Gossip by Christopher Bram Read Free Book Online Page B

flipped around and nested in my armpit.
    I liked having him there. His eyes were closed, his mouth still flush. A tomcat smile stood out on his pale face as if he wore lipstick.
    “Do this often?” I teased. “Take home roadkill from the information superhighway?”
    A brown eye snapped open. “I am not roadkill.” His indignation took me by surprise.
    “Not you, silly. Me.”
    “You? Well, you shouldn’t put yourself down either.” He seemed to have lost his sense of humor with his orgasm.
    “All I meant was you know how to enjoy yourself with someone you just met.”
    “I usually don’t. Do this or enjoy it.” He smiled and laid a leg across my middle to make clear that he enjoyed me, and to keep my body beside him.
    But I was content to stay, glad that he wasn’t the type who promptly wipes off and gets dressed. It took practice to be so comfortable with tricking. I assumed he was being modest about his experience.
    “How old are you?” I asked.
    “Twenty-eight. And you?”
    “Thirty-four. Like I said on the chatline.”
    “I said I wouldn’t read that. I didn’t. So. Did we surprise each other, Sergeant Rock?”
    “Oh yeah.” I didn’t tell him what I’d expected. If he couldn’t laugh at my roadkill crack, he wouldn’t be amused to hear what I had pictured.
    “Do you have a lover?” he asked. The old-fashioned word.
    “Nope.” As gently as possible, not wanting to make him guilty, I said, “But you do?”
    “No.”
    “Really?”
    “No!” He was offended I didn’t believe him.
    “Sorry. Just thought that’s why you had such a big bed.”
    “It was here when I moved in. Almost everything belongs to the friend who owns it. He stays here when he’s in town, but he has his own room.”
    “A gay friend or a straight friend?”
    “Straight. And married. Why does it matter?”
    “Just curious.” I wanted him to be attached or kept, to explain his apartment and car. Otherwise, I’d been picked up by a very successful younger man, and I really was roadkill.
    “Everything has to be gay or straight with you New York types,” he grumbled, stroking the rill of bone by my temple.
    While our voices said one thing, our bodies said something else. We remained curled against each other, too content to climb out of this warm bath of shared skin.
    “Why do you do this to your head?” he asked.
    “I like the look. The feel. Saves money on haircuts.”
    “It’s not for the politics?”
    “Oh, it’s like any haircut. It might have social meaning at first, but then it becomes just a haircut.”
    I enjoy talking in bed with strangers. Often they just want to sleep or go home or I am too disappointed to want to loiter myself. But when the mood is right, I love the inside-out intimacy of learning about the vertical life of a body that I’ve already known horizontally.
    “How long have you been out?” I asked.
    “Depends on how you define out.”
    I wasn’t alarmed; it’s always a tricky question. “When did you start having sex with guys?”
    “Oh, seventeen.”
    “Really? You have the jump on me.”
    “How old were you?”
    “Depends on what counts as the first time.”
    “Your first time in bed with a man.”
    “Twenty-one. Only his wife and another woman were in bed with us.”
    “Truly?” he said, making a face.
    I told him the story, the comic version, which I hadn’t repeated since my days when all postcoital talk seemed to be about first times. I gave no names.
    He listened with growing concern for my shame, and distress that women were present. “I hope you didn’t have sex with them.”
    I assured him I hadn’t, although that disappointed some men.
    “What an awful couple,” he muttered. “What kind of wife can do that with her husband? Both those women sound awful.”
    His righteous disgust amused me. After all, I’d been appalled myself at the time. “But I was just as bad. Tim and Nina’s only crime was that they didn’t know how serious Nancy and I were. My