Contemporary Gay Romances (25 page)

“Why not?” Roger asked.

“I just can’t…You’re a kid, right?”

“So what? Up you go, that’s right! Pull it around! See, you fit into it fine! I’m getting in now.”

“It’s too small.”

“I’ll back up against you.”

“Christ! You’re kidding me.”

Roger eased himself into the bag backward, then slid his feet in. “You don’t need your coat. With the two of us like this, it’ll heat up fine. Might be a good idea to take off your jacket.”

“What about my pants too?” Guy whispered.

“Probably a good idea, otherwise you’ll be overheated by morning. I’m in my shorts!”

“What?” Guy sat up. “I’m keeping my pants on.”

“Suit yourself.”

“No one will believe this,” Guy said. “Gee, Officer, he forced me into the bag and then told me to strip too.”

“Your body is nice and warm,” Roger said, squiggling in deeper.

“You have no idea what a rocket I am tonight.”

“How can that be?” he asked sleepily. “You drank so many martinis. Eight? Ten?”

“Go to sleep.”

“I am. I’m now going to sleep.”

Roger closed his eyes but when he opened them, the big blond head was inches away, and Guy was looking right at him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Guy said in the oddest tone of voice, strangely, hoarse. “It’s just that suddenly…I remembered why I do this. Why it’s worth it
.
You know what I mean?”

“No idea at all,” Roger admitted, mumbling very sleepily. Now that he was warm and comfortable, he was being rapidly overtaken again.

“Want me to…?” was the last thing Guy more or less clearly said, and Roger mumbled back an unintelligible but he hoped positive reply as he sank deeper and deeper.

*

“I don’t know what happened,” Cap admitted, decades later. “When I woke up, Diane was gone. Guy was gone. Their car was gone. You had a fifty dollar bill stuffed in your underwear. No! I’m kidding about the last part.”

They were out on the beach again. Venice Beach, this time. It was sunset again, and the other bartender had come back, and they’d stepped out of the bar, across the very public promenade and onto the sand. headed to the water’s edge. Cap said he would return and finish off a night shift as they were busy at the bar tonight.

“And you and Diane?” Roger found he had to ask.

“I couldn’t! I just couldn’t do it with her! Everything was too…weird! But I had a great time! I only got about two hours’ sleep! We were up all night…In a sense, Diane was what I’d always hoped Trish would be. Grown-up, mostly. Not clingy. Not possessing. But it was all too late for me with…either of them.”

“And the guy? The G-man?” I had to ask. “I’m
so
oblivious…Was he queer? Or what?”

Cap shrugged. “Their friends at that bar were. And the ones they talked about. But…who knows what either of them were. Or if they were anything definite at all… They
were
sensational-looking, weren’t they?”

“He was a ’mo’s dream come true! If only I’d known what to do with him then!” Roger laughed. “Or could stay awake.”

That was when Cap said the sentence that would haunt Roger forever after. “You know, Rog, you turned out to be the lucky of the two of us in relationships.”

“Some luck. Mark’s dying,” Roger reminded him.

“I know. I know. But at least you never had to feel that you were in sexual bondage to someone who was your inferior. You and Mark are equal, and strong together. Maybe that’s what I was looking for back then, myself.”

“You mean when you allegedly tried to seduce me. Which, by the way, I don’t for a second believe or remember.”

Roger did recall them lying side by side, later that morning, when he woke up, their sleeping bags half-opened next to each other, their shirts off, their shorts on, the morning sun radiating gently onto them, the mist rising off the surf, evaporating with this funny little noise, them talking quietly for maybe an hour, before they got up, got dressed, and walked back over a half bridge to the little town for breakfast, then spent the day at the beach, arriving back in Manhattan around midnight. He recalled nothing more.

“I guess I was a little too subtle,” Cap admitted.

Or a little too hetero, Roger wanted to say.

Just then they heard someone shouting. It was the other bartender, holding up a phone, for Cap. Karina. It had to be Karina.

“This was great!” Cap said, “Great!” He hugged Roger and then turned and headed to the bar.

Roger remained where they’d stopped, watching the enormous sun drop into the burning red Pacific, guessing, without pain, or even wonder, that they’d probably never see each other again.

It was later, as he was crossing under the high, globed streetlights on the Venice Beach sidewalk that, among the crowds of nighttime strollers and men and women skateboarding, biking, jogging in wild and weirdly wonderful outfits, one roller skater, a middle-aged guy dressed in a silver and gold outfit of short skirt and tight bodice with puffy sleeves, a crown of a cap and a battery-lighted, sparkling wand, passed him, gracefully angling in and out of pedestrians, and ever so lightly but distinctly tapped him on the shoulder with the wand.

“Shaz-am!” called out the good fairy of the west. And was gone.

Going west beyond the Stockton, California, transport hub, all roads but rutted ones soon come to an end: what is still above water in the East-Bay has been completely Green for a century or more. There is a twice-a-day monorail that sweeps all the way along the increasingly ragged coastline, right over to the drowned remains of what used to be the city of Richmond, stopping at Berkeley Island. I know the route well, this being maybe the sixtieth and I hoped final visit to Cynara in the fen country around what had been the ancient container-port town of Martinez.

I’d grown familiar over the decades with how subtly the landscape alters as you head west, first little encroachments of water like tiny fingers, with here a cottage, there a mound-house surrounded in reeds, then water on both sides, until at last where it is land it’s all threaded through with canals or drowned roads. Fields that once grazed cattle and horses are now marshes feeding waterfowl and dragonflies almost as large, while scarlet-throated sea eagles wheel overhead, screeching their dominion before settling to perch upon what remains of a column once belonging to a desalinization plant or upon the crumbling stanchion of a long-collapsed bay bridge.

Cynara has lived here among the bogs and meres forever, or so the Finnster had always told me, and from our very first crisis in a Centauri Outer-Cloud (a potential showdown with the Bella=Arths) he’d turned to me, half-serious for once, his fingers still dancing almost too fast to see over the touch-board for weapons and maneuvering, and he’d said, “Anything happens to this beautiful bod, promise to take it back home, even if I look to be ninety-nine percent not-there, Locke. Take me back to Cynara in the fen country, east of San Fran, and she’ll take care of me. She’ll make sure I come back, good as new, as amazingly gorgeous as I am at this moment.”

Nothing happened that time, of course, and nothing happened for most of the following year real-time while we patrolled and explored and guarded Earth’s stellar expansion and in general made pests of ourselves among the people actually doing the work and learning—mostly scientists.

We were stationed during the first part of that tour a few light-years out, in the so-called “New Territories.” None of us expected that area to be anything other than a no-man’s-land neutral zone for decades to come between the two cultures, so naturally we’d all then been astonished to see Beta C’s system suddenly taken over by our own kind, leading to the eruption of the recent war.

A foreshadowing of that conflict
had
happened, the one time during that tour that I’d chanced to be away from the Finnster, off-ship at Charon station, undergoing my officer-upgrade Nanos.

My shipmates found themselves in a fracas and then quickly in a firefight with some trigger-happy Arth hauler that had wandered off course. The lower helm, where the Finnster and I always teamed up, had been badly hit and burned before a “diplomatic misunderstanding” was eventually sorted out between the Service and the hard-shells.

I’d always assumed Cynara had been the Finnster’s childhood sweetheart or first university live-in girlfriend: possibly even the love of his life who hadn’t quite worked out for whatever reason—probably because he’d joined the Service. It’s difficult for us to sustain relationships with folks at home when we are away six, eight, ten Earth years at a go, aging only ten or twelve weeks at a go, while they age normally.

Come to think of it, he never had explained exactly what Cynara was to him. But I’d promised him to do it. Notwithstanding the fact that in all the years we were actual mates in the Service, he’d never once mentioned her in any other context, never mind attempted to visit her, or even gotten her some weird gift from an exotic planet-fall. Given how free the Finnster usually was with his “beautiful bod” in those days, I almost would have been surprised to think he would be,
could
be, faithful to any one person.

I wasn’t alone in the little monorail single car train during this latest visit to Cynara in the fens. An older, mixed race, but prevalently Af-Am fellow was in the car. He was Service, or once-Service, given his bulk and stature even now, not to mention his evident UV eye-op, how he still cut his hair, how he glared at you, and especially how he held himself erect, even though he had to have begun way earlier than us. Older too. Maybe two hundred, two-fifty by now. A good-looking man, of course, but then we all were, all of us nearly perfect physical specimens of whatever type or mix of types we were. This being the Service’s unspoken motto, and I’d learned, also an actual requirement. “We want the best of the best in every possible way to represent us in front of some bug or fish or slime mold intelligence we encounter out there,” the first Head of the Service had written in her memoirs by way of explanation. But the real giveaway was how he had all but ignored me when I got off first, at the platform raised above the dilapidated ruins of the old Amtrak station. As I hopped into a waiting two-seater solar Spinner, I was tempted to throw him a salute, just for the hell of it.

I always arrived at Cynara’s at sundown, and the long light would glitter up the waters so intensely I could barely make out the hovering ellipse of green house, gravi-raised above the fen.

But there Cynara would be, on her wide bayfront deck, waving as I swept in for an air dock landing over the waters, one arm thrown up over her face to shield her eyes from the glare.

“I wasn’t expecting you for another month,” she said by way of greeting. Her long red hair would be always be newly tinted; just for me, I was sure, always a slightly differing shade, and she seemed to age nearly as slowly as we in the Service did, not having the same treatments we were guaranteed for life, naturally, but I believe receiving a fifth of the amount of Nanos because of her care of Finn; and those probably fortified by some witchy concoctions she herself brewed up.

“You look lovely as usual,” was my response. Then, “You didn’t read all of my comms.?” I opened my Service kit and removed the little mesh double-helmet that Service Medical Tech had prepped for this trip.

“I read it,” she led me indoors out of the fen’s maritime-tang air and into a more earthy indoor musk, “I guess I thought it was a joke.”

“No joke. They want me to try it, using this new Delphinid-derived technique for neural synthesis. They figure he’s sufficiently water-soluble by now that it might work.”

During the prelude to the war, fleeing Arths had unwittingly led us to a Delphinid colony world. We’d known nothing of the Delphs. They were mammalian too, from out of the sea like us, and they hated the hard-shells. They had welcomed us and joined forces with us against the Arths.

“And you? You don’t look very water-soluble to me,” she commented.

“I’m supposed to take this!” I held up the vial they’d prepared—Delphinid and Human scientists together—“And wait an hour. Unless you think you two were closer and you’ll do it yourself.”

She laughed, pushing the vial away, sat me down, and there was tea at hand, one of her variations of Roibos and something off-world too. Even through the triple-pane-glass, I could hear the high scree-ing of the sea eagles performing their daring sunset acrobatics over the bay waters.

“It hurts me, Locke, to see you torture yourself like this,” she said, sympathetically, and from this close up now I could see that she was heavily cosmetized and beneath it she had aged, was aging, even in the few months we’d been apart, and without the full Service-Nanos, she would continue to age quickly, far faster than myself, so that if I had to keep coming I would soon be a young man coming to visit an old woman.

“It’s not torture!” I assured her. How could I explain?

“I keep thinking, I’ll get a comm. from Locke and he’ll say, ‘I’ve found someone. A real keeper. And I’m not coming back, Cynara. Not now, not ever again.’ And then you show up early, like this, with something new, always new that they give you to try, you with your undying hope.”

“I promised him. We both did.”