Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 13:12:19 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: Destiny

Destiny


     She was so sexy standing legs akimbo in silver heels and black
mesh stockings, you'd pay to look at her. But she was free. "When you
pay," she said, "it's your pleasure I have to pay attention to, but
when it's for free, all you have to do is make sure I am turned on."

     Men want her turned on and enveloping herself in them, rubbing
her beautifully wrought chest against them, blowing in their ears and
caressing their neck. That was their reward. They knew it. They wanted
it. They needed it. She provided it.

     It had been a long day at the office. She thought it would never
end. She experienced several lost moments when time seemed to stop,
but shook herself out of them, drank coffee, frequently pushed her
unruly hair out of her eyes, and plowed through the work.

     She liked her work. She liked the pressure, and she liked the
people. They had jobs that allowed them to flirt with glamor, and that
made them glamorous. They kissed when they greeted each other in the
morning and when they left in the evening. They told each other how
gorgeous they were. She was an editor for a renowned publisher and she
worked with A-list authors. A few knew of her other persona, but to
most people at the office she was Drew, a boy-genius, who had gotten
to the top at the age of twenty-five.

       She liked being part of it. But she liked being away from it,
too. She needed to be. She liked having several dispositions, not
being limited to one personality, one destiny.



     She also liked the beveled, gilt-framed, full-size mirror in her
bedroom. It was, it felt to her, where she kept herself, where she
went to have it emerge.

     She admired her legs in stockings and garters and was pleased by
the allure of her thighs, the fine, bare skin glowing between her
stockings and the silver panties that matched her shoes. She needed a
skirt to go out, a strip of leather wrapped around her hips and belted
with a band of square silver mosaics. A leather jacket was all she
needed on top. She'd keep the jacket zipped up till she got to the
club. She had on red lipstick, black kohl around her eyes. Her
coiffure was a wig of long dark hair arranged in a regal upsweep. The
style privileged the stately column of her long slender neck.



     She couldn't keep her hard-on down or her heart from overflowing
with happiness. She entered like sunshine into the gloomy depths of
The Inferno. Everybody greets her eagerly and hungrily.

      The place becomes quiet. She gets up on the stage and slowly
unzips the jacket and shrugs it off. She pulls the skirt from off her
hips. It falls to the floor. From her platform on the tiny stage, she
stares down at them. She slaps her palm gently with a miniature whip,
a suggestion of her aggressive eroticism. Then she begins to sing.
"I'll Be Seeing You", "Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Joe", "I Cover
the Waterfront." "Lush Life." More.

     They love her. Mike comes over after. "You are gorgeous, Lila,
more gorgeous than ever." She leans over and kisses him with the kind
of passion he can only imagine. "Thank you," she whispers huskily and
brushes his lips with her fingers. "Now be a good boy until I let you
be my bad boy."

     He looks at her with sad, little boy, imploring eyes, cow eyes.
She gently touches their lids. "I want to see light sparkling from
your eyes. Begging eyes bring me down. You can need without begging. I
want to see your eyes shine with need. I like that. But no begging, no
demanding." She kissed each eye tenderly – and chastely.

     "It has to be as you say, Lila."

      She kissed her finger and pressed it to his lips. "Enjoy the
wait," she said and left him, hard like stone looking at her. But he
was bait. One man in toreador pants, bare feet, and a Hawaiian shirt,
stripped, knelt before him, brought his lips to his cock, and slowly
adored it until he held all of it in his wet mouth; his shirt and
pants off, his palms locked behind his head, he could not touch
himself. His body tensed and burned with lust as he sucked and as his
throat devoured Mike's semen, he shot his own into the hands of a guy
wearing only a white jock who had been caressing his balls as he
sucked.

      Lila interrupted everything when she said, "Which one of you is
coming home with me tonight. She saw the need in Mike's eyes, despite
what had just happened. It pleased her. "Haven't you had enough for
one night?" she said.

     "With you, Lila, there never is enough."

     "I give my all and you want more," she said. "No, Mike, let
somebody else take you home. Your time has not come." She signaled,
however, to a shy-looking, handsome, vanilla-seeming collegiate guy,
casually dressed in what used to be called ivy-league fashion.

      "Take me home," she said leaning against him, taking his hand
and leading him out of the place before he could even say anything.



     Outside he took a joint and a lighter out of his camel hair
jacket, lit the joint, dragged it alive and passed it to her.

      "You ain't so green or so shy," she said. "And you're not as
sure as all that," he said. "Try me," she said. "I will," he said,
grinning handsomely. He leaned over and covered her mouth with his.
Their bodies swiveled together and they embraced on the nearly empty
after-midnight sidewalk, kissing as if they were alone.



     "You are more than I ever imagined," he said, gazing into her
eyes, by the side of her bed where she stood, naked and trembling in
his arms.



     The sun shone above the water, blazing upward on the arc of the
sky's blue slope. It broke through their window. Gabriel sprang out of
bed, ruffled his hair, and pulled on his speedo. Lila was up, too. She
fit into the two parts of her blazing red, metallic bikini as if she
were born to it. She wriggled her ankle and toes, and they ran across
the sand and into the Mediterranean. They felt the stretch of their
bodies and their vigor, and without having to wait for thought,
plunged themselves into the morning-cold water, swam through the
colder pockets and floated in the warm spots, saw the blur of blue and
green striations in the water as their eyes met the underwater world
with every exhalation of the bubbling breath just taken in in the
clearer upper world, in the ocean made of air.



     "Look," Gabriel said, as they sat, later, shaded by leaf-rich
vines, and drank coffee, "I know what the difficulties you can
encounter must be. But I'm not deterred, and I'm not hiding. I knew
who you were the moment I saw you, and it knocked me out. Aren't you
in love with me? That's the beginning of possibility." He was
exuberant without losing his composure.

      "You are adorable," she said, touching his smoothly-shaven cheek
and bringing his lips to hers. "This climate brings you out. You are
so tan and tall, and masculine. I love it."

      Gabriel shivered as Lila drew him to her and brushed his lips
with her tongue.

      "I wish I could say this was our honeymoon," Gabriel said.

      "I wish I could grant your wish, but it is the one wish I cannot
grant. I promise to be true to you, and you know I love you and am in
love with you, but I am not made to be monogamous. I cannot be one
thing or another. I am many things. Don't look so beaten. You have no
reason to be. I will always be yours, and you will always be mine. I
am not forsaking you." As she whispered these things to him she gently
fingered him and rose above him, taking hold of him with her eyes, and
she entered him and very slowly took him to heaven.



     Gabriel took the call immediately when he saw it was Lila. He'd
been waiting for it for days. He could not reach her phone. He always
got her voice mail. He brushed off the fear that anything could be
wrong as patronizing. Now, she was back. He could not wait to see her
and to feel her, and to feel her touch. He wanted to be inside her and
he wanted to feel her inside him.

      "Lila," he cried with joy.



     "Gabriel," she sobbed. He crashed. "Lila," he repeated,
frightened. "I'm home," she said. "Come over right now. Shut your
phone and come. I need you here now." "I'm on my way."

      He put the phone in his pocket, took his wallet from the desk,
went down the elevator, got his bike from the cellar and was at her
place in five minutes. Heart pounding, he banged on her door. She
opened it, just in her robe. She was still sobbing, and she threw
herself into his arms and buried herself in him. "Fuck me, right now.
I need it so much. Just you. I need you inside me." Gabriel picked her
up and held her hard to him and placed his fingers between her thighs
and caressed her as she moistened and put his finger deeply into her
as he kissed her and pushed his tongue to the back of her throat. He
kept his finger inside her; with his other hand he caressed the strong
shaft of her male clit, subdued now by the tremor of her womanhood. He
tapped it with his fingertips as if he were fingering the holes in a
flute.

     "You look so beautiful," he said, caressing her neck with his
lips. "Why are you trembling and sobbing?"

     "Keep me warm. Ride me." He rode her. "Lila, what has happened?"

      Then she told him.



     She had gone away to visit an old friend, more than a friend, who
had helped her become herself. She was dying now. Lila told Gabriel
before she left that she'd thought about it, and that it would be most
sensible to travel as a man, keeping up a male persona. Gabriel saw
her the morning she left for the first time in male drag. As beautiful
as she was as a woman, that's how handsome she was as a man. He held
her in his arms, astonished at the force of his desire. Lila grinned
at him. "I'm called Drew," she said. "Drew," Gabriel said, and
devoured her.

     She rented a car, and set out. It was on her way home that terror struck.

      "Why didn't you call me or answer your phone?" Gabriel asked.

      "He took my phone."

      "But you could have..." Gabriel began to say the obvious.

      "I was on a bus. I had to hold myself together. I could not even
drive back, the shakes were so bad. I returned the car at a local
office and got the bus. If I stopped to feel, I don't know what would
have happened. There was nothing you could do. I only had to get home
and get back to you."



     It was growing dark. Gabriel and Lila sat by the Hudson looking
at the sunset. She was dressed pretty conventionally, jeans, boots, a
scoop neck sleeveless black tanktop, a leather jacket, no lipstick,
just some black eye-liner. Even like that, she had glamor to burn. The
water shimmered as the sun set. Lila's agitation had subsided and when
it emerged it was in the form of indignation. She let the story out in
pieces. They sat in a coffee shop. She picked up her narrative:

      "`Shit man,' he said, `I am cool, and I know it, and you know
it. So you can thank your lucky stars I stopped you and not somebody
else. You can think of it like you're makin' yourself a little visit
to an alternative reality. No New York flim-flam here. No rainbows.
I'm lettin' you into my world so you can see what virtue is, and maybe
you'll take something back with you.' He said that after he had
pirated everything I had in the name of law and security! He left me
with nothing.

     "`You know that fat guy in Florida,' he said, once he had me in
custody, `who shot the beanpole black punk? I admire him. He stayed
cool. He stood his ground when it came to his rights not to be
bothered by people he did not want to have to be botherin' with.

          "He took my wallet and everything in it. When he saw it was
a rental car I was driving he was angry. `I can't take that,' he said.
Just like that. Then he took the ring, a beautiful art deco ring with
a brilliant ruby. You've never seen it. Johanna gave it to me before
she died. She knew I admired it. When I lived with her, she'd let me
wear it sometimes. When I had it on, I'd feel like I was her. I begged
him not to take it. I even cried. It was not a strategy. It would have
been a bad one if it had been. He became furious.

     "`Tears are for bitches,' he said. `I should have known. A night
in our jail will cure you of that.' He cuffed my hands together and
sat me in the cruiser, locked the door and then got in the driver's
seat, leaving my car locked at the side of the road `My car,' I said.
"It will be here in the morning,' he said.

      "`Do you do this often?' I said, turning my head towards him as he drove.

      "`As often as necessary,' he said.

     "When we got to the jail – it was a single cell in what looked
like it once was a house where trainmen slept and ate between runs --
I asked if I could have a receipt for everything he had confiscated.
Something had turned in me. I don't know where I got the nerve, but I
think it came from some fierce indignation. I owed it to Johanna.

      "`What you need that for?' he said.

       "`Records. Deduct it from my taxes.'

       "`If I was you, I'd let it go and be glad. This is a civil
proceeding now – this time he pronounced the "g" -- a fair trade, but,
you know, if you give us trouble it could become a criminal
proceeding, and you would not want that.'

      "`What crime have I committed?'

      "`Whatever crimes I say you did. Carrying contraband, being a
drug courier, vagrancy, smoking marijuana, jewelry theft.'

      "`You didn't find any contraband...'

      "`What was that ring I had to confiscate?'

      "`My ring.'

      "`Stolen, or purchased with drug money.'

      "`Excuse me!'

      "`Stolen or bought with drug money.'

      "`How could you prove that?'

       "`How could you prove it wasn't?'

      "`And you didn't find anything, no drugs, no pot, nothing in the
car or on me.'

      "`I smelled a burnt marijuana smell.'

      "`How do you prove that?'

      "`By say so.'

      "`That's not evidence.'

      "`When I say it, it is.'

     "`You think pretty highly of yourself,' I said, moved by a force
propelling me. If I'd stopped to think I'd never have said it. But
then I'd have missed seeing something I wonder if anyone has ever
seen. That cop was stopped in his tracks. He couldn't say yes, and he
couldn't say no. For a moment, all his defenses were down. He was
astonished. There was a terrible intimacy that I felt, and I know he
felt the same thing. I felt frozen sexuality and throttled desire
inside him.'

     "`You talk too much,' he said.

      He locked me in and left me. Once he was gone, I began to shake,
like when you just miss getting hit by a truck when you're crossing
the street.

     "It was hardly daylight when he came into the jail the next
morning and let me out. He was stone-faced. `You be gone now before
people get up and get to wonderin' what a stranger is doin' prowlin'
around.' He handed me my car keys and pointed me to the highway.

      "`I have no money,' I said.

      "`Not my problem,' he said.

     "`No,' I said, `you've got other problems, but you could solve
mine if you gave me back my wallet.'

      "He had already gone through it.

      "`You haven't got much in it,' he said, handing it back to me.

      "`The picture," I said, indicating a photo Johanna had taken of
me, taken a few years ago, on the boardwalk, dressed in high heels,
sunglasses, and my red bikini.

      "`You oughtn't be carrying pictures like this around,' was all
he would say, and pushed me roughly towards the road."



      Reggie Lancaster – that's the cop's name – could not shake an
uncomfortable sense of Drew's presence even weeks later, but he could
not admit to it, either.

      "I think I bagged a fag," the cop said, and he laughed.

      But it was not just faggots he was after. He had to show
mastery, especially to show mastery to the sort who needed the
discipline he could impose, immigrants, blacks, Chicanos, Puerto
Ricans. Order had to be protected and defended. There was a tradition
that had to be served, and he was there to preserve it.

     To look at, he was good looking; as a person he was cold-hearted,
a bastard, and self-loving. He wore boots and jeans, a kaki dress
shirt and a kaki tie smartly knotted, a black leather jacket, and a
beige trooper's hat, and a silver badge. He was very fit, and he was
always fingering the hat brim and edging it slightly back from his
square forehead, letting his curly blond hair escape.

     "You can't talk that way," Harry, the bartender, said, pouring
him another bourbon.



     "Who says I can't? If God lets me know He approves of a thing I
say and do, and He does, ain't nobody gonna keep me from sayin' it or
doin' it. There's good, and there's no good. This man's goin' with the
good and clearin' out the no good."

      "How do you know God approves?"

      "He tells me so."

     "He talks to you?'

      "He has His ways."

      "Well, I'm not sayin' I don't admire you, Reg, `cause you know I
do. But I wish you'd be careful...and a little more...merciful sometimes,
too. No offense."

     "No offense, Harry. It's a hard thing for people to understand
that there's no difference between justice and mercy. It's the same
thing. That's one of the things I learned when God revealed Himself to
me. When you clean the scum out of the pond, you're doing the right
thing and you're being merciful to the water. These are parlous times,
Harry. Terrorists, drug dealers, atheists, homosexuals – there's a
whole mix of evils we are facing."



     "He kept the picture," Lila said.

      Everyone looked at her. "You are extraordinary," Mike said. "I
don't know what I would have done," his companion, a body-builder
named Sandy who'd been hanging around him for weeks, shamelessly
ingratiating himself until he got what he wanted.

      "I was lucky. It could have been a lot worse. I faked my way
through it. I kept up my nerve, but once I was safe with Gabriel, it
was something else."

     "The ring?" Richard said.

     "It's the only regret I have. She always wore it. I never saw her
without it. Before I left, she said, `I won't see you again. You know
it. You know I'm dying.' She said that and took the ring off her
finger and put it on mine. I kissed her. " You are the only one who
knows what this ring means. Wear it for me." She caressed my hand. "I
want to see you dressed," she said, "one last time."

     "I was sitting on a small, plush velvet sofa at the side of her
bed. I stood up. She'd been gazing into my eyes. I reciprocated and as
always my heart melted. I stood up, went into the dressing room, came
back the way she liked to see me, the way she had first fashioned me
when she brought me face to face with myself. I wanted to look
beautiful for her, and I did. I held my head high, stood legs akimbo.
I took her hand at the last moment; I bend down and I put my lips to
her; she died, smiling, her eyes touching mine."

     "The ring," Richard repeated. "There's a story?"

     "The ring," Lila sighed. "Yes." But she refused to tell it. "That
belonged to her," was all she said, only adding, "even more than the
ring."



     It was a small, dark room with a large window that gave onto a
pink and blue neon sign that sat atop the diner across the street.
There was a weak bed lamp that was turned on.

      Reggie examined the ring, repeatedly, fascinated by its beauty,
by the gold of which it was spun and by the ruby whose oceanic depths
gave magnetizing power to the stone. He looked at it closely and at
the picture he had pulled out of Lila's wallet. He told himself it was
Drew's sister, but he knew, actually, that it was Drew, himself. And
he knew what that meant although no one had ever told him. It
tormented him and he hardened himself even further until he became as
resistant as brass armor. Every night, he gazed at the picture, then
at the ring, which fit on his left pinky, then back to the picture,
wondering why he had stood frozen against a guy he could have...he did
not know what, but he sensed that he had suffered some kind of defeat
and felt shame that he had, but he could not figure out how it
happened or even what had happened. Nothing had happened.

      He took to prowling the forest trails around the town, walking
through the woods in the evening with a powerful flashlight, and a gun
strapped to his thigh, as if looking for something.



     Johanna's parents called her Jordan and made her dress like a
boy, but from as far back as she could remember, it felt wrong to her,
and the values and goals that they imposed upon her and directed her
to, made no sense to her, consumed her, destroyed her. She could have
nothing to do with them. Worst were the distinctions in gender that
were incomprehensible to her.

      She left Philadelphia and took a job as a cigarette girl in a
gay sex club in Florida.

     "The only way I know you're not really, I mean anatomically, a
girl is because females in any capacity are not permitted in here. But
otherwise you are exquisite." He was a handsome, youthful man, in a
dinner jacket, nearing fifty no doubt. He held a pipe in his hand and
bought a pouch of tobacco from her.

     Johanna thanked him. He took her fingers in his hand and squeezed
them tenderly. He asked her when her shift was over. She told him. He
said he would wait till then and take her home, if she'd permit him.
She said she would.

     She had never known tenderness until Arthur. And she could never
accept any other kind of relationship, any relationship that did not
have tenderness as its foundation, after she had known him. He was
tender; he was gracious; he always respected her. She felt it in the
way he looked at her. There was lust in his gaze, but there was
adoration, also, an adoration that did not arise from lust. His desire
for her seemed to percolate from the depth of his regard for her. He
was protective of her. He would risk his life for her. Their need for
each other was dangerous and frightening.

      "I want us to go out tonight, the way you are. I don't only want
to see you alone, as if in hiding. I want to be seen with you, to show
you off. Would you like that, or is it objectifying you?" he said, not
long after they had been seeing her regularly, almost nightly, at her
apartment.

      She told him that it sent shivers down her spine to be seen as a
sex object. It was what she had been fashioning herself to be since
she was twelve.

      "You knew even then?"

       "There was nothing to know. I was as I was. That was it."

      "`And you did not have the sense that you ought to be somebody else?

      "`I already was somebody else, and I knew that wasn't working for me."

      He smiled and kissed her.

      "I have something for you," he said giving her a velvet box. It
felt good just to hold it. `Open it,' he said. `I want you to wear it
tonight,' he said. "And always," he added in a whisper. That was when
he gave her the ring that Reggie Lancaster took from Lila. She had not
taken it off from then until she gave it to Lila.



     "It had a power," Lila said to Gabriel as he installed software
updates in her computer for her.

      "What had a power?" he said, looking over to her.

      "The ring," she said. "She told me when she gave it to me, but I
had already imagined that it did."

        Gabriel got up from her desk and walked over to her.

       "Stand up," he said. She did. He took her in his arms. She
closed her eyes and collapsed against him.



2.

     "That's him," Lila said to Gabriel as she pointed to a man
standing a street corner away, leaning against a parking meter.

      They had flown into town and taken a taxi from the airport to
their hotel. Lila was dressed conservatively in an opera mauve Halston
ultrasuede shirtwaist and matching heels that she'd picked up at an
upscale thrift shop, especially to look right for their trip. Her
sandy hair was cut close in a pixie cut. It was a balmy spring day and
they looked like a young couple in a strange town, out for a walk, and
very much in love.

      "He's as queer as a three-dollar bill," Gabriel said, as if it
were a revelation.

      "Tell him that," Lila said, "or all the women in town whom he's
plowed and then turned his back to."

      They watched him go into Harry's Bar. They followed after him.
Five minutes later, they were sitting in a corner, as the jukebox
played an old crooner doing "It had to Be You." Gabriel got up and
went to the bar and asked for two vodka sours. Harry grinned knowingly
at Reggie, who was leaning against the bar taking swallows of bourbon.
As Gabriel waited for the drinks, Lancaster eyed him up and down.

     "She your wife?"

     "Who wants to know?"

      "Reg Lancaster, state police."

       "We do something wrong?"

      "You asked me who I was. I'm identifying myself. I'm here as a civilian."

      "Yeah, she's my wife," Gabriel answered, figuring that was the
safest thing.

      "She's a looker," Lancaster said.

      Gabriel took a step back and looked at him. "That's a bit out of
line, don't you think?"

     "I don't stand on lines," Lancaster said.

      "But I do think you know what I'm saying," Gabriel said as he
went to pay for the shimmering silver drinks that stood on the nickel
bar before him."

     "No hard feelings," Lancaster said. Turning to the bartender, he
said, "Harry, put those on my tab." Turning back to Gabriel, then, he
said, "Mind if I sit with you two and tell you a little about our
town?"

     "Sure," Gabriel said, going to the booth where Lila sat demure
but alert. He sat next to her, and Lancaster turned and straddled the
chair facing them across the table.

     "Where you folks from?"

     "New York City."

     "A dangerous place."

      "Not so dangerous."

      "Satan lives there."

     "Not in my neighborhood."

     "This is not something anybody should take lightly, little lady"

     "But you said you were going to tell us about your town, not about ours.

     Lancaster smiled and began a narrative that was familiar to him
concerning the establishment of the state as an English crown colony,
of the rise of the town because of the clear lake it bordered, of its
proud heritage of resistance to northern abolitionists and how it lost
so many of its sons in the war for secession, of its struggle to
maintain honor during the rapacious times of reconstruction, of its
triumph as one of the major manufacturing centers of textiles.

      "This is a town of God-fearing people who love the Lord," he concluded.



     "What do you do for fun?" Lila asked, but Gabriel put his hand
over her wrist as if to chasten her levity. Lancaster noticed it and
approved. He smiled at Gabriel.

      "What about crime?" Gabriel asked instead. It was a perfect
gambit. Lancaster replied, "We are vigilant."

     "Vigilant?"

     "Vigilant."

      Lancaster spoke of law and order and the danger to society that
liberalism had become, but underneath he was disturbed by an inability
to place Lila. She looked like somebody. He could not figure out who.
It distracted him. It intrigued him. It made him awkward, until he
interrupted himself, looked directly at Lila, and said, "Don't I know
you from somewhere?"

      Lila giggled sweetly. "You aren't the first man who has asked me that."

     Lancaster blushed at the turn she gave his words.

      "Usually, it means that they want to get to know me."

      Lancaster was begin to formulate a confused apology, but Lila
did not let him. "Do you want to get to know me?" she asked. "Because
if you do, I'm flattered, a man's man like you."

      If he had heard any trace of mockery in her words, he could have
dealt with it. But he could find none. She was the embodiment of
innocence, a pretty girl who had not learned to be fake.

     "You're very kind, mam," he said.

     "And you're very polite," she said; "why thank you." Her smile
glowed as she spoke, and she let her gentle violet eyes, naturally
veiled by her femininity, rest on his rock hard icy blue eyes. He felt
her hovering around him. He needed to hold her and confine her in his
arms.

     "Well," Lila said, "I need to be by myself for a few minutes."
She rose from the table and slowly walked to the ladies room, knowing
that Lancaster would follow her with his eyes.

     "Maybe I lock you up for a couple hours, so I can spend some time
alone with her," Lancaster said, with a wink.

     "You wouldn't really do a thing like that?" Gabriel said.

      "Maybe I would," Lancaster answered, as if it were the punch
line to a joke.

      "What's going on?" Lila said as she slipped back into her seat
beside Gabriel.

      "Perhaps you will have the good luck to find out," Lancaster said.

      "Mysterious," she said.

     "He wants some time alone with you," Gabriel said, openly, hiding
nothing, earning a look of rebuke from Lancaster until Lila dispersed
it by saying, "That should not pose a problem. You are a God-fearing
man of honor, aren't you," she said with a flirtatious smile that
seemed to insinuate the contrary.

      "Are you suggesting I might not be?"

      "Are you?"



     "If I am not, the blame must fall on you."

      "Silly boy, a man takes responsibility for his own desires.
Otherwise, he is a zombie, carrying out someone else's will. Whose
will are you obeying?"

      "If you knew me you would not ask such a foolish question."

     "What makes you so sure?" Lila spoke without a hint of challenge
in her voice. Her smile was not smug. Her words were inviting.

     "I think I've lost the thread of what we are talking about."

     "What's a guy like you being a cop in a small town like this for?

     "The least among his servants serve him."

     "So you let God take responsibility."

     "I acknowledge a higher power who has designed a moral universe."

     "Where do you fit in, in this `moral universe'?"

     "I don't understand," he said.

     "I'll show you," Lila said. She reached out her hand, took his,
drew him to her, and kissed him dreamily on the lips She held him
captive in her kiss until she pushed him away."

     "Is that clear enough?" she said with a warm smile.

      Lancaster pulled his head back and blinked his eyes. "What
about?" he said finishing the sentence by pointing at Gabriel.

      Lila smiled, put her am around Gabriel and drew him to her. She
kissed him warmly on the temple. "You don't have to worry about
Gabriel. He knows how to take care of himself. And he understands that
I am not a housecat," Lila said, and then, looking directly at
Lancaster, she growled.

     Lancaster said nothing. Lila broke the silence. "Now do you want
to show us where you live?"

     "Us!" Did she mean only her and him, or was Gabriel included, too?



     Gabriel did not go with them. Instead, he walked around the town
and on the outskirts, where the railroad yard once bustled and was now
the resting place of out-of-use boxcars, he stumbled upon Rods &
Ricks, and sensed it was a gay bar. He stepped inside. He was right.
It was not very crowded and quite subdued; the clientele was entirely
male.

      One man stood out from the rest and Gabriel walked over to him.
"That's a handsome vest," he said.

      The man looked up from his drink. "Thanks," he said. "You're new here."

     "Just passing through. I had a few hours to waste."

     "Maybe it won't be a waste."

     "I hope not."



      It was passed midnight. Gabriel and Lambert Forsythe -- that is
the name of the man Gabriel met in Rods and Ricks -- left the bar
hours earlier, strolled through the city, and wound up in Forsythe's
hotel. Like Gabriel he was from out of town, but only an hour or so
away. He drove to the town several times a month on business, a very
discreet business. He made private appointments with gentlemen who
never would have entered Rods & Ricks, who had deleted any knowledge
of its very existence from their awareness. Gabriel was not surprised
to learn that one his clients was Reg Lancaster. Forsythe did not
volunteer the name, nor did he of any of his clientele; he only told
Gabriel his line of work and his inclinations, in the confidential way
that two men, openly gay, can speak about those who sever that part of
themselves from their daily demeanor, attitude, and behavior.

      They sat at the hotel bar, drinking vodka sours, both feeling
the elevation that each made the other feel.

     "Reg Lancaster!" Gabriel said in hushed tone, slumping a little
forward, his face turned and looking directly into Forsythe's face.

     "How do you know that name?" Forsythe gasped and thereby answered
Gabriel in the affirmative.

     But Gabriel wanted to go the whole way.

     "It's a complicated story, but I'll tell you, if you answer me directly."

     Forsythe put his open palm over Gabriel's wrist. "Yes," he said.

     Then Gabriel told him about Lila, his relationship to her, and
about her encounter with Lancaster, ending with the theft of the
picture and the ring, and that she was with him even as they spoke.

    "Although, he is not on my schedule for this visit, he might enjoy
hearing from me – I'm pretty sure of it; he is not the same with me as
he is in the world; he's quite compliant. I might be able to help in
rectification."

     Gabriel kissed him. "I've got a room. Would Lila mind if we went
to it," Forsythe said.

     "Lila is an alley cat. Where's the elevator?"

     The elevator was in the corridor outside the bar, its doors,
sheets of gleaming mirrors. They waited and looked at their
reflections. They smiled at each other.

     Forsythe stayed in the penthouse. They stepped onto the terrace,
embraced, leaned on the parapet and surveyed the street and watched
the stars.

     "Take me inside," Gabriel said.

     Lambert unbuttoned his shirt with his left hand and held
Gabriel's wrist to keep him from doing anything. His chest was lean
and chiseled. His pectorals stood firm; his nipples were commanding.
Gabriel was fixated on them. Forsythe leaned in and kissed him. His
tongue unlocked Gabriel's lips, which hardly were closed. As he took
his breath away and gave it back to him mixed with his, he unbuttoned
several of the buttons on Gabriel's shirt and pulled it out of his
jeans and, moving his lips away, pulled it over his head. Gabriel was
his equal in physique. It made him dizzy with lust. He took his hand.
"Come inside," he said.

     He flung the bed cover off the bed and pushed Gabriel onto the
bed. He lay beside him and began tonguing his nipples and massaging
him through his jeans, then pulling the zipper down and reaching
inside to take Gabriel's cock and balls in his hand.

     "You're wearing a thong," he said.

      "Lila likes me to pose for her in it."

     "I'd like to meet her. She must be something."

      "She is," Gabriel said, alternating words and kisses. "But you
aren't bad," he said and spidered his fingers to Forsythe's nipples.
"May I?" he said. "Yes," Forsythe nodded as he stroked Gabriel's cock
and lowered himself so that he brought it into his mouth, and with
slow deliberateness, his lips undulated up and down the shaft. He
loosened his own belt and took off his jeans. He was naked under them.
His lovely cock rose hard. He pulled off Gabriel's jeans and, mounting
him, pulled the strip of his thong out from between his legs and
drilled himself inside him as they swallowed each other in kisses.



     When Lila returned to the hotel, Gabriel was coming out of the shower.

     "Have fun?" Lila said.

     "I did," he said. "You?"

     "Sad fun. I'll tell you in the morning. Right now I want to go to
sleep with your arms around me and your cock inside me."



     The picture stood framed on a tall, narrow, black marble-top
dressing table. The ring is there, in front, beside the picture,
behind them, on the wall and touching the dresser top, a mirror. They
are carefully placed, the mirror, the picture, the ring -- the red
jewel, set in a casement of gold, surrounded by a field of black
marble. It was a shrine or an altar. It needed a candle. Lila held her
breath repressing an audible gasp. Lancaster looked at her and
blushed, but quickly regained his composure.

     "Have you ever had bourbon?" he asked her, clutching a bottle and
two glasses.

     "Honey," Lila said in her worst camp, "champagne is my usual drink."

     "Well, it's time for something new," isn't it.

     She seemed to ignore his gambit and went back to her concern.
"Somebody broke your heart," she said. "Somebody. Over there?" she
said pointing to the purloined image of herself, the picture on the
dressing stand. "She's very...alluring."

     "Yes," Lancaster said.

     "She left you," Lila suggested, "but she let you keep her ring.
There's blood in that ring in its stone."

     "It's a ruby," he said, overwhelmed with sadness when he did.

     "What's her name?" Lila asked, approaching him.

     "I don't know," he said.

     She took hold of his head and brought it near, bringing his lips
to her lips. She kissed him and he surrendered. She dragged the tips
of her index fingers up the side of his neck and stopped under the
earlobes, gently vibrating into him. "It's a very beautiful ruby,"
Lila said. "I want to wear it. Put it on my finger. Go ahead."

     He took her by the waist and guided them to the shrine. She
picked up the picture and held her other hand out, palm down, fingers
spread. As he put the ring on her finger, she looked at the picture,
not at him. "She looks like me," Lila said.

     "I know," Lancaster said.

     "Perhaps she is me."

     Lancaster smiled a lost smile. "You're very beautiful," he said,
swallowing some bourbon, "but..."

    "Pretend I'm her," Lila said, still holding the picture. "Look at
me and pretend I'm her. Kiss me and pretend I'm her."

      He knelt before her and pressed his cheek against the skirt of
her dress. He felt her erection. He broke down; he began to weep until
he was crying desperately the way a child cries. She stroked his hair
and let him cry. She whispered that it was ok, that everything would
be alright.