A Teacher and a Poet by Cy Blanca

Author:Cy Blanca [Blanca, Cy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay romance
ISBN: 978-1-63533-339-8
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2017-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

AFTER THE board meeting, Antony and Curt were both on edge. It seemed like all of Topeka had it out for them. They couldn’t go to the grocery store without half a dozen strangers staring at them, a sort of bloodlust in their eyes one wouldn’t expect from civilized people. A child, one Antony recognized from the playground, had come up to him, tugged on his pant leg, and given him a note.

Your kind isn’t welcome here. You should be ashamed!

He’d turned around to ask the child if he knew what he’d just given him. But before he could even form words cogent enough, the kid had skittered off like a beetle, and Antony had lost him in the flurry of patrons and fruit.

He’d been distracted and just about ready to burst the entire day. He considered himself strong enough to handle pretty much anything. After growing up in East Topeka, he’d better be. But everything piled up was just about as much as he could deal with in one week.

After coming home from the market, he’d turned on some music in Curt’s office, whatever he’d left in the CD player the previous night while he was writing. He needed the noise. The quiet was gnawing at his shoulders and suckling on his backbone like the way his grandfather used to eat chicken—cracking the bones open and sucking out the marrow. When the phone rang, he flinched, his body wound so damn tight he couldn’t even walk straight.

“Dammit, Antony James, calm down!” He chastised himself back into the living room where their landline wailed away. “Okay, okay. I’m coming!” When he reached the phone, he took a deep breath to get his nerves under control, then picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

Nothing.

“Hello?” he said once more. Still he was met with dead silence. And just like that, Antony’s nerves were back on high alert. “Look, asshole, I don’t know who you are, but if you don’t stop playing on my phone, I’m going to—”

“If I was you, I’d get you and your faggot spic out of town before something bad happens.”

“Who the fu—”

Before Antony could get the words out, the window in the living room shattered. It wasn’t the pretty sound of an expensive wine flute falling delicately to the floor. No. This was Birmingham 1963, a bomb exploding to the ears of someone like Antony, who even recoiled at the boom and snap of firecrackers.

Instinct drove him to dive to the floor, an alto yelp of “Shit!” jumping from his mouth just as his palms and knees hit the carpet.

There was laughter, the sound of tires screeching, finding traction, then a heavy engine roaring before leaving its decrescendo on the breeze as the car sped off.

He couldn’t move, could hardly breathe. The phone lay on the floor somewhere, the automated blare coming from its depths telling him to get the hell off the ground and hang it up. He looked across the room and saw a large stone among the hand-sized shards of glass.

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