Page 385 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 355

and have his new muscle admired, loved, worshiped.
With ineffable sadness Ryan realized his true place in Kick’s world.
“I’d like that.” It was a lie and not a lie. He pulled himself free from the
curve of Kick’s rib, feeling not a little bit like Eve pulling up off Adam.
Kick lay still, offering himself as a passive object of love. He was
offering Ryan the scene a thousand men lusted for. To Ryan, sex was a
sacrament, a Holy Mass, and Kick was sacred. He knelt like a solitary
priest before the altar of his God. This was what was. His relationship
to Kick had always been a mystery play. Bewildered in the fusion of the
sacred and the sensual, he studied in the flesh the Kick he had studied so
long on videotape. Kick’s flesh looked perfect, but Kick was illusion. He
was maya. He was appearance not reality. His life was his posing routine.
Ryan could not fault him for it. No one was perfect in an imperfect
world. Nothing was what it seemed. That, at least, gave Ryan courage,
because nothing, he reasoned, was exactly what you feared it to be. Yet he
could not will Kick to change any more than he could change himself.
Destiny was a tyrant. They both would be forever the boys they had always
been. The way of the past was the way it was and the way it would be ever
after.
Ryan was never meant to be one of the boys.
He sat back on his haunches, his knees against Kick’s sculpted torso,
looking down over the naked length of Kick’s glorious body, remembering
how he had been, seeing how he was, knowing what he would become.
Kick, his blond head again cradled in the palms of his own hands,
closed his eyes. He lay like a beautiful, fallen warrior. He was the lazing
soldier-comrade Whitman loved. He was the man Ryan adored.
Ryan touched himself, obediently, ritually, with his hand slick with
Kick’s sweat, studying for the last time, he knew, Kick incarnate.
This was the last intimacy.
This was the last time of physical company with this man he loved
more than life itself.
This was what was. Not because tomorrow Kick might flee from Ryan’s
announcement; but because in the heart of darkness of this night, this
moment, this hard point in a harder time, Ryan himself finally decided,
because of the way they were, that, barring Kick’s acceptance of the truth,
barring his kicking of the drugs, this was the last time he could give more
than he received. He had to know if he really could have anything he
wanted from Kick. He had to know if he really was the coach.
He hated the peevish righteousness that rose in him like a power play.
He didn’t want to be right. He didn’t want control. He wanted to have

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