It was after midnight when a cab stopped on Wooster Street and let Nick off in front of his loft. The air was pungent with the smell of roasted coffee. There was a gibbous moon near the meridian in the eastern sky. Nick pulled a leather shoulder pouch out of the cab after him and paid and tipped the driver.
His lithe figure at a moment when he thought no one was seeing him was alive in the moonlight. In him the spirit was made flesh, and each shimmered because of the other.
Luke was on the stoop.
Did you enjoy yourself?
Very much, Nick said, grinning.
I've been thinking about you, Luke said.
Nick was silent. His face lost all expression.
I'm in love with you, Luke said. I've always been in love with you. Every time I've promised myself not to see you again, I was in love with you.
Nick looked at him still with an empty face, listening, waiting.
Is that ok? Luke said finally, unnerved by the silence.
You're asking me if it's ok for you to feel something?
Yeah, I am, Luke said slowly and quietly.
I can't do that, Nick answered.
Do you love me at all? Luke said.
Words that can be said, Nick said, have already died in the heart. Come upstairs. I need to sleep. You can stay if you want.
Lucas realized it was not the time to talk, and when he tried to, all the things that he had meant to say, garnered from monologues that had coursed through his head, would evaporate anyhow.
He went upstairs with Nick.
It was warm in the loft and Luke pulled off his shirt. He was lean and sleek and perfect. He worked out daily, but he was not bulky. He was like a tawny rope. If he hadn't worked out, he would have been fine too.
Nick touched the slope of his bare upper arm and offered him a toke before they got into bed. Then they lay there quietly in a room silver with moonlight looking into each other's eyes and feeling the softness of each other's breathing.
Slowly their warmth became magnetic and they were drawn to each other and embraced. Their eyelids were heavy and Nick's were falling shut.
No, Luke said. Keep your eyes open. Keep looking at me. I like what it feels like to look into your eyes, to have your eyes all to my self.
Nick glowed as he lost himself inside the sound of Luke's voice.
Luke touched his lips first to one and then to the other of Nick's eyes and then caught his sigh of delight with his lips and turned it into a kiss.
They kissed long and slowly; sensuously their bodies touched, chest and thighs, hard bellies and blood hard penises, untold they folded in on each other and burst out of themselves and flung around nowhere until grabbing onto each other they plummeted through the coruscating sky until the flying points of lightning becalmed and they floated to rest in each others arms and breathing lightly fell asleep.
In the morning Lucas was angry and hardly could speak, but it was obvious, and Nick looked at him a little warily. He liked intimacy, but he did not confuse it with melodrama.
So, what's going to happen now? Luke said finally with a touch of defiance in his voice.
About what? Nick said, sipping a coffee.
Fuck you, Luke said.
I can't take these kinds of ups and downs, Nick said.
You don't care at all about what I need, Luke said.
What's the matter? Nick said. A few hours ago we were making love and now you're fighting with me.
Luke could not yield. He felt that he had been betrayed.
I think it better that I go, he said.
Perhaps, for now, Nick said. Maybe.
Sometimes, the less said, the better; sometimes, the right thing happens.
I don't want to go, Luke said. I don't even know what this is about. I liked going to bed with you but I want too much.
He dropped his head into his hands on the table, defeated.
I don't think it's a matter of wanting too much, Nick said slowly. You want what isn't, and you let some non-existent phantom get in the way of what is.
That's too abstract for me, Luke said, dismissing it.
Nick nodded and did not argue.
You are frightened, Nick said quietly.
Frightened? Luke said, raising his head, beginning to reengage.
Frightened, Nick repeated, gently.
It's a hard thing to admit, Luke said.
It is, Nick said.
Frightened of my love, Luke said. I feel the humiliation of wanting you more than I have ever wanted anyone, anything.
I'm here, Nick said. I accept your love.
But, I want, Luke was ashamed to say it. I want your love.
The sign of mine is accepting yours.
Then why can't you say it? Why can't you use the word love?
Because you'll think I mean something I don't. I'm not exclusive, I told that to Harold. He has trouble with it. I hoped you would not. Your trouble is something else. Your trouble is that you are torn apart and fighting with yourself. In one person you combine aggressor and resistance. But love, if I say I love you: don't think it means anything about forsaking all others. It doesn't. Nick spoke calmly.
How does Eliot feel about it?
About what?
Your...
...promiscuity?
I didn't call it that, Luke said.
But that's what it is, Nick said.
Eliot. Why should it concern Eliot?
You two are sort of a couple.
We aren't a couple.
Why aren't you?
Why should we be?
Sometimes I think I get a pleasure from suffering. Sometimes I think the more alienated you are from me the more in touch with myself I am.
Would you like me to beat you up? Nick said.
Luke laughed. Am I that bad? he said.
It was raining furiously and Marisol said the network would send a car for Howard. He had tried to beg off, but Marisol would not hear of it and repeated that Ted said he wanted Howard and no one else to pick up the award.
It is for you, not for your producer or the president of the network, she told him Ted had insisted.
Howard explained it would only be embarrassing, nothing else. Marisol had responded by saying that embarrassment would look perfect.
So now he was in his tuxedo. Debra had gone to their place in the Hamptons with her pal Margaret for a few weeks as she frequently did.
He asked Robin to meet him.
Downstairs, holding a large black umbrella over him, Max took Howard to the curb, where the limousine was waiting.
Midtown was like a dream. It recalled something from his childhood. He had sat next to his father in their old Cadillac. It was night. They drove past the Plaza, up Fifth Avenue, then around a circle into Central Park. His spirit was consumed by the night and swelled with a tender desire he could not name and did not need to; it was so purely, palpably itself. It beckoned to him like the blazing future, like a fire in winter. He could not recall where they were going, but it did not matter. That was not the point. The radio was on and some bluesy jazz was playing.
Now the limo stopped at the Plaza. Another doorman helped Howard out of the car and led him under an umbrella up the steps and into the refurbished lobby.
Robin was waiting for him in that grand lobby.
I did not have a full tuxedo, he said, just a jacket, and you did, he pouted with a mock petulance, not ask me until the last minute.
He was wearing a tuxedo jacket, midnight blue with rounded blue satin lapels over a torso-hugging white silk t-shirt, a pair of faded blue jeans, and Cuban-heel boots. His spiky hair was gleaming with gel.
Put in front of a microphone, Howard was anything but embarrassed. It was, consequently, not a matter of surprise to the audience, but of delight, nevertheless, when he said, after expressing his gratitude and bestowing his thank yous, that he wanted to make his acceptance of the award resonant with some significance beyond his own private gratification at having his work appreciated and rewarded. He could not leave, he said, without begging everyone to join together in a massive movement for the repeal of proposition eight in California.
There was great applause. The band played Happy Days Are Here Again and Howard walked off the stage clutching the golden statuette of Mercury brandishing a sunbeam.
Nick is here, Robin whispered to Howard once he had returned to his seat beside him to watch the rest of the proceedings.
Howard raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders.
Does that upset you? he asked switching the focus of his discomfort from himself to Robin.
I thought it might make you uneasy, Robin responded.
It does, Howard confessed. I get confused around him.
He's too intense, Robin said.
I'm not sure whether it's him or my reaction to him.
In any case, he's a rare beauty, Robin said, but impenetrable.
How come he's here? Howard asked.
He's everywhere, Robin said. He let that sit for a beat and added, Eliot brought him.
Where's Luke? Howard said.
With his girlfriend.
Luke is bi? Howard said.
Sometimes he's bi, and when he's bi, he's bye-bye.
And Nick doesn't mind?
Nick is impervious as well as impenetrable.
The lights rose and everyone stood and moved into the next salon where there was a bar and a buffet.
Let's skip this, Howard said to Robin, guiding him with an arm round his waist to the exit instead of to the oak bar.
And they were out under a great Manhattan sky after the rain had stopped and the smell of Central Park spread through the air and hung in invisible bubbles of clarity.
You didn't want to stay, Robin asked, a little confused.
I want to be with you. Come home with me. The place is empty.
As they wrestled with each other in a frenzy of embraces they grabbed at jutting stones to save them as they hurled from high places. And each as he writhed in the other's embrace found shards of Nick among the fragments of their bursting desire.
Howard held him tenderly.
You're very sweet, he said.
But I'm not him.
No you're not, Howard said with a sigh of defeat. But neither am I.
I tried to look all the way into him once, Robin confessed, and something broke in me, and I couldn't connect. It had never happened to me before, and I've flirted with everyone.
Howard reached out and put his arm around Robin and drew him near and kissed the nape of his neck and began slowly lapping it with long tongue strokes. Robin felt himself melting and wanting to have Harold inside him slowly driving him crazy first with pain and then with that shimmering explosion that suddenly inverts pain and throws open the gate to pleasure.
As if time had disappeared, it was as if time had disappeared when Howard held him going in and out of him, caressing him and kissing him.
You are more desirable than any woman I have ever known, he said, stroking Robin's thigh and biting his nipple and becoming more tensile and frangible each second, forever.
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