Bellies by Nicola Dinan

Author:Nicola Dinan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2023-05-24T20:00:36+00:00

12

Blonde

It was Sunday, just after lunch. I nodded at the stoic bouncer, a large man who looked, and maybe had always looked, somewhere between thirty-five and sixty. He checked my ID and waved me through the black gazebo outside the walled-up underpass.

I joined a small cluster of fully clothed men waiting to get inside. The queue stood single file. I was glad. It made me look less lonely. When I’d told Mum I was gay, she’d told me that she didn’t care. My only worry, Tom, is that you might never meet someone and make a family, but maybe that’s a stereotype that I’ve never been able to shake. I mean, look at my and Dad’s gay friends—they all have partners and are perfectly happy; it’s funny how those things stick, isn’t it? She never mentioned it again, maybe because I’d met Ming, but after Ming and I broke up I started wondering if I was lonely, or if others thought that about me.

The boy in front of me was tall. Bleach had drained the pigment from his short hair, leaving it lifeless and coarse. He turned back to me with a curious stare, his beady eyes deep-set against his high but narrow nose. They lingered for a moment, and so mine escaped downward. He wore big leather boots and a long black coat, the tails of which swiveled back around as I glanced up again to smile at him.

Ming had the same slim and slopy shoulders as him. I wondered what Ming was doing; probably cooking something complicated, squatting in front of the oven, watching a soufflé rise in a ramekin, her spindly fingers twirling and tugging at her fine black hair. Thin Frames had opened something in me, a cavity from which anger met obsession. I thought about it a lot, which meant I thought about Ming a lot. And maybe that was the final cruelty upon cruelty, to intensify the not wanting to think about her and thinking about her in tandem. Nobody knew that I’d watched Thin Frames. I didn’t want to tell anyone. It’d been six months since the breakup. Too much time had passed for me still to be talking about her, and the more I talked, the less I could show that I’d moved on. But I was still in pain. Sometimes it was spread like fire across my chest, but sometimes it was a dull and persistent ache, haunting my body.

I’d muted her on every app, but not before I’d seen she was moving to New York for a master’s she’d never mentioned. I hadn’t even known she’d applied, and this seemed like another secret between us, even though we hadn’t spoken properly since she’d called me about the play. It still made me angry.

There was a gap between the gazebo and the club, with barriers along the edges, protecting us from outside view. Two bears in leather vests guarded the front doors. Men in purple robes smoked on either side of them.

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