yourself short. And please don’t tell me I don’t know what I want.”

“Double negative,” he muttered. But then he smiled in apology. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t joke, either,” I said. “Not about us. Not about this. Okay? I don’t think I could stand it if you did.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, his eyes wide and stricken. “I didn’t mean it.”

I stretched my arm along the length of his body to brush his long hair from his eyes. “It’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t mean it either. You can say anything you want. You have that right.”

“Can I?”

“Yes.”

He considered that silently, still watching my face.

“What?” I asked, a shimmer of fear digging through me. “What is it you want to say?”

His snowy teeth nibbled his bottom lip. I could see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. Closing his eyes for a moment, he pressed his mouth to the side of my dick, bestowing a kiss; then he opened his eyes and gazed up into my face.

“Can I stay with you again tonight?”

“Is that what you really wanted to say?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you really want to? Stay with me?”

A slow grin began to creep across his face. “Like a motherfucker.”

I stared at him. “God, that’s romantic.”

Then, bursting into laughter, I bounced, spun, and twirled around on the bed until we were once again facing in the same direction. I buried my face in the crook of his neck and giggled against his skin. He giggled back, probably wondering if I’d slipped a mental cog or something, but to his credit, he didn’t ask. He simply clutched me tighter in his arms and held on for dear life while I did the same to him.

I pulled away far enough to see his handsome face. The smile I found there was a wonder to behold. All white teeth and dimples and bright, happy eyes. He lifted his head from the pillow with a grunt and kissed the tip of my nose.

I dropped my face to his chest and listened for the sound of his heartbeat. With his hands in my hair and his lips on the top of my head, I spoke directly into the place where I thought that miraculous ball of muscle and sinew was pumping life into the man beneath me.

“I never want you to leave,” I rasped, my voice weak with need. “I never want you to pull away from me. I never want to be any farther from you than I am right now.”

“Logistically tricky.” He grinned, but there were tears in his eyes as I looked up and found him studying my face.

I pressed myself against him, from forehead to toes. Legs, tummy, chest, everything. And when I did, his arms tightened to pull me closer.

I inhaled his scent, tasted his come yet again on my lips, longed once more for that moment of orgasm when his perfect bronze body arched high off the bed and he spilled his seed into my mouth with a cry of joy. “I like the way you taste and feel and smell, Ramon. I like the way you slobber on my chest when you’re snoring. I like the way you drape your hairy legs over me and pin me to the bed while you sleep.”

He smiled, his lips still in my hair, his arms still wrapped around me as tight as they would go. “I don’t do all that.”

“Actually, yeah, you do.”

He nuzzled close and whispered in my ear, “Can we have sex again?”

“You mean now?”

“Now. Tonight. Tomorrow morning. At half past ten, thirteen Thursdays from now. Forever. I’ve been hungry for you for a long time.”

My heart scudded and missed a beat. “You have?”

“Yeah. So can we?”

His statement had touched me to the core, but I thought it best not to show it since we were getting sappy enough as it was. I rolled my eyes skyward, tapped out a rhythm on his chin with my fingertips, hemmed and hawed around as if I was weighing the question very carefully, then finally agreed, “Okay. But I think I have an appointment at half past ten, thirteen Thursdays from now.”

He laughed. “Cancel it.”

“Okay.”

And he laughed again.

I closed my eyes and let that delicious spate of laughter ricochet through me. Over and over and over again.

Yep. My heart is really in trouble this time.

IT WAS almost midnight when we found ourselves, finally sated, lying in each other’s arms and staring out the bedroom window at another incredibly starry California sky. My bed was bereft of any and all linens. Even the bottom fitted sheet was missing. I wasn’t quite sure how we had managed to strip the bed so thoroughly during our little sex fest, but I didn’t much care either. Ramon’s shoulder was the only pillow I needed. His heat the only comforter. A contented silence had hushed our voices as we lay there with the blue light of that fat moon outside spilling over the two of us. Sorry. I should say the three of us, for Wilbur was tucked between Ramon and me, his head resting on Ramon’s shin, his tail draped over mine. He was snoring like a buzz saw.

Ramon cleared his throat. Obviously the silence was about to come to an end.

“What is it?” I asked, my voice lazy and spent and breathless.

“You,” he said softly.

“What about me?”

“You really like me.”

“You sound like Sally Field.”

There was no laughter in his voice. He was being serious. “But you do. You like me.”

Ramon obviously wasn’t in the mood to joke around, so I apologized and molded my face into a more somber expression in case he should happen to look. “I’m sorry,” I said. “And yes, Ramon, I really like you.”

I could have expounded on that answer for the next week and a half, but thought maybe I’d better not. I was already in danger of saying too much.

He considered my reply silently. I could feel his breath stirring my hair. I relished the heat of his body against mine, but his thoughts were a mystery to me. I ached to know what they were.

He kissed the top of my head, then cleared his throat again. I got the impression he was struggling to find the courage to say what he wanted to say.

“I never thought anyone would ever like me again, Barney.”

I splayed my fingers over his chest, the better to feel the heat of him. “Because of Cheech, you mean? Because of what happened?”

He nodded against me. “Even I didn’t like me much. No. That’s not true. I hated me. I hated what I’d done. I still hate myself for it.”

I rubbed his chest in a gentle circular motion, trying to soothe, hoping to ease a pain I would probably never be able to fully understand.

“You have to put it behind you, Ramon. You have to try anyway.”

“I know. It’ll kill me if I don’t.”

Yes, it probably will. Then I thought, No, don’t even think that.

I gave him a little shake. “I won’t let that happen,” I said. “You’re not alone now.”

“I’m not?”

“No. You’re with me. At least—I hope you want to be with me. As friends, I mean. Or—or whatever.”

He softly repeated the word “whatever” as if testing the taste of it on his tongue. Then he scooted down on the bed until our noses touched. He gazed into my eyes. His hair fell over both our faces, pinning us together beneath its shadow. His lips brushed mine ever so gently.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he asked.

I swallowed hard. “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I guess it is.”

“Aren’t you tired of being alone, baby?” I asked softly. “Aren’t you tired of hating yourself? Feeling guilty? Crying in your sleep?”

His eyes opened a little wider, but he didn’t ask me how I knew he cried in his sleep. He peeked out from underneath that curtain of hair as his glance skittered to the closet door that joined our two apartments together, and I guess he figured it out for himself.

“I’m tired of it all,” he said wearily. “All the sorrow and the guilt and the memories that won’t leave and the pain that won’t stop. I’ve been down on myself for so long I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to be up. To be happy.”

“Do I make you happy?”

Again, his lips brushed mine. He buried his fingers in my hair. Stroking. Petting.

“Yeah. You do. I don’t understand why you’d want to, but whether I understand it or not, I can still know it’s happening. I haven’t felt like this in so long, it’s kind of… amazing. I’m just scared is all.” And his voice trailed away.

“Scared of what?” I asked. “Talk to me, Ramon. Please don’t hold back. Don’t hold anything back. I want to know it all. Everything you feel. Everything you think. What is it you’re scared of?”

His lips puckered up as he considered the question. He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m scared I won’t make you happy, Barn. I’m scared I’ll drag you down with me into this fucking pit of guilt and sorrow and… and heartache I didn’t know I would ever get out of for two fucking minutes until you came along. It’s like a big black pit I’ve been living in. And your face is the first ray of light I’ve seen since I fell into it.”

I tried to lighten the mood. “I’m a ray of light?”

But he wasn’t amused. “Yes, baby. My only one.”

I pressed my hand to the side of his face. “Then good. If you need me to be a ray of light, I’ll be a ray of light.” I could feel myself blushing. “I’m sorry. That sounds corny.”

He shook his head. There was no smile on his face. No humor at all. “It’s not corny. It’s just… true.”

Ramon finally turned his head to peer through the window at the stars once again. When he spoke, his lazy accent wrapped itself around words I would remember for days to come. Words I had already heard once before and didn’t fully understand. But now I thought I was beginning to grasp their meaning.

“I’ll never hurt you,” he said. “I promise you that. I’ll never hurt anyone again.”

I lifted my head and laid my mouth to his cheek. “I know you won’t. I’m not worried about that. I—”

He turned back to face me. “You what, Barney?”

I remembered Sylvia’s warning. “Nothing. I don’t know what I was going to say.”

He seemed to accept that.

I kissed his nose to make him smile. It almost worked. Then I gently dug my finger into his ribs, and he squealed in surprise. He thrashed around, trying to get away. With my arms around him, he didn’t get far.

I wrestled him onto his back and pinned his arms over his head. As our hips ground together, I began to feel my dick moving again, raising its head, getting all anxious. Wondering what was up. Clever dick. Ramon seemed to feel it too.

He reached down and circled my stiffening cock with cool fingers. His thumb dragged a gentle trail across the head, making my hips surge forward. He watched my face with a mischievous glint in his eye.

“Oh God,” I gasped, my whole body trembling at his touch. Then I remembered something and thudded my way back to the real world. “Hey, wait! Don’t move! Stay right here!”

I hopped off the bed and ran into the living room with my dick at half-mast, bobbing around in front of me. I grabbed the UPS box Charlie had left with me earlier. I ran back to bed with it, squatted cross-legged on the bare mattress beside Ramon, who was still lying there naked like a bronzed god waiting to be worshipped, and handed him the box. Then I reached across him and flicked on the lamp beside the bed.

“A present,” I said. “From Charlie.”

Squinting against the sudden light, Ramon grunted his way into a sitting position. I was pleased to see his cock was at half-mast too. I’d have to do something about that at the first opportunity.

Folding his legs as I had, he sat opposite me on the bare bed with our bare knees touching. He took the box from my hands to peer inside.

I couldn’t stop myself. I had to laugh at the way his eyes lit up when he saw what was inside the box.

“Scissors,” he squealed. “Clippers! A cape! Holy shit, it’s got everything!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Everything but a head to work on.”

“Now I can give you your haircut,” he said.

I nodded. I figured a teeny dose of exaggeration was in order. “Not just me. Everybody in the building wants a haircut.”

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but his face got even happier. “No shit?”

“No shit.” I decided to spring the rest of the news on him. “And since you already sort of have a clientele, Monsieur Ramon, I think it’s time we got you enrolled back in beauty school again.”

His expression sobered immediately. “Really?”

I chucked him gently on the chin. “Sure. Why not?”

He didn’t look too sure of himself all of a sudden. “You think they’ll take me back?”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Well, I kind of left without notice.”

“Doesn’t matter. If they won’t understand the extenuating circumstances, then fuck ’em. There are other beauty schools in town. I’m sure one of them would be thrilled to have a fine hair stylist such as yourself enrolled in their establishment of higher learning.”

He grinned. “They probably would, huh?”

“Yep.”

He looked again at the contents of the box. Then he looked at me. Then he looked back in the box.

“Wow.”

I laughed. “Wow indeed, baby.”

“Let’s cut your hair,” he said.

I blinked. “What? Now? It’s midnight.”

“So?”

I gazed at Wilbur. I guess our jabbering had woken him up. He was sprawled out on the bed beside us, one leg high in the air, his nose buried in his fat ass, trying to give himself a bath. He was having to grunt to get there. He really did need to lose some weight.

I sucked in a great gout of air, girded my proverbial loins, let myself grin once more at the look of pure glee on Ramon’s face, and said with a leer, “Will you do it naked?”

He smiled wide and returned my leer with one of his own. God, his heavenly brown eyes were gorgeous when he leered.

“You really want me to?” he asked.

“Stupid question,” I mumbled, dragging him off the bed.

FIVE MINUTES later I was sitting naked beneath a cold plastic barber’s cape, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into.

Standing at my side, humming, jabbering away, doing a little barefooted tap dance now and then, so obviously happy to be doing what he so dearly loved once again, Ramon (as naked as a mole rat) was the most stunning specimen of Mexican manhood I’d seen in, like, forever. And while I appreciated his beauty—don’t think I didn’t—the cavalier, devil-may-care way he wielded those electric clippers across my head scared the bejesus out of me.

“Just a light trim,” I had instructed him before the nervous eye twitch had really set in.

“You bet,” he had replied with a wink. It all went downhill from there.

The next thing I knew, my head was filled with the buzz of about 50,000 of Katniss Everdeen’s tracker jackers, and I was feeling a cool wind on the back of my head I hadn’t felt since the time my mother shaved my head in third grade to wipe out an infestation of head lice I’d received from buggy, fatass Belinda Mahoney, who hated everybody and proved it by spreading her vermin to half the class.

“Not too short, please,” I said with a trembling voice, batting my eyes in Ramon’s direction to show him I was being flirty, not picky. The twitch in my eye had grown worse, I noticed.

Ramon didn’t. He leaned in and kissed my ear. “Trust me, baby. You’ll love it.”

He set the clippers aside for a moment, snatched up the barber scissors from the kitchen table, and did something to the top of my head. A second later a clump of hair the size of a tarantula fell into my lap.

“That’s a lot of hair,” I said, forcing up a chuckle as the first niggle of true terror began to crawl up my back, reminding me of the lobstery creature Vincent Price dug out of that guy’s spine in the old William Castle horror flick, The Tingler. Crap. That particular flash of nostalgia couldn’t be good. A dribble of sweat cascaded down my nose, took a swan dive off the end, and landed with a teeny kerplop on the plastic cape below, right next to the dead tarantula.

“You’re going to be so handsome,” Ramon cooed. “I’m getting hard looking at you.”

I gazed down to see if he was exaggerating, and nope, there it was. My barber had a boner. A beautiful one too. Still, it was a bit disconcerting, what with the sudden breeze blowing over the back of my skull, the bigass lobster from special effects crawling up my spine, and the scissors snip-snip-snipping away just over my right ear like the lawn man working on an overgrown clump of elephant grass. Another humongous wad of my hair fell into my lap to join the tarantula-sized clump already there.

“That barbering kit didn’t come with a mirror, did it?”

Ramon gave me a slap on the shoulder. “Kidder! Almost done. Don’t fret.”

He stood in front of me now and worked a little of his magic from the anterior point of view. My point of view was pretty good too. I slipped my hands from beneath the cape, and while Ramon fiddled and snipped at my hair, I ran my fingers over his tummy and cupped his balls in my hand until he was standing on tiptoe obviously hoping I’d grab his dick too. To put the guy out of his misery, I did exactly that. I was rewarded with a glimmer of precome, which I swiped away with my thumb and stuck in my mouth because I couldn’t bear not to.

By the time I’d done all that, Ramon and I were both gazing wickedly at each other. He set the scissors and comb aside, dropped to his knees in front of me, and dipped his head under the cape to slurp my dick into his mouth as payment for all the cool stuff I was doing to him.

While he did magical things to my dick with his mouth, his hand slid between the top phone book and my ass, and his finger stroked my hole, and then I was face-fucking Ramon’s mouth like a junkyard dog humping a French poodle.

I had my head tilted back as far as it would go. The tendons in my neck were about to pop, my eyes were squeezed shut in bliss, and if my legs had been spread any wider in my quest to give Ramon absolute and unfettered access to my hungry opening, he could have snapped my pelvic bones and made a Thanksgiving wish while he was down there diddling around.

With my dick all the way down Ramon’s throat, and his finger in my ass up to the first knuckle where, without proper lubrication, forward momentum had been irretrievably stalled, he mumbled, “We need lotion.”

“Bathroom,” I gasped between frenzied bouts of humping. “Medicine cabinet, bottom shelf.” Hump. “Hurry, and grab a condom too.” Hump. “Right hand drawer.” Hump, hump, double hump. “Why aren’t you gone yet?” Full body spasm and yet another flurry of humps.

He coughed up my dick and wiggled his head out from under the cape to gape at me. He was looking even happier than he had when he was cutting my hair. “Really? You want me to get a condom? Does that mean…?”

The tip of his finger was still burrowed into my hole, so I couldn’t really make complete sentences. I nodded back at him, mouth slack with lust, a little stream of drool dripping off my chin, my ass sliding around on his finger, trying to get the damn thing deeper.

Ramon took off running across the apartment and was back in about three seconds. He yanked me off my stack of phone books, splayed me over the kitchen table, naked ass up, and stuck his mouth over my hole to say hello.

I almost fainted.

“Oh God, fuck me,” I sputtered, my face crammed against the tabletop, his tongue doing things to my ass I had only read about in the seamier side of English lit.

When my hole was liberally anointed with spit, then slathered with a healthy dollop of baby oil, Ramon pierced my ass with one finger, then two, then three. I heard paper tearing and the snap of latex as he applied the rubber to his straining cock, and I was just about ready to sing the “Hallelujah Chorus” when I felt something fat and urgent poking at my hole.

I twisted around and saw Ramon leaning over me, nibbling at my ear. His hands were everywhere, and I was pretty sure he was getting ready to drill for oil, so I took a deep breath and relaxed every muscle in my body.

“Ooh, baby,” he muttered as the head of his dick popped through my sphincter and took a look around.

“More,” I gasped, wiggling my butt against him and reaching around to drag him (and his dick) closer. Ramon obliged by gripping my hips and driving that sucker home with one smooth slide, which wasn’t all that surprising considering the fact that I was so well-lubed I had the stuff running down my legs, puddling on the kitchen floor, and probably dripping into the apartment below.

Once he was in, Ramon hovered over me for a moment as I lay there, spread out on the kitchen table. With his cock buried deep in my ass, he laid his warm body over mine, pinning me down with his weight. Slowly, he pulled his dick almost all the way out, then eased it back in, then once again pulled it out to the very brink before sliding it in once more. No matter how much I begged him to speed up the tempo, he kept that easy, slow pace. Probably to drive me nuts. I couldn’t think of any other reason for it.

I’m not sure why, but while my face was still crammed against the Formica tabletop, and while my arms and legs were splayed as wide as they would go, I had a saltshaker in one hand and a pepper shaker in the other. I wasn’t even sure where they’d come from. I was banging them on the table in rhythm to Ramon’s strokes, and salt and pepper were flying everywhere.

Wilbur came to see what all the hubbub was about, and while I still lay there under Ramon’s slow, maddening pounding, the cat leapt onto the table, stuck his nose in my face to say hello, started purring like a Volkswagen, then plopped down on his side smack in front of me. I buried my face in his tummy, hoping to stifle myself from screaming out loud at the gentle, deliberate, infuriatingly slow fuck I was getting at the hands of the sadistic bastard behind me.

Then Ramon breathed into my ear, “Okay, baby, now we’ll do it your way.”

And immediately his hips shifted into high gear, and he started pounding my ass like a pile driver. I groaned in bliss, cried out in ecstasy, and finally had to reach down and grab my own cock because I needed to come outside almost as badly as I wanted Ramon to come inside.

Spitting out a mouthful of cat hair, I dropped the pepper shaker and reached my hand around to grab Ramon’s hip.

“Now!” I sputtered. “Now!”

And just to torture me completely, Ramon froze in place, his cock buried in me all the way to the hilt, plumbing my depths, unmoving, except for the spasmodic swelling of his cockhead, which from previous experience, I had learned was a forerunner to ejaculation, at least as far as Ramon was concerned.

“Come in me,” I gasped. “Please, Ramon. Come inside me.”

Ever so slowly, as if taking pity on me, he once again eased his cock almost all the way out, then just as slowly eased it back in. His hot breath was on the back of my head, where I’d felt the cool wind earlier, and I noticed there didn’t seem to be a lot of hair for him to chew on, but this wasn’t the time to worry about the state of my new haircut.

Again, he kicked it into hyperdrive, and while he pounded me from behind with long, hard, quick strokes, I felt my come begin to surge up from my balls.

Apparently, so was his. He gasped into my ear, “Here it comes. Oh Christ, here it comes.”

And just as my hand filled with my own spurting jism, Ramon let out a series of grunts and stuttered his way to an explosive orgasm with his dick still buried in my ass as far as it would go. Together, we shook and bucked and wheezed and groaned and the salt and pepper shakers rolled off the table and smashed to bits on the ratty linoleum and Wilbur finally ran off in terror, appalled by the racket we were making. From the very first ecstatic convulsion, as the come erupted from his body, Ramon held me encircled in his arms and continued to grab on as if his life depended on it. His mouth was buried at the back of my neck, the fronts of his legs were quivering against the backs of mine, and over and over he mumbled the same two words with his lips against my nape as he poured his seed into the condom encasing his dick.

“Thank you thank you thank you thank you.”

Slowly, like the lowering of a great satin theater curtain that left our minds darkened and silent and spent, our convulsions slowed, and Ramon gradually fell limp atop me. Sated and exhausted.

I reached around behind me once again to clutch his hip as his thrusts became gentler and gentler and finally ceased altogether. I twisted my head around, and he found my mouth with his. We kissed as his cock softened inside me. His kiss was as tender as any kiss I had ever felt in my life.

I closed my eyes, the better to taste him. And when I did finally open them to look at his face, I saw his eyes were closed as well.

He breathed ragged words into our kiss. “That… that was the best ever.”

All I could do was nod, too weak for anything else.

We didn’t move again until my back began to cramp. He eased his cock out of me then, ever so gently, and led me to the shower while I muttered, “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” with every step. My ass was okay, never been happier in fact, but my back was fucking killing me. Screwing on a Formica tabletop might seem romantic as hell, but in reality it leaves a lot to be desired. Especially if you’re the screwee.

While I hung in Ramon’s arms under a spray of warm water, he lathered my body with his soapy hands before washing down himself. After a thorough rinse, we left the shower hand in hand and dried each other off. Neither of us spoke. Somehow the silence just seemed right.

“Let’s get my poor Barney back to bed.” He nuzzled into my ear, and taking my hand, he led me to the bedroom, where we attempted a quick salvage job of the bed linens, trying to make things at least a little bit orderly. When he had me tucked into my side of the bed all comfy and cozy, he turned off the light and eased in beside me, gathering me gently in his arms.

I lay in the darkness with my face to his chest, and he crooned a little song under his breath as if he were singing a lullaby to a child. He stroked me continually with lazy, gentle movements of his fingertips.

“Thank you, baby,” he whispered in the dark, his sweet breath blowing across my face.

I was asleep before I knew I was nodding off, and I’m pretty sure I was smiling while I did it.

Chapter 12

THE BEAM of moonlight on the bed had been replaced by a slash of morning sunshine when a rapping at the door dragged Ramon and me back to the waking world.

In no hurry to answer it since I hadn’t heard any firetruck sirens or tsunami alarms or stentorian voices demanding we duck and cover prior to complete and utter nuclear annihilation—like that would really help—I yawned and stretched and snuggled up close to Ramon, who was doing the same to me. His body was all toasty warm and delicious from sleep.

“G’morning,” he mumbled, wrapping his arms around me as if he thought I might have slipped away from him in the night.

My heart seemed to suck up every ounce of blood in my body and swell to the size of a medicine ball in my chest. I buried my hands in his thick, long hair and covered his face with kisses, starting at his hairline and working my way down to his chin.

By the time I was slurping at his throat like a Weimaraner, he was giggling and begging me to stop. Of course, I ignored him.

Another round of knocking erupted at my front door. I ignored that too.

It was Ramon’s turn to get all canine with his affections, so he started chewing on my ear like a puppy with a slipper. “It’s Saturday,” he whispered, after the chewing had stopped. “We don’t have to go to work.”

“I know.”

“Will you spend the day with me?”

“Really? You want me to?”

“Well, yeah.”

Once again I found myself wanting to say things Sylvia had explicitly forbidden. The L-word was blaring so loudly in my head and pleading for attention with such reckless abandon that it was a chore to ignore it, but I continued to try.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll make us breakfast. Then we’ll figure out what we want to do.”

“Oh, goody.” He grinned. “I’m starving. I’ve got a lot of body juices to replenish. Hee-hee. Both of us do.”

I thought of the many times we had brought each other to orgasm since we fell into bed the night before. Then I thought of all the different orifices we employed in the implementation of those orgasms, and I gave a blissful shudder. “We’re probably in need of blood transfusions and an IV drip more than food, but that’s okay, I’ll cook breakfast anyway. Eggs and sausage okay?”

“Got any chorizo?”

“Isn’t that like sausage?”

“Well, sort of.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Lymph glands and lymph nodes.”

“Uh, no. Sorry.” Blech.

“Then sausage it is.” He smiled, still holding me close in that heavenly sleep-warm embrace.

I heard an exasperated flurry of footsteps clomp away from my front door, and five seconds later the phone by the couch jangled. I ignored that too.

I glanced at the bedside clock. It was ten in the morning.

“Thank you for last night, Barney.” Ramon breathed the words into my ear, his lush lips tickling and sending a shiver up my spine.

“No, thank you,” I breathed back, as sincere as I had ever been in saying thank you to anybody. Ever. “It was the best night of my life.”

He lay motionless against me, apparently considering what I’d said. Finally he seemed to accept the truth of my statement. “You’re right,” he said, as if a little stunned by the fact that I was absolutely right and that he hadn’t thought of it first. “It was the absolute best.”

A godawful caterwauling erupted six inches above our heads. After jumping out of our skins, we both twisted around to see what the hell it was and found Wilbur sitting at the head of the bed, screeching like a squeaky hinge. He tugged at my hair with his pointy little teeth. Obviously he wanted breakfast too.

“Greedy beast,” I growled. But I kissed Ramon, a quick peck, squirmed out of his arms, and lowered my feet to the floor beside the bed. It was time to get this day rolling.

I had taken one step away from the bed when I heard a renewed flurry of knocking at my front door. Whoever it was, they were starting to sound a little desperate. Grumbling, I snatched my cargo shorts off the top of the pole lamp in the corner, slipped my naked ass into them, and yanked open the front door to see who the hell it was.

It was Sylvia.

She stood there looking as beautiful as ever. Her mouth fell open at the first sight of me. Then she poked her head around the doorjamb and saw Ramon standing at my bedroom door with a sheet wrapped around his waist to hide the dangly bits. Sylvia took him in with one raised eyebrow and a flash of one of her dimples, but then she refocused her full attention on me. She tore her gaze from my face so she could center her attention on something a little bit higher. It took me a minute to realize she was staring at my hair. “My God,” she mumbled to herself. “He’s worse than he used to be.”

That medicine ball in my chest sprung a leak and went phlfbltblt as it deflated to the size of a human kidney and crash-dived into my upper colon with a sickening plop. A few disturbing memories from the night before clawed their way into my head, snickering maliciously as they came. Ramon. Naked. Electric clippers. An unexpected draft at the back of my head. Tarantula-sized clumps of hair landing in my lap. Getting fucked twelve ways from Sunday. But wait, that was from a different collection of thoughts altogether.

“I’m sorry. What?” I heard myself ask. “Who’s worse than he used to be?”

Sylvia gave herself a shake. “Nothing. It’s nothing. I don’t know what the heck I was talking about.” She gave a nervous chuckle and rapped her knuckles on the side of her head. “Must be dementia.”

“Is it my haircut?” I asked. “Are you gaping and making snide comments about my haircut?”

“I’m not gaping,” she lied, “and I’m never snide.” That last part was true, as far as I knew. However, her eyes had still not left the top of my head, and they were still as big as Ping-Pong balls whether she chose to admit it or not.

With the sheet now tied securely around his waist to prevent improprieties and free up his hands, Ramon stealthed up behind me and draped his arms around my chest. With his bristly chin digging into my shoulder, he gazed out at Sylvia still standing in the hall at my front door. With his arms pinning mine to my sides, I couldn’t very well reach up and investigate whatever it was that had stunned the good woman so alarmingly about the top of my head. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know anyway.

“Hi, Syl,” Ramon said around a beaming smile. He reached up and gave my hair a tousle for our visitor’s benefit. “Isn’t it great? He’s a new man.”

“He certainly is.” She opened her mouth to say something else, but nothing much more came out. Lost in translation, I guess.

“Ummm,” she finally managed to stammer again, dragging her eyes back to me and obviously trying to keep them centered on my face this time, although it appeared to be quite a struggle to do so. “The first customer will be here in about an hour,” she said.

“Customer? What customer?” I asked.

“Ramon’s first haircut.” She cast her eyes back to the top of my head and amended her statement accordingly. “Sorry. Second haircut.”

Ramon brightened behind me. “I’ve got another haircut coming?”

Sylvia finally found her smile when she saw the happy look on his face. “Yes. Several actually. I’ve got them staggered every thirty minutes.”

Even Ramon was impressed. “You’ve got them staggered? How many are there?”

“Nine.”

“Holy shit.”

“Well phrased,” she said, dragging her eyes back to me. “You might want to wear a hat when they get here, Barney,” she said. “You know. Wouldn’t want to make them, um, jealous.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, but Ramon did. He flapped his hand at her, “Pshaw! Maybe they’ll want theirs cut just like his.”

Sylvia looked extremely doubtful. “Ooookay,” she droned.

She sucked in a breath of air, took one last incredulous gander at the top of my head, shook her head in amazement, and sauntered off down the hall toward her own front door.

“Toodles,” Ramon happily sang out after her.

“Well,” I said, squeezing around in Ramon’s embrace to face him. “I’d better get breakfast started. I’ll just go in the bathroom first to… uh, brush my teeth.”

Ramon kissed me on the lips, practically vibrating with excitement. “You were right, Barney. This is exactly what I needed. I had almost forgotten how much I love doing hair. And by God, I’ll get back into beauty school too. I will. Thank you for making me realize what I needed all along and was too dumb to figure out for myself.”

“You’re welcome,” I said with a grin, almost forgetting my own haircut and wondering what the hell was wrong with it while looking at the sweet glow of happiness on Ramon’s face. “Although you should really be thanking Sylvia. It was her idea. Hers and Arthur’s. Not mine.”

“Then, I will. I’ll thank them both.” He grinned, wrapping me in his arms for one final squeeze. “I’ll get cleaned up next door so we can save time. And I’ll feed the cat for you while you’re fixing breakfast. Thank you, Barney.” He squished his stubbly cheek against my own (we both needed shaves) and whispered a final astonishing statement into my ear.

“I love you,” he said, as if he said it every day of his life. By the time the words had soaked in, he was already halfway across the apartment, dropping the sheet he was wearing in his wake, and giving me a final heart-stopping glimpse of his naked self ducking through the connecting door with Wilbur, tail high, traipsing along behind him, purring like crazy.

“I love you too,” I whispered to the empty room. Then I took off running for the bathroom.

I threw myself in front of the cracked mirror over the sink and stood, mindlessly gawking at the reflection staring back at me. My beautiful bangs were gone. Now there was just enough hair across the top of my head to cover my scalp. Barely. The sides of my head were shorn so close my ears looked like they’d grown overnight like mushrooms. I could see the pulse of my heartbeat thudding in my temple. Jesus, I’d never seen that there before.

I grabbed a hand mirror and spun around to check out the back of my head, and that’s pretty much what I ended up checking out. The back of my head. Because there certainly wasn’t any hair back there to check out. Not a lick. Ramon had clipped me so short I could practically see inside my head, like one of those poor cows at the Animal Husbandry Institute that had a window in its side to show the students how its stomach worked. Mary, Mother of God, the skin at the back of my gourd was as white as Wonder Bread, and well it should be. It hadn’t seen daylight since that time my mother went at it with my father’s razor to scrape away the head lice from fatass—oh, never mind.

I stared at my head from every angle. Then I stared at it some more.

Then I remembered the feel of Ramon’s come splashing against the roof of my mouth. I remembered his beautiful cock buried in my ass as far as it would go while he breathed tender, gasping words of ecstasy into the back of my neck. I remembered the feel of his arms. The touch of his hands. The way he freely gave more than anybody else I’d ever known. The way he smiled when he looked at me. The way I smiled when I looked at him.

The way I finally liked someone who seemed to like me back.

And I thought—well, shit. So what if I have the worst haircut ever. And I mean ever. Would I rather have a nice haircut and be alone again, or would I rather look like a moron with the haircut I had now and know Ramon came along with it?

Hell, I thought, looking at it logically. What’s that vow people make when they get together? For better or worse? Well, here it is. For better or worse. I didn’t have to do anything, and I already had them both. Ramon for the “better,” and this motherfucking haircut for the “worse.”

I smiled at my reflection in the mirror. With my shorn head, I looked even stupider than I remembered myself looking. Then I thought, fuck it, and headed straight for the kitchen. My honey wanted his breakfast. He had nine haircuts to do, and he’d need his strength. And mine would grow out. I was almost certain it would. Someday.

Later that morning, as the clock was winding its way toward noon and Ramon and I were pushing ourselves away from the breakfast table, our bellies full of food and our eyes full of each other, there came the first knock on my apartment door.

It was Milan, Harlie’s lover from two. He took one look at me, crossed himself like a good Catholic, and with a headed-to-the-gallows expression etched on his face, he parked himself at the kitchen table where Ramon indicated he should sit. Being six foot four or so, he didn’t need the phone books under his ass. He squeezed his eyes shut while Ramon gleefully tied the cape around his neck.

Ramon’s Barber Shop was open for business.

THUS BEGAN, according to Arthur, an orgy of butchery not seen since Vlad the Impaler started hosting block parties at his fixer-upper castle with the dungeon to die for back in Romania in the fifteenth century.

As far as degrees of butchery went, Milan actually fared far better than I. He was so tall and so masculine and carried such a dark, glowering, Mediterranean threat in his eyes, even at the best of times, that I fear Ramon was a little gun-shy about getting too creative with his haircut. He performed admirably, reining in what he thought of as his artistic side, and pretty much gave Milan the simple neck trim he asked for. The line of hair at the nape of Milan’s neck wasn’t quite parallel to the floor when he finished unless Milan leaned over far enough to the right to just about topple over, but if he wore his shirt collar flipped up like a fifties juvenile delinquent until the missing hair grew out, nobody would notice.

When Ramon was finished, Milan breathed an audible sigh of relief, tucked a twenty into Ramon’s shirt pocket, and headed for the door, obviously pleased as punch to be getting the hell out of my apartment with his life and most of his head still intact.

On the way to the door, he risked postponing his exodus long enough to twiddle Wilbur’s ears.

“Hello there, Gizmo. So this is where you’ve been keeping yourself. You never come around anymore. Harlie and I have missed you.”

Wilbur yawned, unimpressed.

“Still a prick, I see.” Milan grinned and headed on out the door.

A few minutes later, it was Harlie’s turn. He rapped at the door, and since I was playing receptionist, I ushered him in with a sympathetic pat on the back.

Harlie had obviously scoped out the back of his lover’s head, because the first thing out of his mouth was “Don’t trim the neck. I’m letting it grow. Just take a little off the top.”

I figured that was probably the wrong thing to say, so I hurried out of the room before having to witness Harlie’s lovely strawberry-blond locks sawed off at the roots, which, by the time Ramon was finished, they most certainly were, except for one odd patch at the crown of his head that stood straight up three inches longer than anywhere else, like the butch-waxed tendril of hair on Alfalfa’s head, back in the days of The Little Rascals when haircuts were all bad.

To protect the man I was crazy about from being slaughtered in his tracks nine times over during the course of the day, I had taken the liberty of hiding the hand mirror from his victims—oops, I mean customers. I could only hope Ramon’s life expectancy would improve exponentially if his clientele didn’t see how their haircuts turned out until after they were home and far away from the easily accessible sharp instruments in Ramon’s hands.

Like Milan, Harlie left a twenty-dollar tip and stopped on his way out the door to pass a few kind words with Wilbur. Harlie seemed to be inordinately pissed off at me for some reason, but at least he didn’t take it out on the cat. Even with the shell-shocked look on his face brought about by the scant stand of nubbins of hair left atop his head, which he had discovered when he ran his hand over them, Harlie let it be known that Wilbur, or Gizmo as he called him, was more than welcome to stop by any time he had the urge for Purina Cat Chow, a bag of which, since he hadn’t dropped by lately, was moldering on the shelf in his and Milan’s pantry.

Wilbur said thank you by scratching his neck with a hind foot, licking his ass for about three seconds, then tipping over onto his side and falling fast asleep.

After that, poor Harlie appeared more stricken than he already did, knowing he had several long months to go before his fucking hair grew out. Being snubbed by a cat was just the icing on the cake.

Roger breezed through the door next, all smiles and waves as he hugged Ramon and me and congratulated us on our recent coming together. I’m not sure how he knew it already, but he certainly did. Maybe Sylvia had something to do with that.

He appeared fearless as far as his upcoming haircut was concerned. I suppose he figured since he wore it in a buzz cut anyway, there wasn’t much Ramon could do to ruin it.

Wrong. By the time Roger left the chair, his knees were knocking, his Adonis face was fire-engine red, and not only was his hair buzzed, it was sandpapered off right down to the second layer of epidermis. He looked like Mr. Clean after a horrific skin peel rendered with a bucket of molecular acid and a wire brush. There was even a pretty good gouge above his left ear. It didn’t bleed more than three or four teaspoons full, so I don’t know why he got so upset over it. It would heal. Probably. And tetanus shots don’t hurt that much. Do they?

After tossing a twenty on the table (I was beginning to see a pattern here) and looking pretty darned pained to be doing it, Roger ignored both Ramon and me as he all but sprinted toward the door. He did stop long enough to pass a few words with Studly, as he called Wilbur, but aside from gazing with interest at the teeny rivulet of blood still forging a path along the side of Roger’s ear, Studly didn’t appear too interested. Cats can be so snooty.

Roger didn’t seem surprised. “You always were a snob,” he said to Wilbur, then turned at the door and with teeth-grinding kindness, said, “I’m glad you boys are together. You probably deserve each other.” Then he did an about-face and stormed out the door.

Ramon glanced shyly at me. “He said we’re together. Are we together?”

I couldn’t see any reason to lie. “I sure hope so.”

Ramon smiled wide. He waded through an ankle deep puddle of blood-spattered hair to gather me into his arms and bury my mouth with his.

We were still kissing when Charlie the kleptomaniac tapped at the door. I ushered him inside, saw he was sweating bullets, and decided I’d hide in the bathroom for the duration.

The duration lasted twelve seconds. I heard a sneeze, a scream, and a thud, in that order, and when I raced out of the bathroom, pulling up my pants in flight to see what had happened, I found myself face-to-face with a near-hysterical Charlie who was sporting only one eyebrow.

To say he looked surprised would have been a massive understatement.

Ramon stood behind him and shrugged for my benefit. “I sneezed and dropped the clippers. They sheared off his eyebrow on the way down. It was a freak accident.”

Of course it was. “Who screamed?” I asked.

“That would be me,” Charlie snarled, digging through his shirt pocket trying to find his lost eyebrow.

“Then what was the thud?” I asked.

Ramon grinned. “Wilbur fell asleep on the table and rolled off when Charlie screamed.”

“I see.”

Charlie passed a twenty-dollar bill to Ramon, which Ramon had to tug on three times before Charlie relinquished it.

“Next time you want stolen clippers,” Charlie snipped, “get them from FedEx. You’re a menace to humanity.”

Then he turned to Wilbur, who was still shaking his head after his tumble from the table. Charlie stroked the cat’s back and cooingly called him Ralph. He told him how much he missed him, then wagged a finger in Ralph’s face and told him not to let Ramon within thirty feet of him with a pair of electric clippers. Ralph seemed to understand.

When Charlie was gone, Ramon asked, “What do you suppose he meant by that?”

I played deaf. I figured it was the wisest course of action.

In quick succession, Pete, Stanley, and Charlie’s partner, Bruce, arrived next for their obligatory haircuts, or should I say for their “best good deed of a lifetime.” By now I was beginning to see what wonderful people the residents of the Belladonna Arms really were. Hell, they were saints. Every damn one of them. Saints with a high threshold for pain and humiliation.

Pete left with sideburns erased all the way up the side of his head to the level of his eyeballs. Disconcerting, to say the least. He tipped twenty bucks.

Stanley sat in a state of near panic all the time Ramon was working on him. God must have been on his side because he got away with one tiny nick on his neck and a graded slope to the back of his head somewhat akin to the Elephant Man’s. He tipped twenty bucks.

Poor Bruce, Charlie’s cowboy-wannabe boyfriend, fared worse than any of them, leaving with one of my blue rocket-ship kiddie Band-Aids folded over each ear lobe, which would hopefully staunch the bleeding, a small cut at the crown of his head that I was pretty sure was oozing brain matter, and four deep slashes on his left arm from when Ramon accidentally stepped on Wilbur’s tail and Wilbur shot straight up into the air and came back down using Bruce’s forearm to slow his descent. It worked too. Wilbur hardly hurt himself at all.

I gave all three of them a heartfelt hug on their way out the door in the hope they wouldn’t hang themselves after they got back home. Or come back and shoot Ramon.

When everyone had come and gone, Ramon turned to me and said, “Well, that went pretty well. Let’s fuck.”

Chapter 13

TWO WEEKS later found Ramon a proud enrollee at the Marinello School of Beauty. The course would begin in a month. He would have to start at the beginning, losing what hours he had earned earlier before his life was interrupted, but we expected that so it wasn’t an issue. He opted to attend evening classes so he could keep his evil day job at the telemarketing center, even though Arthur told him he would help support him if he wanted to concentrate solely on his schooling. Both Arthur and I thought it admirable Ramon would not hear of such an arrangement. He had taken enough charity from Arthur already, he said. From now on he was on his own.

And by on his own, he meant with me. At least that’s what I hoped he meant.

Going to school at night and annoying the shit out of strangers with telemarketing calls during the day would cut into our time together, but both Ramon and I understood it would be worth it in the long run. Ramon had a new infusion of self-respect. He was beginning to believe someone could actually care for him again, and who knows, maybe he would actually learn to cut hair without maiming every head that fell in the path of his scissors. Although I feared that last aspiration was a bit of a long shot.

Only the night before, Pete and I had run into Arthur as we were coming home from work.

“Good Lord,” Arthur said, clucking his tongue at the state of Pete’s haircut, which still hadn’t filled in after his run-in with Ramon’s electric clippers. “There are so many butchered souls traipsing through this building, it’s like the Battle of the Fucking Bulge all over again.”

“Were you at the Battle of the Bulge?” I asked.

Arthur’s false eyelashes dipped and his eyes narrowed to two mean little slits. He was in Norma Desmond drag at the time, plastic mole on his cheek and everything, so the mean little slitty eyes actually worked.

“Your rent just went up thirty bucks,” he growled at me. “How old do you think I am?”

Pete snickered. Then his snicker died out pretty fast when he patted the place where his still missing hair should have been sprouting by now, but wasn’t. Poor guy.

Unlike Pete’s, my hair was beginning to grow out, thank God. As were most of the other butchered souls in the building. Ramon and I no longer received death threats in the mail (kidding) or had Molotov cocktails lobbed through our bedroom window at night (kidding again). The residents of the Belladonna Arms had proven once again they truly were the most forgiving of neighbors. Not only forgiving, but loyal, brave, generous, kind, weird, quirky, not entirely sane, and happy as clams to be of service to any and all who resided under that rusty neon sign perched high above their heads, even if it meant looking like idiots for weeks on end while their hair grew out to do it.

So life went on.

It was a Sunday morning, and Ramon and I were just finishing breakfast. Eggs and chorizo. Yep. Chorizo. And it wasn’t bad. I could actually choke it down if I didn’t think about the ingredients. What the hell is a lymph node anyway?

It was already eighty-six degrees outside, and my electric fan was blowing the heat around the kitchen, cooling absolutely nothing and no one at all. Ramon and I were in our underwear, which I was extremely happy about. I loved Ramon in his underwear. Of course, Ramon out of his underwear was even better.

He had cleaned his plate, and we were sipping our coffee and holding hands across my blue Formica tabletop. The only time the L-word had crossed either one of our lips was on the day of all the haircuts. Ramon had never said it again, and I had never uttered the word within Ramon’s earshot either. Not once. Although I mumbled it under my breath often enough.

I was determined this would be the day all that would change. It was time to declare my feelings for Ramon. And it was also time to stake my claim. After all, we were sharing a bed every single night, I had never been happier, and Ramon didn’t seem too miserable about the situation either. In my opinion it was time to kick-start our romance and make a few commitments. Why else were we together, after all?

“Ramon?”

“Hmm?”

“Remember the first night we slept together?”

“You mean when I wrote you the note the next day?”

“No. I mean the night after that. The morning after the first time we really slept together.”

“Oh, you mean after the first time we fucked.”

“Uh, yes. If that’s how you think about it.”

Ramon cocked his head to the side and somberly studied my face. “That’s not how I think about it at all.”

“How do you think about it, then?”

But he ignored the question. So I forged ahead.

“Remember the next morning when you mentioned something to me before all the haircuts started? You rattled something off as you were toddling off to clean up for the day and feed the cat.”

His face was coming alive now, a sneaky light growing in his eyes. He finally understood what I was getting at, but it was equally obvious he wasn’t going to admit it. “Did I? I said something? Are you sure, Barney? Whatever could it have been, I wonder?”

“You know what it was as well as I do.”

“No, I don’t. What was it? What did I rattle off?”

“You rattled off that you… that you… loved me.”

“Did I really? How odd.”

I blinked. “Odd?”

He clucked his tongue. “Well, no, Barney. What’s odd is the fact that you never said it back. Not once. Not to this very day have you ever said you loved me back.”

“Well, you only said it once.”

“That’s twice as many times as you’ve said it.”

I furrowed my forehead and tried to do the math. “That can’t be right.”

“So do you?” he asked.

“Do I what?”

His fingers tightened around mine until my fingernails turned blue and my knuckles popped.

“Ouch! Okay, okay, okay! I—”

He leaned forward. He was grinning like Wile E. Coyote when he was lighting the fuse on the Acme dynamite just before tossing it into the path of the Roadrunner as he barreled down the Arizona highway toward the pile of free Acme birdseed Wile E. had placed there as bait. “I didn’t catch that, Barney. What were you about to say?”

“I was about to say I was afraid I’d scare you off,” I mumbled.

The humor fell from his face. He eyed me more seriously. His hand was once again gentle and warm as it cradled mine. He stroked my knuckles where he’d popped them earlier. When he spoke, I had the impression he was talking to himself rather than me.

“I guess maybe you would have scared me off. I was kind of a mess back then.”

“Would it scare you off now?” I asked.

He considered the question as he stared silently into my eyes. At last turning from me, he gazed at the city skyline shimmering mirage-like in the heat outside the kitchen window. It took a moment before his eyes swung back to me.

“No, baby. I don’t think it would scare me off at all.”

“Then I love you,” I said, letting the words tumble out at last. “I’ve loved you since the night you cried in my arms.”

His face softened. His eyes sparkled with mist. “That’s when I first started loving you too.”

I stroked the back of his hand with my thumb. “Are you happy now?”

“Happy with you?”

“No, Ramon. Happy with yourself. Do you like yourself again?”

He studied my hand in his. He lifted it and pressed it to his lips, holding it there against him as he spoke. “I still hurt sometimes. I still remember too much. Maybe that part will never go away. But you told me once it wasn’t my fault, what happened. Do you remember that? No one had ever told me that before, Barney.”

I dragged my chair closer to the table, and with my other hand, I reached across to stroke the side of his face.

He closed his eyes and leaned into my hand. There was a gentle smile on his lips and a hint of sadness in his eyes at the very same time.

“Now when the memories come crashing back in, I think of you telling me that. And it’s not just the words you used, Barney, it’s the way you said them. Like you really cared. I think of all that. I think of… you.”

He twisted his head and kissed my palm.

“Barney?” he mumbled into my hand.

“Yeah?”

“You asked me once, if—if things had been different, if I would have looked at you in the same way I must have looked at ChiChi back when me and Cheech were together. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” I said.

“Well, the answer is no. You and ChiChi are as different as night and day. I loved ChiChi, but I didn’t trust him. He was a lot like I was before I met you, I think. Before you and Arthur came and rescued me from myself. ChiChi didn’t like himself either. He didn’t like who he’d become. He even maybe hated himself a little bit. I’m not sure why. I think it was something inborn in him. And the drugs didn’t help either.” He shook his head. “Those fucking drugs. It’s hard to explain, but when I looked at Cheech, I saw a man I was nuts about, but I never saw a man I could really trust or believe in. With you, I see it all. Love, passion, trust, belief. Kindness. And I know, I’ve always known, Barney, that you’ve loved me from the beginning. I’ve seen it on your face every minute of every day we’ve been together.”

“I’m glad you know,” I said softly.

“Tell me one more time. Tell me you love me.”

“I love you. I do. It starts the moment I wake up in the morning and it carries me through to that very last second before sleep takes me away at night. Every day. Every single day, Ramon.”

His eyes were warm cognac, his mouth twisted into a sweet, amazed smile. “And I love you back. You asked me how I thought of that first night we had sex together. Well, I’ll tell you how I think of it, Barney. I think of that night as the beginning. The beginning of me, the beginning of us, the beginning of everything. I was already nuts about you when we came together that night. But by the time the night was over, I was lost completely. Lost in you. I’ll never stop loving you, Barn. Never. You’re mine, I’m yours. Period. I mean, if you really want me.”

“You know I do.”

A chill went through me as his breath flowed over my hand. He kissed my palm one more time, pressing my open hand to his face as he did, covering it completely.

His lips moved against my skin. “I want to lock the closet door, Barney.”

He looked through my fingers and saw my eyes widen in fear. He quickly pressed his lips to my palm again to soothe me.

“I want to lock the closet door and stay on this side of it with you from now on. I want us to be proper lovers. I want us to commit to each other. I want to be a family. You, me, and the fucking cat.”

I felt my chin tremble as a tear leaked onto my lashes. I could see it shimmering there just at the edge of my vision. Ramon reached over and deftly brushed it away before it could fall.

“I want that too,” I whispered. “I want that more than anything. But….”

“But what, Barney? What is it?”

“Do I have to eat chorizo every morning?”

He laughed. “Not if you don’t want to. I’ll choke down your gringo shit if you’d rather.”

“Oh, good.”

He rose from his chair and leaned all the way across the table. I rose to meet him, and we kissed, eyes closed, hearts pounding. A new pair of tears squeezed from my eyes, and for some reason I didn’t even mind.

Wilbur leaped to the table and padded across it, adroitly weaving in and around the dirty breakfast dishes. As soon as he was directly beneath us, he stretched his head up and licked my chin. Then he licked Ramon’s chin.

“Family,” Ramon murmured. His eyes suddenly lit up, and he flashed his beautiful white teeth, first at Wilbur, then at me. “Let’s tell Arthur. Maybe he can rent the other apartment right away and earn back some of the money he lost by giving it to me for nothing.”

There it was. Ramon’s kindness showing through again. My heart swelled with pride. I nodded. “All right,” I said. And at that precise moment, there came a knock on the door.

“Yoo-hoo!” Our caller bellowed from the hall. The singsong voice was basso profundo, battling against a nelly-as-hell lisp. The Incredible Hulk meets Marlene Dietrich on steroids.

“Well, what do you know,” Ramon whispered around a grin. “There she is now.”

I raced to the door and flung it open. “Arthur!” I cried.

Arthur was robed in a gazillion yards of white chiffon. Every time he moved, the gossamer fabric billowed out at one end or the other as if he had an electric fan tucked between his legs. He wore a platinum wig piled high on his head in an intricate updo, and the wig was studded with teeny silver stars. His hands were covered with silver rings, and he had silver bracelets jangling on his wrists. Silvery eye shadow flashed white above silver-sequined fake eyelashes that looked to be about six inches long. A great white jewel like the Arkenstone hung down from his hairline on a silver chain to lie gleaming smack in the middle of his forehead. He looked amazingly similar to Jadis, the White Witch of Narnia, only three times as wide and not quite as grumpy about it. Jadis was such a bitch.

I flung myself in Arthur’s snowy, jangly arms, and he held me aloft as if I weighed nothing, all the while looking properly astounded by his reception.

“Arthur!” Ramon sang out directly behind me, and he too leaped into Arthur’s arms. Arthur held us both in the air like a couple of bed pillows. He didn’t even grunt.

He gave us a friendly shake and asked, “What have my boys been up to? And why, I wonder, do you both look so pleased with yourselves? And why, oh why, for heaven’s sake, are you in nothing but your underwear, not that I mind one itty bitty bit.” He cast an appraising eye on me, then on Ramon, then on our crotches, then back to our faces. His lips, painted with the first white lipstick I had ever seen in my life, spread wide in a radiant smile. We beamed back.

“We love each other,” Ramon announced. “It’s official!”

“We really, really do!” I laughed. “And it really, really is!”

Ramon and I hung there in Arthur’s arms, nodding like fools. Arthur gazed at us, puffing up in pride to see us so happy. His round face mirrored our own delight.

“So it’s truly official, then?” he asked. “You’ve finally made the grand announcement to each other? Good grief, boys, everybody in the building knew you were mad about each other weeks ago.”

I began to squirm around in Arthur’s arms. He was cutting off the blood to my head, holding me so tight. Ramon was starting to squirm too. Arthur took pity on us and lowered us gently to our feet, where we both immediately sucked in a gulp of air.

I took Ramon’s hand. “We want to move in together, Arthur. By my best estimation, it will take us about five minutes. Ramon doesn’t have much stuff. Oh, and we want to keep the cat.”

“You mean Gizmo/Studly/Ralph/Wilbur? Why the hell would you want to keep him?”

“Because we love him.”

“Oh.” He gave a fateful shrug as if to say if love was involved, then it was obviously out of his hands. “I guess you’ve got yourselves a cat.”

“Yay!”

“Whoopee!”

Arthur patted his wig, ignoring the yays and whoopees. “Mind if I come in? We can talk about it over chorizo. That is chorizo I smell, isn’t it? I love chorizo. Bet you didn’t know that. I don’t suppose you have any left? I only had a box of bagels for breakfast and that was hours ago. I’m famished.”

“Come on in,” I said. “We’ll fry some up for you if you’ll give us your blessing.”

Arthur looked doubtful his blessing would change the course of events no matter which way it went. Then he stopped scowling, offered us a grin instead, straightened his tits, and burst out into a booming, boisterous laugh. “It’s a deal!” He did the spectacles-testicles-wallet-and-watch routine and tapped us each on the forehead like Glinda the Good Witch of the West bestowing her good will on a couple of Munchkins. Then he laughed.

“Should I put on pants?” Ramon asked.

“Don’t you dare!” Arthur barked.

Again he scooped us into his arms, catching us off guard, and suddenly there we were, dangling in midair again like a couple of great big fruits. Which, ha-ha, I guess we were.

Again, Arthur lowered us to our feet, and we stepped aside to usher him in.

He flowed and billowed his way straight through the living room and into my bedroom like a big cumulous cloud scudding across the heavens. Once there, he stood in the middle of the room, staring at the secret closet door he had told me about when Ramon first returned to the Belladonna Arms—the door that had not been closed since the day Ramon arrived.

Arthur was still smiling broadly. “I knew that door would do the trick,” he said.

He turned to contemplate our faces as we stood there in each other’s arms, watching him watching us.

“You boys are going to be very happy together. I know it.” He narrowed his vision down to take in me alone. “Still think there’s nothing to the Belladonna Arms love pollen, Barney? Still think it’s just a whimsical notion dreamed up by a bunch of overly romantic nitwits?”

“No,” I said. “It’s real. I’d swear to it in front of the Supreme Court if you asked.” I pulled Ramon closer and dropped my head on his shoulder. “I’ve got the proof right here.”

Ramon planted a kiss on the top of my head, and then we stepped forward, each of us taking one of Arthur’s silver-bangled arms, and escorted him formally to the kitchen.

“You look beautiful, by the way,” I whispered into Arthur’s ear as Ramon pulled a chair out and we got our landlord situated at the kitchen table. I hurriedly cleared our breakfast dishes away like a proper busboy, while Ramon went to work frying up some more chorizo and scrambling half a dozen eggs.

“Toast too, please,” Arthur said sweetly. “With jam.”

Ramon and I hummed and crooned as we worked, brushing up against each other every chance we got while Arthur petted Wilbur, who had come to see what the big fucking white thing in the kitchen was.

“This cat’s too fat,” Arthur said, petting him anyway.

Ramon and I ignored the comment about Wilbur’s weight. We’d heard it before, after all.

“So, Arthur,” Ramon ventured while stirring the chorizo in the skillet. “When is Tom going to let me cut his hair?” He eyed the humongous wig on Arthur’s head. “You, I’ve given up on,” he added. “There’s no hair under that wig to cut.”

Arthur adjusted an earring. “I’m sorry, honey. If I let you mangle Tom’s hair, he’d probably pull a recipe from that fried green tomatoes cookbook and serve both our asses up as barbecue down at the diner. Tom likes his hair. I’m pretty sure he’d like to keep it.”

Ramon’s eyes opened wide. He looked a little hurt. “Oh.”

“On the bright side,” Arthur chirped gaily, “with my fat ass on a spit, his customers could probably eat for a month.”

NO ONE pounds down food with more gusto than Arthur. He had his plate cleaner than even Wilbur could have managed before the minute hand had moved from four to five on the clock above the stove.

Ramon and I sat opposite Arthur, holding hands, admiring his enthusiasm.

“What’s with the gown and all the sparkly stuff?” Ramon asked.

Arthur gazed down at himself, spread his arms wide to show the shimmer and movement of the chiffon, rattling his bracelets to give us the full effect of both sound and sight.

“This is my fairy godmother drag. Don’t you love it?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, “but fairy godmother to who?”

Arthur waved a fat sparkly finger in my face. “To whom, dear boy. To whom. There might be young, impressionable ears around here one of these days. No sense fucking up their grammar right off the bat, now, is there?”

“I think I’d worry more about their fucking vocabulary than their fucking grammar,” Ramon snarked, prompting Arthur to stick his tongue out at him.

“Young, impressionable ears where?” I asked.

Arthur whispered across the table as if Wilbur might be hiding under the sink taking notes. “They could be closer than you think. But hush up, my darlings. Some people might believe they are keeping secrets from Madam Arthur, but I’ve got news for them. There are no secrets under my roof. I see all, know all, control all.”

“Christ, Arthur,” I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but you’re giving me the willies with all this see-all, know-all, control-all crap.”

Arthur giggled. “That’s what Tom said when I told him. You gay boys all think alike apparently.”

Ramon’s eyes rolled over Arthur from his white satin pumps to the tippy-top silver star embedded in his gigantic swirling platinum wig. “Like you’re straight.”

Arthur said, “Harrumph,” and tugged a long silver chain from the depths of his bosom, pulling it up hand over hand like a fisherman hauling in a shrimp net. At the end of the long chain dangled a crystal and silver timepiece. He held it up to his ear to assure himself it was ticking, then glanced at the face before dropping it back into the bottomless abyss of his cleavage, where it immediately sank like an anchor. I wondered if it would ever be seen again.

Arthur held his great big silvery head cocked in a listening position for about five seconds before announcing, “I guess they aren’t back yet. Lots of paperwork, I suppose.”

“Who?” I asked. “Paperwork for what?”

“Oh, never mind!” Arthur groused, obviously impatient, flicking a crumb from his bodice to wile away a nanosecond or two. “This waiting is killing me.”

“Waiting for what?” Ramon asked, but he was only being polite. In truth he wasn’t really paying attention to our guest at all. About ten seconds back, he had started playing kneesies with me under the table. It was a fact Arthur probably didn’t miss at all.

He gathered his billowing skirts around him, patted his belly, and thanked us very sweetly for breakfast. He patted each of our cheeks with his ring-encrusted, meatloaf-sized hands, and said, “Ah, youth! You boys can’t keep your hands off each other even when you have company. I’m glad you’re going to be a couple. You are perfect together. Absolutely perfect.”

I was touched. “Thank you, Arthur.”

Ramon stepped forward on his own and wrapped his arms around Arthur’s massive waistline. He laid his head on Arthur’s breast and just stood there holding him for a minute before finally speaking. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me, Arthur. I’d still be out there in the bushes if it wasn’t for you. I wouldn’t have met Barney. I would never have known love again. I wouldn’t be anything at all. I’ll never forget you for that. You saved my life, Arthur. You really did.” He reached behind him and took my hand as well. “We both thank you. Every happy day we share together will be because of you. I don’t just love Barney, you know. I love you too. You and Tom and Sylvia and everybody else in this batshit crazy apartment building.”

Arthur sniffed while I dabbed at another errant tear threatening to spill over my lash. It had been a morning for tears all around. Happy ones. Very, very happy ones.

I stepped forward to add my arms to the hug, one around Arthur, one around Ramon.

Suddenly Arthur pushed us to arm’s length and tilted his head so far back I was afraid his wig would tumble off. “My mascara!” he wailed amid a wracking sob. “Look what you’ve done!”

Five seconds later Arthur was flying down the stairs in a cloud of white chiffon, weeping like a toddler and howling like an ambulance. Wilbur was licking what little grease was left on Arthur’s plate with his tail sticking straight up into the air, purring like a sewing machine while he did it. At the same time, Ramon was dragging me toward the bedroom with a wicked, delicious glint in his eye and a very suspicious bulge in the front of his underwear.

Oddly, I seemed to have the same bulge in the front of mine.

Chapter 14

SO MUCH happened at the Belladonna Arms in the ensuing days that the commitment Ramon and I made to each other, at least as far as the neighbors went, passed almost unnoticed.

Pete and Sylvia packed up their bags and left on what Ramon and I assumed was a mini vacation, without mentioning their destination to anyone. Woefully short haircuts around the building grew out a wee bit more, and as those heads grew less butchered, the friendliness of the heads’ owners became less stilted and a bit more sincere when we passed them on the stairs. Ramon’s forgiveness was finally complete.

The most astonishing development of all came from Wilbur. Not surprising, really, since he always was a pain in the ass.

Here’s what happened.

Ramon and I had just donned running shoes, shorts, and tees, and Ramon had tied his luscious hair back in preparation for a joint five-mile jog through the city streets because, well, after all, we couldn’t have sex all the time, when Wilbur started yammering like a car alarm. And he did it right at our feet.

It was the most startling and horrifying sound either one of us had ever heard. As soon as we came back down to earth after jumping practically out of our freshly laced tennies, we watched as Wilbur continued to yammer and squeal and keen at our feet as if he were rattling off the latest stock quotes in some annoying alien language that rather resembled thirty or forty sets of fingernails scraping across a blackboard, but was actually excruciatingly worse.

We gazed down at Wilbur in shock, and the moment he realized our eyes were on him, he stalked off to the closet, where the door behind the linen shelves was now firmly locked. Once there, he climbed into his laundry basket and plopped onto his side like he’d been shot with a tranquilizer dart.

When we didn’t follow, he climbed out of the laundry basket, stalked straight-legged back to us, looking a little bug-eyed while he did it as if maybe he had a bellyache, and started yowling again. The minute our eyes were on him this time, he waddled back to the closet and climbed into the laundry basket once more. This time, while still in the basket, he emitted an ear-splitting howl that made the little hairs on the back of my neck jump up and start dancing around.

“He wants us to join him,” Ramon said.

“You think?” I asked.

We hurried to the closet and gazed down at our strange cat, who had made a comfy looking bed among a pile of my dirty underwear. As soon as we were both squeezed into the closet with him, Wilbur began to purr.

“Interesting,” Ramon murmured. “Wonder what he’s trying to tell us?”

I bent, gave Wilbur a pat on the head, and said, “Have a pleasant nap, you nutso cat, you.” And with that formality out of the way, I stood, took Ramon’s hand, and dragged him out of the closet toward the front door. Time to jog.

Wilbur wasn’t having it. He flew out of the basket with a caterwauling cry that made my fillings hurt and chased us across the apartment until he was once again standing at our feet, blocking the door, and wailing in one long, deafening lament that made even Ramon screw up his face and stuff his fingers in his ears.

“Back to the closet?” Ramon asked me.

I nodded. “Back to the closet.”

We trailed along behind the stupid cat as he lumbered back to the stupid closet and crawled back onto his stupid pile of stupid laundry. He stretched out on his back with his stupid fat belly exposed for all to see and expelled what was clearly a heartfelt sigh of relief.

I chewed my lip, staring at that massive belly and wondering if maybe we shouldn’t put Wilbur on a diet pronto.

“What the hell is he doing?” Ramon asked, scratching his head.

“And why does he insist we be with him while he does it?” I asked in return.

“And how did he ever get so fat?” Ramon asked.

“And why are his tits so big?” I wondered aloud.

Then a niggling thought began to take root in my head. “You don’t suppose—” I began.

But Ramon cut me off with a squeal of terror. “Madre de dios. What the fuck is that!”

He pointed a trembling finger at Wilbur’s butt, and I leaned in closer to see what it was he was pointing at. When I saw what it was, I almost passed out.

“Is that… is that… a foot?”

It was. It was a teeny tiny foot, and it was poking out of Wilbur’s ass. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a moment later there were two teeny tiny feet poking out of Wilbur’s ass.

“How did he get those feet up his ass?” Ramon asked. “And why are they only coming out now? And, ay caramba, why does Wilbur look so pleased with himself?”

He did. Wilbur was lying there flat on his back with those two little paws sticking out of his butt, looking blissfully radiant about the whole thing. Personally, I would have been having a grand mal seizure and a couple of strokes.

The thought that had been niggling around in my head earlier suddenly blossomed into a full-fledged epiphany. It had certainly been a while since I had one of those.

Before I could voice this epiphany of mine, Ramon said, “This cat’s nuts.”

I scratched my chin and took another gander at Wilbur’s butt. The two little paws now had two little legs attached to them, and it looked like something even bigger was about to join them. Was that a teeny tiny nose I saw poking through to the light?

“Uh, Ramon…?”

“Yes?”

“Speaking of cat nuts. All those times Wilbur licked himself down there, did you ever actually see any?”

“See any what?”

“Cat nuts.”

“Hmm,” Ramon hummed, scratching his chin exactly as I had. Obviously he was having an epiphany too, which was odd. How often do you see two epiphanies in the same room together at the same time?

We both bent over and watched in horror as a slimy round head with cute little ears, folded flat, slipped out of that alarmingly expanding—crevice—just below Wilbur’s tail. The rest of the creature looked like it was about to ooze out any second.

“I don’t think Wilbur’s Wilbur,” Ramon breathed in wonder. “I think Wilbur is—”

“Wilhelmina,” I finished up for him.

In unison we cried, “Wilbur’s a girl!”

“And now she’s a mother!” I gasped. “Holy shit!”

After that, Wil—helmina seemed to understand completely what was expected of her.

Ramon and I dropped to our knees at the side of the laundry basket, and while Ramon gently rubbed the cat’s tummy and I gently patted the cat’s head, offering our moral support to the endeavor, Wilhelmina gave a great big grunt, and without further ado a beautiful, tiny kitten tumbled out to say hello to the world. We were just starting to ooh and aah over how cute the creature was when, not three seconds later, along came a big slimy slab of some horrifically viscous substance right behind. It was speckled with blood and feces, and Ramon and I almost heaved up our chorizo on the spot.

“What the fuck is that?” Ramon gagged.

I gulped, swallowing about a quart of saliva. “Afterbirth, I think.”

“Well, yuk!”

We stumbled out of the closet, holding our stomachs, trying not to barf. And the moment we left, Wilbur—sorry, Wilhelmina—set off another clarion scream to get our attention and drag us back.

So once again, we parked ourselves at the edge of the laundry basket and watched in awe, and no little amount of nausea, as our new mother cat went to work cleaning up the mess she’d made.

First she licked the kitten clean, and then she daintily gobbled up the afterbirth like Amy Vanderbilt going to town on a plate of aspic.

Even while we were trying not to puke our guts out, Ramon and I were stunned and humbled by our cat’s display of common sense and motherly devotion. After all, we had pretty much always thought Wilbur was something of a greedy twit who didn’t know how to do anything but eat.

Just as we were getting used to the idea of Wilhelmina gobbling up that horrible wad of afterbirth, a second pair of teeny feet suddenly poked through into the light. Geez, Wilhelmina was spitting out kittens like that baseball-spitting machine over at Petco Park.

We sat there, Ramon and I, holding hands, swelling with pride, and watched from beginning to end as Wilhelmina thoroughly tidied up after each new arrival. We were getting so used to it we hardly even gagged anymore.

Soon the kittens were coming like clockwork at ten minute intervals. By the time she was finished, there were five little kittens—two white, two black, and one half-and-half, which Ramon had already named Pancho, Maria, Yolanda, Jesus, and Chuck (Chuck was the half-and-half). Their little eyes were squeezed shut, and their little bodies were trembling weakly but persistently as they nuzzled up to mama’s massive tits and begun to scarf down a complimentary round of drinks from the bar.

By this time there was not one drop of blood or afterbirth on my dirty undies lying at the bottom of the basket. Still I swore I would never wear any of them again no matter how many times she licked them clean.

Wilhelmina lay there, eyes closed—in motherly bliss, I thought—and purred like she had never purred before.

I looked over at Ramon and saw a steady stream of tears flowing down his cheeks.

I tapped him on the leg to get his attention, and as soon as I had it, I made a shushing motion with my finger and tipped my head toward the closet door, indicating we should quietly leave.

This time Wilbur/Wilhelmina let us go. And obviously Pancho, Maria, Yolanda, Jesus, and Chuck didn’t give a shit if we left either.

We tiptoed into the living room to give the new mother some privacy, and the moment we did, Ramon turned to me with a silly grin on his face.

“Gatitos,” he said, through a monsoon of happy tears. “That makes us daddies!”

PETE AND Sylvia remained gone for almost two weeks. Daily, Arthur plodded up the stairs, always in his billowing white fairy godmother drag, and tapped on their door to see if they were home yet, but of course they weren’t. Ramon and I would have known if they were home. After all, the walls at the Belladonna Arms weren’t exactly soundproof.

Ramon was testing that theory at the moment, wailing and thrashing and giggling like a madman because I had my nose buried in his armpit and was chewing on a clump of his armpit hair.

“Delicious,” I mumbled, spitting out a stray hair that I had inadvertently gnawed off completely, then diving in for more.

“Holy crap! Stop! Stop! You’re like a grazing vaca!”

I stopped chewing long enough to ask, “What the hell’s a vaca?” Then, not waiting for an answer, I dove in for another mouthful.

Ramon squealed, “It’s a cow, stupid! A cow!” Then he dissolved into another chorus of hoots and howls and screams of laughter.

Perhaps I should explain. Ramon is extremely ticklish. (It is a trait I attempt to exploit at every opportunity.)

We heard a door close on the other side of the bedroom wall at the head of the bed. Ramon and I froze. I quietly spit out another hair.

“It’s Pete and Sylvia,” Ramon whispered. “They’re back.” He pulled my head out of his armpit and dragged me upward so we could cuddle side by side. We were both naked and sexually sated, for the moment at least. We had been enjoying a postorgasmic state of mellow contemplation of each other’s navels up until the moment I took it into my head to start chewing on Ramon’s armpit. So now I tried to recapture the mood.

“I love you,” I cooed in my most alluring voice.

“Yeah, yeah. I love you too. Where do you think they’ve been?”

I laughed. “You’re so romantic.”

Ramon practically had his ear to the wall, hoping to hear a snippet or two of conversation next door. “Yeah, yeah. I know. Romantic. So where do you think they’ve been?”

We heard the patter of little feet at the side of the bed, and looking down we saw Wilhelmina, mother of the year, with Chuck dangling from her mouth. She had been moving the kittens around for almost a week. First they were in the laundry basket, then they were under the kitchen sink, then they were in the bathtub on a nest of towels (Ramon and I had to take sponge baths at the bathroom sink for two days), and now she was tucking her offspring, one by one, into the bottom drawer of my dresser. Never knowing where mama was taking them next, we began keeping the lights on in the apartment from dusk to dawn for fear of stepping on one of the little guys.

“Let’s go next door and welcome them back,” Ramon said.

I rediscovered Ramon’s belly button and quietly stuck my tongue in it. “Let’s let them unpack first.”

“Let’s go next door and welcome them back,” he said again.

I sighed. “Fine. Let’s go next door and welcome them back.”

A moment later we heard a rapping at Pete and Sylvia’s door. Following that we heard a jumble of voices, greeting, chattering, schmoozing. Then we heard a very loud, very lispy, very basso profundo scream. The scream was so loud it almost knocked the pictures off the wall.

Only Arthur could scream like that.

Ramon and I hurled ourselves out of bed, threw on pants and shirts, and flung ourselves out the front door. It was after we were in the hall that I wondered if I had any embarrassing blotches of dried semen on my face or stuck in my hair, but frankly, I didn’t worry about it much. That scream had startled the bejesus out of me.

It was our turn to rap at Pete and Sylvia’s door. I heard someone utter “Oy” on the other side of the peephole before the doorknob rattled and the door was yanked open.

It was Pete. When he saw us standing in the hall, his face split wide in a grin and he pulled us into his arms. “The lovers next door,” he cooed. The guy was beaming. Positively beaming.

“That’s us.” I beamed back. “What the hell is going on?”

“Arthur’s here,” Pete said, rolling his eyes.

“So we gathered,” Ramon answered.

Then we heard another sound coming from somewhere in the depths of Pete and Sylvia’s apartment. A gentler sound. A chirrupy, gurgling, dainty sound.

“Is that Sylvia?” Ramon asked.

“Uh, no,” Pete grinned.

Then Arthur screamed again—a high-pitched wail of happiness that rattled the windows and caused Wilhelmina to complain next door. I could hear her griping and mewling through Pete’s living room wall, telling us to hold it down, dammit, the kittens were trying to sleep!

“My God, he’s so cute!” Arthur bellowed, making Pete cringe.

“Shhh,” I heard Sylvia desperately whisper. “Good Lord, Arthur, you’ll stunt his growth. Try to lower your voice.”

Since Ramon and I were on tiptoe trying to look over Pete’s shoulder and see what was taking place in the room behind him, he finally took pity on us and stepped aside.

We took one step into the room, and suddenly it was like our feet were nailed to the floor. The tableau before us was so perfect, I thought maybe I had stumbled into a Disney film. All we needed was a flock of fat forest creatures flitting among the furniture.

Wow. That was a lot of f’s.

Arthur, in full fairy godmother drag, white and billowy and sparkly and soft, was perched on the edge of Pete’s sofa. Sylvia, wearing a pretty dress with sunflowers on it, her hair framing her face in soft brunette curls, sat beside him. There was a bassinet on the floor in front of her, but it was clearly empty, for the baby was lying in Arthur’s arms.

The baby.

With a churchlike hush, as if awed by the words he was about to speak, Pete whispered over our shoulders, “Come inside and meet our son.”

Ramon and I sucked in a great gasp of air.

“Your son?”

Sylvia looked over at us and smiled. There were tears sparkling her eyes. Arthur was sitting beside her, his great head looming over the baby in his arms. He was making gentle baby sounds while the infant’s teeny hand reached up and tried to snag the Arkenstone hanging over Arthur’s forehead.

Ramon and I tiptoed closer while Pete hovered proudly behind us. We dropped to our knees in front of Arthur and peered over the edge of the little Alice-blue blanket the kid was wrapped in. Again Ramon and I sucked in little gasps of air.

The baby was beautiful. Blond hair. Pink cheeks. Blue eyes. Slobber on his chin.

“You adopted?” I asked Sylvia. “Is that where you’ve been?”

Sylvia nodded. She held a small baby bottle in her hand. “We arranged it months ago with the adoption agency. Two weeks ago we flew to Chicago to be with the mother. We stayed with her every step of the way. Three days ago the baby was born. And now he’s home.”

Arthur was still googling and guggling over the bundle of blankets in his lap, kissing the little outstretched hand that was reaching for his jewels. He was humming a lullaby under his breath that sounded a bit like a foghorn warning ships away from a reef. Arthur wasn’t built for something as gentle as humming.

When Arthur’s tears began falling again, Sylvia plucked the baby carefully from his arms. “Maybe I’d better hold him for a while. At least until he learns to swim.” But she said it with a tender look on her face, and once she had the baby in her arms, she leaned over and gave Arthur a kiss on the cheek.

Pete perched himself on the back of the sofa. He leaned over Sylvia and reached a hand across her shoulder to stroke the baby, who immediately latched onto Pete’s finger with his tiny fist.

“He knows his daddy,” Sylvia breathed, resting her head against Pete’s arm, prompting Pete to bend over a little more and kiss his wife on the top of her head.

“Yes, Mother,” he said in a breathless hush. The moment the words were out, Sylvia’s eyes misted up again.

The five of us sat in humbled silence, staring at the beautiful bundle resting on Sylvia’s lap. The baby was feeding now, sucking at the bottle of milk, making little glubbing noises and squirming in her arms.

“I think he needs to burp,” Pete said, a worried furrow digging a trench between his eyes.

“Oh, hush,” Sylvia said.

“What’s his name?” Ramon asked in a whisper, still awed by the sight of the new little life in Sylvia’s arms.

Sylvia immediately slid across the couch cushion, making a little more space between her and Arthur. It seemed an odd thing to do until she answered Ramon’s question. Then I understood it completely.

“We call him Artie,” she said, casting a worried look in Arthur’s direction and wincing at the same time. “His real name—”

Pete rested a hand on Arthur’s shoulder. Probably to hold him down.

“—his real name is Arthur.”

Arthur’s mouth went slack. His eyes grew as big as avocados. One could almost hear the scream of amazement gathering force somewhere under that great bosom of white chiffon and chickpeas, picking up steam, accumulating ergs of energy in preparation for one gigantic, explosive blast of sound.

Four pairs of hands reached out as one to hover protectively over the baby. Four worried heads eyed Arthur warily, wondering what the hell he was going to do.

What he finally chose to do was simply flip his mouth shut, swallow hard, gaze lovingly at Sylvia, then at Pete, then lay his huge hands atop his chest and sigh. That was it. Just a dainty little sigh. Maybe Arthur couldn’t hum, but for a big man, he could do dainty really well.

I watched, still waiting for a howl or a scream or a cry or a wail to erupt. But they didn’t come.

What came was a soft exhalation and a gentle, breathless sigh, “Thank you both,” he said, first to Sylvia, then to Pete, his eyes swimming with tears.

With that crisis averted, all attention returned to the child in Sylvia’s arms. A hush settled over the room. The only sounds to be heard were the faint murmurings of a baby feeding, a mother singing softly under her breath, a father happily sighing, and Arthur sniffling noisily into a lace hanky the size of a tablecloth.

It was Ramon who sought to infuse a sense of practicality into the situation.

“Artie’s going to need a pet,” he said quietly, a wily light sparking his cognac-colored eyes. “Little boys love pets.”

“Can’t live without them,” I said, taking Ramon’s hand and trailing along on my lover’s train of thought. We did have a closet full of kittens to find homes for, after all. Might as well get cracking on it at the earliest opportunity, which just happened to be now.

“Absolutely,” Ramon beamed. “Can’t live without them at all.”

“It’s tradition.”

“No way around it really. Kids. Pets. It’s almost a given.”

“So it’s settled, then,” I flatly announced as if making an executive order and leaving no room for anyone to try to wiggle out of it. “The little scamp needs a kitten.”

All eyes focused on me. Sylvia blinked. Pete scratched his head. Arthur was still sucking up snot and trying not to weep, so he wasn’t paying much attention.

“And oddly enough,” Ramon tittered, “me and Barney might just know where you can get one.”

Welcome to the Belladonna Arms, a rundown little apartment building perched atop a hill in downtown San Diego, home to the city’s lost and lovelorn. Shy archaeology student Stanley Sternbaum has just moved in and fills his time quietly observing his eccentric neighbors, avoiding his hellion mother, and trying his best to go unnoticed… which proves to be a problem when it comes to fellow tenant Roger Jane. Smitten, the hunky nurse with beautiful green eyes does everything in his power to woo Stanley, but Stanley has always lived a quiet life, too withdrawn from the world to take a chance on love. Especially with someone as beautiful as Roger Jane.

While Roger tries to batter down Stanley’s defenses, Stanley turns to his new neighbors to learn about love: Ramon, who’s not afraid to give his heart to the wrong man; Sylvia, the trans who just wants to be a woman, and the secret admirer who loves her just the way she is; Arthur, the aging drag queen who loves them all, expecting nothing in return—and Roger, who has been hurt once before but is still willing to risk his heart on Stanley, if Stanley will only look past his own insecurities and let him in.

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Dumped by his lover, Harlie Rose ducks for cover in the Belladonna Arms, a seedy apartment building perched high on a hill in downtown San Diego. What he doesn’t know is that the Belladonna Arms has a reputation for romance—and Harlie is about to become its next victim.

Finding a job at a deli up the street, Harlie meets Milan, a gorgeous but cranky baker. Unaware that Milan is suffering the effects of a broken heart just as Harlie is, the two men circle around each other, manning the barricades, both unwilling to open themselves up to love yet again.

But even the most stubborn heart can be conquered.

With his new friends to back him up—Sylvia, on the verge of her final surgery to become a woman, Arthur, the aging drag queen who is about to discover a romance of his own, and Stanley and Roger, the handsome young couple in 5C who lead by example, Harlie soon learns that at the Belladonna Arms, love is always just around the corner waiting to pounce. Whether you want it to or not.

But tragedy also drops in now and then.

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About the Author

JOHN INMAN has been writing fiction since he was old enough to hold a pencil. He and his partner live in beautiful San Diego, California. Together, they share a passion for theater, books, hiking and biking along the trails and canyons of San Diego or, if the mood strikes, simply kicking back with a beer and a movie. John’s advice for anyone who wishes to be a writer? “Set time aside to write every day and do it. Don’t be afraid to share what you’ve written. Feedback is important. When a rejection slip comes in, just tear it up and try again. Keep mailing stuff out. Keep writing and rewriting and then rewrite one more time. Every minute of the struggle is worth it in the end, so don’t give up. Ever. Remember that publishers are a lot like lovers. Sometimes you have to look a long time to find the one that’s right for you.”

E-mail: john492@att.net

Facebook: www.facebook.com/john.inman.79

Website: www.johninmanauthor.com/

Sometimes an entire lifetime can be spent in the arms and heart of one person. It is not so with imaginations, for they go anywhere they wish.

David Ayres and Arthur Smith are about to find that out. When they meet as young men within the garden walls of the Mission of San Juan Capistrano, one man from one continent, one from another, an uncontrollable attraction brings them together. But it is something stronger than attraction that holds them there. It is love. Pure and simple.

After forty years, when the fabric of their existence together finally begins to fray because of David’s imaginary infidelities, it is with humor and commitment that they strive to remain in each other’s heart.

And turning fantasy into reality, they find, is the best way to do it.

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Sean Andros is tired—tired of hustling, tired of trying to make the rent, tired of running from his past.

But the past can chase you down in a heartbeat. Suddenly Sean’s living a nightmare again and casualties are stacking up around him. The only person he can trust is Harry, a man twice his age and the closest thing to a friend Sean has ever known. Harry Connors has loved Sean since their first night together, and now, with danger hard at their heels, Harry will do anything to protect the tough, strangely vulnerable young man who begs him for help.

Harry had better be serious about offering protection, though, because the demons threatening Sean’s life are no joke. Only a hard winter rain will wash away the evil that drove Sean Andros to the streets, and Sean and Harry are going to have to be strong if they plan on sticking around for the sun.

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At twenty-six, Gordon Stafford figures his days are numbered. At least he hopes they are. Wearied by guilt and regret stemming from a horrific automobile accident two years earlier in which a man was killed, Gordon wakes up every morning with thoughts of suicide. While the law puts Gordon to work atoning for his sins, personal redemption is far harder to come by.

Then Squirt—a simple homeless man with his own crosses to bear—saves Gordon from a terrible fate. Overnight, Gordon finds not only a new light to follow, and maybe even a purpose to his life, but also the possibility of love waiting at the end of the tunnel.

Gordon never imagined he’d discover a way to forgive himself, and in doing so, open his heart enough to gain acceptance and love—from the very person he hurt the most.

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Thanks to fate and his own lack of good sense, eighteen-year-old Danny Shay is headed into what looks to be the worst summer of his life. It starts with a minor meltdown at work that leaves Danny under house arrest with a cast on one leg and an ankle monitor on the other, courtesy of the San Diego Police Department. On top of that, he’s battling a chronic case of virginity, with no relief in sight.

Oh, and there’s one more little glitch. A serial killer is stalking the city, murdering young men. And when strange sounds are heard in the house behind Danny’s, the neighborhood kids think they’ve found the killer. But not until Danny learns he’s next on the madman’s list do things really begin to get desperate.

Damn! And Danny had plans to come out this summer—maybe even get laid! He doesn’t have time for ankle monitors and serial killers!

Then ginger-haired Luke Jamison moves in next door. Not only does Luke solve a few of Danny’s more urgent problems, he also manages to create a couple more that Danny never saw coming. Gee. If he can survive it, this summer might not be so bad after all.

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When small-time thief Timmy Harwell recklessly “borrows” a Cadillac for a joyride, he doesn’t expect to find a cool $100,000 in the trunk. His elation turns to terror when he realizes the SUV and the dough belong to Miguel Garcia, aka El Poco, a Tijuana drug dealer with a nasty reputation. Timmy sees only one way out: leave the stolen car behind and run as fast as he can.

His getaway is cut short when a storm strands him outside Jasper Stone’s secluded mountain cabin. Jasper finds Timmy in his shed, unconscious and burning up with fever, and takes care of the younger man, nursing him back to health. The two begin to grow close, but Jasper, a writer who seeks only solitude, is everything Timmy isn’t. Straightforward, honest, and kind.

Timmy needs Jasper’s help—and wants his respect—so he hides his dishonest habits. But when El Poco comes after him, Timmy realizes he’s not the only one at risk. His actions have also put Jasper in harm’s way. Honesty now could mean Timmy loses the man he’s come to love, but not being honest could mean far worse.

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Dillard Brown has a mother who’s determined he’s straight, a writing career that’s going nowhere, and at thirty, he’s never been in love in his life. But thanks to a ten-pound ball of fluff and energy named Chester, one of Dill’s circumstances is about to change. Maybe even all three.

Who would’ve thought one little stray dog could change Dill’s world—and not by accident either. The damn dog has it planned. If not for Chester wandering into Dill’s life and into his heart, Dill would never have met Hector Peña—and tumbled headlong into love at last!

But for all Chester’s efforts, happiness for Dill and Hector is still not assured. Hector’s evil ex, Valdemaro, is dead set on holding on—even if it means kidnapping Hector to keep him from Dill forever! Now Dill has to pull an army together to rescue Hector, and just where the hell is he supposed to find an army? Gads, if only Dill could write books this interesting!

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To the casual observer, Paulie Banks lives the perfect life. After all, he’s young, handsome, and rich. But Paulie has a secret. He’s madly in love with Ben, his old college roommate—and Ben is straight! Now Paulie has arranged a two-week reunion with his three closest friends to rehash their college years and get to know each other again. Jamie and Trevor are coming, along with their new lovers. And to Paulie’s amazement, even Ben has accepted his invitation.

Beautiful Ben. The one non-gay apple in the old college barrel. Paulie will soon find out if Ben has forgiven him for overstepping the bounds of friendship on the last drunken night they spent together.

With his La Jolla mansion spotless, a stunning new houseboy hired for the duration, and his heart pounding in both fear and anticipation, Paulie welcomes his old friends back into his life. Thanks to a whole lot of liquor and a clothing-optional dress code, boy, do the festivities begin!

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When Tyler Powell’s life is torn apart by an unspeakable crime, the need for vengeance takes over. Every moment of every day, as he tries to pull his shattered existence together again, it’s all he can think about—revenge.

Will he give in to his rage and become the very thing he hates most? A killer?

Only with the help of Homicide Detective Christian Martin, the cop in charge of his case, does Tyler see the possibility of another life beginning—the astounding revelation of another love reaching out to him. A love he thought he would never know again.

Will he let that love into his life, or is he lost already? Is payback more important to Tyler than his own happiness? And the happiness of the man who loves him? Tyler is determined to find a way to exact his revenge without sacrificing all hope for a future with Christian, but it will be difficult—if not impossible—and in the end he might be forced to make an unbearable choice.

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With the world suddenly teeming with zombies, Charlie and Bobby are fighting to stay alive. Being about as gay as two people can be, they insist on doing it with panache.

Even with the planet throwing up its legs in submission, there is no reason a couple of style-conscious guys can’t look good while saying good-bye to the age of man and ushering in the age of… God knows what. Amoebas, maybe. With their loyal zombie poodle, Mimi, at their side, they bravely face the apocalypse head-on.

Death, destruction, and the undead they can deal with. But without electricity, it’s the depressing lack of blow-dryers and cappuccino machines that really pisses them off—until Bobby goes missing! Suddenly Charlie has more than fluffy hair and a good cup of coffee to worry about….

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Dating is hard enough. Throw in an incontinent Chihuahua, an unrequited love affair, a severe case of social anxiety disorder, a dying father, and a man-eating hog and it becomes darned near impossible. Still, it takes two to tango—and when Tom Morgan, a mild-mannered assistant bank manager with a debilitating case of shyness, meets Frank Wells, who is straight off the farm and even shyer than he is, sparks start flying.

Just when Tom and Frank’s burgeoning love affair is rolling along nicely, Frank must return to Indiana to oversee the farm while his father battles cancer. Tom tags along to help Frank out and finds himself slopping hogs and milking cows and wondering what the hell happened to his orderly citified existence. And what’s with all the chickens? Tom hates chickens!

With Frank’s help, Tom grits his teeth and muddles through. Funny what a couple of guys can accomplish when they’re crazy about each other. Not even nine hundred chickens can stand in the way of true love.

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Jason Day, brilliant designer of video games, is not only a confirmed bachelor, but he’s as gay as a maypole. One wouldn’t think being saddled with his precocious four-year-old nephew for four weeks would be enough to throw him off-kilter.

Wrong. Timmy, Jason’s nephew, is a true handful.

But just when Timmy and Uncle Jason begin to bond, and Jason feels he’s getting a grip on this babysitting business once and for all, he’s thrown for a loop by a couple of visitors—one from Tucson, the other from beyond the grave.

I’m sorry. Say what?

Toss a murder, a hot young stud, an unexpected love affair, and a spooky-ass ghost with a weird sense of humor into Jason’s summer plans, and you’ve got the makings for one hell of a ride.

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Reverend Brian Lucas has a secret his congregation in the Nine Mile Methodist Church knows nothing about, and he’d really like to keep it that way. But even his earth-shattering secret takes a backseat to what else is happening in his tiny hometown.

Murders usually do that.

Brian’s “close friend,” Sam, is urging a resolution to their little problem, but Brian’s brother, Boyd, the County Sheriff, is more caught up in chasing down a homicidal maniac who is slaughtering little old ladies.

When Brian’s secret and Boyd’s mystery run into each other head on, and Boyd’s fifteen-year-old son, Jesse, gets involved, all hell breaks loose. Then a fourth death comes to terrify the town, and it is Brian who begins to see what is taking place in their little corner of the Corn Belt. But even for a Methodist minister, it will take more than prayer to set it right.

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Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

About the Author