Between Boyfriends by Michael Salvatore Read Free Book Online Page B

reminding me that when a crisis arises I should simply”—I paused for effect—“let go and let gay.”
    “To letting go,” Flynn said, raising his cup.
    “And letting gay,” we all responded.
    So for the second time that day I found myself raising my coffee in honor of some intangible notion. And for the second time that day while I sat with my arm outstretched, my coffee raised, and a fake smile plastered on my face, I was consumed with the same persistent thought: why hasn’t Frank called me back? And then another thought popped into my head: why can’t I just let him go?
    I answered my questions almost immediately thanks to Lindsay’s earlier advice. Like some people just can’t be anything other than gay, other people just don’t want to be let go.

Chapter Four
    T he next day was as chaotic and poorly choreographed as a Bollywood musical. It was so haphazard that by noon I was actually considering changing my name to Kumar “Steven” Patel, but I reeled myself in knowing my mother would have a coronary if I turned my back on my Sicilian heritage, even if she was developing a taste for cumin thanks to the latest occupant of the Salvatore DeNuccio Towers, the widow Padma Maharaji. As one madcap hour evolved into another I could almost hear the high-pitched nasal twangings of a chorus of Hindi dancers wearing Western garb and gyrating in front of a huge waterfall. Then in the middle of a sun-drenched desert. Then stopping traffic in the center of Bombay’s busy market district. My day, like a screwball comedy in Sanskrit, clung desperately to its through line.
    Here’s how the day went. Bright and early on Tuesday morning I marched into the ITNC studios with the determination of Norma Rae and the optimism of Gidget, resolved to ask Lorna Douglas if she would star in my mother’s Christmas celebration. But by our first early morning break my resolve recoiled. I succumbed to the belief that if you think the answer to your question will be bad it’s safer to avoid asking the question altogether. By ten-thirty, however, I realized that if I didn’t report back to my mother with a yea or a nay as to Lorna’s participation pronto, she would use her maternal powers to psychically haunt me from the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. She had done it before; she would do it again.
    Luckily, luck was my lady and I spotted Lorna sitting by herself during a break in taping. Her lips were moving like those of a silent film star on crack, so I could tell she was using her down-time to memorize lines while a few feet away the makeup team surrounded her costar, Lucas Fitzgerald, to reapply a fake scar to his face. I knew it would take them more than a few minutes since Lucas’s character, Roger Renault, was a race car driver who had sustained terrible burns from a recent boating accident and the resulting scar started at the left side of his forehead, ran over the bridge of his nose, somehow never made contact with his incandescent blue eyes, and ended on the sharpest point of his right cheek. The implausibility of the scar was matched only by the implausibility of my question getting a positive response from Lorna. But the time had come for me to somehow try and make the implausible plausible.
    “Hey, Lorna! Sorry to interrupt, but this December my mother is organizing a Christmas musicale for her senior citizens’ group in New Jersey and she’d like you to be the headliner and perform for free,” I explained. “So how’s about it?”
    “Cool,” was Lorna’s monosyllabic reply.
    For a second I thought she was referring to her scene partner’s scar, which I had to admit did look grotesquely arousing, and in the next second I understood why Lindsay found the guy in Mask a masturbatory fantasy, but in the second after that I realized Lorna had seriously answered my indecent proposal.
    “You’ll do it?” I asked.
    “Sure,” she monosyllabically replied.
    Just as I was beginning to think Lorna was saving all