CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE #2
Adam chuckled at how exuberant Raj got telling the story. Though there was a twinge in his heart at the mention of another man in his life. “Was this the baby guy?”
“No, another. Though he did have a baby face, come to think of it.”
Two boyfriends. Most likely more. Why was Adam surprised? Raj was handsome, sweet, hard and soft at once, masculine without being a gym rat, and approaching forty. He should have tons of ex-boyfriends. That was normal, probably.
“What about you?”
Third date was not the time to be talking about exes, or the hookups that he convinced himself were exes.
“The cat thing? Or pets in general? You seem like a gerbil man.”
Adam laughed at the idea. He reached for the tub of popcorn resting in Raj’s lap, which also let him graze his forearm against the man’s chest. “I can’t be trusted to keep a plastic plant alive, so…”
“I almost adopted a dog,” Raj declared.
“Oh? What stopped you?”
“I moved out here.”
Interesting. “That raises a question. Hook on the handle!” Adam shouted, catching the movie he’d seen a few dozen times. They both took a drink. “I’ve been wondering what it was that drove you out of your fancy job and, I assume, much warmer house for here.”
Raj went quiet. The hands that’d been rubbing up and down Adam’s spread thighs plummeted into his lap instead. In low definition, a woman screamed as a chainsaw plunged through her chest. Blood erupted across the walls, spelling out the killer’s name.
“That,” Raj said. “I got into special effects because I wanted to do that. To make dinosaurs real. To viscerally tear a man in half and have his intestines pulse on camera. But by the time I got out of school, physical effects were out, and everything had to be CG. Instead of being on set, painting actors in blood and rigging mechanics, I spent most of my time inside a small, windowless room moving pixels. It was mind-numbing.”
“Surely some people still do practical effects,” Adam argued to the man who’d lived in this world. He realized his folly as Raj gave a loud huff and looked back at him.
“They don’t even use blood anymore. Like that.
What I wouldn’t give to see some ketchup splattered across a screen.
It’s all CG, so they don’t have to deal with touching up the actor’s makeup or wardrobe.
That’s Hollywood in a nutshell. Doesn’t matter how terrible it looks.
If it’ll save ‘em a hundred dollars, it’s worth the cookie-cutter gore. ”
Adam nodded along with him. There were good, new horror films on occasion, but most had the same jump scares, the same villains, and the same blood animations.
It was more repetitive to see a new movie than for him to pull out the VHS tape he’d worn down to scratches.
“So you decided to try a career as a hotelier instead?”
Silence, save the screams of the goats, cut through them. “You ever watch any Hindi horror?”
“No. Wait, do you have some?”
Raj smiled. “A few. They aren’t in such an antique format as what you’ve got, though I might be able to snag a copy of one from the eighties.”
“Yes, please.” Adam leaned closer to whisper in Raj’s ear, “Next date is at your place.”
“Oh…okay.” He swept his palm over the back of Adam’s hand as they both fell back into the movie.
It wasn’t until the real protagonist arrived at the haunted house that Raj spoke up again. “What about your mysterious past? How’d you go from being in the theater to running the costume shop?”
Adam closed his eyes. “Well, when my dad died—”
“Damn. I’m, I’m sorry. You don’t need to tell me.”
“It’s okay. It was a while back and…” Everyone assumed that was why Adam abandoned his glitzy life in New York.
He was doing right by his family. What a difference that was.
He was damn near treated like a returning hero compared to how he’d been pilloried growing up.
It’d be so easy to let Raj believe the better version of Adam.
That he was so selfless, he had to come back for his poor mother.
But the timeline didn’t quite line up, and besides… his mask was getting heavy.
“When did you know that you preferred the banana in the fruit bowl instead of the fig?”
An uncomfortable snicker broke from Raj, probably at Adam’s awful metaphor. “I dunno. I guess sixteenish. It’s hard to say. Looking back, it seems obvious, but it was like my brain hadn’t caught up with my body.”
“Sixteen? That’s rough.”
Raj sighed. “Tell me about it. I wound up taking a girl to prom because I showed up at her door and she assumed I was there for her.” In a quick whisper, he admitted, “I was trying to ask out her brother.”
Okay, Adam could deal with a pimply sixteen-year-old in his past. “What was he like? Handsome?”
“Eh? Yes. Tall. He was six-foot-five and on the basketball team.”
“At that height, he could have been the basket.” Adam wasn’t feeling any shame about his perfectly acceptable five foot and eleven inches. Besides, he had the extra two inches where it mattered.
“Is that a touch of jealousy on your breath, Mr. Stein?” Raj spun around in Adam’s lap, innocently pressing against Adam’s half-erection. Adam moved to adjust when dark eyes stared into his. Maybe not so innocently.
“Merely an observation. Please, tell me all about this giraffe you crushed on.”
Raj stared him up and down, then he placed his palm on Adam’s chest. “He was lanky, lean. A bean pole. With eyes so blue they were almost white. And he only wore black suits because he knew they flattered him from every angle.”
“A teenager wore suits?” Adam asked, not buying any of this
“What can I say?” Raj shrugged and shredded Adam to pieces with his mischievous grin. “I have a type.”
“You, Mr. Choudhary, are an awful liar. Which I happen to find adorable.” He bent his lanky head and kissed Raj, tasting both the oaken notes of wine and the charred mozzarella of pizza.
As Raj slid back down into place, he nuzzled his cheek against Adam’s chest. “What about you? When did you realize you prefer the sausage to the…um…?”
“Calzone?” Adam suggested.
“Sure.” Raj chuckled. “So…?”
Here came the freight train of trauma, right on schedule.
Adam did his best to hold the man resting in his lap to remind himself he wasn’t that outcast little weirdo anymore.
“There’s the thing. I never had to figure out I was gay because the whole town did before I learned the colors of the rainbow. ”
“Oh.”
“I was the boy who was too feminine, too proper, too careful. Some teachers praised my quiet demeanor while others questioned it. I also, um…” A flash of Adam sneaking one of the feather boas out of his dad’s store and wearing it to school thumped under the floorboards of his memory.
Nope. He was not prying that one out. “I mean, in a family where my sister could scare the crap out of Wednesday Addams, I was the freak. It was my background. Taunts I didn’t understand.
Ostracizing at lunch, the playground, just in general. It all came to a head when…”
He hadn’t breathed a word about his crush.
By that point, Adam had known better than to let it exist anywhere outside of his brain.
But somehow he’d found out, and he hadn’t liked it.
At all. Being so cute, the boy had also been popular and had had a lot of friends who didn’t like the idea of the weird kid liking them either.
“Adam?”
The darkness fractured in his mind. He stared out at the grainy eighties colors of the movie as the monster lumbered across the screen after his victim.
Adam didn’t buy the common trope that the monster killed people who had naughty sex because they’re all secretly puritanical prudes.
The monster went after those who were in love and loved in return—something a hideous creature like him could never have.
A hand crested over his thigh, ripping Adam back to the present. His heart pounded hard in his chest, and he was breathing faster than a locomotive. Raj had to think he was losing his mind.
“Can we, uh, not talk about that right now? Dumping a garbage truck of trauma on you is not how I want the night to go.” He winced at the t-word. He’d meant baggage, but they were one and the same after all.
“It’s okay,” Raj whispered. “We’ve all got one of those.”
Adam shuddered and collapsed around him. He wished he could envelop him completely. Pull Raj inside, not to harm him, but to keep him safe, so their hearts beat together for all time.
“I didn’t go to New York to be on stage. I wanted to be a costume designer for big Broadway shows.”
“You can sew?” Raj asked with no malice. Adam didn’t realize he was bracing for it until it didn’t come.
“My mom taught me, and I used to make costumes for Dad’s shop. Some of them managed to get me an internship at a theater where I studied hard and lived in an apartment the size of my closet with three other people and five rats. But it got me out of here and into my dream.”
“What happened?”
Adam closed his eyes, not knowing why he had to tell him. “I got a break. The lead costume designer for a show had to drop out, so they called me on short notice. It was an off-off-Broadway production of Rocky Horror. I was ecstatic.”
He’d thought he could finally buy the name-brand mac and cheese instead of the generic stuff. “Everything was going well, until… A matinee performance. The actor decided to change up the choreography. During Sweet Transvestite he decided to do a chorus girl kick.”
If Adam closed his eyes, he could still hear the rip. “His costume gave out, and Doctor Frankenfurter flashed his frank and beans to the entire theater. People were mortified. Parents kept calling the theater demanding refunds and threatening to sue for emotional damages.”
“I’m sorry, they were scandalized by a swinging dong at Rocky Horror? Did they think they were at Annie?”
Adam barked out a laugh at the idea. Maybe they had, and he’d just caught the worst break of his life.
“It was such a disaster, they had to fire me on the spot and make a big deal out of it too. Apologies on social media. I think a local news outlet made a story out of it about how they were grooming the youth.”
“Rocky Horror? If they’re that bothered by a cock and balls, they shouldn’t be there. That’s ours.”
That was the thing. Maybe it was once—a story about a monster and sex, and the wild freedom to be as you are instead of what the world demands.
But not anymore. Every edge has to be buffed away.
Every erotic, queer moment smoothed down until it was little more than an implied longing across the street.
“It may have been ours, but once the sharks smelled money in the water, they took away the spice and made it bland enough for everyone. So that’s why I left. I didn’t have a choice.”
“I’m sorry. They shouldn’t have done that to you. Do you still sew?”
“No. I haven’t had much reason to dust off my machine since. Besides…” Adam stared back wistfully at his closet, where he’d stuffed the worst of himself into a box.
“Besides what?” Raj prompted like a curious jay.
“I’m much too busy with my store. You know how it is. A haunt and a hotel.”
Raj’s curious voice softened. He scratched his ear. “Yeah. It’s a lot.”
The final girl got her car started and ran over the monster.
Rather than drive over him a few times, she stopped the car and got out.
That called for finishing his whole glass.
Just as Adam put his lips to the rim, a thought hit him.
“I can’t believe I told you all that.” He spilled his guts to a man he’d only taken on two and a half dates.
“My previous boyfriend didn’t even know my last name for a year. ”
Random hookup for eighteen months counted as a boyfriend.
Like a harpoon through the chests of two sexy teens, it hit Adam.
Without thinking, he’d torn open his ribcage and spilled his guts all over a man he’d been at war with a few weeks earlier.
Complicated feelings, an inability to hold a relationship past the new state, a mess of buried trauma, hints of heels and corsets hiding in the closet.
He couldn’t blame Raj if he leaped to his feet and ran right out the door.
At least he’d be smart enough to roll his car over the monster and keep going.
“Adam?”
Here it comes.
Raj flipped around in Adam’s lap. He let go of the man, bracing for the “This has been fun, but I’ve got a long day tomorrow. Maybe we can hook up some other time.” The warm body against his slipped away. For a second, Adam almost reached for him, as if he were afraid of letting go.
Of being alone.
As if a monster had any state other than soul-rotting loneliness.
The movie clicked off, and Adam looked up. His head pounded, and he struggled to see through the dark light. Raj pressed his palm on top of Adam’s chest, just over his heart, and asked, “One more?”
Smiling like an idiot, Adam caught the VHS tape. He started to pull it free in order to switch the movie. “Sounds—?”
Raj swept up his body and kissed him.