by John Inman
“You were?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “I was hoping the same thing about you.”
He spread his arms wide and cast a victorious glare at the sky. “And wonder of wonders, here we are!”
I laughed. “What happened to your hair?”
He lifted a hand to his head and felt around through his blond locks. It was his turn to laugh. While combing his hair into a semblance of order with his fingers, he quickly explained. “I was working with a young boy today. He was five and fond of wrestling.”
“And he was blind?” I asked slowly. I reached over, unbidden, and straightened his tie.
“Oh, thanks,” he said. Then, “Yes. The boy was blind.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know,” he said. “So was I.”
“How was he blinded? Was it a birth thing?” I asked.
“No. A plate glass window.”
“Oh Jesus.”
Ken didn’t seem to have an answer for that, so he said nothing. I turned and gazed at the blind center. “I guess you hear a lot of stories like that working where you do.”
“A few,” he said. “Does my hair look better?”
It did, and I told him so.
He got a sneaky look on his face and scooted a few inches closer to me on the bench. “Can I feel your hair? I have a thing for texture. I imagine that it helps me understand a person.”
“That’s weird.”
He snorted. “I know. So can I?”
“You’re going to find I’m a little short on texture,” I said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because I shaved my head.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” I leaned in close and said, “Check it out if you don’t believe me.”
Still smiling, he carefully lifted his hand toward the last place he had heard my voice. I closed my eyes, waiting, and soon I felt his warm fingers stroking my noggin.
“You really did shave it,” he said, his mouth wide in an astonished gape. “There’s maybe two days regrowth, if that.”
“A week, actually.”
He lifted his other hand and gently cradled my head between them both like he was holding a bowling ball. Sliding his fingers downward, he lightly caressed my ears, causing a shudder to rumble up my back. I felt a sudden tightening in the crotch of my pants and wondered if that was really appropriate, considering the circumstances. Not that I cared. He lightly stroked the fingers of one hand across my face. With my eyes still closed, I let him travel wherever he wanted to go. He outlined the slope of my nose between his thumb and index finger, lightly pinching it here and there as he went along.
“Nice honker,” he said, and I grinned.
While my grin was still there, he touched my lips with his fingertips, stroking the flesh, causing me to grin wider.
“Tickles,” I said.
His fingers left my mouth and he cupped my jawline in two hands. He stroked through the beard I was trying to grow, plucking at it to gauge its length.
“Your head is upside down,” he said. “Bald on top, fuzzy on the bottom.”
“Don’t be cruel,” I said.
“I like it.”
“Oh. Well, good, then.”
I longed to lay my fingertips to his face the same way he was touching mine but decided not to try. It was enough that I now had a raging hard-on while sitting on a park bench in broad daylight with a blind man wearing a bow tie.
“Is that how you tell what I look like?” I asked, trying not to think about my dick. Like a guy can ever do that.
“Not really,” he said, pulling his hands back and resting them in his lap. “Actually it lets me know how your skin feels. And your hair, if you had any.”
“So how do I feel?”
“Is anyone nearby?” he asked.
I took a quick look. “Uh, no. Why?”
He leaned close and to my utter surprise, pressed a light kiss to the corner of my mouth, then just as quickly pulled back. “That’s why,” he whispered. “And in answer to your question, your skin feels heavenly.” His green eyes were not quite centered on my face.
“Do that again,” I whispered back.
And with only a beat of hesitation, Ken leaned in once again and found my mouth with his. This time I lined myself up properly and kissed back. His eyes closed in front of me, and his long pale eyelashes brushed the bridge of my nose.
Once more he pulled back.
“Wow,” I muttered, eliciting a smile.
His cheeks weren’t flushed, but mine were. I could feel the heat in them. Out of the blue, he asked, “Why are you here? Are you watching someone again?”
“Only you,” I said.
He cast me a mocking glance. “Not professionally, I hope.”
“Not yet,” I said with a grin, and we laughed.
“Did you really come here to see me?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I scrambled around for an answer and came up blank. “I’m not sure I can explain it. Just wanted to, I guess.”
I saw his hand slide slowly toward me on the seat of the bench, and I carefully laid my own hand in the path of it. When we touched, he didn’t pull back but simply laid his own fingers over mine. I kept my hand perfectly still, wondering what he would do next. But he seemed content to do nothing more than what he had done already.
Even though his eyes were sightless, he seemed embarrassed to aim them in my direction. He stared out over the park instead, closing his eyes to enjoy the breeze now and then, lifting his head at the warble of a starling somewhere in the branches above our heads.
Still staring skyward and purposely not at me, he said, “Are you sorry you did it?”
I thought I had misunderstood. A sudden rush of fear flooded through me. Images of the fat dead man flashed across my mind. His heels tap dancing against the foot of the bed as his life slipped away while I clamped a pillow to his face. “What? What did you say?”
“I said are you sorry you came?”
Relief poured through me. “Oh. No.”
A wily sparkle lit his eyes. “What did you think I was talking about?”
I forced a laugh. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
He didn’t look like he quite believed me, but he let it go. He lifted his hand from mine and stood. “I have to get back to work,” he said.
Bummer. “Oh. But wait. Can I see you sometime?”
He stared down at the ground, thinking. “You mean you want to meet me here on the bench again?”
“Yes. Would that be all right? I mean, you come here a lot, right?”
He laughed. “I work here, so yeah, I come here a lot.”
I could see the outline of a cell phone in his trouser pocket. “Can I jot down my phone number for you?”
“Unless you have a braille punch handy, it won’t do me much good. Just tell it to me. I’ll remember.”
“Wiseass.”
“I know.”
I recited my number. I waited for him to offer me his, but he never did.
“I’d better go,” he said quietly.
Before I could respond, he turned and walked away. I stood there licking my lips, watching his ass, and thinking of all the things I’d like to do to it. Nothing inhibited about me.
I called out to him when he was ten yards away. “Thanks for the kiss!”
He lifted his hand to show he had heard, but he didn’t turn to face me again. I wondered if it was because he was blushing. Moments later, he had ducked back through the door of the blind center and was gone.
As confused as I had ever been in my life, I meandered back to the car. The minute I closed the car door, my cell phone rang. I wrestled it out of my pocket and clapped it to my ear.
“Tomorrow,” a voice said.
It was Ken. My heart started racing. “Tomorrow what?”
“Tomorrow you can take me to dinner. I’ll be on the bench at six.”
“Gotcha,” I said, and he hung up. Grinning, I mean really grinning, I cranked up the car. I had barely left the curb before I was already making plans.
Chapter Five
THE HOUSE I lease stands tucked amid a copse of pepper trees high on a shrub-shrouded cliff at the edge of Juniper Canyon in a part of San Diego known as South Park. (Miles from my mother.) I don’t have a pool or a tennis court like my erstwhile client, but I do have a wraparound sundeck that extends off the second floor and is accessed only through a sliding door from my master bedroom. At night I can see the shimmering lights of Tijuana far off in the distance. Facing another direction I can enjoy the view of Mount Miguel, a long-extinct volcano that rises up from the edge of the city to the east.
The house, erected back in the 1940s in classical Mediterranean Revival, boasts a circular breakfast room, above which extends a castle-y spire poking up through the roofline, where just to be snooty, I fly a medieval pennant such as one might have spotted at jousting matches back in Merry Olde England. The house is roomy and bright, with broad, high windows on the back three sides. The pepper trees offer privacy, and the upstairs deck affords plenty of space for my two black standard poodles, François and Chuck, to sunbathe for hours on end while they chase phantom bunnies and dream away their old age.
If I had a legitimate explanation for the money I make, I would buy the house. But since I don’t, and since most of my earnings from my “extermination” business must remain hidden in a safe deposit box so that neither the IRS nor my mother will ever catch wind of it, I have no choice but to continue leasing. Being an honest, upstanding citizen is wonderful, but for those of us who commit illegal acts on a regular basis while trying to maintain an appearance of honesty, it’s a royal pain in the patootie.
I spent most of that day running errands and thinking about my upcoming dinner date with Ken. I picked up three huge bags of dog food for François and Chuck. They came along for the ride since they like to pick out the individual bags to be brought home. Don’t ask me why, but they are quite adamant about it.
After delivering the dogs and the dog food back to the house, I proceeded to the bank, where I accessed my safe deposit box for the purpose of stashing the money I had received for my last extermination job—that of the late perverted murderer with the tattooed cherubs on his arm. I spent a couple of hours in the afternoon snoozing with François and Chuck on the sundeck while working on my tan. Afterward I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and shaved the lichen-like beard off my face, since it didn’t look like it would ever amount to much anyway. I massaged my scalp in what was probably a futile attempt to make the hair grow back a little quicker. It seems I was having elaborate fantasies about Ken running his fingers through my locks so he could test their texture. For that to happen, I needed to actually have locks. Sigh.
While impatiently piddling my day away and looking forward to the evening ahead, I tried to decide where to take Ken for dinner. It had to be somewhere different. Somewhere special. Somewhere with such ambiance that even a blind man could appreciate it. Basically, I wanted the very last place he would expect.
The brainstorm came as I was razor-swiping the last square inch of fuzz from my chin. I watched in the mirror as my eyes crinkled up in mirth, my teeth popped into view, and my Barbasol-splattered lips spread wide in a broad, excited grin. I had it. The perfect place for dinner. And the last place Ken would be expecting to go.
I threw on casual slacks, a loose cotton shirt, untucked, and my best Reeboks. After gargling with Listerine three times and stuffing enough cash in my pockets to buy a small house in the Midwest, I snagged the car keys off the kitchen counter and spent a long two minutes kissing the dogs goodbye. They were clearly as nervous as I. I’m sure they wished me well, although at that moment, their main motivation seemed to be cramming their tongues down my throat. So with a final shot of Listerine to counteract the possibility of their dog breath transferring to me, I finally locked the house behind me and tore off down the driveway in my little Kia, as eager and as rattled about a first date as I had ever been in my life.
I found Ken right where he said he’d be—sitting on what I now considered to be our bench. He was mindlessly tapping the toe of his shoe with his cane again, which seemed to be a habit of his. He wore a light sweater vest over a maroon short-sleeved shirt. He had, as always, a bow tie (a clip-on, I noticed, charmed) fastened prissily at his throat, and his trousers were cool, white linen. He looked scrumptious.
Ken looked my way before I even climbed from the car. He must have memorized the sound of my engine. Somehow that realization made my heart palpitate happily. And you know what they say. If you get all excited because some guy recognizes the sound of your car, then you know you’ve got it bad. At least I think that’s what they say. Certainly if they don’t say it, they should.
I padded my way across the soft grass while Ken stood to greet me. Sunset was closing in, the daylight softening and the air turning cool. Across the street, a troop of howler monkeys hooted their song across the city from somewhere inside the walls of the zoo.
I took Ken’s hand, and the first thing out of his mouth was “The monkeys are having fun.”
“Maybe they know something you don’t,” I said mysteriously.
A little furrow appeared in his forehead while a confused smirk twisted his mouth. With his hand still in mine, he pulled me closer. Teasing, he said, “Not sure I follow you, Larry. What could the monkeys possibly know that I don’t?”
“You’ll see,” I said, shooting for cocksure and aloof, although what I probably conveyed was a goodly dose of assholery.
“Fine,” he said, all but confirming the fact that assholery it was. “Keep your little secrets.” He brushed his fingertips over his Dot Watch and mumbled something about how first dates always drag so.
I took the high road and assumed he was kidding. Lifting his hand to my mouth, I flipped it over, and kissed his palm. He jumped like I’d poked him with a pin, but I didn’t give him time to yank his hand away. “You hungry?” I asked.
“Always,” he said, gently easing his hand from my grasp. He flexed it into a lazy fist a couple of times as if reexperiencing the feel of my kiss on his palm. He nervously plucked at his earlobe. “So, uh, where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” I said again. Once you’ve established your reputation as an asshole, it’s hard to reinvent yourself.
As if to confirm that fact, Ken rolled his eyes and groaned. “What have I got myself into?”
Before he could run away screaming because he had a dinner date with a twit, I took his arm and led him toward the car. As gentlemanly as I could manage it, I ushered him into the passenger seat. When I reached over him and pulled his seat belt snug, he grumbled, “What am I, three?” My cheeks warmed, but since he couldn’t see my blush, I didn’t care. “Sorry,” I said. “Next time I’ll let you buckle yourself in.”
“Just try to remember,” he said, “I’m blind, not paraplegic.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s a common reaction when sighted people are around someone who can’t see for the first time. They overcompensate. It’s sweet, actually, but annoying as hell.”
“I didn’t realize. I’m sorry,” I said again.
This time he reached up and found my cheek with the first try. He laid his fingers across my jawline while his thumb slid across my bottom lip. “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Just be yourself. Be comfortable around me. That’s all I ask.”
“I am comfortable around you.”
His fingers did a little more traveling over my chin. “You shaved,” he said.
“I did.”
He smiled slyly. “Thank God. Now let’s go to dinner.”
I eased the passenger door closed and ran around to jump in behind the wheel.
“You still haven’t told me where we’re going,” he said, shifting his ass in the seat, making himself comfortable, patting the dashboard and
running his hands over my console to get the lay of the land.
“It’s a surprise,” I said.
He brushed imaginary lint from his pant leg. “Yes,” he said, “I think you mentioned that already.”
I pulled onto the street, did a U-turn in the driveway of Ken’s apartment building, and headed out in the same direction I had come. By my calculation, it was approximately forty-eight seconds later that I pulled into a parking space and flipped off the engine.
“We’re here,” I gaily chirped.
Much closer now, the monkeys were going berserk. Somewhere amid their raucous cries I also caught the unmistakable baritone wail of a trumpeting elephant, and off in the distance in another direction, something that sounded like a pterodactyl screaming to high heaven. Darkness was closing in, and the animals were waking up. The pterodactyl was a figment of my imagination, of course. It was probably a bigass condor or something. But all the other animals were real enough. Their voices filled the evening air.
Ken faced me and flashed one of his two-dimple smiles. There was considerable amazement in it. “We’re at the zoo!”
For the first time, a smidgeon of self-doubt began to sink in. Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea, after all. “Is there a problem?” I asked.
“No, it’s great! I love the zoo. You’d be surprised how seldom I come, even though I live right across the street. Most people don’t want to waste thirty bucks buying a ticket to the zoo for someone who can’t see it after they get there.”
“Oh,” I said, crestfallen. “I really didn’t think about that.”
He grinned. “I know. That’s what makes it so charming.” He reached out and caressed my arm. His smile had broadened, and I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off it. “But I can still hear it, Larry. I can still experience it. Maybe I can even touch it in a place or two. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather have come tonight than the San Diego Zoo. Thank you.”
My confidence salvaged, I piled us out of the car. Before I could lock up, he hesitated. “My cane will be a problem in the crowds. Can I hold on to your arm instead?” he asked. He looked handsomely shy when he asked.