Best Gay Erotica 2004 by Kirk Read

Author:Kirk Read [RICHARD LABONTÉ, KIRK READ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2012-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Outer Limits of My Aspirations

from Seven Sweet Things

Shaun Levin

“These are for you.”

Handmade chocolates in a small white box bound with a thin lilac ribbon, which I hand to my love as we walk through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, leaving Holborn behind us on our way to the river. Summer evening, and the air is damp with humidity and car fumes. We walk beside the railings through the fields smelling of wet grass and rust. The chocolates are soft; we eat one of each: Cointreau truffles, rum truffles, orange and walnut creams. My love keeps bumping into me, nudging my shoulder, looking at me as if over the top of spectacles, and laughing.

“You’re in a giggly mood today,” I say.

“I’m glad to see you,” he says.

“I was almost late,” I say.

And I make my love listen to the journey I have taken to get to him: there were no trains from Blackheath, where I’d been running a workshop all day, getting old people to record the details of their war years (almost all of them had been taken from their homes as children and sent to live in the countryside), so I got a cab to Lewisham, then a train to London Bridge. I felt accompanied in the world, less fragile than usual, loved by a man, connected to him as I stood in a carriage on the Northern Line to Bank, then the Central Line to Holborn, and rode up the escalators, moving without having to move, then into the light, and there he is, my love, waiting beside the newsstand with a smile, a reduced version of one six times its size.

“I’m not going to kiss you,” he says, as he leads me like a blind man down Kingsway. “People know me here.”

“Do they?” I say. As if all this is news to me.

We’re passing Sir John Soane’s Museum; everything, my love tells me, is as it was in Victorian times: the furniture, the crockery, the plumbing, everything that was this man’s home is as it used to be. And there are Hogarths all over the place. At this time of day, though, it is closed, so we turn right and keep walking through the Law Courts and down toward the London School of Economics where my love lectures in mergers and acquisitions. We’re still new to each other, eager to display the sceneries of our day-to-day existence. Pointing to the buildings covered in a film of carbon residue, my love tells me why Downing Street is painted black; the soot that has always coated the prime minister’s house is what makes it recognizable to Londoners.

Ever so quickly, as he’s engrossed in his own stories, a peck on his shoulder, a kiss before continuing on our way along the side streets of the LSE to Clement House on Aldwych where my love takes me down to the study-room in the basement. This is where he sits sometimes, pretending to read or work at a computer, just so he can

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