Windward by Kirby Crow

Author:Kirby Crow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay romance, gay contemporary, LGBT romance, gay fiction, m/m romance
Publisher: Bonecamp
Published: 2017-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

HE REMEMBERED when he fell. The day you meet the Devil, his mother had called it. He supposed it to be poesy then; an obsolete verse she had heard in church, or from her Quaker relatives.

The day you meet the Devil is the day you choose.

Matty had believed the saying meant that one must decide when to confront evil. Only when it was too late did he realize it meant evil would find you in its own time, and then you would have to choose whether you were an enemy of evil, or in league with it.

Saturday morning had begun ordinarily enough. Once he paid his bills and cleaned his apartment, he found he had nothing to do. He thought about going to a club, but the thought of putting himself through that pretense annoyed him. He was a terrible dancer and he had a stocked bar at home. What he wanted was to fuck, and yet, he didn’t want that at all.

He’d sat in front of the TV all Friday night, and he knew if he didn’t leave the house he’d be doing the same thing until Sunday night, when he had a dinner date with Alma and Rey. Out of options and ideas, he went to the museum.

As a child raised on a farm, Matty’s exposure to art had been limited, but he understood it more than he understood spraying for cutworms, for example. Art was emotion to Matty; either it affected him or it didn’t, and if it didn’t then it was forgettable to him and he was unlikely to remember the name of the artist.

Jacquet’s Lady with a Fan was on solitary display under muted light in a far corner of the museum’s wing, set back far enough to be almost an alcove. Matty sat on the bench below the painting and studied it, finding something lonely and exotic about the work. A young, black-haired woman in elegant evening dress pulled back a length of rich curtain to peer at... what? He could almost smell the atmosphere Jacquet had been attempting to produce: spice and cologne and old linen. The silver bangle encircling the curve of her wrist fascinated him. The bracelet almost seemed to hold her back, or was that his imagination? What restrained her from passing beyond the curtain?

The same thing that restrains you from being in a gay bar right now. You want and you don’t want, because wanting carries too much weight. Too much work and compromise and settling. Too much of everything.

He realized his eyes were stinging. He bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose fiercely, willing himself not to cry.

It was a week after Alma had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Rey had told Matty that the news wasn’t that bad, that her condition was treatable, but Alma was a nurse and understood her test results better than Rey. She was not optimistic.

“Excuse me,” a male voice said, very near to him.

Matty looked up quickly.

The

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