Read When Tony Met Adam (Short Story) for Free Online

over.
    Not that Adam fought very hard. But now he was looking up at Tony with the eyes of a stranger, not the eyes of the man who’d recently sighed his name.
    Shit. If he’d known he was going to get called in this quickly, he would’ve kept sex entirely out of the equation.
    But okay. What was done was done. And the truth was, he just couldn’t make himself
completely
regret it.
    And wasn’t
that
an understatement?
    And God, the truth was if he’d had even just ten more minutes, he’d turn this hold into something more intimate. And he wasn’t alone in his wishful thinking. He could feel Adam, already hard again, beneath him.
    But he didn’t have time.
    “Here’s how it’s going to work,” Tony told Adam when he finally stopped trying to get free. “I leave here and you don’t say
whatever
. You say,
Be aggressive out there
. Or
Stay alert
. And I say,
Always am, always do
. And you say,
Email me if you get a chance
. And I say,
I will
. And I say,
I will spend every fucking minute of my downtime thinking about you
. And you believe me, because I haven’t ever lied to you. I never have, and I never will, Adam. I promise. And then you kiss me goodbye and—”
    “You
are
young,” Adam said with a scornful laugh, “if you think any part of the past few hours meant
any
thing at all to me.”
    “I
don’t
think that,” Tony said quietly. “But I hope it did. And …” He laid it all out on the line. “I want you to know that, well, it meant everything to
me.”
    Adam’s expression didn’t change. He didn’t blink. He didn’t move. He just stared up at Tony with those stranger’s eyes. And then he said, “Whatever.”
    Tony leaned down and kissed him, but it was like kissing a CPR-class dummy. So he stopped. “I gotta go,” he said.
    “Like I’m the one keeping you here,” Adam said.
    “You are,” Tony told him. “I hate leaving like this and … I’m sorry if what I said scared you.”
    Adam made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat. “Do I look even the least bit scared?”
    “You look terrified,” Tony said.
    “I’m not,” Adam said. “Just get the fuck out of my house, kid, okay? You were good, but you weren’t
that
good.”
    And Tony knew he wasn’t going to win this fight.
    Not today, anyway.
    So he released Adam’s hands and climbed off of him, and off the bed.
    And Adam pretended to shift into a position that would let him go back to sleep, again giving Tony the back of his head.
    Tony touched him one last time—he couldn’t leave without at least that much—his hand resting briefly on Adam’s tousled hair. “I’ll see you in a few months,” he said, then he went back down the hall to where he’d lefthis T-shirt and sandals.
    And right as he let himself out, a half a second before the door closed and locked securely behind him, he could’ve sworn he heard Adam calling from the bedroom. “Stay alert.” Or maybe it was another “Whatever.”
    Either way, it was more than he expected, and it made him smile.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
    Adam could hear the pounding beat of the music, even before he opened the outer door.
    But now it washed over him at too high a decibel level to even try to speak. So he merely nodded to the bouncers, who let him cut ahead of the waiting line and step into the crowded darkness of the club.
    The dance floor was packed, and half of the dancers already had their shirts off. And okay.
Already
didn’t exactly qualify. It
was
nearly one A.M . He was the late arrival. No doubt everyone here had been working up a sweat for quite some time. They were closing in on the size-up-the-possibilities-make-a-connection-stagger-home-together-and-get-laid part of the evening.
    Which was precisely why he was here.
    Fucking Tony Vlachic—getting inside of his head like that. Making him surf the news websites, looking for crumbs of information about terrorist activity in Afghanistan, trying to get a sense of exactly where the kid might be