When You Were Me by Robert Rodi

Author:Robert Rodi [Rodi, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: erotic MM, Romance MM
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp
Published: 2007-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37

Jack’s funk only deepened as the days ensued. What he’d considered at the time no more than a dose of cold water in Frida’s face, he came to view in retrospect as pitiless cruelty. The woman obviously had her share of issues, had just been dumped by her longtime lover, and had reached out to a dear friend for comfort—only to find that that friend had changed the rules of their relationship without telling her. Worse, he’d gone to her own house to spew his bile at her, leaving her nowhere to retreat, no place left to feel safe. He’d invaded her turf and attacked her. What must she be feeling now…?

His guilt put a pall over his sex life, and since his sex life was basically his only life, he found himself more than a little adrift. Nelly still hadn’t warmed to him; she continued to resist his attempts to hold her or play with her, and flat out fought him when he tried to feed her her pills; more than once her jaws clamped down on his fingers, just shy of breaking the skin—so far.

Jack took refuge in reading—Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, an old favorite—but the book conjured up images of the first time he’d delved into it, during a trip to the Amalfi Coast some twenty years earlier; one of his and Harry’s happiest holidays together. Somehow, despite his now being beautiful, desirable, and young again, the memory was an unsettling one; what was renewed life, sexual pleasure, and freedom from responsibility, if he lacked—as horrifyingly clichéd as it sounded—someone to share it with?…Thirtysomething Jack, tucking his gut into linen trousers and holding Harry’s hand after a lazy dinner in Ravello, had it all over the new twentysomething Jack, tucking his fifty-three years into skin half his age and hurling himself into a chain of empty ecstasies.

One morning he awoke to find a great smear of bloody diarrhea across his living room carpet. It actually took him a full, panicked minute to locate Nelly, who was hiding listlessly behind a couch, whether from guilt or depletion, he couldn’t determine. He picked her up and raced down the stairs to the garage, then placed her gingerly in the backseat of his new Saab convertible and drove like fat on fire to the vet’s office.

Three hours later, having left her secured to an I.V. drip and obtained reasonable assurances that she would survive the episode, Jack got back in his car, started the ignition, pulled out into traffic, and drove exactly one block before being overcome by emotion. He pulled up beside a fire hydrant, threw the gearshift into Park, and draped himself over his steering wheel to sob uncontrollably.

What have I done, what have I done, what have I done, he thought, over and over again, until the words lost coherence, drifted free of meaning, and he was able, with only a little effort, to pull himself together and drive the rest of the way home without a thought of any kind daring to cross the minefield of his mind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.