Best Gay Romance 2014

by R. D. Cochrane

  So Victor’s told her that, too. Are there any secrets left? “No problem,” I say, forcing a smile. “I think I can scrounge up some wine.” I head into the kitchen. There’s an open bottle in the fridge; Victor likes to unwind with a drink after work. Pulling out the cork, I catch a sharp whiff of the bouquet and have to stifle an urge to pour some for myself. I make Victor brush his teeth before kissing me, to lessen the temptation.

  When I return, Christina has gravitated toward a corner by the window. She takes the glass, her faintly pink fingernails complementing the golden wine. “Aren’t you having anything?” she asks. “I hate to drink alone.”

  “Maybe I’ll have a Coke later.”

  She nods and takes a sip. Her lipstick, a perfect match for the nail polish, leaves a half-moon on the glass. “Victor always was good at picking out wine,” she says.

  I’m having trouble reading her expression. I’m not prepared to be sympathetic toward my lover’s ex-wife, but there’s something vulnerable about the turn of her lip, the way one lock of otherwise perfect hair scoops out of place by her ear. I don’t know Christina; I have very little sense of her life outside those phone calls, outside Victor’s biweekly visits to her house to retrieve his daughter. I never go with him on those Saturday mornings, never return with him on Sunday nights. I would be out of place somehow; he needs that time, driving back alone, to get used to the transition from having a daughter to having a lover.

  Christina drinks the wine quickly, half the glass gone before she speaks again. “How’s Sarah?”

  “Fine. We took her to The Nutcracker last night.”

  “Yes, Victor told me you would. Did she enjoy it?”

  “She loved it.”

  “Good. It was like pulling teeth at first to get her to take lessons, but now that’s all she wants to do.” Christina walks away, around the perimeter of the room, and I find myself trailing behind, as if she’s leading a tour. Her eyes linger on certain objects—a brass clock on the mantel, a crystal vase Victor inherited from his grandmother. Things he’s had for years, things that used to be in her house.

  “Victor’s wonderful with Sarah,” she says. “Very attentive. Very protective.”

  I see Victor’s hands clutching Sarah’s belly, pulling her away from disease. “Yes,” I whisper, “he is.”

  “Some men are born to be fathers. It’s like he knows everything she thinks before she says it. No wonder Sarah adores him.” She blinks slowly, mascara locking her lashes together for a split second.

  “What are you doing for Christmas?” she asks, completing her circuit of the room and settling back into the chair. The you comes out sharper, more pointed than the rest of the sentence; it’s assumed that I already know her plans.

  “Nothing,” I tell her, squatting on an arm of the sofa. “I’m Jewish, remember?”

  She laughs nervously. “Sorry, I forgot. Then you don’t mind Sarah and me stealing Victor for the day.”

  Actually, I do, but Victor and I settled that argument weeks ago—or he did. “Not at all. I’ve never really understood the ritual anyway.”

  “I thought you exchanged gifts at Hanukkah.” Her glass dangles from her hand, a single golden drop of wine sliding slowly toward the stem.

  “It’s not really the same.” In grade school, the Gentile kids were always envious, assuming I got eight times the presents they did; I never bothered to disillusion them.

  “Oh!” Christina blurts. “That reminds me!” Clattering her glass onto the coffee table, she scurries toward the shopping bags and begins digging through one. Paper rustles as she lifts one package after another—presents, I assume, but I wonder for whom. Does she still buy something for Victor, just so he has something to open in front of Sarah? A wallet, a wide and garish necktie—the sort of thing suburban fathers get every year. I wonder if I’ll smell Brut or Old Spice on Victor’s neck when he gets home Christmas night.

  “Isn’t this darling?” Christina cries, delicately unfolding a handful of tissue paper. She holds the tiny dress by the shoulders—blindingly white, with a lace collar and cuffs on its short sleeves. I can’t imagine Sarah standing still long enough to keep it clean.

  Christina turns the dress around, gazes at the collar as though picturing Sarah’s head set above it. “Oh, what the hell,” she says, “it’s too good to hold on to. Besides, she’ll have a ton of gifts to open at Christmas.” Still pinching the dress at the shoulders, her other fingers extended into the air, she marches into the hall.

  An unexpected territorial instinct pulls me along. I’m right behind her when she opens the door to Sarah’s room. She lays the dress atop the pink and white bedspread and steps back to admire it. “I can hardly wait to see the look on her face,” she says.

  Christina strolls slowly to the far side of the room, studying her daughter’s home away from home. She picks up Sarah’s latest toy, a spongy, flexible doll that folds up into a cupcake. Christina squishes the head down, the pleated blue dress miraculously transforming into a frilly cup holder, and lays it gently on the shelf. Each time Sarah visits, there’s something new—a toy, a dress, a stuffed animal. The room is already crammed with such presents, to make her feel at home, to give the apartment history for her. Victor wants to make every moment count; he may see Sarah only a few days a month, but those days must be packed with quality time, not a second wasted.

  “What’s this?” Christina flips through a sketch pad on the desk. The afternoon sunlight glows on the blond oak, and Christina’s bracelet sparkles as she turns the pages. I draw up beside her and she shifts the book to share the pictures. They’re squiggles mostly—meaningless shapes with an occasional face peering in from a corner.

  “Look,” Christina says, “I think that’s our house.” It’s the typical child’s A-frame, four-paned windows on each side of the door. I realize suddenly that this is as close as I’ll come to seeing the real thing, the house where Victor spent five years of his life.

  “I feel like a spy,” Christina says. “Sarah never lets me see her drawings.”

  The next page at first seems just as conventional—stick figures holding hands, a family. A child is in the center, denoted female by virtue of curly hair and a triangular purple skirt. On her right, the mother, with the same features but much larger. The father’s on the other side, no curls, no triangles, the round chin garlanded by a full beard. And beside him—Christina and I both notice it at the same moment, I can feel our eyes turning together to stare—another figure, identical except for the beard. There’s no caption, no names to describe the characters. She doesn’t need names to identify her family.

  The front door suddenly creaks open, Sarah’s voice arching into the air. She’s singing again—a new song, something upbeat and charmingly unrecognizable. Christina quickly closes the sketch pad, as if afraid of being caught spying, and we walk out of the room together.

  We’re standing side by side in the hall when Sarah notices us. Victor, kneeling down, is helping her out of her coat, pulling her arms free of the sleeves. “Mommy!” she cries. “Guess what we did today!” She runs across the room, her tiny boots carving U-shaped indentations in the carpet, and stops, breathless, between Christina and me. With one arm around Christina’s left leg and the other around my right, she leans back to look up at us, turning her head from one to the other, as though she can’t make up her mind, as though she wants equal and complete attention from us both.

  Her grip is firm, fingers pressing sharply into my denimed thigh. There’s a delicate passion in her touch. If she lets go, if either of us pulls away, she’ll fall back onto the carpet, like crayons spilled from a box. Already, Sarah knows about the fragility of family, the bonds that can so easily, so unexpectedly, break.

  I look up at her father by the door, Sarah’s empty coat limp in his hands. He seems as shocked as I am by her sudden show of indiscriminate love. Sarah trembles excitedly beneath me, her energy pulsing out as if to take us all in, to draw the three of us togeth
er around her. Victor stares, and suddenly his features soften again. I know that look, like ice melting, like hearts opening. I know.

  BROODING INTERVALS

  Kevin Langson

  I could discern Mohsen’s recent mood by the size of his orgasm. We’d been meeting for sex, and increasingly, a bit of conversation and commiseration, for roughly six months, and I knew there to be a correlation between his level of joy and the frequency with which he got off. When his sensitive mind was too addled with the afflictions he only alluded to, his neglected sperm congregated and formed a restive mass ready to be unleashed at my hands.

  Mohsen had appeared shivering at the entrance to my decrepit apartment building, his tender and tentative grin obscured by a faux-fur-trimmed hood pulled tight. San Francisco’s weather is as defiant of expectations as a transient offspring in a bourgeois family (which both of us were), but that February afternoon was true winter. I imagined I was offering him refuge from a journey through a Siberian-scale tundra of gay indifference. I was compelled to lean down and find his thin lips within the hood, but I resisted.

  It was fleetingly pleasing when his nearly ethereal groan gave way to an effusive spewing, yet I was aware of the implications as his semen fell on my chin, collarbone and chest. I was no stranger to postcoital melancholia myself, but his shift was alarming. Shivers quelled, moans silenced, face fallen; his delight gave way to what could only be deemed abjection, as if his erection was all that could keep it at bay. I knew it was time to rise from my knees to get a towel or rag; that was the protocol. But I was inert with the acknowledgment that the pleasure we arrived at together could so soon be whisked away.

  He insisted on seeing me through to orgasm, like a soldier propelled by a vague conviction in his war, despite a despairing heart. From the very edge of my ragged mattress on the floor I reached to grasp his buttocks as he used his spit-glistening hand to stroke me. I focused on the white of his lips where his bite chased the blood away, then the dark stubble that toughened his visage. His gaze drifted between my eyes and my groin but never lost concentration.

  Afterward, he stood nude by the window of my small studio apartment, his receding dick pointing downward toward jostling dealers and junkies, as well as wary civilians swerving to avoid proximity or stepping on waste. At all hours, Turk Street teemed with the unsavory interactions the Tenderloin was infamous for—drugs sold, inner demons unleashed, racial resentment rabidly articulated, hipsters spat on, sidewalks shat on. I sometimes recoiled, but I adored it. It disheartened me less than the glittering windows of trendy boutiques born out of late-stage gentrification.

  “Mamnoon,” he muttered, turning away from the window. He always thanked me in Farsi, a small concession to my likely annoying request that he speak his native language to me during intimacy. It wasn’t a lascivious desire, like getting off on a muscled German guy gruffly declaring, “Ich werde dich hart ficken,” as he pounds away at his blissful American booty. Farsi lulled me into a poetic mind, a sense of artful languor.

  “How can you live here?” he asked. I had joined him at the window, and from the fifth floor we watched a banal scuffle of Tenderloin hooligans. A spasmodic woman spread her puffy red coat to ensconce a wiry man as he moved to and fro like a withering menace.

  “Does she wish to smother that guy with her vile coat?” Mohsen wondered aloud.

  “How can you live in Oakland?” I replied to his initial question. “I still contend it’s better to live at the hard knock center of SF—street feces and used syringes and all—than to commute from Oaktown any time something worthwhile is happening in the city. You might as well be in suburbia, for all the spontaneity and splendor that the Oak allows.”

  Once, in the abbreviated chats that followed sex, we’d lamented being downwardly mobile. We were poverty poseurs of sorts during university; then we were sincerely impoverished in the art school and liberal arts aftermath, which was far too common an affliction in a city designed for moneyed progressives. I’d lived in the Mission, the epicenter of bohemia, while on my parents’ bill and had hastily vacated after graduating. All of this was dull, I felt, next to Mohsen’s trajectory. As I admired him in repose, it required a student’s discipline not to assault him with a deluge of questions. He’d once referred to the Curious Caucasian Syndrome, scoffing at the questions posed by his lovers at the revelation of his Persian ethnicity. Listening, I felt like a foolish old john who convinces himself he’s an exception in claiming the affections of his favorite whore.

  Mohsen stared down at the street as if all the world was inscrutable and he could only venture to be amused from afar. Small patches of soft black hair accentuated his pecs, and coarser hair led up his soccer-player legs to an ass that was surprisingly hairless until you got to the edge of the crack, where hair dense and dark like the depths of a northern forest drew one’s eyes to that crevice. I was smitten.

  Ordinarily, my stares were cautious, as I’d numerous times been embarrassed when caught, but with Mohsen I relaxed. He stared unabashedly—sometimes at me, causing me to squirm, sometimes at the objects and spaces that made up my home. He turned slowly toward me, as if trying to draw a connection between what was happening on the street and me, and I again caught a glimpse of the unfathomable in his eyes. Sometimes they shimmered with intimate promise; other times they seemed to feign vacancy so that I wouldn’t bother trying to penetrate his thoughts. I hadn’t truly tried. I no longer trusted my perception of profundity. I’d so many times swooned for some force or curled up beside some warmth that soon revealed itself to be illusory. San Francisco was a city of transient affections.

  Mohsen listlessly ran a finger over the window ledge, and then seemed to scrutinize the sizable ball of dust that had collected at its tip. “Suicide doesn’t suit me,” he said simply, as if it were a logical continuation of a conversation we’d been having.

  “Well, um, I’m glad for that.”

  He looked down at the dirty windowsill. I thought, Why don’t I ever clean anything?

  “I mean, it seems like a perfectly legitimate response in the absolute absence of hope, but it’s just too dramatic, desperate—like a play for a headline or for pity and regret from people who haven’t considered me in ages.”

  His curt laugh emanated from the outskirts of lunacy. “Suicide. My strongest association with it is a bit absurd. The first lover I took when I moved to the Bay Area was an underhanded motherfucker—Michael. One afternoon, after a romp of foreplay, he pulled a sad face and said he had something horrible to tell me. He said he dreaded it like his father’s cooking, but he just had to be honest with me. Then he told me that he was HIV positive. In the ten or twelve minutes before he conceded it was just a fabrication to test my empathy, my mind raced through a million morbid thoughts, the final one being that the poor lad would commit suicide. He was already self-loathing; he wouldn’t be able to cope.” He laughed again and looked over at me. “I actually felt homicidal toward him. I left his apartment and never contacted him again.”

  I thought of the Craigslist ad I’d stumbled across a few months ago in which a young guy had threatened to off himself if he didn’t get “blasted with at least ten loads” up his “slut ass” by the end of that night. I’d wondered if I should notify the police. It seemed callous to ignore that but also lame and intrusive to call the authorities. Now I wondered if anyone else intervened, or if he got his coveted loads.

  Suddenly my thoughts shifted to what Mohsen was like with his other lovers. Was he safe? Was he rough? Did he tend toward domination, as he did with me? Was there the same complicated interplay of tenderness and sullenness?

  He rose and walked over to the tiny kitchen in the right corner of my open square of a home. He opened a cupboard and sifted through my boxes of herbal tea, not seeming to find anything to his liking. Though it was the first time that he’d made himself at home in any part of my apartment other than my mattress, it seemed natural somehow.

  I said, “When I was about eigh
t and my sister announced that she was going to vet school, I was horrified, and I pleaded with her to choose another path and with my mother not to let her, much to the dismay of both of them. I had seen enough ratty guys by the highway holding cardboard signs that said HOMELESS VET that I figured she was fated to become a mistress of the streets.”

  He turned the knob to ignite the flame of the back burner, occupied by my black kettle, and then turned toward me without looking directly at me. “I’m sure there’s a reason you are telling me this, but it eludes me,” he said without unkindness. He turned back to the counter to prepare his pomegranate tea.

  “I’m prone to being concerned for people I care for, though it’s sometimes misguided or awkwardly expressed.”

  I watched minute shudders ripple across his backside. I pulled down the burgundy afghan from the top shelf of my closet and draped it over his shoulders as he poured honey. Timorously, I kissed the spot above his collarbone where a few stray hairs sprouted. I found it strange. Moments earlier we’d been swept up in a brazen, wet sex embrace that was beastly and gentle, in turns. But now this gesture brought a tremble to me. I halfexpected him to pull away.

  He stood still and the plastic honey bear tipped, leaking a fine drizzle, not unlike his relaxing cock after ejaculation or at the onset of arousal.

  “It’s going to be too sweet,” I warned in a whisper, nodding toward the honey.

  He laughed lightly. “It’s too bad this isn’t a cheesy movie because then I could say something like, ‘You’re too sweet, my dear,’ and I’d let the honey continue to pour.” He placed the honey bear back on the counter.

  “You can say whatever you like with me,” I said simply.

  “Okay. That is borderline. Well, I’ll take it because I think I believe in its sincerity.” He blew on his tea, and then looked into the pot that occupied the front burner. With an exaggerated expression of disgust he pulled out a soggy mess of ramen noodles that I had forgotten and left to turn to mush. He clicked in disapproval as he lifted them out and threatened, with a gesture, to throw them on my head, but instead carried them to the window, opened it, and tossed the soppy mass down onto the sidewalk—or perhaps on the head of a hapless passerby. “Ruffians like ramen,” he announced, turning back to me.