Fugly (11 page)

“I’ve never known you to write autobiographically, either. Those college friends in your story—they sounded a lot like us.”

“Why are you playing this game?” David fired a look at Jake. The distress on his face was heartrending.

“I’m sorry,” Jake whispered, his urbane detachment swept aside. What made him think he could sustain it? Suddenly, his throat felt clotted. He reached for his glass and sipped, buying time he had no idea how best to use. “Maybe because I feel the way Neil Gaiman does about love.”

He’d outed The Word. It sat between them now, like a stubborn kid who refused to be ignored.

“I’m not familiar with his views,” David said to his right shoe. The foot it encased rested on his right knee. He curled his free set of fingers over his hidden toes. Obviously awaiting some explanation, he finally glanced at Jake.

Jake was again struck by the muted rays of mossy green in the rich, loamy brown of his eyes. “Gaiman said he hates love. It takes hostages and sticks glass splinters into their hearts. Or something like that.”

Shit, he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t even think. That headstrong kid kept whistling to get his attention and then taunting him with a smirk.

Worse yet, David kept watching him.

“So…is my assumption correct?” Jake pointed at the manuscript lying on the table.

He tried to maintain
some
semblance of self-possession.

“It’s correct.”

“Which means you’re telling me—”

David shrugged. “I love you. It’s time you knew. I’ve been in love with you since…probably since that night we went to the state fair together on a lark, and you kissed me in some tacky attraction on the midway.”

The memory resurfaced in Jake’s mind, as fresh and whole as if he’d kept it vacuum sealed. “Two tacky attractions—the funhouse and the haunted house—and one ride.”

His correction seemed to shock David. “The Himalaya. You remember.”

“I’ll never forget.”

Jake rose from the chair, crossed the living room, and jogged upstairs to the master bedroom. He grabbed a plush toy from its perch atop his dresser mirror and went back downstairs, where he tossed the toy at David.

“We were talking about our guilty pleasures,” Jake said. He felt the weight of inevitability riding each word. “When I told you I got a kick out of SpongeBob SquarePants, you spent eleven dollars to win that thing for me. Eleven fucking dollars.”

Jake’s eyes began to burn. “It meant more to me than if I’d just turned Johnny Depp gay and he’d given me a Mercedes to show his appreciation.”

David held up the silly-looking doll and gazed at it. He smiled wistfully as its spindly legs swayed.

“I hated that you made me feel that way,” Jake muttered.

He’d hated it, all right. First, because he figured he was too young to submit to that bondage called love. He had a career to build, places to go, men to fuck. Second, because David Ocho was too unremarkable yet too goddamned wonderful to be the perfect catch for him. So Jake had tried assiduously to turn his feelings into something else: a platonic enjoyment of David’s company, with an occasional burst of sexual hunger thrown in. No big deal. Nothing threatening.

“So you banished the feeling.” David lowered the toy to his lap. He idly stroked it as he watched Jake, who hadn’t moved from the foot of the open stairway.

“No, I just…reshaped it.”

“Why?”

Now Jake had somewhat different reasons for shunning that feeling. He knew David’s patient, undemanding love was being wasted on a superficial poseur who was cursed not only with a disfigured face but with a rotten head for business; wasted on a pretentious manwhore whose literary agency wasn’t more than a flyspeck on the map of the publishing industry.

“You should know,” Jake said. He didn’t want to launch into some
I don’t deserve
you, waa-waa
pity-party spiel.

After staring at him a few seconds longer, David whispered, “Fuck,” and looked down at SpongeBob’s moronic face.

Feeling helpless, Jake raised and lowered his arms. His hands fell like dead weight against his legs.

David carefully laid SpongeBob on the cushion beside him and got up. “I hope you can sell the story,” he said in a lifeless voice. He grabbed his jacket.

The realization that he was leaving propelled Jake forward. “David—” He stopped several feet away.

That unremarkable yet captivating face turned up to him. David didn’t look expectant. He had no expectations. Jake realized that had always been the case. David took things as they came, including Jake’s one-night stands with other men, and never felt entitled to a single thing.

They stared into each other’s eyes.

Jake prepared as best he could before throwing himself on that glass splinter. He swallowed before he spoke. “I love you too. Still.” He licked his lips and took the final step. The splinter sank clear through him. “Always.”

The responsive feeling that moved through David’s face made the impalement worthwhile.

“I know I look like deep-fried shit,” Jake said, “but I really wish you’d come upstairs with me.”

David smiled. “It’s better to look like deep-fried shit on the outside,” he said, “than on the inside.”

“Fuck that.” Trying to affect an air of insouciance, Jake reached for David’s hand.

“Don’t shove Dorian Gray at me. Let’s just go upstairs and be dirty boys.”

Jake wanted more than that, though. It was the first time he’d been able to admit it to himself. As he and David walked hand-in-hand to the bedroom, he knew he had more of a statement to make than
get me off
.

“Quit smiling,” he said, glancing at David.

“I can’t.”

“Then get undressed and lie down. On your back.”

“That I can do.”

Seeing David naked wasn’t a unique thrill for Jake. They’d been together in various states of undress dozens of times before. But it
was
a thrill, and the best possible prelude to passion, to see him stretched out on the bed like an offering. His lowering eyelids and rising cock invited Jake to take advantage.

Somehow, David looked different. Flawless, actually. Jake had never taken the time to study his physique—the artistic arrangement of muscles and bones, of fine black hair against tawny skin. Now, he wanted to. Needed to.

“I think it’s time to depart from the fast and furious,” Jake said.

Wearing a sultry smile, David extended his left arm.
That’s exactly where I belong
, Jake thought, crawling in beside him, feeling the reflexive curl of David’s arm around his shoulders as he settled half on the comforter and half on David’s body. Lifting himself slightly, he slid a hand over David’s chest and behind his head. As David tilted toward Jake to hold
his
head, Jake angled a leg over his lover’s leg.

Excitement immediately crackled through the air—it always did when they felt the first glide of bare skin over bare skin—but they didn’t rush their response. Jake knew it was time to luxuriate in David’s long, hard body and long, soft kisses. They were gifts he’d had for nearly two years but never taken the time to appreciate.

As they made slow love, they shifted and rolled but never once broke contact, never let each other go.

“Is it horrible, touching me?” Jake asked as David’s fingers stroked down his face.

“It’s horrible
not
touching you. This”—he trailed his tongue down Jake’s throat to his chest—“is heavenly.”

“I do love you, David.”

“That’s all I need. I don’t need gorgeous. It’s been that way from the start.”

His face moved up to Jake’s. They kissed with exquisite care, repeating the same message without words.

The languor couldn’t last forever. Urgent, stifled moans began to ball in Jake’s throat as his heat and sweat mingled with David’s. Their stiff cocks bumped and buffed each other more aggressively. David’s breath came harshly between his moist, open lips as he drew them over Jake’s body, nipples to abs to crotch, sucking here and nibbling there, harder each time. Jake tensed and shuddered, his fingers digging into David’s shoulders, biceps, ass.

Another shift of position, its necessity telegraphed by their excitement, and they were on their sides, head to crotch, hands gripping each other’s upraised thigh. Jake’s arousal spiraled as mouths found cocks, as he imagined David feeling exactly what he was feeling: the electric blast that came from wet heat and tightness around crown and shaft, from the irresistible rhythm of the suck.

His strangled groans pushed against David’s plump cockhead along with his tongue…and his control crumbled. Cum throbbed out of him as more cum spilled into him, and he would’ve laughed if the pleasure lapping through his bones hadn’t made him mute as a millstone.

“God
damn
, I love you!” David shouted as he rolled onto his back.

Finally, the laughter came.
I gave in to it
, Jake thought, flopping onto his belly,
and
the Four Horsemen didn’t gallop over me and pound me into the dirt. Instead, I got this
.

A happy dick and a heart full of joy. What more could a man possibly want?

Still grinning, he boosted himself up and sat on his haunches. David tilted onto his side. Head resting in upraised hand, he smiled. His smile gave way to a look of wonderment as his gaze moved over Jake’s face and shoulders.

“What’s wrong?” Jake asked. Did he look worse? Now that he’d let his desire for David deepen and move from occasional to ongoing, did his face seem more mutilated?

That would’ve been the cruelest twist of this curse. The cruelest twist of all.

“Actually, no.” Slowly, David sat up. “You don’t look like a splitting tomato anymore.”

“I don’t?”

“Not at all.” David reached out and touched Jake’s face. “I think the curse has been lifted. The rash is gone, Jake. It’s completely gone.”

The man who answered my knock on the door looked a little like Humpty Dumpty.

He was ovoid and no taller than five-foot-nine. A mat of finger-waved red hair hugged his skull, and not a single whisker sprouted from his pallid face. Although he was expecting me, he wasn’t too welcoming. I got the impression he was more shy than distrustful.

“Helmut Auerbach?” I asked.

He blinked once, as if it were a code. His eyelashes were nearly translucent. “You’re the person Jackson Spey sent to see me?”

“Yes. David Ocho.”

Auerbach nodded. “I’m sorry. I’m terrible with names. Come in.”

“He didn’t really send me,” I said, following my host into his townhouse. “He just suggested I contact you.”

The place was done in white. It was so white I felt I’d just slipped inside a ream of paper. Auerbach himself, dressed all in black, looked like a moving blot of ink. He led me into his library. At least the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining one wall gave my eyes some respite from the infernal glare. We sat in two chintz-covered easychairs tucked into a corner of the room.

“Would you like some tea?” Auerbach asked. It was obviously an afterthought.

“No, thank you. I’ve already had plenty of coffee.”

I could tell I was imposing enough just by being there. My reluctant host seemed like something of a recluse. Not old and not exactly antisocial, just introverted, like so many eccentrics.

“So,” he said, primly folding his hands and crossing his ankles, “what is it Jackson thinks I can tell you that he couldn’t tell you himself?”

“I’m not sure.” It was true, but it sounded lame. “I mean, he didn’t have time to fully explain what it was you could explain, because he had a date.”
Lamer.
I winced inside. I always did when I talked in blurry circles.

Thank goodness Auerbach got the gist of it. “Ah, yes. I heard he has a partner now. It rather surprised most of us.” He chuckled quietly and became reflective for a moment.

“He’s always been such a rogue.”

I didn’t ask who “us” were or press for any other explanation. Instead, I suddenly wished I did have something to drink, because my mouth felt as dry as mummy linen. I was nervous.

I cleared my throat and dived into my story, starting at the beginning and ending with the miraculous healings. And the fact that none of the affected men had been able to get in touch with the others until they’d all undergone their transformation back to normalcy. Auerbach, eyes downturned, listened without interrupting. A musing smile was on his face.

When I was finished, he asked, “So these three men, the ones you call the Hunt Club, are now happily bonded with people who care for them?”

“Yes.” The thought of my new relationship with Jake welled warm and sweet within me. “In at least one case, it’s love. The others could be too, sooner or later.”

And then, another thought. A memory, actually.
“That depends entirely on whom
they find attractive.”

“Jackson succeeded, then.” Auerbach cocked his head. “Well, he always does—

unconventional as his motives and methods might be.”

“So…you believe Mr. Spey was behind the whole thing? That he engineered it somehow? That’s what he implied.”

“No doubt.”

“No doubt he implied it, or no doubt he was responsible?”

Auerbach lifted his almost nonexistent eyebrows. “That latter. Of course.”

“Of course,” I echoed hollowly. The old WTF was slapping me upside the head again. “Mr. Auerbach, I realize Spey doesn’t seem like an entirely ordinary man—”

“He’s anything but ordinary. Yet he’s thoroughly grounded in the ordinary.”

Auerbach smiled. “And therein lies the source of his power.”

Now I was really adrift. “What power?” Goosebumps rose on my arms. In my mind, I saw the preternatural gleam of Spey’s leather jacket; heard the keys that mimicked my friends’ voices. “Who is he?”

“Exactly who he says he is.”

That didn’t do me any good. “Then…
what
is he?”

At that moment a gothy-looking young man, certainly younger than Auerbach’s thirty-some years, bounded into the room. “Helmut, Matilda’s—” When he spotted me, he looked startled and then penitent. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had company.”

“What about Matilda?” Auerbach asked kindly.