#1 in HOMOEROTIC, BOYxBOY, MANxMAN, and a dozen other related tags | Sexy one-shots and romantic short stories. From love at first sight to love through the years, these tales cover hunky dudes in love, lust, and passion in every aspect. From Ernie...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
PHOTO above - Toronto lakeshore and the Big Banks tower cluster
Part 3 - THE MAN
Stuck in the deepest mind-bender I'd ever been on, I headed back uptown and over east to get away from the city centre and its bright lights I didn't want to see anymore. My head was throbbing, my heart pounding, and anxiety clawed at me as I strode on like an angry ghost caught forever in an endless midnight journey.
The cloying thought kept spinning around and around in my mind - how the hell could a guy like me, a dude who's got it all, everything one could possibly want, end up like this over and over again ... so many fucking times ... and in so many fucking places ...?
I hit the neighborhoods and stalked angrily through Cabbagetown and its streets of old row houses and gingerbread Victorians where gnarled trees hid me from the light of the moon, same as they did the other creatures of the night. But Regent Park with its open streets and new renovation put me back in plain sight, and I hurried across the Don River bridge to East Chinatown to get lost on dark streets again. I wandered aimlessly, on and on, forward my only sense of direction, like on an endless catwalk with the macho swagger that always had people talking about me. It was so easy to do with the thumping dance music played at shows. Just step in time to the beats, aloof and like you don't give a fuck, smugly stone-faced. And so easy to do now too, because I was only seconds away from those fires burning within me.
But how long was it going to take to extinguish the flames tonight? That was the freaking question.
I crossed Queen Street several times as I wandered, down through Corktown with its quaint old immigrant houses and endless Irish pubs. Then on to the Studio District, dark now and sinister, full of shadows like an old film noir world, where Toronto was trying its best to sock it the fuck to Hollywood and stake its own movie-making claim. Back up to other East End neighborhoods I went, ones I didn't even know the names of, where big houses from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lined heavily-treed streets, packed close together on lots much too small for them. Mostly quiet and middle-class, these hoods were still lively in spots at this late hour, and I did my best to avoid the areas others gathered in.
My teeth were clenched, my hands balled into fists, and I ignored those who passed me by as if I didn't even see them. I could've stopped in a pub and had a drink or two, maybe several, and got a buzz to chill me down. Or copped a joint from a local dude, or ... something even stronger, better, harder, to get me high and up and out of this freaking hole. But no, no way. That's not how I dealt with my dark side.
I was Italian, Spanish, and Native North American. I had a fuse as long as the continent was wide. And I'd learned to let it smoke and spark and sizzle. I let myself burn. I didn't fight the pain, I felt it, so I'd get it the fuck out of me. It fizzled eventually if I let it take me and withdrew into my lone prowl through dark streets past endless homes of lucky people who had simpler lives, simpler feelings, nothing so grandiose and complicated and just plain fucking weird as mine. Or so I foolishly believed.
