Luke dangles his feet in the water, lost in his own thoughts as Chloe sits next to him on the diving board. When he turned up at her house late last night, tear stained and looking defeated after a full week of refusing to talk she'd left him alone, but now it's the morning she wants answers.
"He says that's all I was to him. Just a fuck..."
"That's a shitty thing to say."
"...and he doesn't want to see me anymore."
Sighing, Chloe turns to Luke who takes a long heavy drag on a cigarette he's nicked out of the box on her fathers desk. For once she doesn't chastise him for stealing one.
"When my last boyfriend dumped me I didn't hang around feeling sorry for myself, I went out and got a new one...." she offers up.
"When did you have a boyfriend? Third grade?" Luke asks sarcastically. He hates how shitty he feels and how it's making him be shitty to Chloe, it's not her fault that Michael's hurt him.
"No, last summer!"
"You never told me!"
"I'm telling you now. You should have seen how jealous he got. You should do the same thing! Show that Michael. Go down there tonight, pick up some hot hunky guy. You're not some troll you know!"
Luke's face lights up with the idea, "Would you come with me?"
"What if some lesbo tries to pick me up? I wouldn't know what to do! Although, I do like that Melissa Etheridge a lot...think that means anything?"
"Maybe..." Luke says slyly, grinning and leering at her just before Chloe pushes him into the pool.
~~~
"What if he had a heart attack?" Calum asks, panicking as he looks down at Corey who's lying still as a stone on the floor.
"He's just fainted," an exasperated Sam tell him.
"Let me through I'm a doctor," an authoriatative voice says behind Sam who makes way for him.
"You're a retired podiatrist..." his long suffering wife tells him, peering over his shoulder at Corey.
"What? You think no-one ever fainted in my office?"
"From a corn?!" she asks.
"Anybody got an smelling salts?" he addresses the room but receives a lot of head shaking in return.
"How about poppers?" Sam offers but Geordie quickly interjects, "What about horseradish? We have some to go with the fish?"
Gasping, Corey wakes up when the horseradish is shoved under his nose, "What happened?" he asks, seeing a crowd of people gathered around him.
"You fainted," Sam informs him before Calum can turn it into anything worse. The last thing he needs right now is the two of them setting each other off.
The Rabbi pops his head into the circle, "I don't mean to hurry things along but I'm doing twins at three..." and with that everyone disappears leaving Corey lying on the floor wondering why there's a bowl of horseradish beside him.
~~~
Michael's doing the buttons up on his shirt when a hand comes around from behind him, slipping a piece of paper into his jeans pocket. The guy he's just banged in the steam room tells him to call him sometime.
"Sure," Michael tells him, with no intention to do any such thing.
"How's the party?" He answers his ringing phone a little sardonically, seeing the caller id pop up. He might have known he wouldn't get any peace today.
"You'd better get your ass over here fast," Calum tells him urgently.
"Why?"
"Remember Geordie and Maddie's invitation? The part that was in Hebrew? I just found out what it means..."
~~~
"In every Jewish boys life there are three steps to becoming a man. First his Bris, then his Bar Mitzvah and finally his marriage..."
Calum and Sam have Corey standing between them, propping him up with hands at the ready in case he should faint again.
"...for thirty five hundred years the circumcision has been the covenant between God and Israel. Maddie will you please place your son on his mother's lap?"
The naked baby is placed on a pillow on Geordie's knee as Calum looks on, wondering where the hell Michael is.
"Oh my god he's really going to do it. Okay I can't watch..." Corey mutters to Sam, who's faintly fascinated by the whole thing.
"Where's Michael?" frets Calum.
"Looking after the only dick that matters..." Sam answers, trying to see whilst at the same time trying to stop Corey from running out of the room "...his own."
"Excuse me, Rabbi? You two. In the kitchen. Now," a voice commands from near the front doorway, making Calum breathe a sigh of relief.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Maddie tears strips off Michael, her tone livid. "Barging in here. Interrupting a religious ceremony?"
"You should have asked my permission first."
"For what?!"
"To circumcise my son!"
"We don't have to ask permission, we're the parents!"
"And I'm the biological father and that gives me more rights than you," Michael counters.
"Oh I see someone's been studying the law..."
"This is no time to be having this conversation with a houseful of guests..." Geordies words fall on deaf ears. Both Michael and Maddie are head to head, both refusing to back down.
"When exactly did you start caring about your son considering you haven't been to see him once since he was born?"
"Well I'm not exactly welcome..."
"Bullshit! You've been too busy fucking everything that moves!"
"Can we please stop this?" Geordie begs. Turning to Michael she asks him a question, "Why does it matter to you if Gus is circumcised?"
"It matters that he's been in this world less than a week and already there are people who won't accept him for the way he is..." Michael glares at Maddie as he answers, "...who would rather mutiliate him than let him be the way he is, the way he was when he was born. Well, I'm not going to let that happen."
YOU ARE READING
Queer as Muke
Fanfiction"The thing you need to know is, it's all about sex. It's true. In fact they say men think about sex every twenty-eight seconds. Of course that's straight men. With gay men it's every nine." Twenty nine year old advertising executive Michael Cliffor...
