The driver pulled over at a busy street corner in NoHo. Jase offered to pay, but Luis pulled cash out of his back pocket and handed it to the driver before Jase even had a chance to get his money. After that, they walked across the street to an Internet café that wasn’t very crowded yet.
When they entered, Luis walked directly to the largest computer screen in the café. It was in the back of the room, surrounded by funky-looking overstuffed arm chairs and tables made out of distressed wood. There were two armchairs in front of the large computer screen. They both had tufted velvet cushions, one green and the other orange.
“This is your favorite place?” Jase asked. He looked around the café and rubbed his jaw.
“It seems kind of ordinary. I thought you’d take me someplace peculiar, like a secret Zen garden in the middle of the city where you sit and chant.”
Luis laughed. “I’m not really like that,” he said. “I’m much more practical than people think I am. I love this place because it’s so mundane.” Mundane was another word that seemed to be popping into his head all the time.
“But you already have a laptop and an iPhone,” Jase said. “You don’t have to come here to use the Internet.”
“It’s where I love to go when I need to feel better and escape from all the peculiar things in my life,” Luis said. “And my screens are so small. In here, I can read Elena’s blog about gay men and gay romance for hours on a larger screen, where I can appreciate her blog better. Elena has a great deal of respect for gay men, without actually saying she does. She shows it—she doesn’t tell it. Best of all, this place is mostly a college crowd and the guys aren’t out cruising for sex.” He shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “At least they aren’t cruising for other guys. I’m sure a lot of them are cruising for women, though.”
Jase smiled. “If you love this place, then so do I.”
“This is a particularly quiet day,” Luis said. “Most colleges are finished for the summer, and summer classes go all day long. It’s the best time of year to come here.”
Then Luis pointed to the green velvet armchair. “You sit here and I’ll get a couple of lattes, and then I’ll show you what Elena’s blog is all about. She posts something different every day.”
He crossed the room and smiled at the guy behind the counter. He called the guy by his first name, then ordered two café lattes and a couple of English scones. He figured Jase hadn’t eaten breakfast yet. And for some reason he couldn’t explain, he was absolutely starved.
Normally, Luis never ate anything at all during the day. He skipped breakfast and lunch and ate light dinners. Though he’d never been obese, he’d always had a good appetite. When he’d arrived in New York, he’d been a healthy size thirty-four waist. While most people in Tennessee wouldn’t have considered him fat, it didn’t take long for him to notice that most of the gay men in New York were extremely underweight. So he stopped eating two meals a day and started living on salad and chicken for dinner. In no time at all, he was down to a size twenty-nine waist, his stomach muscles started to show and his cheekbones became more pronounced. But it hadn’t been easy to starve this way. One night he’d been so hungry he’d eaten a few handfuls of his dog’s dry kibble just to take the edge off. He had what he considered the gift of love for food. It was so bad, in fact, that he’d never forgotten a single good meal he’d ever eaten.
When he returned to Jase, he placed the lattes and the food on the table and sat down in front of the computer screen. He typed the Web address of Elena’s blog in the browser and clicked the mouse. When the blog appeared, he pressed his hand to his heart and smiled. “This is one of my favorites,” he said. “Once in a while Elena writes a blog post about nostalgic gay books…the classics that were written long before I was born. And today she’s written about one of my all-time favorites. Even though I haven’t read the book, I love it.”
“You haven’t actually read the book?” Jase asked. He was leaning on the table with his elbows. His head was stretched and he was looking over the entire Web page.
Luis laughed. “I haven’t read most of the books,” he said. “I will someday when there’s time and I have more money. But right now I just love reading about the books.”
They spent a few hours reading Elena’s entire Web site. Luis showed him a few of his favorite older blog posts, then showed him some of Elena’s classic male nude photos. When Jase looked at the photos, he seemed to become uncomfortable. He looked around the room to see if anyone was watching them, he kept adjusting his position in the chair, and he crossed his legs as if he were hiding an erection. So Luis didn’t spend too much time on the photos. He spent more time showing Jase all the posts Elena had written about gay men, gay literature, and gay cinema.
By the time they were ready to leave the café, Luis sat back in his seat and rubbed his stomach. “I feel so fat,” he said. “I ate the entire scone. I never do that.”
Jase shrugged. “I ate mine. So what? I could probably eat another.”
Luis’s eyes grew wide and he frowned. “I never eat that much during the day. Now I’ll have to skip dinner and I won’t be able to eat a thing until tomorrow night. My schedule is all thrown off now.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Jase said. “You’re far from being overweight. If anything, you could use a few extra pounds. I like a nice big ass. I think it’s sexy.”
“You wouldn’t like it very much if I ate everything I wanted to eat,” Luis said. “You don’t know how I am. I love food to death. I love it so much I’ll never forget the scone I just ate.
I’ve been known to eat an entire turkey on Thanksgiving Day all by myself. Once I get started, I have no self control.”
“You look just fine to me,” Jase said.
Luis smiled and changed the subject. He said he wanted to leave a nice message for Elena on the comment thread of her most recent blog post before they left. Elena wasn’t getting paid to write these excellent blog posts. She was doing it because she loved doing it, and Luis liked to compliment her as much as he could so she’d keep her blog going forever. “I know I’m insignificant,” he said. “But I like to think that she really does care about me.”