Page 331 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 301

“Is it true?” Ryan dared finally blurt the question directly. “Is it true?
Maybe you can’t tell me. Maybe you don’t quite remember.” He was
awash in a wave of vague homesickness. “You know I recognized you the
moment I met you. I know you’re you. We both know you’re something
else besides.” Ryan was deadly serious but he covered himself by tickling
Kick in the ribs. “You must tell me. I need to know. I need to know if
you’ve come from some other star to make me one of the boys?”
“Please don’t try to humor me,” Kick said. “I’m not up to teasing.”
“Me tease you?” Ryan said. He backed off to the fixed dissembling
distance and pulled out the kid gloves Kick required.
Kick was who he was, and that was his attraction. He was himself.
He never tried to be someone else on the street where Attitude, being
something other than real self, was all the vogue.
“I sometimes wish I was ugly.” He choked. He recovered quickly. “I
wouldn’t know how to live life if I was ugly. But what am I supposed to
do,” Kick said, “when my Look seduces men without me even trying to
seduce them?”
“Enjoy it.”
“How can I enjoy it when they say I make them unhappy because I
never go with any of them?”
You’ve gone with a few. With one too many.
“I don’t know,” Ryan said. Who could have figured there was a curse
on the diamond of sex appeal? “I can only wonder what it must feel like
to be able to walk up to anyone and have them.”
“I don’t want anyone. I hardly want anybody.”
Ryan felt him slip a notch away.
“Too few men hold up in intimate contact.” Kick smiled. “You hold
up. You don’t ask questions.”
“I have a caution,” Ryan said, pulling Kick back towards him, “about
our book. I think we better put Universal Appeal on the back burner. At
least for a while.”
“I think you’re right,” Kick said. “I’m not all that ready to go that pub-
lic at the moment. I can’t function that way. I’m tired of being everybody’s
good example. I don’t want it backfiring on me.”
January’s special caused enough trouble, huh? “When the time is right,”
Ryan said, “we’ll do it.”
Kick rubbed the back of his hairy forearm across Ryan’s lips. “We have
all the time in the world,” he said.
Three blocks away, under the ticking clock on the Hibernia Bank, a
cheer welled up from the Castro Street Fair where the crowds, shoulder to

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