I ducked and grabbed my Macbook.
Mr. Layworth was scanning the courtyard slowly, scoping the landscape for obstacles before attacking his prey. And his prey was Marzoli. His gaze landed on my window and held fast.
Marzoli opened the curtain all the way and stepped into full frame, clad only in the tight blue and white shorts. Layworth retreated to the bathroom and returned seconds later without clothing, wrapped in a white towel, looking spectacularly Greek with chiseled muscular definition in the bright daylight. His guns bulged as thick as an average man's thighs. His shoulders bulged. His chest bulged. Everything bulged. Layworth once again put his arms above his head against the window, and stared into our apartment with supreme confidence.
Marzoli matched if not exceeded Layworth's physical perfection muscle to muscle, but had none of that overt master-of-all-I-survey attitude. The sulfuric fumes of an over-inflated ego did not fuel Marzoli. Marzoli was cocky, to be sure, but aware of his affectation, inviting strangers to participate in a sexy and lively game. Marzoli pretended to be the shit just to amuse himself as well as others. As a result, he came across as charmingly badass and irresistibly loveable. Layworth, on the other hand, believed to his core he was a better breed of human being than the rest, and he came across as an asshole. As with yesterday, somehow this pose with his hands above his head against the window epitomized this assholishness.
Marzoli rested his hand underneath his dick and clutched the length.
Layworth wasted no time. He flicked his pelvis to the side and the towel fell down to the floor. So smooth, all too slimy.
Marzoli muttered out of the side his mouth to me, "Okee dokee smokee, let's do this."
Marzoli pulled his gym shorts down his knees, and let his touched-up organ dangle in the cold air. Layworth licked his lips. Our theory was correct. Layworth had dammed up testosterone from having been cockblocked from Ruben three days ago and then from Marzoli yesterday, leaving his cock raging. Layworth put his middle finger in his mouth, moistened it with saliva, and then reached around his fleshy firm lobes. He inserted, and parted his mouth in ecstasy.
I could virtually hear his long low groan.
"What a fucking creep," Marzoli muttered.
"You'd better show him you're game," I said.
"Put the song on."
I played it, and Max Angel's breathy voice crooned "Slow Slide Down From Me," filling every inch of the apartment with sensuality. Marzoli's eyes quickly went from bemused to salacious. Marzoli reached his hand to his mouth as Layworth had, slobbered saliva onto it, then reached down to pump his penis until it plumped with blood. The irony hit me-an entire career of songwriting was having its greatest success right at this very moment, with this very dance, with this very libidinous yet noble purpose.
"Take yours out," Marzoli ordered me over the singing.
I complied. I was already good to go, and Marzoli feasted his eyes on it until his man muscle started twitching. I was so fucking rigid I had to touch lightly so as not to shoot all over my keyboard and fuck up Apple's fucking no-liquid repair policy. Marzoli gripped even tighter and slid his fist from the base all the way to his scarred head. Precum had already started dripping from his hole, streaking down his shaft. He was going to need more cover-up.
I glanced briefly at the computer. Layworth started rocking his hips to and fro, digging his finger deeper. Suddenly he stopped and extracted it.
Then he did it.
Through the falling snow, he motioned for Marzoli to come over.
This was it.
Marzoli, however, shook his head and mouthed "No."
I immediately registered Marzoli's psychological manipulation. Convincing Layworth that Marzoli needed to be cajoled into crossing the courtyard indicated that Marzoli wouldn't ordinarily be such a slut. It flattered Layworth, making Marzoli all the more desirable.
Layworth signaled again for him to come over more insistently.
Marzoli paused, looked down at his feet, and then looked up and nodded bashfully. Layworth winked in satisfaction. Marzoli quickly stepped out of the frame and put his back against the wall, breathing hard. In spite of his pretense of bashfulness, he was nervous as fuck.
"I want you to know," he said to me, his voice quavering, "that what you're about to see isn't me."
"You're going to have sex with him. You can't fake that. You're going to have to get into him in order to fuck him."
"Yeah."
"He's got a hell of a body."
Marzoli couldn't look me in the eye.
He began to reapply makeup to his plump penis.
When he finished, I handed him his clothes and said, "It's cold out there."
He pulled on his jeans, his polo shirt, and his socks.
I held his shoes out for him. My heart was pounding, as was his. But mine was beating from an entirely different line of thought. As he reached out, I withdrew the shoes.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"The body isn't there."
"What do you mean?"
"The Layworth kids played in the closet last night. They saw nothing."
Marzoli grabbed his shoes and kneeled to put them on.
"Ruben is there."
"He's not in the closet."
"He has to be."
"But I saw … "
"When were you going to tell me what you saw?" he demanded, dead cool.
He stood up, eye-to-eye, and once again probed my brain, skillfully following my thoughts even more closely than ever. I swallowed the painful dryness in my throat. I couldn't speak. With each new second a lathe sheered my vocal chords one pass at a time. My eyes filled with tears. He displayed no sympathy. I knew he knew I'd withheld the information for fear of losing him. He crossed his arms. His face was stern. The suspense of how he would react was killing me. Would he be too angry to want to deal with me again, or would he instantly forgive me and overlook my goddamn weakness?
Being a natural son-of-bitch, Marzoli did neither.
He placed his gun on my desk with a solid thud.
"I can't take this with me if I'm going to be naked," he stated flatly. "You're going to have to watch closely and text me if you see anything I need to be aware of. Anything."
And he stepped speedily out the window into the snow, leaving me uncertain what he was feeling about my fuckup, and to what extent he was feeling it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Marzoli left black footprints on the snow-covered metal steps as he carefully padded his way down the fire escape, circled the second floor platform, then descended the next flight to the brick wall.
Mr. Perfect kept his eye on the prize. No turning back now.
A four-inch pad of untouched white snow now covered the foot-wide wall. He placed one foot tentatively on the wall, then, after assessing the feasibility, alighted from the fire escape onto the wall completely. He extended his thick arms to secure more balance, and negotiated the distance of the wall, foot after foot, kicking sheets of snow off to either side.
The image of this beautiful specimen performing this high wire act for only two sets of eyes was exquisite. His broad shoulders narrowed to his hips and down to his delicately placed feet, balancing as laced flakes of snow dropped down in white streaks from the sky to the courtyard ground. I was mesmerized by his performance-competent but dangerous, illicit but noble, delicate but strong, determined but conflicted, heated but icy. In an odd way, Mr. Perfect and I were now linked by watching the slow real-time progression of this walker on the wall.
He finally reached the fire escape on the opposite wall.
Marzoli was now on the enemy's side of the war zone. He was about to encounter a hairy, chiseled, pumped physique of unquestionable allure. Any illusion I might have had that I somehow offered something that appealed to Marzoli was about to be pitted against Mr. Perfect's many somethings. If Mr. Perfect was, in fact, not guilty of murder, as I was now beginning to suspect, then I was sending the best thing I'd encountered in decades across the courtyard and up Mount Olympus to diddle Zeus. After Zeus, why would he care to return to this lump of clay?
The dark descending whirlpool in my brain was starting to rotate again.
One way or another, he's going to leave me.
Marzoli's ascent up the opposite fire escape was swift, for there was less snow directly falling on that side of the courtyard due to the direction of the wind. The Princess was no longer in her bedroom, having disappeared into her bathroom to finish cutting her hair, so Marzoli bypassed her window without risk. This time, however, I wished the Princess had been there to prevent his progress.
Mr. Layworth hovered at the bedroom window until Marzoli arrived. He swung the window open. Marzoli slid over the windowsill and stood upright in the bedroom. Marzoli had now become one of the puppets I observed across the courtyard. The moment was stunning and surreal, twisting the distant and the intimate, the personal and the impersonal.