Virgin Heat by Laurence Shames Read Free Book Online Page B

"Paulie's worried?"
    "How should I know, Paulie's worried? I talked to Maria. Maria's worried. Y'ask me, I don't see what the big worry is. Y'ask me, Angelina, for once that oddball kid is acting normal for her age."
    "Maybe she's in trouble," Louie said.
    Rose didn't answer. She put her cigarette in the corner of her mouth and stabbed the pork chops, flicked them off on plates.
    Louie thought a minute, watched the frying pan, still sizzling and steaming.
    *
    "How many bars in this town?" Michael said. "How many would you guess?"
    "I don't know," said Angelina. "Hundreds."
    "At least they're close together," Michael said, as they ducked into another one, their fourth or fifth that evening.
    It was in a courtyard off Duval Street. A mostly outdoor place, Caribbean. Cockeyed tables, their legs sunk in white and dusty stones, leaned against the trunks of scabby palms. Speckled crotons sprouted up from shallow soil and scratched at the backs of chairs. The bar itself was basically a shed—a seamed and ripply metal roof to siphon off the downpours of the tropics, a set of flaccid shutters for locking up the booze during the brief nondrinking hours between four and eight a.m. Vines clung to the overhang; a smudged mirror stood behind the ranks of bottles.
    The place felt familiar, and Angelina wracked her brain to remember the details of Uncle Louie's video. But remembering was difficult. The bar where Sal Martucci worked—before the camera had zoomed in on the longed-for hands, how long had it been on the screen? Three seconds? Four? And, until she'd seen the hands, she'd had no reason to pay particular attention. She thought she remembered vines. She recalled a mirror, a warmly polished slab of wood in a place that was not quite indoors, not quite out.
    But in Key West there were lots of places that looked like that, and with a tiny heartbreak Angelina saw that the hands that made their gimlets were long and regular and slender, not the hands she dreamed about. Discouraged and mirthlessly looped, she led her escort to a table under a palm whose deadly coconuts had been snipped away like the testes of some gigantic wild beast.
    "Cheers," she said morosely, as they clinked their streaming glasses. Then she added, "This whole thing is crazy, isn't it?"
    Michael beamed. "Absolutely."
    "I mean," said Angelina, "who knows what he looks like anymore? Who knows what his name is?"
    "That's what makes it so romantic," Michael said. "You've got to find him with your heart, there's no one that can help."
    "You're helping," Angelina said.
    Michael modestly blinked, toyed with his stud earrings.
    They sipped their drinks, looked up at the sky. Lumpy clouds were massing, their pillowy bottoms reflected the red of city lights, their tall tops fell away in darkening shades of purple and charcoal and inkiest black.
    "And it's really not fair," Angelina went on, "my taking up your time like this. You came here looking for excitement, passion."
    "And I found it," Michael said.
    Angelina scanned his face, refrained from saying, yes, but what he'd found was someone else's passion, not his own. As that thought rolled through her mind, however, it trailed behind it a hunch about Michael that surprised her. She heard herself saying, "You're really kind of bashful, aren't you?"
    He looked away, and she wasn't sure she should have said it. But after a moment he answered. "Meeting people. It's really not so easy."
    Angelina dabbed her lips.
    "A lot of straights," he said, "they have these wild notions, they think it's all disco dancing and meet me in stall three. But if you're talking about really finding someone . . ."
    He broke off, drank, glanced up at the wet, black, spongy clouds.
    "Little secret, Angelina?" he went on. "Men talk big. Straight men do. Gay men do. There's a little bit of wishful bullshit in all of us. Or a lot . . . But when you're out there, looking, there's all this insecurity, all this doubt. I'll tell you—you can take a guy with