Dead Stones [manxman] [boyxboy]

Stunning little things

A white stone cleft between his forefinger and middle finger, Luke’s right hand curved high into the air, hard, graceful like a ballerina’s arched back. His lips were hard. His eyes were unblinking over the board—beady cloud of white stones. The stillness of his pose concealed turbulent thoughts. The game was difficult. Hao had made him play a version of go where both players used the same color. This was, he claimed, to help Luke with visualization.

The air was a Mediterranean indecisive cold, the sky creamy with clouds. On their board, everywhere was white and the brown of wood and the black of gridlines. Nowhere was a clear direction of play. Sequences played and replayed in Luke's mind, clashed against the wrong colors on the board, melted into the white confusion of chaos. But there was no chaos, just stones on board circling and clumping to intentional order. All he had to do was keep calm and see the entire board with its correct colors in his mind’s eye. Simple enough.

Luke slid carefully a move. Hao, with two nods up-down the board, tossed a move then returned to smiling crookedly, brows lopsided, at his blackberry. While Luke was sweating over a game, Hao was thumbing through sex engagements for the evening. TheAssManCometh666 aka Jamal Williams had deemed the webcam video featuring a shirtless Hao worthy and had initiated a rendez-vous, but it would be all the way in Compton. Hao could go for the closer, safer but diminutive David Wang who insisted he was Taiwanese NOT CHINESE. But the Compton date had a rounder butt, and if Hao disregarded his twisty-looking ear lobes, his side profile traced a lovely ebony line of hardness and suppleness.

Possibilities of the evening bloomed in Hao’s mind, and the definite chance to try someone has big as Jamal. Ricardo’s rakish comments on his size still had their sting. Hao remembered the evening pelted with rain and tremulous with Ricardo’s jests when he broke down and measured his length—it was one-eight of an inch smaller than the national average.

Directions to Compton seemed straightforward, but unsettling fast plans were television images of gang-sundered Compton, big black men with trousers falling off their rump, big black men and whooping police sirens. He hiccupped; perhaps he should reconsider.

“Have you been to Compton?” Hao said as if talking would make Luke play faster.

“Driven around there a bit …”

“Doing what?” Hao cried.

“Driving around.”

Luke’s tone shamed Hao a little. He re-suited himself and asserted the new Hao who would try dangerous and exciting things. The thought pumping him with pride, he added dryly, “I have a date in Compton. It should be entertaining.”

The ledge of Luke’s massive brows inched upward. “Are you cheating on your partner, sir?”

Hao’s mind scrambled with words. “Ricardo and I have an arrangement. Monogamy doesn’t work for everybody, you know.” Hao teared a little inside, as he was parroting the same words Ricardo had said to him two years ago.

“I’ve never seen a couple allow such an arrangements before. Interesting …”

“We’re all surprising in little ways.” Hao’s tone was feathery, and his cheeks were tinted an uglier shade of crimson.

The last few weeks of Luke never smiling, never laughing, blinkering embarrassment at his reclaiming the lost highs of a college idiot riffled through Hao with distressing speed. Hao could not wink at his new self without the side looks of sheepishness at Luke. Still, he had long accepted Luke as kind of a household god, like Zao Jun the Kitchen God, to whom you had to offer regularly inconsequential cookies or your peace would always be skewed awry.

Hao descended to scowling at the rice hat of black curls, the contours of lips eaten up by a wooly sludge. Smiles, frowns, pouts were all hidden in the thick beard. Humanity was left to be discerned from the smearing and blinking of the eyes or the rounding of cheeks or the hands, hairless, drumming fingers against the armrest. The contrast of the fresh bareness of his hands compared with the wild face was more confounding. Perhaps even more confounding was the irrefragable truth of a young man, who had elated him with the magnificent recall of seven games by his go hero.