When Irish Eyes Are Sparkling

by Tom Collins

  The line engaged, “Hello?” Chills rand down my back; it was Oliver. I breathed, but now I actually had to say something to him and I had nothing.

  “Hello?” again.

  I licked my lips. Why couldn’t I say something?

  “Liam?” I thought he sounded hopeful. “Is that you?”

  I tried to say yes, but my vocal chords felt paralyzed.

  “Breathe, Liam,” he said, sounding amused.

  “Yeah,” I croaked. “Yeah, I—I’m breathing. I just…don-don’t know what to s-say.” My voice shook as bad as my hands, my heart did somersaults inside my ribcage, and it felt like I’d been sucking on wool, my mouth was so dry.

  “Say, ‘Hi, Oliver, it’s Liam,’” he teased.

  “God, I’m such a dweeb,” I lamented, covering my eyes with my free hand.

  “I like dweebs,” he said. He sounded so cool and confidant.

  “Yeah, right,” I scoffed without thinking.

  “Would I give my number to someone I didn’t like?” That stopped me for a moment.

  “You could’ve felt sorry for the poor schlemiel laid out on the floor,” I suggested, wishing I could shut up. It was almost as if I was trying to talk him out of wanting to spend time with me.

  He laughed. “Feeling sorry for you was the last thing on my mind. When you fell, I caught a glimpse of what was under the kilt.”

  I could hear the smug grin in his voice, as if he had one up on me. My face flamed as my brain turned to hot pudding. The thought his eyes on my bare flesh electrified my blood. I’d been sporting a little chub as we talked, but now I was raging hard. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Liam?” Oliver asked after a long moment of silence, in which I imitated a fish. “Have I lost ya?”

  “No, I’m here,” I managed. I was about to say something I might regret, and there was nothing I could do to stop myself. It’s like Tourette’s syndrome, except I blurt embarrassing truths instead of curses. “I can’t stop thinking about you. Actually, it’s worse than that, because saying, ‘can’t,’ implies that I’ve been trying not to, which couldn’t be further from the truth.”

  That was it. I breathed a sigh. The majority of the fear evaporated and my insides calmed. The worst had happened; he knew the truth. At this point, there was nothing to do but see how he took it.

  This sort of thing is what drives them away, you dolt, the reasonable part of me chided and shook its head, because the impulsive part had gotten out of its cage again. Now it was Oliver’s turn to make dead air. I waited.

  “Well, how about we meet up, so we can think about each other together?” he asked. I giggled with relief and slapped my hand over my mouth. Dweeb! “I’ve got tomorrow free,” he added, “day and night. What about you?” It sounded like he was smiling.

  “Pub’s closed on Tuesdays, so yeah, I’ve got the whole day free, too. I also have Saturdays free.”

  “According to the weather channel, tomorrow’s going to be a scorcher, so how about doing something indoors where there’s air conditioning? Tuesday morning is good for movies, since everyone’s at work.”

  Thoughts of being in a darkened theater with him, sharing popcorn out of a tub and running my hand up and down the inside of his leg—maybe even a little further up. I was sweating. I got up to turn on the fan and pulled my shirt over my head.

  “Are you undressing?” he asked, sounding suspicious, or maybe hopeful.

  “What?! No…! Well, I mean, I am, sort of. I just took my shirt off ‘cause it’s hot as the Devil’s drawers in my room tonight.”

  I wasn’t sure if the “Mmmm…” I got in response was meant to convey his understanding, or if it was a yummy sound. I chose to believe the latter.

  “Oh!” I said, excited. I’d just thought of something. “Do you have swim trunks?” A water park! I could take him to Garden Springs. Silence. I swear I could hear his surprise. “I know…that sorta came out of left field, sorry…but do you?”

  “Yeah…but it’s been so long since I wore them, I can’t be sure they fit.”

  “Wear them if they fit and I’ll bring along an extra pair of trunks in case they don’t. Sound good?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Where are we going?” I couldn’t tell if he was curious or concerned.

  “Not telling,” I taunted. We agreed on a time and place to meet in the morning and we rang off. I waited until I heard him disengage, just in case he might have one last thing to say.

  “Yes!” I cheered. Too loudly, it would seem, as Brendan banged on the wall. “I got a date!” I yelled at the wall. “With Oliver!”

  “That’s great, Space Oddity. Now go to sleep, it’s two-thirty in the morning,” came Erin’s encouragement from down the hall.

  Chapter Four

  *Oliver*

  When I came up out of the subway to street level, I saw Liam waiting for me in the IHOP parking lot, exactly as he’d said he’d be. It was an intersection in the older, yet hipper, part of the city, where college kids roomed together on the cheap. The buildings were all mixed-use apartments with air conditioners hanging out of windows and antique fire escapes down the sides. Below, where there’d once been delis, movie theaters, and soda shops were now funky boutiques and independent bookstore-cafes.

  Liam was restlessly moving about, tossing and catching a set of keys. I hung back, taking a moment. He’d called last night at an ungodly hour, but I’d been wide awake, unable to sleep. As soon as we’d started chatting, I hadn’t wanted it to end, though I knew we both had to get our rest.

  He’d said he couldn’t stop thinking about me, and I’d admitted that went both ways. I certainly wasn’t going to easily forget what I was seeing right now: Liam in a rather blinding pair of board shorts—trunks that came down to the knee. They were patterned with brightly colored hibiscus, ferns and birds of paradise. Unapologetically gaudy and loud. Atop this he wore a blue tee with the sleeves torn off. Across the front it read: “My brother did it!”

  I felt dull by comparison. My old, and very boring, white bathing trunks were hidden under a pair of olive green cargo shorts and I had on an ancient, faded red-cross t-shirt. I didn’t even want to contemplate the subliminal message of picking out a shirt that made me look like a lifeguard. Or a target.

  My flip-flops slapped my heels as I crossed the street. Liam saw me, froze, and then managed to smile and wave.

  “Hey,” I said, joining him. My hands went into my pockets because I didn’t know what else to do with them. It was, if I thought about it, totally upside down. I could be instantly, and deeply intimate with men I’d never met before and would never see again, but I hadn’t a clue of what to do with a nice young man I wanted to really get to know. My urge was to push him against the car, set one hand on his crotch, and kiss him for a long time, preferably with a lot of tongue. I was not sure how Liam would take that. Besides, I’d never been comfortable showing affection in public, not even holding hands.

  “Hey,” he said back and waved to a tired-looking, Nissan Altima that had to be at least ten years old. It was the ugliest shade of yellow I’d ever seen.

  “My mom’s car,” he explained with a snort and popped the doors open for us. “You won’t believe me, but she likes this color.” I climbed into the passenger side, noting as I did an astonishing number of coffee cups in the back seat jumbled with a small library’s worth of well-thumbed paperbacks. I wondered if there was a theme in the repetition of authors like Ursula Le Guin, Andre Norton, Samuel Delaney….

  “Are we going far?” I asked, as Liam got behind the wheel.

  “About thirty, maybe forty-five minutes away. Out of town, but not across any borders.”

  I nodded. Doors shut and buckled up, Liam turned the key; the air conditioner came on full blast and so did the car’s CD player. David Bowie pleaded through the speakers:

  “Please be mine

  Share my Life

  Stay with me

  Be my wife.”

  Liam frantically jabbe
d buttons to lower the volume. The music got louder instead. He cursed and found the right arrow even as the song sadly noted, “Sometimes you get so lonely—”

  Liam smiled faintly at me. “Hope you like Bowie,” he murmured.

  A Bowie fan, eh? I wondered if I ought to tell him that when I was fourteen and all skin-and-bones, one of the neighbor ladies told me I was a dead ringer for Bowie. Fortunate or not, another growth spurt and a hearty, teenage appetite erased the brief similarity I once had with the gaunt singer.

  “Bowie’s fine,” I assured him.

  Releasing the parking break, Liam directed us out of the lot. He was surprisingly careful while pulling from the driveway, checking his mirrors and signaling. Did he think I was going to rate him on safety? We motored down the narrow streets to a major thoroughfare, turned and then, a few blocks later, got on to the highway.

  Bowie, now singing about changes, continued in the background as I sat in my bucket seat, very conscious of Liam right at my side, warm and oh-so-close. His scent hung in the cooling, though still humid air of the enclosed car; male musk and Head & Shoulders. I wanted to caress his arm or thigh or between them. I didn’t. He was driving like a very cautious robot, one that didn’t look like it’d welcome my touch.

  I didn’t understand. How could he—how could we both—be this nervous and awkward with such a sexual charge between us?

  Because you’re not playing by the usual gay rules, I reminded myself.

  “I guess we should exchange, like, basic information, huh?” he finally ventured.

  “Probably a good idea if we’re going to spend the day together,” I agreed, and grinned at him. His eyes flickered my way then back to the road. I saw him relax a little. Behind us, the skyline receded.

  “Okay,” he sucked in a breath. “I’ll start. Technically, I’m from a nuclear family, mom, dad, a sister and brother. But really, my relatives live so close, and I see so much of them, that my cousins are almost like siblings. I mean, my cousin Erin, the cook at the pub? He’s like a big brother and his younger sisters, Bethany and Ariel; they’re like little sisters to me, too. So I always say I belong to a big, extended family. How about you?”

  I shrugged and shifted. Family was not the most comfortable subject for me.

  “My parents had me because they thought they ought to have kids, it being the thing to do, and then realized it wasn’t the thing to do too late. They wisely didn’t have any more. They divorced when I was eight. Dad remarried, best thing he ever did for me, and when I was twelve, my stepmother left him and I went with her.”

  “Wow.” Liam threw a quick, green-eyed glance my way. Was that pity in his eyes?

  “Not very conventional,” I admitted wryly. We were passing by warehouses and old train tracks now. Bowie was singing of outer space.

  “I can understand that,” he said, “I mean, having other father or mother figures. All my aunts and uncles are like second parents, which made it hard to get away with things when I was growing up.” He smiled crookedly. “But it sure paid off when it came to birthdays.”

  I smiled, and almost snorted. Birthdays, right. I wondered what he’d think if I told him I hadn’t had a real birthday with a cake and gifts until I was nine. My parents hadn’t bothered during my first eight years, and it wasn’t until Sandy arrived that someone cared enough to celebrate me.

  Probably not a story for a first date.

  We came to a roundabout and Liam turned us north. Up ahead were gently rolling hills shaded by groves of trees. Bowie mused about “life on Mars” as we passed bridges and roads leading off to suburban neighborhoods and shopping centers. I started to enjoy the air-conditioned ride.

  “So,” I said, as I figured it was my turn. “You’re an artist?”

  “Yeah. Art major.” He named the college. It was a good one and not easy to get into from what little I knew about such things. “My specialty is fantasy art.”

  “Fantasy art? I’m sorry, but I don’t know what that means.”

  “Here.” He dug into a side pocket and dragged out an iPhone. Sweet. With half an eye on the road, he one-handedly touched the device, bringing up pictures. Finding the one he wanted, he handed it over.

  I turned the phone on its side and the image went wide-screen, which was clearly the way it was meant to be viewed.

  “You’re not going to see all the detail from that,” Liam said, “The original’s huge and the photo doesn’t do it justice.”

  I didn’t know about that. The camera and the superior technology of the phone’s wide screen seemed to have captured everything.

  “You did this?” I marveled. It was a painting of a blue-green dragon, glowing like an opal, soaring through stormy clouds. The creature had shimmering wings that reminded me of the fluttering tail fins of a Japanese fighting fish and sinuous limbs that seemed to go on forever. It was making its way through the downpour toward a patch of sunlight and a rainbow.

  “Do you like it?” Liam asked me, almost anxiously. “That’s my air and water dragon.”

  “It’s stunning.” I wasn’t lacking in imagination, but I couldn’t even dream of how someone might invent such a creature, let alone paint it so that it came to life like this.

  He grinned. “Thanks. Dragons are the cash cows of fantasy art. They never go out of style. Well, them and unicorns.”

  “So you create pictures of mythic creatures?”

  “Or anything else a sci-fi or fantasy author can come up with. You read speculative fiction?”

  I shifted again. He was a reader, figured. “I’ve listened to some Arthur C. Clarke on tape.”

  “I hardly read anything else. My mom and dad raised us on the three ‘Rs’: Robert A. Heinlein, Roger Zelany, and Robert E. Howard, not to mention Moorcock. Anyway, fantasy art is art related to that sort of literature. Book covers and illustrations, calendars, trading cards, games. That’s pretty much what I want to do, art for all of that.”

  “Wow.” I handed the phone back to him and he slipped it back into a pocket. “So, how did you decide that’s what you wanted to do?”

  A shrug. “I’ve been doodling long as I can remember, from the minute someone put a crayon in my hand. When I was little, I did the usual superheroes and fairytale stuff, but then I got old enough to read Lord of the Rings. That was it. I became obsessed with drawing up pictures of Orcs and dwarves and armored men on horses.”

  He glanced over at me, and I nodded to encourage him. I didn’t mind that he was going on a bit. In fact, I rather liked listening to him.

  His hands played nervously on the wheel. “I put up all these pictures on the walls of the bedroom I shared with my brother, so many he finally told me that if I drew one more Balrog he’d cut off my fingers.” He grinned. “And then the movies came out and we all went to see ‘em, and Molly, that’s my big sister, started bugging me to draw pictures of Orlando Bloom for her and her friends.”

  I laughed. “Did you like what they did in the movie?”

  “Like? It was stupendous! Unbelievable. Beyond perfect! And that,” he said excitedly, “that’s what really did it for me. See, Jackson, the director, he hired these two famous artists for the production design: Alan Lee and John Howe—ever heard of them?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Oh, wow.” He sighed like a pre-teen girl over a pop-idol. “They’re the elder gods of fantasy art. If I had one-tenth their talent, I’d die a happy camper. Anyway, they became my inspiration. I wanted to do what they did and maybe one day have my art be used for a movie. Only, I found out pretty quick it wasn’t so easy.”

  “No?”

  “No; art classes aren’t enough if you want to be a successful fantasy artist. You have to learn zoology and ichthyology, so you can create realistic creatures, botany so you can design fantastic trees and plants. And history. Lots of history for armor and chain mail and castles and such.”

  Right. I thought, worried now. So he’s talented, well read and widely educated. Anything else to mak
e me feel inferior?

  “You can’t draw a mermaid by slapping a fishtail on a girl,” he insisted. “You have to think about what kind of aquatic tail would work on a human body, and what kind of anatomy would propel such a creature through the water, as well as what’s going to capture the imagination of the person seeing the mermaid. Speaking of which—”

  He added the last as we turned off the highway, curving in toward our destination. Ahead was a vast parking lot half full of cars baking in the hot sun. Beyond that, I saw a jigsaw of steel girders and crossbeams rising up to support long blue and yellow swirls. As we neared, I realized they were slides and tunnels. Dozen of them. I made out people in bathing suits, splashing and streaking their way down those slides.

  Temptingly high and daredevil fast slides, one after another. My heart skipped with awe. Oh, baby.

  Garden Springs Water Park read the glittering sign before the row of ticket booths and fountains. I felt weird thrill. In part because my date with Liam was about to really start, and because I couldn’t wait to shoot down one of those slides.

  “Ready to enter a fantasy world?” Liam asked, as he found us a spot under the shade of some trees and set the brake. He turned the key, cutting Bowie off as the singer contemplated jumping down “that rainbow.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say; I don’t think I’d ever felt more out of my depth in my life.

  *Liam*

  I parked at the far end of the lot, under a row of trees, whose shade would be falling on the car in about half an hour. I’d spent the whole trip blathering, and I hoped Oliver hadn’t been too bored, but I’d sensed he wasn’t comfortable talking about his family and youth and I didn’t know what else to ask about. I cut the engine and looked over at him. He wore a strange expression; disappointment, maybe.

  “If you don’t want to do this,” I said, hooking my thumb at the slides rising above the trees, “we don’t have to. We can go to a movie if you prefer. I don’t really care—”

  “Are you kidding?” he interrupted, smiling. The sun shone kindly upon me. “This is great! Way better than a movie. Let’s go!”