Stories Beneath Our Skin by Veronica Sloane Page B

fate."
    " Now that's a guy I could get behind." Ace let the knife drop with a clatter. "You like him?"
    " Sometimes. I don't agree with everything he has to say."
    " So who's your favorite then? Writer or whatever."
    " Who's yours?"
    " Oh, no. You go first, Professor." Ace grinned. "I've learned your little tricks. Might have been too drunk to catch on last night, but you are the king of redirection. So, favorite author. Go."
    " Depends, I guess." Liam squirmed as Ace stared at him, clearly ready to wait in silence for an answer. "For pleasure, I've got to go with Clive Barker."
    " The horror guy? Man, I tried to read one of his books once. He's disturbing."
    " I like the way he's disturbed. It's dark and vicious, but it's also real and his characters have all these deep feelings that get expressed through mutations of the flesh." Liam gestured between them. "Sort of thing we get."
    " I haven't grown any new limbs recently, but yeah, I can see where that might be something you'd like. You said for pleasure though. What else is there? You read for pain, too?"
    " There's the stuff I read because it make me think even if they're not easy to get through." Liam leaned back in the booth, trying to keep his legs tucked on his side. "Mary Shelley was my favorite. Frankenstein has all these layers when you read it."
    " Layers in a groaning mindless monster?" Ace mimed the classic zombie pose.
    " That's just it!" Liam waved his hands in broad circles. "He isn't mindless at all. In the book, he's a sensitive thoughtful creature rejected by his creator and trying to sort out what it all means. It's about God and motherhood and man's search for meaning."
    " Never got any of that out of the movies." Ace propped his chin in his hand. "So Nietzsche, Barker, and Shelley."
    " And Ginsberg," he added, tearing off a strip of his napkin.
    " Who?"
    " Seriously?" Liam shook his head. "He was a beat poet, and he got banned almost everywhere and wrote all about being gay. His most famous poem is Howl , but he wrote a ton of great stuff."
    " So lay some on me."
    " What? Why?"
    " Because you like the guy, and now I'm curious." Ace looked serious, eyes soft and mouth a neutral straight line. "Never seen you get your blood up before. Nice to know you've got some passion bottled up in there."
    " It's not really diner appropriate stuff."
    " So don't get up on the counter and yell it. Just me sitting here."
    Stymied, only one piece , the "Sunflower Sutra", came to Liam's lips and it was easier to spill it out than keep it in once he'd thought of it.
    " We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive ," he spoke low, mimicking the cadence of Ginsberg's voice from the recordings Liam had played ragged once upon a time, " we're all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed and hairy naked accomplishment -- bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset ."
    Their food came then and Liam broke off, preferring to eat th an gauge his performance by Ace's expression.
    " I'm not much of a poetry person. Can't say I even understood all of that, but I liked the sound of it." Ace poured ketchup over his fries. "You'll make a good teacher."
    " You think so?"
    " Yeah, if you can let loose like that. When you care about something, you make me want to care about it, too." Licking a stray spot of ketchup from his thumb, Ace glanced at him under his eyelashes. "That's a talent."
    " Yeah." Liam disassembled his burger. His skin buzzed, and his heart started up double time. It had been ages and he'd never been good at reading signals to begin with, but he could almost swear that Ace was, very gently, flirting with him. "I'm nervous about it. I haven't started applying for masters programs yet."
    " Be strange if you weren't nervous, but it's good that you know what you want to do." Ace shrugged. "I had to kick around for a while, waste time."
    " You're thirty-one, now right? So you started the shop when you were like