Above The Thunder by Renee Manfredi Read Free Book Online

fidelity.
    Stuart cupped the tiny bird in his hands. “Am I supposed to cook or feed this?”
    The evening ended with Jack’s insistence on a monogamous, exclusive relationship. He made Stuart promise faithfulness and he pledged the same. Most of the time, Stuart believed that as an honorable man Jack could override his baser instincts.
    “Try some,” Jack said, blotting the plantains on a paper towel. He speared three slices at once and ate them, his eyes watering from the heat. “God, that brings back memories.”
    Jack was baiting him, Stuart knew. When he was feeling particularly feisty or frustrated, Jack started talking about Africa, about Tutti, the boy “who was as glossy as mahogany, so polished I could see my face in his biceps.” Stuart thought maybe Tutti was an invention, like many of Jack’s stories, a boy, perhaps, who guided him on one of his treks up a mountain. Jack had turned it into a torrid love affair over the years, gradually embellishing the tale until the ubiquitous Tutti was the great tragic love of his life.
    “Wanna do something useful?” Stuart asked.
    “Not now, dear, I have a wicked headache.”
    “There’s fresh basil and garlic in the fridge. Make the salad. I still need to cook the cappellini.”
    “All righty. I think I’ll slip into something more comfortable, though. I’ve had this monkey suit on long enough today.”
    “Okay. But can you step up the pace a bit? I’m feeling a bit harried. I still need to do the dessert and they’ll be here in half an hour.”
    “Cool your zest.” Jack picked up a handful of plantain slices, kissed Stuart on the cheek. “Back in a Gordon.”
    “What?” Stuart said.
    “Back in a flash.”
    “And while you’re at it, feed Loki. There’s a new bag of seed under the cage.”
    *
    They were halfway through the meal and into their second bottle ofwine when Jane and Leila exchanged a conspiratorial look. Stuart and Jack both caught it, which made Leila color deeper.
    “Okay
chicas
, let me say I
know
this visit isn’t just for the pleasure of our company or for Stuart’s fine cooking, which, by the way, is beyond superb.” He raised his wineglass in Stuart’s direction. “I mean, really Jane, you see my ugly mug every day.”
    Jane and Leila both laughed. “Well, actually there is something we’d like to explore with you,” Jane said. She was a tall redhead, with long, Pre-Raphaelite curls that hung nearly to her back. In candlelight, Stuart found her beautiful, but in less forgiving light her skin had a strange uneven texture, scaly-looking, as though she were recovering from a bad sunburn. Jane usually wore loose, drapey clothes in jewel tones, Eileen Fisher-type things for stylish overweight women, though she was in fact on the thin side of average. Tonight she was dressed in a prim, petal-pink dress that made her look like somebody’s Sunday school teacher.
    Stuart liked Leila less, though his opinion might have been tainted by the stories Jane told of her. She was attractive, with strong, even features, though the military-short hair, combat boots, and multiple piercings seemed to Stuart more like a self-conscious statement of her sexuality than anything else. She was twenty-something, a domestic abuse counselor for some sort of women’s program. She had a confident, self-contained air about her, which is what Jane reportedly first found appealing. “She’s so poised for someone who isn’t even thirty yet,” Jane told Jack and Stuart the day she’d met Leila and claimed love at first sight. Jane, in her late thirties, had been through two troubled relationships in the year Jack and Stuart had known her. Katrina, the woman before Leila, had done a real number on her. Jack and Stuart both despised Katrina, a Croatian veterinarian who had lived all over the world, but mostly in Russia and Alaska, studying the seasonal feeding habits of reindeer and their possible links, through neuropeptide-y, to eating disorders in