Destiny
She was so sexy standing legs akimbo in silver heels and black mesh stockings, you'd pay to look at her. But she was free. "When you pay," she said, "it's your pleasure I have to pay attention to, but when it's for free, all you have to do is make sure I am turned on."
Men want her turned on and enveloping herself in them, rubbing her beautifully wrought chest against them, blowing in their ears and caressing their neck. That was their reward. They knew it. They wanted it. They needed it. She provided it.
It had been a long day at the office. She thought it would never end. She experienced several lost moments when time seemed to stop, but shook herself out of them, drank coffee, frequently pushed her unruly hair out of her eyes, and plowed through the work.
She liked her work. She liked the pressure, and she liked the people. They had jobs that allowed them to flirt with glamor, and that made them glamorous. They kissed when they greeted each other in the morning and when they left in the evening. They told each other how gorgeous they were. She was an editor for a renowned publisher and she worked with A-list authors. A few knew of her other persona, but to most people at the office she was Drew, a boy-genius, who had gotten to the top at the age of twenty-five.
She liked being part of it. But she liked being away from it, too. She needed to be. She liked having several dispositions, not being limited to one personality, one destiny.
She also liked the beveled, gilt-framed, full-size mirror in her bedroom. It was, it felt to her, where she kept herself, where she went to have it emerge.
She admired her legs in stockings and garters and was pleased by the allure of her thighs, the fine, bare skin glowing between her stockings and the silver panties that matched her shoes. She needed a skirt to go out, a strip of leather wrapped around her hips and belted with a band of square silver mosaics. A leather jacket was all she needed on top. She'd keep the jacket zipped up till she got to the club. She had on red lipstick, black kohl around her eyes. Her coiffure was a wig of long dark hair arranged in a regal upsweep. The style privileged the stately column of her long slender neck.
She couldn't keep her hard-on down or her heart from overflowing with happiness. She entered like sunshine into the gloomy depths of The Inferno. Everybody greets her eagerly and hungrily.
The place becomes quiet. She gets up on the stage and slowly unzips the jacket and shrugs it off. She pulls the skirt from off her hips. It falls to the floor. From her platform on the tiny stage, she stares down at them. She slaps her palm gently with a miniature whip, a suggestion of her aggressive eroticism. Then she begins to sing. "I'll Be Seeing You", "Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Joe", "I Cover the Waterfront." "Lush Life." More.
They love her. Mike comes over after. "You are gorgeous, Lila, more gorgeous than ever." She leans over and kisses him with the kind of passion he can only imagine. "Thank you," she whispers huskily and brushes his lips with her fingers. "Now be a good boy until I let you be my bad boy."
He looks at her with sad, little boy, imploring eyes, cow eyes. She gently touches their lids. "I want to see light sparkling from your eyes. Begging eyes bring me down. You can need without begging. I want to see your eyes shine with need. I like that. But no begging, no demanding." She kissed each eye tenderly – and chastely.
"It has to be as you say, Lila."
She kissed her finger and pressed it to his lips. "Enjoy the wait," she said and left him, hard like stone looking at her. But he was bait. One man in toreador pants, bare feet, and a Hawaiian shirt, stripped, knelt before him, brought his lips to his cock, and slowly adored it until he held all of it in his wet mouth; his shirt and pants off, his palms locked behind his head, he could not touch himself. His body tensed and burned with lust as he sucked and as his throat devoured Mike's semen, he shot his own into the hands of a guy wearing only a white jock who had been caressing his balls as he sucked.
Lila interrupted everything when she said, "Which one of you is coming home with me tonight. She saw the need in Mike's eyes, despite what had just happened. It pleased her. "Haven't you had enough for one night?" she said.
"With you, Lila, there never is enough."
"I give my all and you want more," she said. "No, Mike, let somebody else take you home. Your time has not come." She signaled, however, to a shy-looking, handsome, vanilla-seeming collegiate guy, casually dressed in what used to be called ivy-league fashion.
"Take me home," she said leaning against him, taking his hand and leading him out of the place before he could even say anything.
Outside he took a joint and a lighter out of his camel hair jacket, lit the joint, dragged it alive and passed it to her.
"You ain't so green or so shy," she said. "And you're not as sure as all that," he said. "Try me," she said. "I will," he said, grinning handsomely. He leaned over and covered her mouth with his. Their bodies swiveled together and they embraced on the nearly empty after-midnight sidewalk, kissing as if they were alone.
"You are more than I ever imagined," he said, gazing into her eyes, by the side of her bed where she stood, naked and trembling in his arms.
The sun shone above the water, blazing upward on the arc of the sky's blue slope. It broke through their window. Gabriel sprang out of bed, ruffled his hair, and pulled on his speedo. Lila was up, too. She fit into the two parts of her blazing red, metallic bikini as if she were born to it. She wriggled her ankle and toes, and they ran across the sand and into the Mediterranean. They felt the stretch of their bodies and their vigor, and without having to wait for thought, plunged themselves into the morning-cold water, swam through the colder pockets and floated in the warm spots, saw the blur of blue and green striations in the water as their eyes met the underwater world with every exhalation of the bubbling breath just taken in in the clearer upper world, in the ocean made of air.
"Look," Gabriel said, as they sat, later, shaded by leaf-rich vines, and drank coffee, "I know what the difficulties you can encounter must be. But I'm not deterred, and I'm not hiding. I knew who you were the moment I saw you, and it knocked me out. Aren't you in love with me? That's the beginning of possibility." He was exuberant without losing his composure.
"You are adorable," she said, touching his smoothly-shaven cheek and bringing his lips to hers. "This climate brings you out. You are so tan and tall, and masculine. I love it."
Gabriel shivered as Lila drew him to her and brushed his lips with her tongue.
"I wish I could say this was our honeymoon," Gabriel said.
"I wish I could grant your wish, but it is the one wish I cannot grant. I promise to be true to you, and you know I love you and am in love with you, but I am not made to be monogamous. I cannot be one thing or another. I am many things. Don't look so beaten. You have no reason to be. I will always be yours, and you will always be mine. I am not forsaking you." As she whispered these things to him she gently fingered him and rose above him, taking hold of him with her eyes, and she entered him and very slowly took him to heaven.
Gabriel took the call immediately when he saw it was Lila. He'd been waiting for it for days. He could not reach her phone. He always got her voice mail. He brushed off the fear that anything could be wrong as patronizing. Now, she was back. He could not wait to see her and to feel her, and to feel her touch. He wanted to be inside her and he wanted to feel her inside him.
"Lila," he cried with joy.
"Gabriel," she sobbed. He crashed. "Lila," he repeated, frightened. "I'm home," she said. "Come over right now. Shut your phone and come. I need you here now." "I'm on my way."
He put the phone in his pocket, took his wallet from the desk, went down the elevator, got his bike from the cellar and was at her place in five minutes. Heart pounding, he banged on her door. She opened it, just in her robe. She was still sobbing, and she threw herself into his arms and buried herself in him. "Fuck me, right now. I need it so much. Just you. I need you inside me." Gabriel picked her up and held her hard to him and placed his fingers between her thighs and caressed her as she moistened and put his finger deeply into her as he kissed her and pushed his tongue to the back of her throat. He kept his finger inside her; with his other hand he caressed the strong shaft of her male clit, subdued now by the tremor of her womanhood. He tapped it with his fingertips as if he were fingering the holes in a flute.
"You look so beautiful," he said, caressing her neck with his lips. "Why are you trembling and sobbing?"
"Keep me warm. Ride me." He rode her. "Lila, what has happened?"
Then she told him.
She had gone away to visit an old friend, more than a friend, who had helped her become herself. She was dying now. Lila told Gabriel before she left that she'd thought about it, and that it would be most sensible to travel as a man, keeping up a male persona. Gabriel saw her the morning she left for the first time in male drag. As beautiful as she was as a woman, that's how handsome she was as a man. He held her in his arms, astonished at the force of his desire. Lila grinned at him. "I'm called Drew," she said. "Drew," Gabriel said, and devoured her.
She rented a car, and set out. It was on her way home that terror struck.
"Why didn't you call me or answer your phone?" Gabriel asked.
"He took my phone."
"But you could have..." Gabriel began to say the obvious.
"I was on a bus. I had to hold myself together. I could not even drive back, the shakes were so bad. I returned the car at a local office and got the bus. If I stopped to feel, I don't know what would have happened. There was nothing you could do. I only had to get home and get back to you."
It was growing dark. Gabriel and Lila sat by the Hudson looking at the sunset. She was dressed pretty conventionally, jeans, boots, a scoop neck sleeveless black tanktop, a leather jacket, no lipstick, just some black eye-liner. Even like that, she had glamor to burn. The water shimmered as the sun set. Lila's agitation had subsided and when it emerged it was in the form of indignation. She let the story out in pieces. They sat in a coffee shop. She picked up her narrative:
"Shit man,' he said, I am cool, and I know it, and you know it. So you can thank your lucky stars I stopped you and not somebody else. You can think of it like you're makin' yourself a little visit to an alternative reality. No New York flim-flam here. No rainbows. I'm lettin' you into my world so you can see what virtue is, and maybe you'll take something back with you.' He said that after he had pirated everything I had in the name of law and security! He left me with nothing.
"You know that fat guy in Florida,' he said, once he had me in custody, who shot the beanpole black punk? I admire him. He stayed cool. He stood his ground when it came to his rights not to be bothered by people he did not want to have to be botherin' with.
"He took my wallet and everything in it. When he saw it was a rental car I was driving he was angry. `I can't take that,' he said. Just like that. Then he took the ring, a beautiful art deco ring with a brilliant ruby. You've never seen it. Johanna gave it to me before she died. She knew I admired it. When I lived with her, she'd let me wear it sometimes. When I had it on, I'd feel like I was her. I begged him not to take it. I even cried. It was not a strategy. It would have been a bad one if it had been. He became furious.
"Tears are for bitches,' he said. I should have known. A night in our jail will cure you of that.' He cuffed my hands together and sat me in the cruiser, locked the door and then got in the driver's seat, leaving my car locked at the side of the road `My car,' I said. "It will be here in the morning,' he said.
"`Do you do this often?' I said, turning my head towards him as he drove.
"`As often as necessary,' he said.
"When we got to the jail – it was a single cell in what looked like it once was a house where trainmen slept and ate between runs -- I asked if I could have a receipt for everything he had confiscated. Something had turned in me. I don't know where I got the nerve, but I think it came from some fierce indignation. I owed it to Johanna.
"`What you need that for?' he said.
"`Records. Deduct it from my taxes.'
"`If I was you, I'd let it go and be glad. This is a civil proceeding now – this time he pronounced the "g" -- a fair trade, but, you know, if you give us trouble it could become a criminal proceeding, and you would not want that.'
"`What crime have I committed?'
"`Whatever crimes I say you did. Carrying contraband, being a drug courier, vagrancy, smoking marijuana, jewelry theft.'
"`You didn't find any contraband...'
"`What was that ring I had to confiscate?'
"`My ring.'
"`Stolen, or purchased with drug money.'
"`Excuse me!'
"`Stolen or bought with drug money.'
"`How could you prove that?'
"`How could you prove it wasn't?'
"`And you didn't find anything, no drugs, no pot, nothing in the car or on me.'
"`I smelled a burnt marijuana smell.'
"`How do you prove that?'
"`By say so.'
"`That's not evidence.'
"`When I say it, it is.'
"`You think pretty highly of yourself,' I said, moved by a force propelling me. If I'd stopped to think I'd never have said it. But then I'd have missed seeing something I wonder if anyone has ever seen. That cop was stopped in his tracks. He couldn't say yes, and he couldn't say no. For a moment, all his defenses were down. He was astonished. There was a terrible intimacy that I felt, and I know he felt the same thing. I felt frozen sexuality and throttled desire inside him.'
"`You talk too much,' he said.
He locked me in and left me. Once he was gone, I began to shake, like when you just miss getting hit by a truck when you're crossing the street.
"It was hardly daylight when he came into the jail the next morning and let me out. He was stone-faced. `You be gone now before people get up and get to wonderin' what a stranger is doin' prowlin' around.' He handed me my car keys and pointed me to the highway.
"`I have no money,' I said.
"`Not my problem,' he said.
"No,' I said, you've got other problems, but you could solve mine if you gave me back my wallet.'
"He had already gone through it.
"`You haven't got much in it,' he said, handing it back to me.
"`The picture," I said, indicating a photo Johanna had taken of me, taken a few years ago, on the boardwalk, dressed in high heels, sunglasses, and my red bikini.
"`You oughtn't be carrying pictures like this around,' was all he would say, and pushed me roughly towards the road."
Reggie Lancaster – that's the cop's name – could not shake an uncomfortable sense of Drew's presence even weeks later, but he could not admit to it, either.
"I think I bagged a fag," the cop said, and he laughed.
But it was not just faggots he was after. He had to show mastery, especially to show mastery to the sort who needed the discipline he could impose, immigrants, blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans. Order had to be protected and defended. There was a tradition that had to be served, and he was there to preserve it.
To look at, he was good looking; as a person he was cold-hearted, a bastard, and self-loving. He wore boots and jeans, a kaki dress shirt and a kaki tie smartly knotted, a black leather jacket, and a beige trooper's hat, and a silver badge. He was very fit, and he was always fingering the hat brim and edging it slightly back from his square forehead, letting his curly blond hair escape.
"You can't talk that way," Harry, the bartender, said, pouring him another bourbon.
"Who says I can't? If God lets me know He approves of a thing I say and do, and He does, ain't nobody gonna keep me from sayin' it or doin' it. There's good, and there's no good. This man's goin' with the good and clearin' out the no good."
"How do you know God approves?"
"He tells me so."
"He talks to you?'
"He has His ways."
"Well, I'm not sayin' I don't admire you, Reg, `cause you know I do. But I wish you'd be careful...and a little more...merciful sometimes, too. No offense."
"No offense, Harry. It's a hard thing for people to understand that there's no difference between justice and mercy. It's the same thing. That's one of the things I learned when God revealed Himself to me. When you clean the scum out of the pond, you're doing the right thing and you're being merciful to the water. These are parlous times, Harry. Terrorists, drug dealers, atheists, homosexuals – there's a whole mix of evils we are facing."
"He kept the picture," Lila said.
Everyone looked at her. "You are extraordinary," Mike said. "I don't know what I would have done," his companion, a body-builder named Sandy who'd been hanging around him for weeks, shamelessly ingratiating himself until he got what he wanted.
"I was lucky. It could have been a lot worse. I faked my way through it. I kept up my nerve, but once I was safe with Gabriel, it was something else."
"The ring?" Richard said.
"It's the only regret I have. She always wore it. I never saw her without it. Before I left, she said, `I won't see you again. You know it. You know I'm dying.' She said that and took the ring off her finger and put it on mine. I kissed her. " You are the only one who knows what this ring means. Wear it for me." She caressed my hand. "I want to see you dressed," she said, "one last time."
"I was sitting on a small, plush velvet sofa at the side of her bed. I stood up. She'd been gazing into my eyes. I reciprocated and as always my heart melted. I stood up, went into the dressing room, came back the way she liked to see me, the way she had first fashioned me when she brought me face to face with myself. I wanted to look beautiful for her, and I did. I held my head high, stood legs akimbo. I took her hand at the last moment; I bend down and I put my lips to her; she died, smiling, her eyes touching mine."
"The ring," Richard repeated. "There's a story?"
"The ring," Lila sighed. "Yes." But she refused to tell it. "That belonged to her," was all she said, only adding, "even more than the ring."
It was a small, dark room with a large window that gave onto a pink and blue neon sign that sat atop the diner across the street. There was a weak bed lamp that was turned on.
Reggie examined the ring, repeatedly, fascinated by its beauty, by the gold of which it was spun and by the ruby whose oceanic depths gave magnetizing power to the stone. He looked at it closely and at the picture he had pulled out of Lila's wallet. He told himself it was Drew's sister, but he knew, actually, that it was Drew, himself. And he knew what that meant although no one had ever told him. It tormented him and he hardened himself even further until he became as resistant as brass armor. Every night, he gazed at the picture, then at the ring, which fit on his left pinky, then back to the picture, wondering why he had stood frozen against a guy he could have...he did not know what, but he sensed that he had suffered some kind of defeat and felt shame that he had, but he could not figure out how it happened or even what had happened. Nothing had happened.
He took to prowling the forest trails around the town, walking through the woods in the evening with a powerful flashlight, and a gun strapped to his thigh, as if looking for something.
Johanna's parents called her Jordan and made her dress like a boy, but from as far back as she could remember, it felt wrong to her, and the values and goals that they imposed upon her and directed her to, made no sense to her, consumed her, destroyed her. She could have nothing to do with them. Worst were the distinctions in gender that were incomprehensible to her.
She left Philadelphia and took a job as a cigarette girl in a gay sex club in Florida.
"The only way I know you're not really, I mean anatomically, a girl is because females in any capacity are not permitted in here. But otherwise you are exquisite." He was a handsome, youthful man, in a dinner jacket, nearing fifty no doubt. He held a pipe in his hand and bought a pouch of tobacco from her.
Johanna thanked him. He took her fingers in his hand and squeezed them tenderly. He asked her when her shift was over. She told him. He said he would wait till then and take her home, if she'd permit him. She said she would.
She had never known tenderness until Arthur. And she could never accept any other kind of relationship, any relationship that did not have tenderness as its foundation, after she had known him. He was tender; he was gracious; he always respected her. She felt it in the way he looked at her. There was lust in his gaze, but there was adoration, also, an adoration that did not arise from lust. His desire for her seemed to percolate from the depth of his regard for her. He was protective of her. He would risk his life for her. Their need for each other was dangerous and frightening.
"I want us to go out tonight, the way you are. I don't only want to see you alone, as if in hiding. I want to be seen with you, to show you off. Would you like that, or is it objectifying you?" he said, not long after they had been seeing her regularly, almost nightly, at her apartment.
She told him that it sent shivers down her spine to be seen as a sex object. It was what she had been fashioning herself to be since she was twelve.
"You knew even then?"
"There was nothing to know. I was as I was. That was it."
"`And you did not have the sense that you ought to be somebody else?
"`I already was somebody else, and I knew that wasn't working for me."
He smiled and kissed her.
"I have something for you," he said giving her a velvet box. It felt good just to hold it. Open it,' he said. I want you to wear it tonight,' he said. "And always," he added in a whisper. That was when he gave her the ring that Reggie Lancaster took from Lila. She had not taken it off from then until she gave it to Lila.
"It had a power," Lila said to Gabriel as he installed software updates in her computer for her.
"What had a power?" he said, looking over to her.
"The ring," she said. "She told me when she gave it to me, but I had already imagined that it did."
Gabriel got up from her desk and walked over to her.
"Stand up," he said. She did. He took her in his arms. She closed her eyes and collapsed against him.
"That's him," Lila said to Gabriel as she pointed to a man standing a street corner away, leaning against a parking meter.
They had flown into town and taken a taxi from the airport to their hotel. Lila was dressed conservatively in an opera mauve Halston ultrasuede shirtwaist and matching heels that she'd picked up at an upscale thrift shop, especially to look right for their trip. Her sandy hair was cut close in a pixie cut. It was a balmy spring day and they looked like a young couple in a strange town, out for a walk, and very much in love.
"He's as queer as a three-dollar bill," Gabriel said, as if it were a revelation.
"Tell him that," Lila said, "or all the women in town whom he's plowed and then turned his back to."
They watched him go into Harry's Bar. They followed after him. Five minutes later, they were sitting in a corner, as the jukebox played an old crooner doing "It had to Be You." Gabriel got up and went to the bar and asked for two vodka sours. Harry grinned knowingly at Reggie, who was leaning against the bar taking swallows of bourbon. As Gabriel waited for the drinks, Lancaster eyed him up and down.
"She your wife?"
"Who wants to know?"
"Reg Lancaster, state police."
"We do something wrong?"
"You asked me who I was. I'm identifying myself. I'm here as a civilian."
"Yeah, she's my wife," Gabriel answered, figuring that was the safest thing.
"She's a looker," Lancaster said.
Gabriel took a step back and looked at him. "That's a bit out of line, don't you think?"
"I don't stand on lines," Lancaster said.
"But I do think you know what I'm saying," Gabriel said as he went to pay for the shimmering silver drinks that stood on the nickel bar before him."
"No hard feelings," Lancaster said. Turning to the bartender, he said, "Harry, put those on my tab." Turning back to Gabriel, then, he said, "Mind if I sit with you two and tell you a little about our town?"
"Sure," Gabriel said, going to the booth where Lila sat demure but alert. He sat next to her, and Lancaster turned and straddled the chair facing them across the table.
"Where you folks from?"
"New York City."
"A dangerous place."
"Not so dangerous."
"Satan lives there."
"Not in my neighborhood."
"This is not something anybody should take lightly, little lady"
"But you said you were going to tell us about your town, not about ours.
Lancaster smiled and began a narrative that was familiar to him concerning the establishment of the state as an English crown colony, of the rise of the town because of the clear lake it bordered, of its proud heritage of resistance to northern abolitionists and how it lost so many of its sons in the war for secession, of its struggle to maintain honor during the rapacious times of reconstruction, of its triumph as one of the major manufacturing centers of textiles.
"This is a town of God-fearing people who love the Lord," he concluded.
"What do you do for fun?" Lila asked, but Gabriel put his hand over her wrist as if to chasten her levity. Lancaster noticed it and approved. He smiled at Gabriel.
"What about crime?" Gabriel asked instead. It was a perfect gambit. Lancaster replied, "We are vigilant."
"Vigilant?"
"Vigilant."
Lancaster spoke of law and order and the danger to society that liberalism had become, but underneath he was disturbed by an inability to place Lila. She looked like somebody. He could not figure out who. It distracted him. It intrigued him. It made him awkward, until he interrupted himself, looked directly at Lila, and said, "Don't I know you from somewhere?"
Lila giggled sweetly. "You aren't the first man who has asked me that."
Lancaster blushed at the turn she gave his words.
"Usually, it means that they want to get to know me."
Lancaster was begin to formulate a confused apology, but Lila did not let him. "Do you want to get to know me?" she asked. "Because if you do, I'm flattered, a man's man like you."
If he had heard any trace of mockery in her words, he could have dealt with it. But he could find none. She was the embodiment of innocence, a pretty girl who had not learned to be fake.
"You're very kind, mam," he said.
"And you're very polite," she said; "why thank you." Her smile glowed as she spoke, and she let her gentle violet eyes, naturally veiled by her femininity, rest on his rock hard icy blue eyes. He felt her hovering around him. He needed to hold her and confine her in his arms.
"Well," Lila said, "I need to be by myself for a few minutes." She rose from the table and slowly walked to the ladies room, knowing that Lancaster would follow her with his eyes.
"Maybe I lock you up for a couple hours, so I can spend some time alone with her," Lancaster said, with a wink.
"You wouldn't really do a thing like that?" Gabriel said.
"Maybe I would," Lancaster answered, as if it were the punch line to a joke.
"What's going on?" Lila said as she slipped back into her seat beside Gabriel.
"Perhaps you will have the good luck to find out," Lancaster said.
"Mysterious," she said.
"He wants some time alone with you," Gabriel said, openly, hiding nothing, earning a look of rebuke from Lancaster until Lila dispersed it by saying, "That should not pose a problem. You are a God-fearing man of honor, aren't you," she said with a flirtatious smile that seemed to insinuate the contrary.
"Are you suggesting I might not be?"
"Are you?"
"If I am not, the blame must fall on you."
"Silly boy, a man takes responsibility for his own desires. Otherwise, he is a zombie, carrying out someone else's will. Whose will are you obeying?"
"If you knew me you would not ask such a foolish question."
"What makes you so sure?" Lila spoke without a hint of challenge in her voice. Her smile was not smug. Her words were inviting.
"I think I've lost the thread of what we are talking about."
"What's a guy like you being a cop in a small town like this for?
"The least among his servants serve him."
"So you let God take responsibility."
"I acknowledge a higher power who has designed a moral universe."
"Where do you fit in, in this `moral universe'?"
"I don't understand," he said.
"I'll show you," Lila said. She reached out her hand, took his, drew him to her, and kissed him dreamily on the lips She held him captive in her kiss until she pushed him away."
"Is that clear enough?" she said with a warm smile.
Lancaster pulled his head back and blinked his eyes. "What about?" he said finishing the sentence by pointing at Gabriel.
Lila smiled, put her am around Gabriel and drew him to her. She kissed him warmly on the temple. "You don't have to worry about Gabriel. He knows how to take care of himself. And he understands that I am not a housecat," Lila said, and then, looking directly at Lancaster, she growled.
Lancaster said nothing. Lila broke the silence. "Now do you want to show us where you live?"
"Us!" Did she mean only her and him, or was Gabriel included, too?
Gabriel did not go with them. Instead, he walked around the town and on the outskirts, where the railroad yard once bustled and was now the resting place of out-of-use boxcars, he stumbled upon Rods & Ricks, and sensed it was a gay bar. He stepped inside. He was right. It was not very crowded and quite subdued; the clientele was entirely male.
One man stood out from the rest and Gabriel walked over to him. "That's a handsome vest," he said.
The man looked up from his drink. "Thanks," he said. "You're new here."
"Just passing through. I had a few hours to waste."
"Maybe it won't be a waste."
"I hope not."
It was passed midnight. Gabriel and Lambert Forsythe -- that is the name of the man Gabriel met in Rods and Ricks -- left the bar hours earlier, strolled through the city, and wound up in Forsythe's hotel. Like Gabriel he was from out of town, but only an hour or so away. He drove to the town several times a month on business, a very discreet business. He made private appointments with gentlemen who never would have entered Rods & Ricks, who had deleted any knowledge of its very existence from their awareness. Gabriel was not surprised to learn that one his clients was Reg Lancaster. Forsythe did not volunteer the name, nor did he of any of his clientele; he only told Gabriel his line of work and his inclinations, in the confidential way that two men, openly gay, can speak about those who sever that part of themselves from their daily demeanor, attitude, and behavior.
They sat at the hotel bar, drinking vodka sours, both feeling the elevation that each made the other feel.
"Reg Lancaster!" Gabriel said in hushed tone, slumping a little forward, his face turned and looking directly into Forsythe's face.
"How do you know that name?" Forsythe gasped and thereby answered Gabriel in the affirmative.
But Gabriel wanted to go the whole way.
"It's a complicated story, but I'll tell you, if you answer me directly."
Forsythe put his open palm over Gabriel's wrist. "Yes," he said.
Then Gabriel told him about Lila, his relationship to her, and about her encounter with Lancaster, ending with the theft of the picture and the ring, and that she was with him even as they spoke.
"Although, he is not on my schedule for this visit, he might enjoy hearing from me – I'm pretty sure of it; he is not the same with me as he is in the world; he's quite compliant. I might be able to help in rectification."
Gabriel kissed him. "I've got a room. Would Lila mind if we went to it," Forsythe said.
"Lila is an alley cat. Where's the elevator?"
The elevator was in the corridor outside the bar, its doors, sheets of gleaming mirrors. They waited and looked at their reflections. They smiled at each other.
Forsythe stayed in the penthouse. They stepped onto the terrace, embraced, leaned on the parapet and surveyed the street and watched the stars.
"Take me inside," Gabriel said.
Lambert unbuttoned his shirt with his left hand and held Gabriel's wrist to keep him from doing anything. His chest was lean and chiseled. His pectorals stood firm; his nipples were commanding. Gabriel was fixated on them. Forsythe leaned in and kissed him. His tongue unlocked Gabriel's lips, which hardly were closed. As he took his breath away and gave it back to him mixed with his, he unbuttoned several of the buttons on Gabriel's shirt and pulled it out of his jeans and, moving his lips away, pulled it over his head. Gabriel was his equal in physique. It made him dizzy with lust. He took his hand. "Come inside," he said.
He flung the bed cover off the bed and pushed Gabriel onto the bed. He lay beside him and began tonguing his nipples and massaging him through his jeans, then pulling the zipper down and reaching inside to take Gabriel's cock and balls in his hand.
"You're wearing a thong," he said.
"Lila likes me to pose for her in it."
"I'd like to meet her. She must be something."
"She is," Gabriel said, alternating words and kisses. "But you aren't bad," he said and spidered his fingers to Forsythe's nipples. "May I?" he said. "Yes," Forsythe nodded as he stroked Gabriel's cock and lowered himself so that he brought it into his mouth, and with slow deliberateness, his lips undulated up and down the shaft. He loosened his own belt and took off his jeans. He was naked under them. His lovely cock rose hard. He pulled off Gabriel's jeans and, mounting him, pulled the strip of his thong out from between his legs and drilled himself inside him as they swallowed each other in kisses.
When Lila returned to the hotel, Gabriel was coming out of the shower.
"Have fun?" Lila said.
"I did," he said. "You?"
"Sad fun. I'll tell you in the morning. Right now I want to go to sleep with your arms around me and your cock inside me."
The picture stood framed on a tall, narrow, black marble-top dressing table. The ring is there, in front, beside the picture, behind them, on the wall and touching the dresser top, a mirror. They are carefully placed, the mirror, the picture, the ring -- the red jewel, set in a casement of gold, surrounded by a field of black marble. It was a shrine or an altar. It needed a candle. Lila held her breath repressing an audible gasp. Lancaster looked at her and blushed, but quickly regained his composure.
"Have you ever had bourbon?" he asked her, clutching a bottle and two glasses.
"Honey," Lila said in her worst camp, "champagne is my usual drink."
"Well, it's time for something new," isn't it.
She seemed to ignore his gambit and went back to her concern. "Somebody broke your heart," she said. "Somebody. Over there?" she said pointing to the purloined image of herself, the picture on the dressing stand. "She's very...alluring."
"Yes," Lancaster said.
"She left you," Lila suggested, "but she let you keep her ring. There's blood in that ring in its stone."
"It's a ruby," he said, overwhelmed with sadness when he did.
"What's her name?" Lila asked, approaching him.
"I don't know," he said.
She took hold of his head and brought it near, bringing his lips to her lips. She kissed him and he surrendered. She dragged the tips of her index fingers up the side of his neck and stopped under the earlobes, gently vibrating into him. "It's a very beautiful ruby," Lila said. "I want to wear it. Put it on my finger. Go ahead."
He took her by the waist and guided them to the shrine. She picked up the picture and held her other hand out, palm down, fingers spread. As he put the ring on her finger, she looked at the picture, not at him. "She looks like me," Lila said.
"I know," Lancaster said.
"Perhaps she is me."
Lancaster smiled a lost smile. "You're very beautiful," he said, swallowing some bourbon, "but..."
"Pretend I'm her," Lila said, still holding the picture. "Look at me and pretend I'm her. Kiss me and pretend I'm her."
He knelt before her and pressed his cheek against the skirt of her dress. He felt her erection. He broke down; he began to weep until he was crying desperately the way a child cries. She stroked his hair and let him cry. She whispered that it was ok, that everything would be alright.