2. Meet Jonathan & Lily #2
He knew it wasn’t Daphne du Maurier’s words, clearly, but he knew those lines, had once memorized the first three paragraphs to recite dramatically for his grandmother.
The rhythms and schemes of her favorite book pulled emotion out of him the same way the notes of Me and the Sky and his other program music would take him right back to a different place in his life.
One prompt, one cue, and feelings strummed in him without conscious thought, a flow he couldn’t stop even though he hadn’t heard a live voice speak those lines in almost a dozen years, not since Tammy had passed.
He reached for Lily and the magazine.
“Don’t you go making grabby hands. I found it.”
“These aren’t my grabby hands. These are my pleading-please hands. I love Daphne du Maurier.”
That was wholly inadequate to convey how much the book meant to him, whisking him away to the summer his parents had abandoned him in Palm Springs and Gammy had fed him crudités like he was one of her friends while they’d reclined on pool floats and talked about books.
Together they’d combed thrift stores for cast-off designer clothes and romances she hadn’t read.
She’d taught him to sew. And they’d read every afternoon on her aluminum-framed pool loungers. They’d read so much.
After that summer, he’d been skating almost every day, and only had snatches of time in Palm Springs with her. But he never forgot the summer of Gammy and Daphne du Maurier, the last time he’d been able to do nothing and yet be enough.
“Look at this.” She held the magazine up to show him the cover, which featured a giant pumpkin obscuring the not-safe-for-work parts of a clearly naked man. The colors and fonts did in fact look as cheesy as she’d previously described. “It’s some Halloween spoof issue, I think. Satire.”
“See this?” He unbuttoned the cuff of his white linen shirt and pushed the sleeve as high as it would go on his biceps. “This is a lilac and a copper beech and if that doesn’t get you to give me this magazine, then bitch, I will have to scratch you.”
Lily stared at the tattoo on his upper arm, mouth slightly open. “That’s beautiful. I don’t think I’ve noticed it before.”
Perhaps his usual long-sleeved button downs or thin sweaters were too formal for summer at the public library, but as a smaller man, he liked the gravitas conferred by wearing sleeves to work.
“It’s a line from the novel. From Rebecca.
A lilac had mated with a copper beech, both wrapped in poisonous ivy, thus something evil is trying to strangle the lovers. Nature as foreshadowing and so forth.”
“Your tattoo was inspired by Daphne du Maurier? By Rebecca?”
“My teenaged goth phase was actually gothic romances, courtesy of my grandmother’s penchant for used bookstores.”
Lily sighed. “I want a man who says penchant.”
“So do I.” Jonathan kept his hand extended. He could wait her out.
“Fine. My recent fandom cannot beat an actual freaking tattoo. Here.” She thrust the magazine at him. “But I expect to see his photo.”
“Maxim de Winter was played by a young Laurence Olivier in 1940. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? I think there are some photos on the interweb thingy.”
She made a rude sound. “The Portland dude, silly. Show me.”
“Shh.” He glanced over his shoulder at the closed door, then at the wall clock again. They had five more minutes.
She wiggled her fingers in a bring-it-here motion. “Waiting.”
He sighed, unlocked his phone yet again, and swiped back to the profile for BatsAndBalls. While he rolled his desk chair toward Lily, he tapped to make the photo screen-sized. No way would he hand her the phone and let her read the messages. “Here.”
They both stared at the glorious photo of a twisted male body stretched in mid-leap, one arm extended in front and the other trailing behind. Because the subject’s face was cropped out, they had no choice but to focus on his form.
On a stage instead of a field, he could be a bulky-bodied dancer, but in reality, he might be trying to catch a frisbee. His tight tank top revealed the expected arm and chest muscles, as well as tufts of underarm hair that Jonathan had uncharacteristically decided were not a deal breaker.
He wasn’t going to lie, not even to himself, about why: the side view of thighs and butt in tight black shorts.
“Oh, that’s, wow. That’s certainly a—what do they say in baseball? A dump truck?”
“I don’t know. Why baseball?”
“That handle? Bats and balls?”
“That’s baseball?” He’d assumed it was a dick reference, but Lily was nodding in agreement. A strange cold sensation prickled on the back of his neck and his knew his shoulders tightened, but he couldn’t stop them.
“What did you think…ohhh.” At least she had the grace to turn as red as Jonathan felt. “Yes, it could also be a reference to the phrase ‘batting for the other team’, which was originally a baseball reference or maybe cricket, but also means, you know—”
“I certainly do know.”
She continued as if he hadn’t interrupted. “So he might be making a deep pun.”
“I hope to God you aren’t trying to make a deep pun right now.
” He wasn’t going to understand anything his date said, and it was going to all be awkward silences.
The acid suddenly coating his throat told him that saying yes to someone he’d suspected of being a jock was a mistake, but he’d been easy to text with and he did have that butt.
A dump truck in technical parlance, apparently, and Jonathan’s usual type rarely arrived with one of those.
He could feel his heart doing weird things, but he had no idea how to fix this. How to fix anything.
“Wait a minute.” Lily leaned toward him and stared into his face.
He tried to smooth out the crease in his forehead into something nonchalant, a Herculean effort that was doomed by his friend’s regrettable mascara application.
“You didn’t know his handle was referring to an actual sport! Like, not at all?” Lily thrust the phone back and rolled her own chair away so she could laugh far too loudly for the workplace.
At him.
“Ohmigod. This date,” she gasped. “I want to be there. So, so bad. He’s going to talk about sports and you’re going to think it’s, I don’t know what, artisanal cheese? K-Beauty products?”
“Shut up. No one mistakes cheese for skin care.” That came out too waspish and he was not a waspish type of gay. Even if he might occasionally be borderline waspish, he carefully did not cross that Rubicon, just splash in the shallows, that was all.
Her laughter made him feel better. His former therapist might question whether this was good or bad attention, and ask him why he liked it, but he chose to believe it was friendly laughter because he liked Lily.
She clasped her hands in the middle of her chest and opened her eyes to plead.
“You need me. Please, I can be your Cyrano de Bergerac and sit behind you and feed you information, I promise I can. You know I have two dads, but also, I played softball for a year in college and helped manage the football team videos, I can carry you. Take me, please. Take me.”
He snorted. “You wish. Get your own himbo.”
No matter how the date turned out, at least he’d have a story for Lily on Monday.