Burden by Michael Marano Page B

for the first time in years, you had enjoyed sex free of the constraints of latex.
    Part of you whispers that it is worth dying for such sex . . . that the enjoyment of such sex is part of your identity. You have a right to what you enjoy, no matter the consequences.
    Later, in the indigo and umber of autumn twilight, you are frightened that you are capable of such thoughts.
    * * *
    With night, come the sounds.
    Of chains, boots, keys and buckles. You hear them in darkness.
    You hear them in solitude.
    Your radio, tuned to a banal talk show, fades to silence. Your drafty apartment becomes sweltering. Dusty air rising from the barely functional radiator is replaced by muggy summer air. You feel the calling of The City in your crotch. Just as long ago, in the life you abandoned, there had been the constant calling to the streets, to limbs and bodies, to thrusting hips and the taste of men.
    Always, the calling.
    You sit in darkness, trying to ignore the calling. Even as you remember, and as you feel again, what it had once done to you.
    One late May, in your other life, you had worked in a bookstore near
    Columbia, taking second-hand text books from college brats eager to be rid of them. You felt the daylight fade, felt the coming of night like a rising fever. True summer had come early that year, announcing itself as an arousal spreading through you like the fire of cognac and the tingling thrill of poppers.
    Working the late shift, which you had taken because it allowed you to sleep in, became intolerable.
    A whiny Long Island girl, so much like your whiny sisters back home, demanded to know why she was not getting more money back for a book that was not on order for the next semester.
    You stood from the counter and left, embracing the fever. Not caring that your fat and stupid boss saw you leave.
    As you walked through the door, heat rose from your body to join the heat of the city. You felt yourself shimmer, felt the need to discharge the welcome fever with sex and the feel of hard-muscled flesh.
    In the room you rented, you stripped off your ridiculous shirt with a collar, your narrow tie, your khakis. You clothed yourself in the identity you’d earned by coming to The City, pulling on the jeans and the black leather armour that kept at bay the life of sniveling mediocrity your parents had wanted you to embrace. Chains were your epaulets, a blue kerchief in your back pocket your standard.
    You walked down the hall to Tony’s room. You didn’t knock—you never knocked.
    Tony was lifting weights.
    Sweat glistened on his body as he did military presses. He saw you in the mirror before him and smiled at your reflection, grunting as he pressed the barbell over his head.
    He gave you that smart-assed Italian grin. Liking that you were watching, he did one more press, straining, the cords of his back and shoulders visible though his olive skin like cables.
    He rested the barbell on his broad chest, then set it on the floor. He walked toward you, and pulled you close.
    With the door still open, with Tony’s sweat-stained cut-offs filling the room with the musk of his crotch, the two of you fucked, not caring who passed in the hallway.
    Afterward, you both went to the streets, to Washington Square, your steps falling in with the chimes of chains and the bass of heavy boot steps, to cruise for more bodies, more satisfaction.
    The night made you both drunk. Now, in this night.
    Now, in the alone.
    The sounds come, calling you to a night fifteen years gone in a City hundreds of miles away.
    You feel the fever again. It pulls you to the window. You pull the frayed curtains aside.
    And see dead men cruising each other.
    Two lines of men in jeans and leather jackets make an alley of themselves. Other men mill and pace within this alley. They are emaciated. Desiccated. Yet they move with swaggers, with cocky masculinity. One among them is not sick, but flushed with health. Glowing with sexuality and strength.
    It is The Boy.
    You