Chapter 1
The Harrington Postonline article by Samantha Lynn Dillinger, a four-year graduate of Brown University, and one of its top writers about relationships, stated:
“Sometimes, the right guy comes along. You don’t know who he is at first in the crowd of many, and you don’t know when he’s going to come along, stepping forwards and announcing his love for you. Relationships are a mystery, as they’re supposed to be. Mr. Right is there all along, you just don’t see him at first, although you want to. Eventually, you do, though, and he notices you. He smiles. You smile. And things start to rub together well in the world for both of you. It’s like that classic song by Bryan Adams. The one called “Heaven.” Damn, no wonder the song is classic. It speaks volumes about your life when you finally meet the perfect guy of your dreams.
“You date him, whatever his name is: Carr, Tim, Gleb, Sam, Nole, Creighton, or Mark. Sometimes, his name doesn’t even matter to you, not that it should. Other times, you just want to call him Magic Man because he’s done amazing things to your soul. Literally speaking, the guy has helped you breathe better, on many different levels and understandings. But you don’t call him crazy, perplexing, or challenging. When Mr. Right drops into your lap, he turns out to be just that, Mr. Right. You don’t fight it. You’ll never fight it. When you’re with him, things always feel right, and you can’t prevent the goodness from happening in your soul.”
I stopped reading. A smile formed on my face. Mr. Right just happened to walk into my life, out of the blue, unexpectedly. The smile wouldn’t go away anytime soon, not for years to come, decades. Good for me.
* * * *
“Victor, do you have a minute?”
I looked over my right shoulder at one of God’s most beautiful creations. The guy had an unbelievably muscular body, compact in all the right places inside his khaki dress pants and Kenneth Cole dress shirt. Did he see me discreetly lick my lips? I didn’t think so. I hoped not. How embarrassing that would have been. He stood by the office door with his legs and feet spread apart, his palms planted on his hips. At first, I thought him to be a superhero from Marvel Comics because his chest popped, as well as his private parts.
“I just got back from Miller Street. Two interested buyers were looking at the Shelton property there. I was wondering—”
My mind wandered and concocted a vision of our bodies together, naked and rolling on a queen-sized bed, sharing heavy and intense kisses, licking each other, doing things that only happen in male/male romance novels. I imagined his fingers pinching one of my nipples, then both nipples, and his tongue gently applying wet and sultry strokes against the splay of my chest, southward bound between my pecs, circling my navel, and…
“—if you could look over the stats of the property with me. I think I may have its square footage listed wrong on our website.”
I agreed to follow him into his office. I agreed to let him stand behind me while I sat at his office desk, my tight rump snuggled inside his comfortable chair. I agreed to pull up the stats on his company’s realty website and review the Shelton property’s square footage and other details, verifying if they were correct. I agreed to his athletic palms on my shoulders and his warm and minty breath against my neck as he leaned over me. And I agreed to his hands falling over my shoulders, one palm meeting a pert pec, the other palm meeting a second pert pec, squeezing both, causing me to grow hard.
“We’re alone now. My office door is locked. Now I have you where I want you, Victor Trye.” 1: The Rudder
At The Rudder, a chic little bistro on Stanton Street in downtown Pittsburgh, I read out loud to Gloria from the e-magazine, Money + Art + Life, on my phone “Brent Cassidy’s castle-like residence, Chantilly, is worth nothing, a blur of black and whites without any life. It makes one feel dead inside, insubstantial, and hardly worth the time to look at or live in. The house lacks substance, a block of nothingness and…”
“You lost me,” Gloria said, looking over her Long Island Ice Tea. “Maybe I’ve had too much to drink.”
I closed the app and told her, “The writer sounds like a pompous prick. I can’t stand him. He’s never given me a high review of one of the houses I have sold.”
“I wouldn’t object to that.” Forty-year-old Gloria Linear winked at me and flipped her red mane to the right. Drunk again, she hid from her cheating husband by hanging out with me and probably wished she could have married me instead of Leonard Linear, the physicist without a personality
Matthew “Miller” Van Millerhowsen, our regular waiter in tight jeans and a cobalt blue T-shirt glued to every one of his chest muscles, overheard our conversation and spun around from the table he tended. “Calm down. They’re just words. They can’t kill anyone. People have died over worse things.”
I knew Miller for the last ten years, but didn’t consider him a friend. Yes, we worked out at the same gym, Dude Pumps, where we occasionally bumped into each other. We didn’t hang out at bars, go dancing, eat meals together, or go to the movies together. Miller had his life, and I had mine. He always treated me with kindness, though, respectful, and graced me with compliments about my clothes, eyes, and everyday whatnots, always flirting with me.