Uume has redressed, pretty unfazed -- David's tiny thing -- teaser

You're possibly expecting a followup to the last "Yellow Parrot" teaser, but we are misbehaving as usual and have switched channels, and so we are working on a novella about Jamie & Dex, the heroes of a somewhat discordant series of short stories. In its present form, and mutatis mutandis, the manuscript uses our contribution to Rob Rosen's anthology "Best Gay Erotica of the Year, Vol. IV" as a point of departure, and continues with Jamie and Dex holed up in their unaffordable Florence hotel room. We've just had a flagrante delivered by Jamie, with Dex and Uume on the receiving end, and now...Dex narrating...

I skip a few details.

Jamie—-well, he knows I’m a slut. We fart in each other’s presence, there aren’t many secrets between us. And his mathematical mind will have figured out that Luigi’s pecuniary lenience---how would Jamie say this---is a dependent variable in any equation explaining our staggering Savoy bill. But one can go too far.

Uume has redressed, pretty unfazed, and blown air-kisses in departure

Uume has redressed, pretty unfazed, and blown air-kisses in departure, at both of us-—this wasn’t his first flagrante, you can tell. And Jamie, tidy Jamie has collected my Tornabuoni outfit from the floor, briefs, T, and shorts, and stacked them away. He sits next to me on the bed and stares at these damned Archlight trainers from Louis Vuitton still loitering on the carpet as silent witnesses of my recent past. I’m stark naked (another silent witness). Jamie-—I steal a sideways glance-—is pale, dead pale. Well, he’s always pale, even under the Californian sun he was, when we fell in love, or I fell in love with him. But he’s beautiful, so beautiful with his androgynous face: the fine, low-bridged nose, a nanosecond too long, the blue, expressionless eyes (each time I look at him I have to check whether the color hasn’t changed), or his perfect chin lines framing the sensitive, always questioning lips. Not to mention the angelic forehead capped by a ginger brush of fine, shiny, honey-scented hair---the perfect hair of a truly-young person.

(Yes, expressionless eyes; they are like mountain lakes, his peepers, because he’s usually somewhere else when we are together, lost in thoughts about “Jones polynomials,” “threshold theorems,” and some other stuff I always forget. Sometimes, by way of apology, he tries to explain why he feels safe with me, protected, mysteriously, free to wander off into his own, private sphere of otherworldly beauty-—the beauty of the whole thing being that math is not private at all, is the least private thing in the universe in fact, intelligible to all races and aliens. Why didn’t he hook up with a like-minded computer?)

________________

We fart in each other’s presence, there aren’t many secrets between us

________________

I’m still naked, he’s still sitting next to me, so we should talk. Sex has been bad-—you guessed it—-practically non-existent since our arrival in Florence. Our “relationship” has reached a point where I, each night, before going to sleep, have to force myself to say, “I love you,” even though I mean it, whereupon he (still immersed in some math book) echoes back, flatly, “I love you,” and that’s it. (This is not the whole story, I’ll try to explain later.) It’s absurd, our thing, the whole thing-—us sitting on this draped, canopied bed amidst a hit-or-miss collection of antique furniture framed by silky wall-paper in insipid, outdated green. We’re so broke, we can’t even go to the Yellow Bar, and so have to feed on room service at hundred bucks per pop, (polpette alla Fiorentina, pollo alla cacciatore, no French fries), everything served on gadrooned china and gadrooned silver platters by mock-servile pages who expect horrendous tips and shake their head when we wave a comatose credit card at their face. They know. Some of them are cute. We’ll get back to them later.

“Will you forgive me?” I ask.

This, this flagrante was a close call, but I know how to read Jamie, and so I see his mind drifting away from this “situation” and seeking shelter among his q-bits and other ingredients of quantum computing in…five, four, three…(he nods)…two, one, zero seconds.

He always nods. Why isn’t he getting jealous? Why isn’t he staying jealous, the way I behave?


Stay tuned...