Gossip by Christopher Bram Read Free Book Online

play. Because Cressida is a nut and slut who betrays the man who loves her. Not qualities one wants in a motor vehicle.”
    He unlocked the door of a pearl gray Lexus whose interior smelled like a box of new shoes.
    “What do you do for a living, Bill?”
    “I’m a writer.”
    He was too young to have earned the car with words, and I knew firsthand that “writer” was often a synonym for bum.
    “What do you write?”
    “Journalism. Freelance. What do you do?”
    “I’m a shipping clerk in a bookstore.”
    “Truly? Maybe you’ll be selling my book when it comes out.”
    “You’ve written a book?”
    “A first book. Expanding an old article,” he said dismissively, as if everyone wrote and published such things. “There’s a fine coffee bar nearby. Or, if you like, I have an espresso machine. We could go back to my place.” He smiled, a complex double smile, as if smiling at his own smile.
    Yes? No? Why not?
    “Espresso sounds good,” I said casually.
    “You mean at my place?” He could not believe his luck.
    “Why not?” I said aloud. In New York I might not have looked at him twice. Tricking with strangers was not high on my menu and I hadn’t been to bed with anyone in months. But being in another city with time on my hands opened my mind, extended my standards. His nerdy cheerfulness promised a quick yet friendly boff.
    “For how long are you in D.C.?” he asked. “Do you get down often? How long have you lived in New York? Where are you from originally? You don’t sound Southern, you realize.”
    He peppered me with questions that I answered truthfully while we drove a mile or so, past a Metro stop labeled Cleveland Park—I needed to know the closest public transportation—and swung into the parking lot of a tall, flinty twenties apartment building in a tangled net of bare trees.
    The simple sensual act of walking from raw cold into a warm lobby was enough to chub me in my pants.
    “Swank place,” I said in the elevator. “What’s the rent?”
    “None of your business.” He chuckled. “But I will tell you—it’s a friend’s apartment. His rent is very reasonable.”
    I’ll bet, I thought, assuming it was a boyfriend’s apartment, a boyfriend’s car—and the boyfriend was away.
    “Home,” he said as he opened the door with his maraca laugh. We stepped into a dark, overheated apartment large enough to have a front hallway. “Take your wrap, sir?”
    I waited until he hung my coat and his vest in the closet. Then I laid an arm across his shoulder and turned him toward me. I expected a flinch or a startled laugh, but his lips promptly opened to my kiss.
    “Mmm? Mmm.” He took me in his arms. He’d recently brushed his teeth. “You don’t want espresso,” he murmured.
    We were all over each other. I was surprised to find he was slightly taller than I, and solid, a six-foot cherub in glasses. We stumbled deeper into the apartment and I noticed three televisions side by side, a printer and an open Powerbook. From software to underwear, I thought, my hand down the back of his pants. High tech, high touch. He had the most muscular lips and tongue.
    “You’re a good kisser,” I muttered.
    “Played trumpet,” he croaked. “My high school band.”
    We were on a sofa, undoing buttons and sliding hands under clothes while our tongues squirreled in a tight, wet room of joined mouths. There was the porno ritual of undressing each other item by item as we necked, the slow unwrapping of gifts. We were down to white briefs—he was more acculturated than he seemed: Calvins—when he stood up to examine me. His baby face, vague and piglet-eyed without glasses, was misleading. He wasn’t fat, but firmly upholstered in plush skin. His arms were thick and his waist narrow, with a neat trail of hair under a knotted belly button and a thick diagonal fold in his cotton.
    I didn’t break him into details until later. Sex is like classical music for me in that I never quite hear a piece the