KEITH
It took three tries before finding a cabbie who would go from 52nd and 2nd all the way to Brooklyn Heights. I never would’ve bought a pied a terre in Brooklyn if I knew it was going to be treated like a foreign country.
Citizens can cross the Brooklyn Bridge without a passport.
The best part of my weekend was hitting the bridge because I knew I could relax. No one knew me in Brooklyn and work was best on the on the weekends. I kept a small one bedroom in the city so I could show places to clients without the hassle of taking a train in from Hempstead twice a day. Even after the bubble burst moving a place on the waterfront wasn’t too hard and I got my new place for dirt cheap after the crash. Apparently so did everyone else - the rest of the building was populated by 20-somethings who all seemed to know each other and needed to scream about it. They were loud, they were rowdy, they were impossibly good looking.
If I got back at the right time on a Friday night I could catch a glimpse of the guy across the hall, the most casually erotic kid I’ve ever seen. I saw him the day I moved in, took it as a sign that this was the right place.
Door absent mindedly left open, he was wandering his apartment looking for something. He was pure sex, looking like he’d just emerged from a slow afternoon fuck. A pile of clothes heaped on his floor, he pulled on a pair of pants without realizing I was watching him. He turned around, smiled at me in the hallway. He was Adam Levine without the awful, his face all scruff and glasses and youth.
“Hey. Welcome to the building.”
“Thanks,” I said. I’m too old to be tongue tied around a half dressed man.
“Keith. Keith Raonic.” I put a box down and offered a handshake.
He stared blankly for a beat before snapping back to our conversation and grabbing my hand.
“F,” he said.
“F?” I wasn’t amused.
“Yeah, sorry, that’s a nickname. It’s short for Fantastic.”
Brash little shit.
Our handshake had grown long and awkward. I reached out and covered his hand with the palm of my left hand, asserting a gentle but obvious dominance before breaking away.
“Hey, um, Raonic. You have a light?”
I looked him up and down. God this kid was devastating. I keyed into my new condo and pushed the door open.
“Grab that box,” I instructed with a nod.
He leaned over to grab the box and I spotted one of the many tattoos hidden across his body. He stumbled into my apartment and looked around while I dug through a box and emerged with a book of matches. I struck the match and he leaned forward with a cigarette, I could feel his breath on my thick fingers and the sensation sent a shiver down my back. His eyes still had a morning haze to them in the afternoon and I lost myself wondering how he’d look with his face glazed after I’d had my way with him.
“Fuck.” I came back to the moment and threw the spent match on the floor.
“Ok?” He still sounded half asleep, post-coital.
I inspected my fingers. “Fine.”
“Thanks for the light. See you around.”
“Yeah, sure,” I mumbled. I looked forward to it.
