Beautiful Boys: Gay Erotic Stories (23 page)
Read Beautiful Boys: Gay Erotic Stories Online
Authors: Richard Labonte (Editor)
“My partner, Zeffie, is caretaker of this place. I’m here every Monday and Friday to help him out.”
“Your partner as in life partner?” The words float in the dank air, then evaporate like steam.
“I’m learning to untangle my life from Zeffie’s sphere.” He glances past a hedge of bushes that have been shaped to resemble a swan. “You can help me with this.”
“Tell me how.”
“We can meet together here on occasion. Create our own little legend, if you will, in this oversized greenhouse. If you’d like to.”
“Here?” I study the spacious environs, then return to relishing Giacinto’s handsome face. ”You’re saying, give up my lunch for a steady diet of your French kisses?”
A finger of sunlight passes through a clouded pane of glass and falls directly on our foreheads. It purifies us, galvanizes the palpable physical electricity that yokes us together.
“So, next Monday, then? Luke, please know I do wish we could be more open. But in time, perhaps?”
“Well, not every passion can see its way into the daylight.”
“As long as I can stand in your light again.”
“Half past noon under the rubber tree?” I note the sun has reddened his olive complexion, rendered his freckles more prominent, his brow more tan.
“I’ll be waiting there for you, my cherry kisser.”
I hand Giacinto my last hard sugar heart and turn down the footpath leading out of the conservatory.
“Why not?” The muffled laugh in Giacinto’s voice disturbs the soft atmosphere of the plants as he calls out to me. I turn around and he’s holding the tiny heart between two fingers. Then, smiling, he pops the Valentine into his mouth and turns away.
Thirteen clandestine meetings under my belt, so to speak, and I’m still handing my secret lover candy hearts—often just passing them to him from my tongue to his—but this time, I place it in his hand for him to read.
WHAT’S NEXT? Giacinto blushes and looks away.
“It’s not that I don’t enjoy our kisses behind the shade tree,” I begin in earnest. “But I think it’s become something more—for me, anyway.”
“You can overwater the African violets.” Giacinto points to wide terra-cotta pot of exquisite pink and purple blooms. “Too much pruning back, too much fertilizer, and they die. You have to give them just a bit of your careful attention, then allow nature to do the rest.”
I run my finger down the nape of his wide neck to the crest of his broad right shoulder. “So you’re saying, step back?”
“My tender wolfman, why can’t this time here be enough?”
I flash on the last two months of covert meetings with Giacinto: My insistence on having a conversation each time in order to know him better. My gentle prodding to get details of his failing relationship with Zeffie. My repeated requests to meet outside of the conservatory, for dinner dates or walks along the lakefront. And always the same response: “Why would you want to leave our little Eden?”
What constitutes a real romance?
I ask myself after each addictive session with my lover.
Does it only begin and end with an extravagant sexual embrace—or does there have to be a mutually shared zeal to know one another—a desire to share one’s secrets and become accustomed to one’s habits, both the charming and annoying?
Maybe Giacinto is right—maybe it’s enough just to linger beneath the dripping glass ceiling of the conservatory all afternoon and create our own insular mythology of passion and desire.
I ask myself after each addictive session with my lover.
Does it only begin and end with an extravagant sexual embrace—or does there have to be a mutually shared zeal to know one another—a desire to share one’s secrets and become accustomed to one’s habits, both the charming and annoying?
Maybe Giacinto is right—maybe it’s enough just to linger beneath the dripping glass ceiling of the conservatory all afternoon and create our own insular mythology of passion and desire.
People come to the conservatory to absorb the beauty of the exotic plants, to breathe in the aroma of the dwarf roses, to marvel at the color and shape of the Peruvian lilies, to brush against the tendrils of the hanging fern plants. But there are signs everywhere forbidding the visitors to pluck the blooms. “Perhaps it is enough,” I say out loud to myself, walking to another interlude with Giacinto. “I don’t need to bring home a bouquet of iris—it’s enough to gaze at his beauty, to appreciate his perfection.”
I enter the warm sanctuary of trees and flora. Walking up the stone path, I note that Giacinto is arguing with a stocky, dark-skinned, middle-aged man with a shaved head and wide penetrating eyes. His nostrils are flared and sweat beads Giacinto’s knitted brow.
“You’re just a lot of wind. You think I care about your threats?” Giacinto is shaking a mud-clotted garden trowel in his adversary’s face. “You’re just filled with a lot of hot air, Zeffie, so why don’t you just blow out of here already.”
I step lightly past the agitated couple, between two rows of yellow tea roses. Giacinto swiftly moves past me beyond the sightlines of his oppressor, nods silently and with a jerk of his shoulder motions for me to follow him.
We move through dripping moss and low-hanging branches into an area off the public path that is notably and unusually humid.
“This way, my hungry little wolfhound.” Giacinto has already unbuttoned his overalls and pulled his sleeveless T-shirt over his head. “We have to hide our scent.” We push through the narrow opening of a large bush into a remote corner of the greenhouse. Rows of potted plants sit upon a wire wall shelf: hibiscus, bright red azaleas and a bird of paradise, mute in cracked crockery.
“Unbuckle yourself and let me see how faded your summer tan lines are.” Giacinto pulls at my belt buckle and playfully kisses my forehead.
“Who were you fighting with?” My voice wraps around the dense tree branches above my head, heavy with crescent-shaped leaves.
“Don’t concern yourself with that. He’s nothing.” My Italian beauty reaches over his head and begins to do chin-ups onto the branch above. “Count for me, Wolfie.”
By the time I get to sixteen, Giacinto’s workpants have fallen from his body and rest at the base of the sturdy tree. He wraps his legs around my neck and shoulders, and I sequester my face in the warm crevice between his hairy, muscled thighs. The ocean-salt smell of his moist crotch blends with the clammy air of the covert garden.
“Listen, I’m a little nervous here. Let’s talk.”
“We’re safe,” he assures me with a hushed puff of air from his lips, then pulls himself onto the wooden chin-up branch. “Have you ever done it in a Bald Cypress tree, my friend?”
“You mean, like the monkeys do?” I whisper as Giacinto extends a hand to me and hoists me onto the splintery perch. The tree’s branches are intertwined, forming a giant canopy above us, shutting out the sunlight.
“It’s a sky of branches up here,” I say, reaching up for a neighboring limb.
“The
Olea europaea
is this tree’s next-door neighbor.”
Olea europaea
is this tree’s next-door neighbor.”
“Translation please?”
“Just an ordinary olive tree, my little wolf,” Giacinto says, plucking an overripe green seed from the tip of the branch, “also known as a moira. They’re common on the Isle of Crete. Been around for thousands of years, as old as myth.”
“Do you follow the legends of the great gods?”
“I’d like to think their stories are still in us, Luke. Like a genetic code, their thumbprint is planted inside of us so that, perhaps, we’re destined to learn their lessons.”
“The gods broke all the rules, though, Giacinto.” I slowly kiss the tips of each one of his exposed toes. “There were repercussions for that, even on Mount Olympus.”
“Always consequences, my gentle coyote.” Giacinto shrugs as he climbs higher into the maze of branches. “For every action, a reaction. Everyone knows that truism.”
As we move together through the tangle of leaves and curving branches, a beam of sun somehow burns through the thick foliage.
“How is it that even in the center of a tree there is sunlight?”
Giacinto places his hands on my warm face. “It is wherever you are, Luke. With you and all around you, pure, perfect light.”
He deftly steps onto the next branch and dangles his manhood just above my face.
“So this is part of your tree-climbing sport?” I rest my back against a smaller upper trunk and steady myself on a short branch. The inner sap from the tree hums and throbs and merges with my own. I marvel at Giacinto’s athletic frame, his perfectly sculpted torso, his sinewy, muscled arms entwined with the thick network of branches.
“If we climb any higher we’ll be meeting Zeus,” I call out.
I stand at a lower branch and it’s enough to kiss his ankle, taste the salt perfume that emanates from his body.
“Careful, I might fall for you,” he grins back at me.
“Giacinto, I already have, for you.”
“Should we build a little tree house here, my friendly hound?”
I try to secure myself onto the next highest branch. All of the trees around us shudder with my shifting weight. “Maybe it could be our own little rendezvous point—something more permanent for us,” I concur, then I reach for the spindly trunk of the tree in order to gain better equilibrium.
“Steady yourself here in my arms, Wolfie.” Giacinto reaches from behind me, one arm around my waist, the other hand extending in front of me. “Can you see that top shelf of flowers on the wall there?”
I note a row of tiny budded flowers in soft purples and creams lining the ledge. “They’re exquisite,” I say. “I love the small cone-shaped petals.”
“It’s my namesake flower, you know. Those perennials are of the genus Hyacinthus. They originated in Anatolia and were brought to Europe in the sixteenth century.”
“You were named after the flower?”
“I was named after my grandfather. But he and I are both connected to that plant—he taught me how to cultivate them. He had a greenhouse dedicated to every type: the brodiea, the squill and the deathcamas. I used to wander for hours up and down the aisles, watering the soil, gaping at the purple and white petals. He inspired me to make a life out of working with plants.”
I crouch and step down a level to get closer to the fragrant blooms. “I can almost smell them from here,” I whisper.
“You should be able to get a good whiff of them now because I just heard the vent fan turn on overhead.” Giacinto rests his head on a long branch under his neck.
I move carefully down the massive tree, then step back onto the ground and move closer to the petals.
“You know, hyacinths are cultivated in Holland for the perfume trade.” Giacinto speaks in a normal voice, enough to be heard above the rustling branches and grinding air vent.
“Could we go to Holland together?” I call out as I quickly step back into my crumpled wardrobe. “I’d love to watch you pick out tulip bulbs there.”
“We could go anywhere together,” he answers slyly, “as long as I can pick out your big bulb anytime I want.
“Ah, you say that. Don’t make promises.”
“It’s not a promise, just an image to focus on for a moment,” he replies. “Can you toss up my pants? Careful of the garden tools strapped onto the heavy belt strap. Just ball them up and I’ll catch them.”
I toss the crusty heap of denim and metal tools up toward Giacinto’s perfectly toned and naked body. I turn back to the hyacinths, and take down one of the terra-cotta pots holding the blooming bulbs. I sit cross-legged under the tree while Giacinto fumbles with his trousers, pulling out a small cutting tool.
“One second, I want to see if I can reach this one stray branch.”
There is a great deal of jostling about in the bramble of leaves above me. I hear the snapping of twigs and the tumble of heavy branches falling onto the hard ground. I listen as Giacinto gasps, as though all the air had been taken out of him.
Without warning, a pair of ratchet pruning shears falls to the ground, then Giacinto stumbles off the branch he is standing on and falls in a heap at the base of the tree.
I am dumbstruck. Terrified, I see bald-headed Zeffie, pale and quivering, climbing to the base of the neighboring tree trunk. He collapses at the gnarled roots.
“I’m telling you, it was an accident.” Zeffie is shaking wildly and placing his sweaty hands over the wet gash on his partner’s forehead. “I was pruning back the branches of the old elm tree. I didn’t see him. I swear I didn’t see what I was doing with those cutters.”
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