“Pretty, isn’t it?” says Neil. He has followed Manning through the house and out to the edge of the pool.
Manning turns. He stammers, “I’m … overwhelmed.” He waves his arm in an arc that embraces the house, the pool, the grounds. “Only you could build this. This is yours. This is you.” He drops the red flowers from his other hand onto the mat beside the pool and breathes a sigh of admiration for Neil’s talents. “Pretty? It’s sublime.”
Neil tells him, “I was referring to the view, but I’m delighted that you approve of the whole package. Welcome to my home.” He walks toward Manning and extends his arms.
Manning steps forward and for the first time in his life presses his lips to those of another man. He surrenders not only to another person, but to an idea, to the imagined scorn that others will hurl at him, to a drive that has been locked and buried deep within him. How long? he wonders as his tongue probes the teeth of the man whose body clings to his. Why only now? his mind asks, mocking, as he tastes the new substance of their mingled spit. It is a passionate kiss, but its physical message is one of warmth, not lust—not tonight.
Neil finally says, “It’s chilly out here. Let me show you the house.”
Manning obeys without protest, for he is eager to see the full product of Neil’s design talents. They reenter the main room of the house, Neil closing the glass door behind them, switching on more lights. The living room, dining area, and an open kitchen are contained in the one large room, tranquil and elegant, painted a dark, nondescript color. Limestone flooring extends the depth of the house from front to back. Furnishings are sparse and expensive.
Manning’s eye is drawn to an antique console table placed against an otherwise bare wall. The table is five or six feet long, barely more than a foot deep, crafted of honey-colored birch, accented with black trim. A row of shallow drawers runs beneath the mottled marble top, supported by a row of simple, classically proportioned columns that rise from the front of the wooden base. The overall style of the piece is restrained and masculine—offset by Neil’s whimsical addition of bright silk tassels that hang from each of the brass keys in the drawer locks.
“Yes,” Neil says, “it’s real.”
Lacking Neil’s knowledge of such matters, Manning responds with an embarrassed shrug.
“Sorry,” says Neil, leading Manning across the room to examine the console more closely. “It’s Biedermeier, an early-nineteenth-century German style, sort of a workingman’s version of French Empire. But the style has gotten very popular—and pricey—in recent years, so there are lots of contemporary knock-offs in production now. This, however”—he pats his prize piece of furniture—“is genuine. I was lucky enough to place the winning bid at an estate sale last year.”
“It’s stunning,” Manning tells him. He gives Neil’s shoulder a squeeze, as if to congratulate him on the acquisition.
“Thanks,” says Neil, putting his arm around Manning’s waist, “I admire your taste.” Then something occurs to him. “Speaking of ‘taste,’ would you care for a drink?”
Manning doesn’t need to answer. It’s been a long, wearing day with a happy ending—of course he’d like a drink.
They cross to the other side of the room, where Neil rattles around in the kitchen. Within a minute, he hands Manning a glass. There’s no need to ask—it is indeed the Japanese vodka. They raise their glasses in a toast to Manning’s arrival, then drink—not quickly, as if priming themselves for glassfuls to follow, but slowly, recognizing that this is a nightcap, a moment to savor.
As Manning drinks, he studies the room again, while Neil in turn studies his friend’s wandering gaze. Manning says, “This is exactly where I would expect you to live. I couldn’t quite picture it from what you and Roxanne told me about it, but now that I’m here, I can’t imagine it any other way.”
“But do you like it?” Neil asks. He’s never given a second thought to other people’s feelings about his house, his design work, his taste, so he is shaken by the fact that he now cares deeply about Manning’s answer.
“Of course I do,” says Manning.
Neil presses the question, “Do you like it because of your feelings toward me, or do you like it yourself?”
“I like it myself. I marvel at your clarity of thought and your power of vision—and your ability to translate them into something that’s real and concrete, not just words or rhetoric. My God, you’ve taken an idea, a way of thinking, a life, and you’ve actually built a house out of it. Yes, I like it. Myself. Not because it’s yours, but because of how and why you did it.”
Neil kisses Manning on the cheek. “You say all the right things.”
“We ‘word people’ deserve something to our credit,” Manning says with an innocence that prompts them both to laugh.
Neil shows Manning through the rest of the house. It’s a quick tour because it’s a small house. Its plan is that of a chubby H, with the big room at its center. Each side of the H is a bedroom wing with a bath. The second bedroom is used as Neil’s studio, but a comfortable-looking cushioned platform has been made up there as a bed to accommodate his guest. As Neil places the baggage near the platform, Manning stifles a yawn.
“Hey, Mark. It’s getting late. It’s been a hell of a day, and we’re both shot. Suppose we call it quits.”
“Sure,” says Manning, having hoped that Neil would make the suggestion.
Before leaving the room, Neil turns to ask, “Bring your running shoes?”
“You bet.” Manning waves toward one of his bags.
“It should be a beautiful morning, so let’s not waste it. Mind if I wake you around eight?”
“Please do,” says Manning. “But I’m bound to be up by then. I slept on the plane.”
“Good night, Mark. I’m glad you’re here.”
“So am I.”
A deathlike sleep sweeps over Manning tonight—a sleep that stops his brain, washes his mind of the accumulated tensions and doubts that have more and more muddied his waking hours. If he dreams at all, he does not know it, will not remember it.
When Neil shakes his shoulder, when he opens his eyes, he is confused by the sunlight that fills the room, certain that it cannot yet be morning, certain that he has just lain down. Yet he is totally rested, suddenly alert, aware of the powers that have somehow been rejuvenated … recharged by the silent workings of his brain and body through the night. He hears Neil tell him, “Time to get up.”
Manning turns his head on the pillow to see Neil sitting on the bed next to him wearing a pair of faded gray cotton running shorts. Manning gazes openly at the other man’s chest, impressed by its muscle tone, by the clearly delineated pectorals. He has felt an intense attraction to Neil since their first meeting, but he now feels his attraction redoubled with the confirmation that Neil’s body is a match for his intellect—and a match for Manning’s own body, his own mind.
With a still-groggy smile, Manning says, “You’re beautiful,” as a substitute for the more conventional good-morning.
Neil runs his fingers once, lightly through Manning’s hair. “It’s eight o’clock. I brought you some coffee,” he tells him.
“The perfect host.”
“I do try. Now—not to rush you, but if you’d like to wake up in the shower first, please do—then we can run.”
Manning asks, “Will I need a shirt?”
“There’s still a morning chill, but you’ll work up a sweat fast enough.” Neil pats Manning’s head again, gets up, and leaves the room, affording his guest some privacy for his morning routine.
A few minutes later, Manning enters the living room. He wears his old yellow shorts and a new pair of white leather running shoes—he bought them weeks ago but has been “saving” them—for what, he wasn’t sure.
“You’re not so bad yourself,” says Neil, returning Manning’s earlier compliment as his eyes examine every line, every muscle of the man who stands before him, searching in vain for some evidence that Manning is near
ly ten years older.
“Come on,” says Manning with a laugh, jerking his head toward the front door. “Show me your mountain.”
Outside in the still air, nothing moves—the rest of the world is indoors shooting videos of kids mauling presents. The sun hangs low in the winter latitudes of the desert sky, but its warm rays penetrate Manning’s chest as he emerges from the shadows of the arbor in front of the house.
Without a word, Neil trots off across the terrace toward the road, pebbles grating rhythmically beneath the treaded soles of his shoes. Manning catches up with him and trots at his side. They run easily, at a comfortable gait, like animals stretching their muscles for no other reason than to limber their bodies, to test their own endurance.
They pass one of the houses that abuts Neil’s property, and Manning notes the skill with which Neil has secluded his own house from it. Other houses flash by, confirming Manning’s hunch that these mountainside addresses are among the city’s more desirable. As they move up the steep road, Manning—who’s not accustomed to running on hills—finds that even their mild pace quickly tires him. In contrast, Neil pumps away with steady strides and deliberate breathing. Manning glances sideways to indulge in the sight of his friend’s body in motion.
In spite of the recent rains, the mountain’s rocky red earth can support little more than scrub and cactus—except in the rich topsoil trucked up to form carefully nurtured lawns and gardens around many of the houses. The desert environment is hostile toward trees, offering virtually no shade. The blacktopped ribbon of the road, already softening in Arizona’s morning sun, winds its way up the mountain in search of greater heights and broader vistas.
The heat, taken for granted by those who live here, is a hedonistic luxury to Manning, who suffered the rigors of a winter storm only yesterday. He gulps lungfuls of warm, dry air while sweat begins to rise from every pore, collecting into salty drops that trickle down his bare skin to lodge in the waistband of his shorts.
Manning has not yet gained his second wind and has fallen several strides behind Neil, who slows his run to pace Manning with measured steps. The pounding of Manning’s feet on the asphalt becomes synchronous with Neil’s. As Manning follows, he watches the long tendons down Neil’s thighs that stretch and contract with each stride, the damp V that creeps further into Neil’s shorts and sticks in the crack between his buttocks. Manning has lost awareness of the world around him. His entire consciousness is fixed on the body of the man who runs before him, on his own hard purple-brown nipples that sting hot-cold in the air passing over them, on the lump that comes to life between his legs. He runs easily now, enjoying the euphoric lightheadedness induced by overbreathing.
Veering to the edge of the road, Neil directs his feet in a curving path that will reverse the direction of their run. They have reached the road’s highest point. To follow it farther would take them down the mountain’s other side, a great distance from the house, so Neil is turning back. Manning leans into the same semicircular turn. As they pass each other in opposite directions, each becomes aware of the other’s obvious arousal, which intensifies the drives that are building within both of them.
The downward run accelerates into a race for the house. Only moments ago, Manning struggled to climb the road’s steep grade; now both men struggle to keep from pitching forward as gravity pulls them through the curves at an all-out sprint, their feet barely tapping the ground while their legs scissor repeating arches like dance leaps. They run in precise unison at each other’s side, so close that their arms brush.
About a hundred yards from the house, as if responding to some secret signal, they stop running and begin walking the rest of the way—the “warm-down” that will ease their pulses to a slower, normal rate. Neither speaks as they turn off the road together, cross the courtyard, and enter the front door. Nothing is said as they walk through the main room toward the glass doors in back, still breathing heavily from the rigors of their downhill dash. Without a word, they emerge from the house toward the pool.
Neil descends the terraced decks with a purposeful stride. Stepping onto the canvas-covered mats that edge the water, he collapses on his back next to the bunch of red flowers that Manning dropped there last night. He stares at Manning, his vision blurred by the sun’s glare on the sweat that covers him with an unknowable number of tiny lens-like beads. Then, the glare disappears as Manning’s shadow crosses over his body.
Manning stands at Neil’s feet, their shoes touching at the ankles. He reaches down to push the shorts from his hips. When he steps out of them, his blood-gorged penis springs forward, a drop of lubricant stretching from its tip, dazzling in the sun from over his shoulder.
But Neil sees only the green clarity of Manning’s eyes as the naked man drops to his knees, straddling Neil’s hips. Manning lowers his chest onto Neil’s, and their open mouths meet. Their teeth scrape as their tongues wag within each other, as they exchange a single spent breath and whimper with the dizzying lack of oxygen.
Manning’s pelvis grinds in slow circles upon Neil’s, his bare penis stabbing at the lump still trapped in Neil’s shorts. Manning finally releases his lips from Neil’s, sits back, and tears off the shorts with a compulsive swipe. He gazes in wonder at the other man’s penis, erect, quivering with each pulse of blood. Cock, he tells himself. Neil’s cock.
Neil moans a guttural, ecstatic laugh as he feels Manning’s lips close upon him. He spreads his legs farther apart. His hips begin to thrash gently, as if wagged by the suction of Manning’s mouth.
Without disconnecting from Neil, Manning positions himself to lower his own genitals over Neil’s face. Neil reaches with his tongue to tickle Manning’s testicles and feels the body on top of him shudder at the contact. Neil draws one of the lumps into his mouth and swirls his tongue around it. Manning groans awesomely as Neil begins to stroke Manning’s penis in rhythm with the pumping of his hips. Neil knows he will soon come. His back arches involuntarily as he tries forcing his way deeper past Manning’s lips. Manning’s grunts are steadily louder. Neil suddenly tenses as the surge of ejaculation grips his body, rips through his penis and into Manning’s throat. Manning’s moans erupt into a heaving shout as his own semen bursts through Neil’s hand and spews like a paste between their chests.
When Manning can move, he crawls around to collapse in Neil’s arms, their mouths just touching, panting. The desert sun beats down upon their bodies, upon the bunch of delicate red flowers now scattered at their side and in the pool.
Recovery from their sexual frenzy is slow and serene. The stillness of the morning is pierced only by the peeping of a tiny hyperactive bird somewhere in the nearby foliage. Neil swallows. Deadpan, he tells Manning, “You’re supposed to say, ‘I never dreamed it could be like this.’”
“I did dream about it,” Manning assures him, “but you’re right—this was far better.”
They lie there motionless except for their random exchange of tender little gestures—the touch of a nose, the probing of a fingertip. Then Neil raises one foot high before them, displaying his running shoe, wagging it at the ankle, eyeing it curiously as if not certain what it is. “Hm,” he says at last, “that’s pretty kinky, Mark. I’ve never done it with shoes on. Not that it didn’t add a certain erotic twist, but it’s highly unorthodox.”
“There was no time to take them off.”
Neil concurs, “I noticed a sense of urgency to the whole business.”
They both laugh. Neil brings his knee to his chin and reaches forward to unlace and remove the shoe. Then the other. He stands up, his feet at Manning’s shoulders. Manning gazes up at him, intrigued by the contour of Neil’s body from this perspective. Neil steps over him and lowers himself smoothly into the pool, the water rising to his nipples. Manning rolls onto his side, planting one elbow in the mat to support his head in the palm of his hand. He watches while Neil splashes fistfuls of water over his chest to wash away the sun-baked crust of Manning’s orgasm. Manning sits up, removes
his own shoes, and slips into the pool.
“Christ,” he says, “this water’s cold.”
“It’s December,” Neil reminds him. “You could be home shoveling snow.”
Aware of his complaint’s futility, Manning wades forward to embrace Neil. They cling together mouth-to-mouth. Water spurts from between their chests. Their limp penises swim together in the tangle of their legs.
Morning drifts into afternoon. They haven’t eaten all day, satisfying their hunger with the exploration of each other’s body—on the terrace, in the pool, indoors on the floor, and in bed. Manning proves himself an eager pupil and a quick study in Neil’s Berlitz-style version of Safe Sex 101. Their lessons are interspersed with short naps, allowing their bodies to prepare for the next call to action. But when the afternoon sky begins to glow with the first orange streaks of evening, they both, at last, are feeling starved and exhausted. Clearly, it’s time to get dressed.
“It’s Christmas,” Neil announces in a tone suggesting they had both forgotten about it. “I planned a holiday meal—there’s a beautiful rack of lamb in the fridge. Will you be in the mood for a late, intimate dinner?”
“That sounds wonderful,” says Manning. “I’m famished.”
Clad in the running shorts that have come off and on throughout the day, Neil sets to work in the kitchen and sends Manning to the shower.
Standing in the bathroom shaving, Manning leans over the sink and examines himself in the wall-size plate glass mirror. He peers deep into the emerald-flecked irises of his own eyes. They have not changed. He sees nothing unusual within. His face, his entire body, looks the same. The experiences of the day have not marked or scarred him. The labels he has feared have in no way branded him. He can detect neither a superficial nor a fundamental difference.
Flight Dreams Page 17