The sky broke open and rain began to fall. The protestors lasted about five seconds under the bite of the late-winter rain before running for cover.
“See?” Kingsley said to Duke. He looked up at the sky, “Dieu, merci.”
“God must be a tits and ass man.”
“If He wasn’t,” Kingsley said, “He wouldn’t have invented them.”
He shut the door and glanced around the club again.
A psychiatrist—if Kingsley would let one near him—would have had a field day with his prodigious talent for finding the blond in every room he entered. If someone blindfolded him right now, he could, with picture-perfect recall, point out every last blond man in a fifty-yard radius. Five of them sat at various stations of the M?bius strip club—two at the bar (one real blond, the other a punk who’d bleached his hair), one working as a bouncer, one disappearing into the bathroom with a suspicious bulge in his trousers and a young one at table thirteen back in the corner. Kingsley had noticed the young blond when he’d first entered the M?bius half an hour ago. He’d been watching him, studying him, getting a read on him. Kingsley approached him.
The blond at table thirteen sat alone. He didn’t look at any of the girls, but only at his hands, his drink, his table.
Kingsley sat down across from him and placed the bourbon on the table between them. The amber liquid licked at the sides of the bottle. The blond glanced first at the bourbon, as if wondering where it came from and how it got there, before his eyes settled on to Kingsley’s.
“I’m going to ask you a question, and it’s important you answer it correctly.” Kingsley did his best to temper his French accent without disposing of it entirely. The accent got him attention when he wanted it but in such a noisy room, he needed to speak as clearly as possible. “Luckily for you, I will tell you the correct answer before I ask the question. And that answer is twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one?” The blond spoke in some sort of accent of his own—American, obviously, but this young man was far from home. “What’s the question?”
“How old are you?”
The blond’s eyes widened. In the dim light, Kingsley couldn’t make out the boy’s eye color. Steel-gray, he hoped, although tonight he wouldn’t be picky.
“Twenty-one,” he repeated. “I’m definitely twenty-one.”
“Blackjack,” Kingsley said, smiling. The blond boy might be twenty-one. In two years he might be twenty-one.
“Do you work here?” the blond asked.
“I wouldn’t call it work.”
“I can go. I should go.” The blond started to stand, but Kingsley tapped the table.
“Sit,” he ordered. The blond sat. A promising sign that he could and would take orders. “Tell me something—no right or wrong answer this time.”
“Sure. What?”
“Why are you here?”
He shrugged, as if the question were obvious.
“You know. Tits. Asses. Naked girls.”
“You weren’t looking at the girls. Not even the one who took your drink order. Which I found interesting, as she was mostly naked.”
Kingsley took another sip of his bourbon straight from the bottle. It burned his throat all the way to his stomach. The woody aftertaste stained the inside of his mouth.
“Sir, I don’t know what your problem is with me being here, but I can—”
“Do your parents know?”
“Know what? That I’m here?”
“That you’re gay.”
The blond tried to stand up again, but Kingsley kicked his leg under the table, and the boy landed hard back in his chair.