I could tell by the way the Broadway Dancer kept grasping his forehead as he typed in his underwear on his laptop that he was nursing one whopping hangover.
The Princess looked up from her magazine. The doorbell just rang. She put down her spoon and headed down the hall. Ruben seized the opportunity and darted up the stairs to Mr. Perfect's open window and entered. Clad only in slacks and a long shirt, he must have been freezing. The Princess returned from the hall with a confused expression on her face; nobody was at the door. She stretched out on her bed again, picked up her spoon, and continued reading.
It seemed like a lot of trouble to get from point A to point B. Why not just get buzzed in the front door like any normal person?
Ahh, but this building had a doorman. Like many buildings on the island, it's entirely possible the doorman in Perfect's building had too watchful an eye on visitors. And perhaps a more fluid exchange of information with the Missus than the Mister would have. I wondered if this close eye on her husband was something the Missus felt was warranted from a previous matrimonial faltering.
Hmm hmm.
The fucking marathons married New Yorkers run to get ass.
Moments later, Mr. Perfect entered the front door. He strode through the living room, tossing off his suit coat to the floor. As he entered the short dividing hall, he removed his belt and dropped it to the floor, and by the time he entered the bedroom he had dropped his trousers, leaving him clad only in his white button-down shirt. I doubted they even had a second to introduce themselves before Mr. Perfect pounced on Ruben and locked lips with him. With their mouths suctioned together like lampreys, Mr. Perfect unbuckled Ruben's pants, simultaneously pushing him to the bed.
Wow. How long had Mr. Perfect been storing up these impulses? Since he was sixteen?
As the pair of lampreys approached the bed, Ruben's dick was missile hard and sticking out of his khakis in launch position. Mr. Perfect smeared a finger of lube onto it and massaged it to a shine. The platform bed was the kind with a layer of drawers underneath and a thick box spring, making it perfectly high enough for what they were about to do. Romance was not the name of the game at the moment. In lust-driven swiftness, Mr. Perfect bent over the bed, his stomach on the shiny quilt, his arms in front of him, stretched out to the pillows, burying his nose and forehead into the quilt, with his legs bent at perfect right angles down to the floor, his muscular hairy globes thrust into the air. With one hand strangling the pillow in front of him, he reached with his other to pull Ruben's dick between his bulging lobes.
The Peasant was crowning The King.
My penis was responding to the coronation.
Ruben plunged deeply into Mr. Perfect's hole, slamming his thighs tightly against Perfect's thick, muscular hamstrings. My imagination supplied the sounds of the thighs and hamstrings slapping together, the squish of lube frothing into a white foam around the base of the piston, the primal moans caused by Perfect's hole stretching to accommodate Ruben's beefy dick, of Ruben's breathless shock of having his flesh forcefully engulfed and squeezed tight by a lubed pink hole.
Mr. Perfect opened his jaw and took a large mouthful of the quilt, and then clenched down, muffling grunts and screams of pain and unimaginable pleasure.
I started stroking my dick furiously. Straight, gay, bi-sexual-I didn't care one iota. This was hawt man-on-man action in the flesh and, although part of my brain judged it to be the antithesis of what I really wanted, another part of my brain was sending blood down to engorge my member by the pint. My whole pubic area was sweating again from the intensity of what I was watching, providing a sweet slickness to my strokes.
The men's pistoning was rapidly becoming more frenetic. Mr. Perfect began sweating through his white button shirt, and as the cotton clung to his back, the details of his well-developed lats and rear deltoids appeared. God, he was a sexy motherfucker.
I heard a raspy "Oh, Fuck!" echo across the courtyard.
Mr. Perfect grabbed his shirt and wrestled it over his head, free and naked. His back shone wet, hard, and striated with muscles. A pool of sweat gleamed in the small of his back. I grabbed my dick tighter. Ruben's face glistened. His abdomen peeked out from under his shirt occasionally, flexing, tightening, releasing.
Suddenly something caught my eye.
My heart fucking froze.
Mrs. Perfect opened the front door. She had returned unexpectedly.
Oh my fucking god!
She dropped her suitcase on the floor. That noise caused Mr. Perfect and Ruben to freeze like the snapping of a Polaroid. Mrs. Perfect uttered something-perhaps, "Honey, I'm home?" I watched in horror as Ruben scrambled to hide somewhere.
Mrs. Perfect eyed the coat on the floor. She lifted her brow.
Ruben hopped out the window onto the fire escape, his shiny dick still waving in the air. Mr. Perfect grabbed the lube, made one sweeping brush with his forearm across the quilt to smooth it out, and darted to the bathroom, closing the door. Ah, he would pretend to take a shower.
Mrs. Perfect entered the dividing hall and saw the belt. She picked it up, rigidly grasping it.
Ruben descended the fire escape only a couple steps, but stopped before he'd be forced to enter directly in front of the Princess.
Yappity yap yap.
Mrs. Perfect paused in the empty bedroom. She sniffed and widened her eyes. Confusion? Anger? Disgust? I could not tell because steam drifting from the bathroom into the bedroom, fogged up the window. Mrs. Perfect went to the open window.
Knock knock knock.
Was that my door?
Ruben flattened against the cold brick wall beneath her. He sucked in his stomach, simultaneously tucking his dick back into his pants.
Knock knock knock.
"Who's there?" I barked.
"It's Johanna."
I shut the curtain with a swift movement, sending dust flying.
Shit me to hell!
Chapter Ten
"You ill?" Johanna asked, easing her Kelly green couture dress into my office chair, the only one vacant.
"No. Yes. No. I don't know."
I was definitely flustered. I'd managed to buy some time to let my dick deflate by throwing on sweats and holding a mound of dirty clothing in front of my groin as I answered the door, pretending to be cleaning.
"You look like shit," the lady volunteered.
"Thank you."
"My therapist thinks I need closure."
"On what?"
"On us."
"I think he's right."
"I think she's wrong."
Oops. It's not as if she hadn't been going to the same therapist for two years.
"I think she just thinks you're cute," Johanna said, "and nobody likes to see cute people suffer."
"That's sweet. Well, go ahead. Close."
She bit her lip. I don't think she'd thought this through beyond this point. And that was not like her. I ought to have acknowledged the rare and beautiful opportunity to have a moment of unprepared candor with her.
I smiled for the first time in months. A follow-up conversation after a breakup is supposed to be emotional and all-consuming with the gravitas of two people who need to simultaneously express their love for each other while justifying their need to remain apart. It was supposed to help lift the fog. Yet here I was, with Johanna right in front of me, wondering if Ruben made it past the Princess, wondering if Mrs. Perfect put enough pieces together to start calculating a divorce settlement, wondering if the children were right behind Mommy in the hallway to complicate that lovely farce …
"Are you here?" demanded Johanna.
I refocused on Johanna being back in my apartment. I observed her demeanor. She was highly conflicted inside, yet attempting to adopt a comfortable posture in the chair rather than remain standing upright. She wanted me to feel comfortable-or at least safe-to speak freely. She wore a soft green dress with an elegant yet relaxed feminine cut. She was open to being thought of as sexy but did not want me to feel pressured into thinking of her that way. This was probably the most unguarded she'd been in front of me for years. She and her therapist really had been working hard. I ought not to take that lightly.
Honesty. Honesty.
"I haven't really talked too much since you left. I'm not used to it. I'm sorry."
Johanna took that in, and it appeared to resonate deeper in her than either one of us expected. For the first time she looked around the room. She saw a human tragedy mapped out in mounds. Her eyes watered slightly. She sighed softly and ran her fingers along part of the piano, eyeing all the remnants piled on top of it.
Looking away from me, she said in a soft voice, "I always loved your music. It's important to me that you know that."
"It used to be important to me that you loved my music."
Used to be. I actually said those words. I actually meant them too. I did not mean to injure her, but I had two reasons for saying them. One: I was never terribly trusting that Johanna's esteem came from a creatively truthful place. Two: I was not terribly sure I would ever write another song again.