Page 226 - Some Dance to Remember

196 Jack Fritscher

over his tight belly. The shirt fit like a second skin. “This is the right one
tonight,” he said. Kick had form fitting cotton tee shirts, not all in one
size, but in all the several sizes of his arms and chest to accommodate
precisely his heft: in contest shape, bulked, or trimmed down between
competitions.
“In anyone else,” Ryan wrote in his Journal, “this could be vanity;
but I understand what is in his heart and my heart, and our heart, when
it comes to the fetish of his shirts.”
Kick turned and hit a pose for no more reason than to delight Ryan.
The athletic gray tee shirt transformed his Look from bodybuilder to more
of a husky college jock. That was one of the wonders of Billy Ray Sorensen.
Most bodybuilders always looked like bodybuilders. Kick defied catego-
rization. Almost more than a bodybuilder, he was an artist, maybe even
in the sacred sense of a priest, who could transform himself with mind
control, transubstantiate himself with body control.
Ryan, more than once in their bedroom, had seen Kick metamor-
phose from Kick into almost anything a body artist could conjure on his
basic handsome and husky Look. Kick was as believable a college jock as
he was a bodybuilder, or, one of their favorite impersonations, a blond,
moustached California Highway Patrolman uniformed in blue-and-gold-
striped motor breeches and boots, black-leather gloves and jacket, golden
helmet, and tan military shirt with short sleeves almost ripped apart from
the straining pressure of his huge biceps.
Ryan ran his hand down the belly of the tee shirt. He felt the soft
gray cotton over the mat of dirty-blond belly fur. He felt Kick crunch his
wash-board muscle to ultimate definition for his pleasure. In the palm of
his left hand, Ryan was memorizing Kick’s body.
“You have,” Ryan said, sounding for all the world like Daisy Buchanan
adoring the golden Jay Gatsby, “such beautiful...beautiful...beautiful...
shirts.”
Kick put his hands on his tight waist, arms akimbo, the way football
jocks stand around between scrimmages, “Tonight,” he said, “we’re gonna
get into pud. Pecs and pud. Varsity football pecs and pud.”
Kick was too good to be true.
Ryan wondered sometimes if he were hallucinating. Was he losing his
mind, imagining this phantasm of masculinity who filled in all the blanks
of everything he thought a man should be? For twenty-three months they
had gone at each other nonstop. They were lovers, and more than lov-
ers, they were friends together. He had made up his mind to ride along
with this man whatever way mutuality took them. Even if they should

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