Ode to Lata by Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla Read Free Book Online Page B

were mending each other, dressing the wounds we had been condemned to inherit by those who had borne us, and the ones we had inflicted upon each other.
    Yes, we had injured each other as carelessly as our parents had one another, but we would make up for it more quickly than they had and make promises that would prove true only to the moment.  Never to inflict such injuries, cause such pain.  He would make up where our fathers had left off – abandoning, betraying and being absent.  I would make up where both our mothers had tried – forgiving, enduring and perhaps even preventing him from straying again.
    The fact that we never went any further than making glorious promises and holding and kissing each other started to matter less to me as time went by.  I never stopped wanting him, though.  Craving him inside me.  In fact, it was the image of him hungrily taking from others what he refused me that would play in my mind when, after moments of such close physical contact, I would be left alone to find myself helplessly masturbating.  It was the scent of his deodorant as I stood sniffing at the counter of some supermarket that evoked sensations and liquefied my stomach.
    I don’t want to jeopardize our friendship… It’s just not what I want from you, Ali.
… And I would be left to contend with intimate brushes against his body and caresses that titillated but never quenched.
    That was just the “Ali-Richard” relationship.  There was no changing it.  Too much time had gone by and there was no chance of crossing that line.  We had become “snuggle buddies.”  A kind of relationship, we both discovered later, that was not uncommon in the gay culture.  You fucked around with everyone and to them you gave your body and your cock.  And sometimes you had that one person to whom you gave your sweet moments and your grief, not much else.  Often two people, driven by different emotional needs, found themselves dependent on each other for the kind of loving that, for at least one half of the pair, precluded any kind of sexual compulsion.  I told myself that there were ties more binding, and more lasting than those built around sex.  And this, I was determined to believe, was one of them.
    When Richard broke away from our embrace an hour later and smiled sheepishly for pardon, I composed myself, still glowing from his touch.  In years to come, the memory of accepting such charity would repulse me.  But not that night.  That night I had gotten more than I had dreamt possible.  Injected with my favorite drug, I knew I could confidently bear whatever came my way until the shakes came again.  I could go to sleep now, safe in the knowledge that I had not been shunned.  That I was still loved.  That nothing I had done had alienated or driven him away from me.
    Soon he would be gone, and I knew I would have to employ the memory of that hour we had spent together to satiate myself.  But that mattered very little now.  With a satisfied smile on my face, and a glow emanating from inside me, I kept telling myself over and over again that sex was such a trivial omission from our relationship.  Who needed it when there was so much sincerity, such genuine caring?  You can’t have everything and this is so much more substantial than
that
.
    Richard ran his hand through his tousled black hair as he stood at the foot of the bed, looking down at me.  He buttoned up his shirt and tucked it back into his pants and said that he had been glad to be able to spend that very special evening with me.  “I love you,” he said again.  “And don’t you ever forget it.”
    “Don’t you ever let me,” I said, smiling.
    He glanced at the wristwatch I had given him for his birthday and shook his head at the time like it was late. It was 11:30, and luckily he wouldn’t have to drive too far from my apartment.
    Louis lived only a few streets up and had promised to wait up until at least midnight.

CHAPTER 8
     
    ROPE OR RAT