Author: Damon Suede
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/damon-suede/page,8,510994-bad_idea.html
“Sorry. Oh man. I’m sorry.” Trip flushed in horror.
Gleek shuddered and said nothing. The group continued toward the quagmire of costumes at the base of the stairs.
Please let Silas have missed that stupidity.
Again, that small irrational part of Trip thought of bolting. Maybe he could text Silas with a fake last-minute emergency that would let him off the hook. But then he heard Jillian in his head: This is your little freaky-deaky tribe. He belonged here if he belonged anywhere, just by virtue of the fact he could name every single character in the masked mob.
“You made it!” Silas’s warm Alabama baritone came from midair. “Trip!”
He-Man. A golden grinning Masters of the Universe barbarian waved a brawny arm and strode down the stairs. He gleamed in his fur diaper and fur boots, and his pectorals bounced at each tread. Holy jock itch, Batman! A dull metallic harness crisscrossed his torso so that his heavy shoulders seemed a yard wide. His hair was a thick thatch. Several would-be rivals in and out of costume rubbernecked with obvious appetite. As he crossed the lobby, the shining slice of teeth widened.
“I was keeping a lookout.” Silas hooked a thumb back toward the staircase he’d just descended.
“Hi.” Trip’s greeting came out in a choked whisper. He cleared his throat. “Uh, hello.” He took his hands out of his pockets.
Silas opened his arms and embraced Trip firmly. “I’m so glad you came.”
Trip hesitated a moment and then squeezed back, keenly aware of his bony hips and lean chest under his stupid T-shirt. Again, he savored that sweet marker scent. Vanilla and sharpies. The hug lasted a heartbeat longer than necessary, until he forced himself to step back. “You really are a He-Man.”
“Is it okay?” For one heartbeat, Silas looked nervous.
Trip tried not to stare at Silas’s tiny nipples and ended up stuck on the long stretch of thigh that led into the packed furry briefs. His skin wasn’t tan so much as tawny under the dark blond hair. Gulp.
“It’s awesome. You look awesome.” Trip licked his lower lip.
Standing with Silas with all that charm aimed at him gave him a funny buzzing pleasure that made his limbs heavy and knocked him sideways. He’d felt this way before but couldn’t remember when. In control. Weird enough to feel that way alone at his desk with a pencil in his hand, but with a handsome man, it stole his breath.
The sensation wasn’t exactly superiority or lust, but the details hypnotized him. He regarded Silas with an intimate attention that gave him a chub in his shorts and dropped his eyelids to half-mast. He felt like he’d eaten a hash brownie that was giving him a prostate massage.
“By the power of Greyskull?” Trip looked askance, even though he liked the sound of it.
“Gay-skull.” Silas laughed.
Trip pretended to smile. Hearing the word out loud squeezed his stomach into knots, pretty idiotic standing ten feet from a Filipino transvestite in a wheelchair dressed up as Oracle.
Silas’s abs tensed when he peeked over his shoulder. “The Herd is really into cosplay, and we have a sorta unofficial competition to see who can out-fanboy the others.” He peered upward. “I even tried to blond up, but it’s only metallic gel.”
“I didn’t get that you meant costume-costume.” Trip wavered a little, joking-not-joking.
“Anytime I can take my shirt off in public, I try to.” Silas slapped his hard stomach. “Forces me to haul my fat ass to the gym.”
Trip cringed inwardly. He never took his shirt off in public—ever.
Silas shifted the straps of his harness. The pearly paint on his torso made it glimmer. “It’s your first time. So I wanted to dress up for you.” His dimple was so deep that his sly smile seemed like a perpetual state. “I didn’t do the sword or the hair, but I figured He-Man would give me a chance to strong-arm you.”
“I wish I’d known.”
Silas shook his head. “Oh man! Oh, jeez. I’m sorry. Doesn’t matter. We’re just gonna watch a shit-tacular movie and have some drinks with the gang.” He bumped shoulders with Trip. “No pressure.”
No. Trip flashed back on Jillian’s warning. Pressure.
Silas leaned closer, sloe-eyed. “’Sides, you don’t need to dress up; you’re like a celebrity. Everybody knows Big Dog comics. A bunch of these loonies collect the Mighty Mites.”
Not hardly. “Wait…. How did they know?”
“Everyone googled you. Fair warning: Randy and Mary are gonna corner you at some point and demand that you sign his foreskin in Sharpie.”
Blink-blink. “Gah. Yah. Umm. You know ’em? They’re okay?”
Silas jerked his head toward the costumed flock. “Fans. They’re wigging about meeting Trip Spector. I swear: Randy came as Alphalad tonight. Boots and all.”
Trip bowed at the waist. “Autographs it is.”
“Fuck that. I’m not gonna share you with these goons. Anybody trying to cop a feel has to get past me.” He flexed his shimmering pecs and grinned, as if he knew Trip was stealing glances.
“I should—” Trip tightened his jaw. His face burned. “Crowds. People. Wig me out sometimes.” A shrug.
“No prob. I’m big enough to be your human shield. Cross my heart.” Silas dragged his scarred finger across the He-Man harness, which had crossed his heart already. He licked the glittery finger.
They stared at each other in happy conspiracy.
“Okay.” Trip liked him even more than he had at dinner or in the park. Where has he been hiding all this time?
Silas wiggled his eyebrows. “Sodomy powers, activate.” His warm eyes shone.
And then Trip’s smile got off the leash and he couldn’t stop it. At this rate he’d have a dimple too. Hell, if he got nervous, he’d just rest his eyes on the gilded muscle Silas showed under his harness, at least until the lights went down. He wasn’t shredded and shaved like a real Chelsea juicehead; his body had a slight fleshiness that reminded Trip of construction workers and words like “ripe” and “lush.” Trip’s cock thickened in agreement, like a fat exclamation point.
“This has gotta prove my comic fan bona fides.” Silas waved at a Harley Quinn, who cruised Trip from head to toe.
“You realize, I’ve only seen you in, y’know, clothes, once.”
Silas snorted and nearly split himself laughing.
“Oh! Not like that. I mean, I didn’t—” Trip covered his mouth. “That’s not what I meant. Eesh. Sorry.”
“’S’the fucking truth. What gay boy doesn’t love dressing up?”
Me. But Trip fake-grinned… as if the idea of standing near-naked in a crowded movie theater didn’t feel like an anxiety dream with rabies.
“I mean, alla time in a gym? The creativity gene? Any gathering, y’got an 80 percent chance of costumes with possible public indecency showers.”
A Human Torch in low-rise jeans trotted over, all of five two in his sneakers, and stroked Silas’s chest casually. “Sigh-las.” He said the name as two breathless words.
Trip’s cold irritation swept over him. Instant loathing. This prick resembled a nelly golf caddy disguised as a bright orange buffalo wing.
“Keith.” Silas removed the roaming hand from his pec and turned to Trip. “I brought Trip for his first-ever Herd.”
“Of course you did.” Keith slid his eyes over to Trip but didn’t turn. “And what are you supposed to be?” He appraised the T-shirt and jeans.
“Pfffft! C’mon!” Silas squawked like it was a no-brainer. “He’s Peter Parker.” He wrapped a paw around Trip’s shoulder and squeezed. “The real costume is underneath.” A possessive grin.
Trip tensed under the affection but didn’t step away.
The bitchy Gleek Trip had sneezed on earlier skittered over to join the fun-fun-fun and draped a blue paw over Keith’s orange shoulder pads.
Silas raised a friendly hand at Gleek. Great. Everyone knew everyone.
“Sigh-las,” Keith scolded and flicked his gaze to Trip for a moment, then
back. “You’re supposed to share your toys.” The little putz reached out and pinched Silas’s nipple, then tugged at it.
“I don’t need toys.” To his credit, Silas ran his arm around Trip’s beltline and drew him closer. “If I got the real thing.”
Keith rolled Silas’s tit gently. This was Chelsea, so no one even blinked.
“Yeah, uhh. See you inside.” Silas leaned back to pull free. He put his face close to Trip’s ear. “C’mon.”
Trip gave a forced wave to the hostile blue monkey and the flirty Dorito gnome. “Flame on.” As Silas headed for the concession stand, Trip left space between them and his hands became fists.
“Sorry about Keith. Bad mistake from a couple years back.”
“Cool.” It wasn’t cool, but Trip felt queasy and determined. Silas hadn’t run for the exit or punched him in the face. So far so good.
Silas blinked at the display. “You want any crap?” He said the word with respect.
“Yeah.” The word popped out of Trip’s mouth with a “Duh!” sarcasm he immediately regretted: junk food wasn’t exactly sexy. They were on a date, in Chelsea, and Silas obviously worked out. “Uh. Yes, please. If that’s okay.”
“Well….” Silas faltered for a beat. “That’s why I asked, mister. I try to eat healthy, but He-Man knows no flab,” he rumbled in a radio-announcer voice that sounded like some kind of private joke. “Brace yourself while corporate America tries to sell us its wretched things.”
Trip laughed even though he didn’t get the reference.
Silas steered them into the line and nodded hello to a very tall She-Hulk as she passed.
Trip’s gaze roamed the room: men, women… mostly twenties and thirties, looked like. “Is the Nerd Herd just gay people?”
“Aw hell no. I mean, the movie nights are mostly because of the neighborhood, but the Herd is a wide-open welcome wagon for every fandom. Comics. Sci-fi. Horror. Slash fanatics. But I’m all about superheroes myself. Gimme a hot guy in tights any day.” Silas winked. “And a mask? Fuck me.”
Without thinking, Trip winked back, glad he had.
The line bumped up.
Silas spread his arms to the crowd and declaimed. “Give us your freaks, your geeks—”
“Your order?” A happy Middle Eastern high school—boy? Girl? Who could say?—person asked from under lots of eye makeup and the brim of a Clearview Cinemas cap.
“Large Diet Coke, popcorn, and uh….” Silas turned to Trip.
“A small Diet Coke.”
The concession androgyne reappeared.
“You’re welcome to share my urn.” Silas’s He-Man arm bulged as he accepted a bucket of soda the size of a birdbath.
“Oh!”
“If that doesn’t gross you out or whatever. Y’know. I’m fully cootie-free.” His crooked smile showed one perfect canine. “You can have your own straw.”
“Right. Sure. No. Great.” Stop with the word-burps, idiot.
“Besides, if you don’t help me drink some of this, I might rupture something and you’ll have to rush me to the hospital.”
“I wasn’t thinking.” Trip dug for his wallet, but Silas held up a hand: no. “I always feel crazy drinking diet soda with a heap of gummies, but I like to pretend they cancel each other out.”
“Gummies?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean…. Popcorn is great.” More grown-up than candy, and Trip didn’t need to breathe corn syrup on the poor guy.
But Silas had already flagged the cheerful employee behind the counter, and a jumbo bag of Avengers-branded gummies smacked down hard enough to make Trip flinch. He could not refuse the unholy siren song of carbs and dye. FD&C number 69. Silas tucked it into the waistband of his furry loincloth diaper thing. “I gotcha.”
Trip flashed a smile in assent. The waves of Silas’s easy charm overwhelmed him, and for the hundredth time, he felt like a pitiful fraud standing here in a T-shirt next to someone whose superhero costume was literally his glowing caramel skin.
A terrible nose-tickle built and built until he sneezed, loudly and wetly. He held his face in abject humiliation.
“Bless you!” Silas offered a napkin. “Cold?”
“Sorry.” Trip took it and wiped his nose. Sexy. “Allergies. I took a Zyrtec so they’d let up.”
A chattering line of Nerd Herders formed along the wall, snaking toward their theater.
“We should wade in or you’re gonna have to sit in my lap.” Silas seemed to contemplate the Fig Newtons. “Cookies?”
Trip opened his mouth to answer.
Please God don’t let him eat a hundred processed fig bars and then try to kiss me so that I choke on his tongue and die in a movie theater with Halle Berry and Gleek watching me and snickering—
“Sorry.” Silas snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “You’re allergic to figs.”
What if I die on a date because I’m too embarrassed to say no to third base?
Trip made a puke face. “Really allergic. Like anaphylactic shock, EpiPen allergic.”
Silas seemed embarrassed. “I shoulda remembered.” He pivoted to the concession counter. “Never mind.”
Trip exhaled. Crisis averted. Reason number three million why he never dated anymore. He hugged himself like a lonely porcupine, isolated in public, hoping Silas didn’t notice. Say something. Be interested. Trip opened his mouth and words came out. “You’re in the movie business.”
“Sorta. The way a hose fights fires. I just spray where they aim me. Mosta what they shoot won’t even make the DVD extras.” Silas sounded glum but smiled brightly.
“Comics are the Wild West for that shit. You can make a killing, but you can’t always make a living.”
“Yeah, but you get to start with a blank page and decide what’s gonna happen and how things look.”
Trip laughed. “It sounds glamorous when you describe it. But I have to navigate all this slop.”
Silas jogged his elbow and nudged him toward the crazy line. “Your friend writes vampires. Straight borrow of Euro superstition by way of Bram Stoker, who also stole it. But who’s written all the big vampires in the past hundred years? Americans. You got hundreds of millions of people obsessing over vampires written by us. We’re good at stories.”
“Rina nags me to create my own book. From the ground up, right? Just turn it loose.” Trip thought of the Horny Bastard portfolio and shrugged.
“I figured all comic book artists had a trunk full of dream projects they sketch in their spare time.”
“I’m always racing the clock. If I wanna get paid, then I draw for Big Dog. I hate all that Atomic Age bullshit. Aliens and radiation. I dig the supernatural stuff, but I don’t have time to draw for fun.” Trip resisted the urge to crow about his new demon.
“I don’t mean for fun. For art. I mean, like to let the ideas out on the paper. I’m always doodling and futzing.”
Trip fished in his pockets. “I’m lucky. A thousand people want my job. A lotta books use artists in South America, Italy, the Eastern Bloc. They cost so much less than we do. Cliff uses them to fill in.”
“Huh-yeah. That’s kinda my point.” Silas double-checked the ticket stubs. “American movies. Music. Games. Fan fiction. We have the gift of bullshit.”
“At selling it.”
“Pop culture. Nobody does bullshit better than us. Right? China took over manufacturing. And the Middle East has us on fossil fuels. That’s just geography and politics. We’re a nation of whacko immigrants. Scavengers and con men. We crossed the ocean on faith, stole some land, and then stone-cold made up a whole country out of nothing but balls and bullshit. Superhero comics got invented by crazy genius Jews who showed up and revamped the refugee experience into a Man of Steel sent from Krypton with a secret identity.”
Trip nodded. “Chutzpah.”
“What?”
Trip tilted his head. “What you’re talking about. It sorta means ‘balls plus bullshit’ in Yiddish: chutzpah.”
“I always th
ought you said it with a ‘chuh,’ like cheese.” Silas grinned, then produced a sound like clearing his throat. “Hhcchutzpah.”
“Nice.” Trip grinned.
Silas peered at him sideways. “Ninety-nine percent of the monsters I’m asked to build are rehashes of something some twenty-three-year-old director saw in a comic or in a game. My job is to make the monster fresh so the project doesn’t feel like a regurgitated TV dinner. But it’s someone else’s story. You get your own because you’re in New York. That’s huge.”
Way up at the head of the line, a middle-aged Alphalad whooped and hollered, and the Herd echoed. The chatty crowd began to shuffle past the ushers.
“Lemme grab my shit.” Silas rescued a short peacoat from one of the chairs under a sconce.
Trip rolled that thought around. Silas was right. Funny thing: Hero High was just as borrowed as any folklore. No high school existed with that kind of plasticine perfection. Cliff had swiped it from sitcoms.
Silas held the door and Trip stepped through. Inside the crowded theater, they searched for a pair of seats in the rowdy rows. For half a second, Trip’s nose tickled, but he blinked and battled the sneeze silently.
With shame, Trip realized his Campus Champions idea had been another regurgitation: just the same old bland shit crammed into push-up bras and dorm rooms.
But not Horny Bastard. He owned his big incubus, balls to bones. A panicked fizzy hope sprouted in his heart and the sneeze faded.
Silas apparently didn’t notice. “All our monsters come from somewhere else. Our whole country was dreamed up. Natural selection. Bullshitters took over a couple cities where stories can fuck like rabbits.”
“What?” Trip snickered and snuck another glimpse.
“Why duke it out in New York or LA? Why pull up your roots? I mean, Bulgaria has stories, right? But those artists fight a tidal wave of ideas if they want to get anywhere, without the same—” He waved his hand at Trip.
“Chutzpah.” Watching someone get so juiced about his work bowled him over.
“That chutzpah… you do. Their economies and opportunities suck in ways we can’t imagine because we’re spoiled. I starved a lot to move to the city.” Silas nodded toward two likely seats near the back, which they claimed without difficulty. Piling their coats, Silas plunked down, bare thighs wide.