Page 376 - Some Dance to Remember

346 Jack Fritscher

over the Bay like a soft blanket thrown out between him and Bar Nada.
Christmas trees spaced out on rooftops around the City glowed as brightly
as the huge Safeway sign that dominated Market Street. To the west, red
lights blinked atop the Erector Set of Sutro Tower. Moonlight bounced
off the saucer of rocks where he stood. At night, no one, not even raven-
ous cocksuckers beating the bushes, climbed this outcropping of ancient
mountain so wild and primeval in the heart of the City.
He knew what he had come here to do.
He was wearing Kick’s clothes.
He unzipped the thick leather SFPD motorcycle jacket with the black
fur collar. The jacket had been Kick’s gift to him the Christmas before this
last one. It was not a new jacket. It had been Kick’s before it was Ryan’s.
It was that much more dear. He hugged the jacket to him like an embrace
that would last forever. He shrugged its weight off one shoulder then the
other. His motion was slow and deliberate. He intended to savor each
station of his stripping himself naked to the night. The jacket slid slowly
down his arm till he caught its yoke in his hands behind his butt. He
swung it around, kissed the collar that had so recently ridden up against
the nape of Kick’s strong neck, taking up the scent of his blond hair. He
slowly folded the jacket open and stretched it carefully out on the smooth
rock of the cliff edge where he stood.
Memories. The autumn before, he had photographed Kick, shirt-
less, standing perilously close to the edge of the saddleback rim thirty
feet below him. Ryan had lain belly-down on the gravel making the rim
the horizon. His video camera framed only the cut in the rocks with an
immense expanse of blue sky behind it.
Slowly, Kick had made his way up from the other side of the cut.
Ryan’s angle in the video shows first Kick’s blond head, radiating sunlight,
rising over the rim. Then, against the blue sky, he rises slowly up, in the
flat perspective of the camera, as if he is rising straight up from the rocky
mountain itself against the pure blue sky. Beneath his golden head, up rise
his wide shoulders and chest and arms, stripped and oiled and thick with
body hair. He looks naked, magnificent. He rises farther and the cut of his
faded jeans hangs aslant across his slender hips, his cock and balls filling
out the basket between his massive blue thighs rising up, until full-body
he stands at last, full of golden grace, booted feet planted firmly on the
rock rim, resplendent against nothing but the brilliant blue California sky,
a man against the horizon.
Ryan knew they could not go back to that. They must go forward. He
was warm, too warm. His body was layered in clothes vested him by Kick.

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