"Smeds-MarathonRunner" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smeds Dave)

Yes. He had.

An hour later, emerging from the gallery, he drank in the ambience of the street
with senses newly tuned. The redolent musk of sweat and arousal that wafted from
open upper-story windows made him heady. A thousand nights' worth of gasps,
sighs, and moans seemed to pour out of the walls of every building on the
street.

Maybe Matthew had been right to bring him here. It had awakened something.
Perhaps it wasn't so unreasonable to explore the feeling.

But not in this rain of fire. Despite all the changes, one thing about this part
of town was the same: here, sex was a commodity. It was for jaded palates,
looking for something new, something quick, something uncomplicated.

Neil's palate was not jaded. He'd been out of the game so long he was like a
virgin. He couldn't start with a business transaction. He'd have to do things
his way.

He headed for the fountain to wait for his grandson, treading like a snow
leopard across the Himalayas, knowing a mate must be somewhere up there among
the alpenglow and mist.

The party scene was the same backwater it had always been, with the same fish
caught in its eddies, lacking the vitality to dare the rapids to the spawning
pools. Neil endured it until, at a housewarming for a neighbor of Matthew's, he
met Thea.

Thea was long and statuesque, with a deep ebony complexion that may or may not
have been her birth color -- did it matter these days? She came up to him as he
sat, alone, on the patio retaining wall.

"Hello, you must be Neil," she said.

Avoiding eye contact, he gestured indoors at the petite blonde Thea had arrived
with. "Your spouse seems to be the hit of the night in there." "Oh, she's not my
spouse. Just my roommate."

His cheeks reddened. "Whoops," he said. She laughed in a way that told him both
that she'd taken no offense, and that she thought it hilarious that anyone would
characterize her as homosexual.

"What do you. . .um, do?" Neil asked.

"I'm in household AI sales. Tell me, sir, do you want your door guard program to
growl at Jehovah's Witnesses or to politely tell them to fuck off and leave you
alone?"

Neil snorted into his beer.