an orphan (one in a sporadic series)

From time to time, ideas come to me...lines, snippets of dialogue, even whole scenes...that have nothing to do with whatever I'm working on at the time. Sometimes these random writings are incorporated into full-blown pieces...and sometimes they remain as orphans, tantalizing teasers from the fickle muse that have no home. This then is one of the orphans which has been languishing in a file since it was born. This scene was the beginning of what was going to be a story about a series of five interconnected relationships...a man and his lover, the same man and his wife, the wife and her ex-husband, the ex-husband and his current wife, that wife and her lover...but it never really got going and all that was written was this opening bit.

*****


The old man sighed heavily and began to murmur; he rolled over and twitched slightly, wrestling with demons in his sleep. Jacob, having long since given up trying to go back to sleep himself, found it all enormously endearing. The humid night made it too uncomfortable for blankets and even the thin fabric of the sheet seemed too much to bear and it was cast down just below their waists.

Jacob marveled at the old man…the slight, soft paunch underneath the unruly shock of gray-streaked black chest hair, the leathery skin that showed its age with casual grace…and resisted, just barely, the urge to lay his head on the man’s chest.

In the morning they would be polite and distant, stealing glances and making innocuous conversation. In the morning, they would dress, suddenly shy and exposed, quickly and make no reference to the passions indulged in the heat of a summer’s night.

In the morning, the old man would casually mention the imminent return of his wife of 24 years and Jacob would pointedly ignore the comment.

In the morning they would part and not see each other again until some furtive night when the old man’s wife was away and Jacob would be, despite impassioned promises to himself, glad to welcome him back into his lonely apartment and his welcoming bed.


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