Silver-tongued lawyer Linus Twist has expensive tastes. The sharpest suits, the purest drugs, and the dirtiest sex. Linus wants it all in excess, especially the sex, and especially with the wrong types of men. So when he impetuously follows a foxy r...
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New Year's Eve
Linus Twist is flying. The biting wind is the cigarette at the corner of his mouth. The frigid ocean is the roar of his blood. His ankles crook around the balusters of the hotel balcony, hands gripping iron tight. He perches on the railing, high above the Southern California Pacific.
Linus thinks, just for a moment, if he would relax his ankles and let his stomach ease, maybe then he could just be.
But be what?
He's always trying to be something. In one way, he's achieved quite a bit, chasing that siren. In another, the chase renders any satisfaction elusive.
In just a few weeks Linus will be 30 years old. It's something he's not trying to be at all, but there it is anyway.
And yet, the idea of falling off the balcony is far less appealing. So Linus tenses his ankles and his core until his muscles vibrate from the effort. Hoping that the wind doesn't change directions, he sits straight up. One finger at a time, Linus lets go of his death grip on the handrail. He holds his breath and raises first one trembling arm, then the other.
His stomach tries to switch places with his heart and just like that, Linus Twist is flitting, floating, fleeing. The ocean below is roaring, reaching, responding. And the stars.
Oh God, the fucking stars.
"Christ on a cracker."
Linus puts his hands back on the railing and relaxes his spine. The dangling cigarette scatters hot ash on his bare shoulder.
"Linus?"
It's just one word, but Linus can hear generations of Eton and Oxford in it. Afternoon tea on the estate lawn. An inverse to Linus's shuddery Irish and its accompanying disregard for grammatical norms.
Maybe if Linus doesn't respond, Bennett will go away.
"Linus."
Bennett seats himself on the balcony table with a grating scrape of iron on cement. He fumbles through a pack of cigarettes and sparks the lighter. Click-click, "Fuck."
More scraping and shuffling. God, was Bennett always so bovine?
The cigarette is plucked from Linus's mouth.
"F'r fuck's sake, what you want?" Linus says, gulping air. Salty. Fresh. He fills his lungs with it and promises himself, no more cocaine.
"Bored?" Bennett asks, reseating himself at the table.
Maybe. Maybe he is bored. Could it be that simple?
"Old things losing their shine, perhaps?" Bennett says as he marries the cigarettes, lighting a new one in the embers of the old.
