He looked at my puffed-up face.
"Just because you want something really badly doesn't mean you get it! Didn't anyone tell you the truth about Santa Clause???"
"Look, he said that it was a date! I should let myself in. He told me to bring Chinese and he asked me for a massage."
"Honey? I ask you for massages," he said. "Doesn't mean I want to bop like bunnies in the pea patch."
"That's different."
"Excuse me?"
"Well..." I hedged. "You're...you."
He gently patted my still-sore face. "Come again?"
"You know I secretly lust after you, Hugo."
"Who doesn't?"
"It's just that Mike's so...perfect."
"Yes -- perfectly straight."
"I just thought... I mean...he's a dancer!"
"What! So just because the man's light on his feet means that he's "light on his feet?!? " Hugo shook his head. "Well, my little love-bitten boy, obviously, Mike likes his sexual preference, as much as we like ours."
I rubbed my face.
"Obviously."
I went to a country bar on the westside to, as the Gene Autry song says, get back in the saddle again.
I looked around the dance floor and felt like some ignorant redneck in an all black bar .
They all looked alike to me.
Every one of them wore a cowboy hat, had a mustache, a beer and was doing the Texas two-step.
Everybody, except one gentleman.
He stood at the bar and was decked out in a nice double-breasted suit.
I saw him checking me out.
I walked up to him.
"Buy you a drink?" he asked, his accent notably not Texan, or southern. It was more like northern - like Ireland.
"Sure," I said. "Vodka Collins."
My drink came, I took it and we looked for a place to sit and talk.
We found a table and sat down.
The evening went by in a blur.
Tim, in fact, was in town from England and looking for some western action.
I was more than willing to oblige.
We went out on the dance floor and tried our best to do the two-step.
We called each other "pardner." I noticed he said the word without the the 'r,' made it sound more distinguished.
I finished the evening in the great western tradition: I rode him hard and put him to sleep wet.
