Love on the Web Page 4

  On my way back downstairs, I stopped at my old room. I was disoriented to see that the twin beds were gone, replaced by a double bed in the center of the room, and the posters on my side of the room had been taken down and replaced with flowery art nouveau ones.

  Leroy came in behind me. “Sorry, should have told you we were packing up your shit,” he said. “There’s a couple of boxes in the garage for you.”

  “Angie’s already living here?”

  “A month now.”

  Well, that was great. I’d been kicked to the curb, and nobody had even told me. But I was never moving back to Homestead, for sure. The life there was not the one I wanted. I never knew anything about the rest of the world, beyond what I saw on TV or scrounged around online, until I got to college and the world opened up for me.

  Leroy and I sneaked out to the garage, where our oldest brother Lincoln was sitting on the concrete, tinkering with his motorcycle. When we were kids, the three of us shared one bedroom, and the two girls the other. When he turned thirteen, Linc decided he couldn’t live with Leroy and me anymore, and he commandeered a corner of the rec room for himself—probably so he’d have a safe place to jerk off.

  Soon after, he cut lawns for a year to earn enough money to buy a broken-down dirt bike, and the next year worked to buy the parts to rebuild it. It was clear he was going to be a mechanic. Leroy got my dad’s aptitude for electronics. He couldn’t wait to graduate from high school and get into one of the training programs at Turkey Point.

  Linc and Leroy were both good-looking guys, with square jaws and thick dark hair, though there was something tougher about Linc—his hands were always scratched and blistered, and he had a scruffy five o’clock shadow that never seemed to disappear no matter how often he shaved.

  We hung around together for a while until Lisa and Lori appeared in the doorway. A lot of people had trouble telling the twins apart, because they both wore their brown hair long and straight, wore the same color lipstick and nail polish, and all that stuff. When they were little, they worked at fooling people, but I could always tell. They were what you call mirror-image twins, Lori right-handed and Lisa left-handed, and they weren’t perfectly identical. Somehow I was able to pick up those differences and magnify them in my mind, so to me it was easy to know who was who.

  “Mom says you have to come in,” Lisa said.

  “It’s time to eat,” Lori said.

  “We have cake afterward,” Lisa said.

  “For the birthday boy,” Lori said.

  You get the picture. One never spoke without the other saying something too. It was like there was a string connecting them.

  We went back to the dining room, where my mom had laid out a big platter of sandwiches with her homemade potato salad and coleslaw, and we all sat down to eat. After dinner there was a birthday cake for Leroy, and he and Angie made their big announcement, though it didn’t look like it was a surprise to anybody at the table.

  It started to pour as I drove back to South Beach. It was so dreary that I couldn’t help feeling depressed. I might never get a date, and even if I did meet someone, I doubted I’d ever come out to my family or bring him home to them. For a moment I thought of Julian Argento. What would he think of my family? What would they think of him?

  Since there was no chance I’d ever be introducing him to them, it didn’t matter. At least I was on my way home to the planet where I belonged.

  6 – Cows and Pigs

  It rained on and off all Sunday evening, which I spent coding and getting quotes from Indian programmers. Two of them, Rajesh and Rajneesh, had great credentials, and I thought they could whip out some complicated routines pretty quickly. I e-mailed their quotes to Julian and was surprised that within a couple of hours he had sent them their own contracts, and they were ready to work.

  Monday dawned rainy and gloomy, and I had to jump aside when the bus pulled up or get splashed from a massive puddle. Palm fronds littered the streets, along with a thin layer of dead leaves. It was another depressing day, and for once I didn’t mind the lack of windows in our offices.

  I was hunched over my computer when Dylan came in. “Hubba, hubba,” he said, nudging me. “You get some over the weekend, or what?”

  I wasn’t about to share my sex life with Dylan—or any of the guys, for that matter. Noah was obsessed with the Pleasure Emporium across the street, always talking about what he saw in the window there, wanting us all to go over there together. Probably because he was scared to go in by himself. But I didn’t want anybody to see me pop a woody over gay porn, and I didn’t want to fake interest in bustiers or garter belts.

  “Go to work, Dylan,” I said.

  “Huh,” he said, but he walked away.

  It was the same with each of the guys as they came in. They all wanted details of my sexual encounter Friday night, but I didn’t have any details to share, and I wasn’t going to confess to my misunderstanding, so they got cranky with me. “At least let me live virtually,” Noah pleaded. “Come on, did she have big tits? I love big tits.”

  “Go away, Noah,” I said.

  “I take back everything good I said about you to Boris,” he grumbled as he walked over to his cube.

  I had brought a sandwich with me for lunch, and as I sat in the conference room eating, Mila came in to join me. “You’re eating late today,” I said. It was after two o’clock—normal time for me, but late for the office staff.

  “Boris made me stay in a meeting to translate,” she said.

  “Translate? Russian? Doesn’t Boris speak it?”

  “Not Russian. French. He can only speak a few words, and his accent is terrible.”

  I picked up my sandwich and took a bite. When I was finished chewing, I asked, “You speak French? But I thought you were from Russia.”

  She smirked at me as she peeled the top off her yogurt. “I’m from New York, dummy. My parents, they were from Moscow. I majored in French in college. I can speak Russian, Spanish, and German too.”

  “What are you doing here, then?”

  “What kind of job do you think I could get with a major in French?” she asked. I noticed how long and delicate her fingers were as she dug into the yogurt with a plastic spoon. “Teaching eighth graders to say Bonjour, Mademoiselle?”

  “Why’d you major in it, then?”

  “Because I loved to speak it and read it. And because I was a dumb girl at a state university. Boris is my second cousin, so when he offered me the job here, I took it.” She nodded toward me as I kept eating. “You, at least, have a skill. You weren’t dizzy and stupid like me in college, mooning after Balzac.”

  “You could learn programming. Any of the guys could show you a few things.”

  She barked out a laugh. “I have other ideas. I want to meet a rich man who will support me while I eat chocolate and read Proust.”

  “Having any luck with that?”

  She plunged her spoon back into the yogurt. “It’s a work in progress. How about you? Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know...”

  “What, that we knew you were gay? We all knew right away. All the girls, at least. The boys are too obsessed with their computers to pay attention.”

  I finished the last bit of my sandwich and rolled up the wrapper.

  “So, do you?” Mila asked.

  “Not right now,” I said.

  She nodded. “You boys have it easy. You want to have sex, you go to a bar, you meet, and then you go off and do it. If a girl tries that, everyone calls her a slut.”

  “You know what they say,” I said, standing up. “Why buy a cow if you can get the milk for free?”

  “Boys say that. Girls say why marry a pig just to get a little bit of sausage?” She laughed again as I walked out.

  I finished the Mexican-restaurant app that afternoon and began testing it. Around six thirty I ducked out and headed for home. On the way I texted Manny and agreed to pick up some takeout Chinese for the t
hree of us.

  We sat in the living room to eat and watch Wheel of Fortune. “Weird thing at work today,” I said. “This girl Mila, the receptionist, casually told me that everybody there knows I’m gay. At least, all the office staff.”

  “Is that a big deal?” Gavin asked.

  I shrugged. “I wanted it to be my business, you know?”

  “At least you don’t have to worry about getting fired for it,” Manny said. “You should have seen what happened at the site today. The superintendent saw this drag queen walking along the street and went after her with a front-end loader.”

  “I love it when you talk construction,” Gavin asked. “It’s so butch.”

  “Yeah, well, try working in an environment like that,” Manny said.

  I’d heard too much about the place Manny worked, so I claimed the conversation again. “This girl asked me out of the blue if I had a boyfriend.”

  “Does she have someone to fix you up with?” Manny asked.

  “I wish. Nah, she was being nosy. But now I feel kind of weird. Wondering if people are looking at me differently.”

  “Did she say she just figured it out?” Gavin asked.

  I shook my head. “She said they twigged right away.”

  “Then nobody’s going to change their attitude because you know they know,” Gavin said.

  I worried over Mila’s comment as we finished dinner, but once I turned on my laptop, I was deep into programming zone. When my phone trilled beside me, I almost didn’t answer because I didn’t want to lose my train of thought. But then I saw the call was from Julian.

  “Just thought I’d check in,” he said. “Not too late to call?”

  “I’m a programmer. We’re creatures of the night.”

  Julian laughed. “Cute, smart, and funny too,” he said. “Everything I could want in a programmer.”

  Was it just me, or did I hear a brief pause before the word “programmer,” when I was hoping he’d say “boyfriend”? And did he call me cute?

  “So what’s happening?” he asked.

  I told him what I was working on and asked a couple of questions that I could have figured out myself, but I wanted to drag the call on.

  Then we came to an awkward silence, when I had nothing more to ask. “Well, I need to get my beauty rest,” Julian said. “I have appointments tomorrow. I’ll give you a beso on each cheek.”

  Then he made two kissy noises, and I laughed. “Good night, Julian.”

  I went to bed, because I did have that pesky job at AppWorks and so I couldn’t devote my whole life to Julian Argento. Maybe someday, though.

  The next day, after I’d worked out at the gym for a while, I walked over to AppWorks, thinking about the way Mila had so casually outed me the day before. It was a weird feeling, almost like one of those dreams where you show up for school naked and everybody stares at you. I was glad to nod a quick hello to her while she was on the phone and then duck into my cubicle. I watched each of the guys as they came in for signs that they knew. But each of them was in his own little world, as usual.

  I’d been in my cubicle an hour when Kaitlyn bopped up. “Great news! That client you met last week, Victor? He signed up, and he wants you to be the developer for his app.”

  “If it’s okay with Boris, it’s okay with me,” I said. “I’m almost done with testing the dancing Mexican.”

  “That’s terrific. I’ll clear it with Boris. Can you meet with Victor this afternoon to go over details?”

  “I guess. When is he coming in?”

  She shook her head. “He’s not coming here. He wants you to meet him for lunch at the Van Dyke on Lincoln Road.”

  “You’re going to be there, right?”

  “No, just you. Techie stuff, I guess.”

  The thought of having lunch with a sexy male client gave me the shudders. I was sure I’d spill food on myself or have a spontaneous orgasm, or say or do something utterly clumsy and embarrassing. “I can’t go. Have him send his requirements, and I’ll build it.”

  “No, he specifically requested that you meet him,” she said. “Come on, Larry. This is a big contract. Don’t screw it up for me, please?” She leaned in close. “Don’t quote me on this, but I think he likes you.”

  I recoiled from her. “Likes me? Why?”

  “You’re a cutie-pie! I’ll bet you have guys falling all over you.”

  So Mila had been telling the truth, and Kaitlyn knew I was gay. What the fuck?

  She mistook my confusion for agreement. “Very cool! He’ll meet you at the Van Dyke at one.” Then she scurried out of the cube farm before I could stop her.

  I figured that at least the other guys still thought I was straight, based on their comments about booty calls. But Kaitlyn and Mila both knew, and what Mila knew, I was sure she’d told Boris.

  Which meant that my boss knew I was gay. And it didn’t seem to matter to him. But I still didn’t want to spread my business around the office. And I was certainly not going to say anything about Julian Argento either.

  7 – Flirtation

  I used my bus pass and rode up to Lincoln Road in comparative cool, then kept under the awnings whenever possible as I made my way to the Van Dyke. I was a few minutes early, so I stood across the street at the sunglass place, imagining how I would look in different styles.

  “Hey, Larry, thanks for meeting me!”

  I looked around and saw Victor approaching. He was as gorgeous as I remembered, and as immaculately groomed as when I’d met him the week before. “Um, hi,” I said. I felt like such a dweeb in my board shorts and T-shirt—perfect for work at the cube farm, but completely out of place for a business lunch with Mr. Perfect. “Sorry—I, uh, didn’t know I was going to have to meet a client, or I’d have dressed up.”

  “You look fine to me,” he said, smiling.

  Shit. Was Kaitlyn right? Did this guy like me? That made me even more tongue-tied. He led me across to the restaurant, and I couldn’t help noticing how perfect his ass was. I knew how much work went into tight glutes like that.

  The hostess recognized Victor and led us to a quiet table at the back of the restaurant.

  “I’m glad you’ll be available to work with me,” Victor said as we picked up our menus. “I can tell you and I are going to get along very well.”

  I hid my blush behind the big menu. Shit. This was going to be way harder than I’d expected. How was I going to talk to this guy about computer stuff when everything he said gave me an instant boner?

  The waiter, a cute young guy about my age with a goatee that made him look like a fifties hipster, appeared before I’d gotten my head wrapped around the menu. “Would you care to begin with a cocktail?” he asked Victor.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Would you like a chocolate kiss, Larry?”

  I blushed again, which I figured was what Victor was aiming for when he smiled.

  “No, that’s a dessert drink. We’ll save that for after we get to know each other better. I’ll have an orange mojito,” he said to the waiter. “You want one too, Larry?”

  “I shouldn’t. I have to get back...”

  “Make it two,” Victor said. “I’ll have the steak and fries. Larry?”

  I glanced down at the menu. I had no idea what the etiquette was for ordering with a client. Was he going to expect me to pay for lunch? I panicked and picked the first item I saw. “I’ll have the Black Forest ham sandwich.”

  The waiter swept up our menus and strode away, leaving me with nothing between me and a very sexy client.

  “So, Larry,” he said. “Tell me about yourself. How long have you been working for Boris?”

  I looked down at the table. “I graduated from FU in May,” I said. “But don’t worry; I know what I’m doing.”

  “I’m sure you do.” He leaned over and used his right index finger to tip my face up. “You can look at me, you know. I won’t bite. Unless you ask me nicely.”

  Jesus. I blushed again, and Victor laughed. “
You’re adorable, Larry. You look so shy and naïve on the outside, but underneath I’ll bet you’re a tiger.”

  I looked him right in the eyes and growled softly, and he threw his head back and laughed.

  After that, I decided to go along for the ride. Victor had enough to say to carry the conversation when I got tongue-tied. We talked about how his app could work while we sipped our drinks and waited for our food, and the more mojito I drank, the easier it got to talk to him. It was funny that I could talk to Julian without the benefit of alcohol. Was that because we were only going to work together, and nothing more?

  My sandwich arrived on a French baguette. “You’ll have to open wide to jam that in,” Victor said in a low voice. “But I’ll bet you can do that.”

  Listening to his voice made me feel like I was going to come in my pants. I was sure that when I got up from the table, there’d be a big wet spot at my crotch. How was I going to get out of the restaurant, then ride the bus back to work?

  But I was already in too deep to back out. I opened my mouth, licked my lips, and picked up the sandwich. Victor watched me stick the end in my mouth and take a bite. He didn’t say anything more, just dug into his steak.

  By the time lunch was over, I was tipsy. I didn’t care if he stuck me with the bill—I’d put it on my one credit card and get Boris to reimburse me. But Victor had a black AmEx out even before the server laid the check on the table. “Can I give you a ride back to your office?” he asked.

  “Oh, you don’t have to. I can catch a bus on Alton Road.”

  “A bus! I wouldn’t hear of it. My car’s around the corner.”

  I was relieved that by the time we stood up, my dick had gone down, and there were no telltale stains on my pants. I followed Victor out of the restaurant, once more admiring his tight ass, and then across Lincoln Road to the north parking lot. “This is me,” he said, pulling out his remote and beeping it.

  The lights on a midnight-blue Porsche Panamera flashed. “You drive a Porsche?”