Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

hostess. “There’s a soda machine on the landing.”
    “No thanks,” he said.
    “Did you have a hard time finding us?” I asked.
    The guy just shook his head.
    “I’m Michael,” I said, finally standing at half-mast, “and this is Ben.”
    He shook our hands sheepishly, seeming, for some reason, far less comfortable than he had in the bar. “I’m Patreese,” he said. The name was exotic enough to have rung a bell immediately—or set off a whole carillon of recognition—but it didn’t.
    Ben moved next to the guy and slipped an arm around his waist, as if to reassure him. I’d worried that the first sight of my sweetie with a stranger might make me squirm, but I found this gesture so gently hospitable, so typically Ben, that it actually put me more at ease. “We’re glad you came,” Ben said, while his other hand slipped into those high-tech fatigues to work Patreese’s nipple. Patreese moaned a little, then kissed Ben voluptuously on the mouth before doing the same to me. “Y’all are sweet,” he said.
    Ben caught my eye with a private inaugural smile, then dropped to his knees and tugged Patreese’s cock out of the fatigues. He began to rearrange the voluminous foreskin with the tip of his tongue, but I caught only the briefest glimpse of this action since Patreese had responded to it by ramming his own tongue into my mouth. It stayed there for quite a while, so warm and invasive that it actually seemed to swell like an erection. When he removed it he said, “I hope it’s okay. I’m sort of a kiss pig.”
    “No problem,” I said as I caught my breath.
    Looking up at us, Ben removed Patreese’s cock from his mouth. “No problem here, either,” he reported, getting a big laugh from the troops.
    Patreese suddenly seemed distracted. “I should tell you something.”
    I’m used to this moment arising—what gay man isn’t?—so I tried to make it easier for him. “We always play safe,” I said, “if you mean that you’re positive.”
    He shook his head. “No. It’s something else…”
    We waited for the penny to drop.
    “…I do your mama’s hair.”
    This simply did not compute.
    Ben looked up at him, completely openmouthed—well, almost as openmouthed as he’d been a moment earlier. “What?” he murmured.
    “I do his mama’s hair,” Patreese repeated. “At the Gospel Palms.”
    In this moment of raw revelation, my mind raced back to my mother’s room at the rest home in Orlovista and the obvious pride she had shown in her smart new pastel do: “Patreese did it…my new hairdresser…black as the ace of spades but very talented.”
    Somehow I managed to keep from saying “I thought you were a woman” to a man whose proud sea horse was still prancing in the vicinity of my husband’s face.
    “How’d you know who we were?” I asked.
    “Yeah,” said Ben, rising to his feet in obvious fascination.
    “She’s got a picture in her room,” Patreese said. “Y’all by a waterfall. She talks about you all the time.”
    Ben and I swapped dumbfounded glances.
    “She said you were coming to visit, and I recognized you in the bar.”
    “Jesus,” said Ben. “What are the chances of this ?”
    Patreese shrugged. “There’s not that many bars in Orlando.”
    I asked the obvious question. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
    “I wanted to suck some dick,” he said with a sleepy smile. “That ain’t gonna happen with your mama in the conversation. She takes too much explaining.”
    I liked the way he nailed that down. “That’s the truth,” I said.
    “I felt bad about it later. It wasn’t very sociable.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Ben said.
    “I almost didn’t come,” said Patreese. “That’s why I was late. Then I thought, fuck that shit. I need a break from her, and it might as well be y’all.”
    Ben chuckled. “How often does she get her hair done, anyway?”
    “I don’t just do her hair. I do her makeup, too.”
    “Oh,” I said. “You cover up the blue.”
    “It’s not that blue,” he said. “It’s not near as bad as she thinks it is. Somebody told her she was a blue bloater and…she got to worryin’ about it.”
    Lenore, I thought. It must have been Lenore .
    “She looks really good,” I said, since it seemed to matter to him.
    He nodded. “I like to work on old ladies. They appreciate it.”
    That was the worst possible segue for what happened next, but no one objected. Patreese knelt and nuzzled the mound of Ben’s