![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmkaternaterJames Wilson has the coldest feet of any man I've ever slept with.
By day he keeps them safety constrained in tailored Armani, ostentatious tassels and insert-a-penny-here slots for occasions formal and whimsical, respectively. At night - one night - his ten toes, ball and heel put up a blockade against all encroaching circulation and make each subtle prod or poke the podiatric equivalent of a cold stethoscope. Hey, doc - you wanna' warm that thing up a little bit?
But I didn't mind. The rest of him, from ankle up, was warm and breathing and weighing down a side of my mattress that hadn't been weighed down in a very long time. And we were okay for that seven hours and twenty-nine minutes between bedroom and board room; okay until our This Is Some Serious Shit meters simultaneously squawked into the red zone - past the red zone and into the this color looked great in the can but it's shit on the dining room walls zone. When we were in the kitchen and he reached indiscriminately for a pager - realized he'd grabbed mine instead - and read at least half a dozen frantic messages from hospital dignitaries and suck-off-to-suck-ups. When our eyes collided between the labyrinth of hanging copper pots and the kinetic, transferrable thoughts
I just slept with my boss
and
I just slept with my head of oncology
came crashing in like the 1812 Overture, the cymbal player jacked up on at least eight Starbucks espressos. The immediate dovetail revelation - and it was good - with the brass section popping a pulmonary embolus.
A shower after that - for me, not him - while he followed the breadcrumb trail of clothing from the bedroom back to the living room, his tie rescued from the 60-watt singe of a table lamp. I came out of the steam a half an hour later, three-quarters put together, un-makeup'd, but needing to see him. He was in the kitchen, shirt and trousers creased, bent over the butcher's block with his tie and a bottle of club soda that I'd been unaware I had. Precise, sweeping strokes of thumb pad and washcloth. A smear of coral-colored wax at the place where the knot kinked into his neck. I remembered that my mouth had wandered when we'd braved the dark place beyond the living room. Felt a very unDeanlike desire to add new and interesting stains to interesting places, but his brown eyes came up over his work and he smiled - that endearing little James Wilson, First Rate Boy Scout smile - and I felt like I'd said a blue word in a church.
And then it was the cheek-to-cheek air brush and his hand on my waist - not as firm or assured as it had been the night before - and his winking red tail lights in the impossibly mobile morning. I couldn't stand the CDs in my car that morning, nor could I tolerate being talked at by pundits and political pariahs, so I spun the dial to a halfway point between stations and subsisted on white noise until I got to the interstate. Tried silence for a while - which wasn't really silence because things inside my head were crashing together like drunken college students - and finally lowered the passenger side window for the roar of passing air. There was a tornado in the car when I hit eighty-three miles per hour.
The good, obliging, numbing soundstorm continued while I made the trek from cushy parking space to the front door, like the residual deafness you get when you stand too close to a speaker during a concert. And as long as my brain was mute I could smile without having a motive; pass on a "good morning" to the nursing staff and a "I need the preliminary specs for the situation in Radiology - and get me a black coffee" to whomever was gophering as my assistant that day. Some brunette from Legal Affairs with a name that ended in "i" but should have ended in "y" to really get ahead in this business.
The doldrums crept in when they called for the assembly of the transplant committee and I happened to catch James' eye as he was coming into the room, his green tie switched out for something in diagonal blue stripes. We exchanged a tight now-that-we've-seen-each-other-naked-what's-left? smile and took chairs at opposite ends of the table. At some point during the proceedings he'd tossed one knee over the other and I caught a glimpse of his shoes from around the corner of the table --
Tassels.
By day he keeps them safety constrained in tailored Armani, ostentatious tassels and insert-a-penny-here slots for occasions formal and whimsical, respectively. At night - one night - his ten toes, ball and heel put up a blockade against all encroaching circulation and make each subtle prod or poke the podiatric equivalent of a cold stethoscope. Hey, doc - you wanna' warm that thing up a little bit?
But I didn't mind. The rest of him, from ankle up, was warm and breathing and weighing down a side of my mattress that hadn't been weighed down in a very long time. And we were okay for that seven hours and twenty-nine minutes between bedroom and board room; okay until our This Is Some Serious Shit meters simultaneously squawked into the red zone - past the red zone and into the this color looked great in the can but it's shit on the dining room walls zone. When we were in the kitchen and he reached indiscriminately for a pager - realized he'd grabbed mine instead - and read at least half a dozen frantic messages from hospital dignitaries and suck-off-to-suck-ups. When our eyes collided between the labyrinth of hanging copper pots and the kinetic, transferrable thoughts
I just slept with my boss
and
I just slept with my head of oncology
came crashing in like the 1812 Overture, the cymbal player jacked up on at least eight Starbucks espressos. The immediate dovetail revelation - and it was good - with the brass section popping a pulmonary embolus.
A shower after that - for me, not him - while he followed the breadcrumb trail of clothing from the bedroom back to the living room, his tie rescued from the 60-watt singe of a table lamp. I came out of the steam a half an hour later, three-quarters put together, un-makeup'd, but needing to see him. He was in the kitchen, shirt and trousers creased, bent over the butcher's block with his tie and a bottle of club soda that I'd been unaware I had. Precise, sweeping strokes of thumb pad and washcloth. A smear of coral-colored wax at the place where the knot kinked into his neck. I remembered that my mouth had wandered when we'd braved the dark place beyond the living room. Felt a very unDeanlike desire to add new and interesting stains to interesting places, but his brown eyes came up over his work and he smiled - that endearing little James Wilson, First Rate Boy Scout smile - and I felt like I'd said a blue word in a church.
And then it was the cheek-to-cheek air brush and his hand on my waist - not as firm or assured as it had been the night before - and his winking red tail lights in the impossibly mobile morning. I couldn't stand the CDs in my car that morning, nor could I tolerate being talked at by pundits and political pariahs, so I spun the dial to a halfway point between stations and subsisted on white noise until I got to the interstate. Tried silence for a while - which wasn't really silence because things inside my head were crashing together like drunken college students - and finally lowered the passenger side window for the roar of passing air. There was a tornado in the car when I hit eighty-three miles per hour.
The good, obliging, numbing soundstorm continued while I made the trek from cushy parking space to the front door, like the residual deafness you get when you stand too close to a speaker during a concert. And as long as my brain was mute I could smile without having a motive; pass on a "good morning" to the nursing staff and a "I need the preliminary specs for the situation in Radiology - and get me a black coffee" to whomever was gophering as my assistant that day. Some brunette from Legal Affairs with a name that ended in "i" but should have ended in "y" to really get ahead in this business.
The doldrums crept in when they called for the assembly of the transplant committee and I happened to catch James' eye as he was coming into the room, his green tie switched out for something in diagonal blue stripes. We exchanged a tight now-that-we've-seen-each-other-naked-what's-left? smile and took chairs at opposite ends of the table. At some point during the proceedings he'd tossed one knee over the other and I caught a glimpse of his shoes from around the corner of the table --
Tassels.
