How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle by Ethan Mordden

ivy.”
    “How about a bracing swim in the surf?”
    “What are you cooking?”
    “Raspberry-peach whole-wheat pancakes and Swiss sausage, paper garlic toast, and—”
    “That really thin bread with the … How come some cute guy hasn’t moved in with you just for the food?”
    “Sounds good to me,” said one of the most beautiful naked young men you have ever seen. Dennis Savage and I just gaped.
    “Hi!” he said, smiling through unforgivably big even white teeth and thrusting his dark hair out of his eyes. “Jim Burmeister.”
    He and I shook hands; Dennis Savage excused himself because of Cook’s Palm.
    Pulling on a Speedo and sitting on the stool next to mine, Jim asked, “Is there any—,” but Dennis Savage was already setting down a mug of coffee before him (this one a souvenir of Iowa, with a map and an ear of corn) complete with honey pot and creamer.
    “Many thanks,” said Jim.
    He’s six five, by the way, just like Lars Erich.
    It was Jim’s plan, he said, to poison his coffee with three spoonfuls of honey and then a lake of cream. Yet one taste and he treated us to a great corny “Wow!,” followed by “What’s the secret ingredient here?”
    “Chicory,” said Dennis Savage.
    Whereupon a second naked titan joined us, kissing Jim, shaking my hand, pulling on a pair of Everlast boxing shorts, and giving the coffee its second Wow. His name was Sean.
    Spiritedly empty palaver about anything at all followed, till I tried to ascertain how Jim and Sean came to be here.
    “We came back with…” Jim gestured at Lars Erich and Peter’s room. “Last night. I hope we didn’t—”
    “Not at all,” I said.
    Dennis Savage set before us one of the greatest breakfasts since the convening of the Congress of Vienna, to another Wow! from Sean and a Say! from Jim. Once we tasted, silence reigned as we three got into some serious eating. I want this known, boys and girls: if Dennis Savage ever opened a restaurant, Zagat would be forced to bestow the first 31.
    We were on our seconds when Cosgrove banged in through the back door, wet from the ocean, also in a Speedo (and a Steel Pier baseball cap), followed by Fleabiscuit in the world’s tiniest straw sun hat.
    “Where’d that come from?” I asked about Fleabiscuit’s headgear.
    “Someone I know went to a fancy ball and saved one of the party favors, including this dainty sombrero from an iced margarita that brings Fleabiscuit into the height of fashion.”
    Fleabiscuit posed, so we could admire the hat, while Cosgrove met the guests.
    “It was the Harvest Moon Ball,” Cosgrove then went on, scooting onto a stool and accepting a plate with a look at Dennis Savage that read as … well, accepting. Dennis Savage accepted it. He even created a dish of tiny pancakes and sausage cuttings, lightly cooled in the fridge first, when Cosgrove requested a “children’s platter” for Fleabiscuit, who inhaled the whole thing in a millisecond.
    *   *   *
    “B UT I DON’T WANT to do foursomes,” Peter told me at the same kitchen bar much later that day. He and Lars Erich not only missed breakfast; they almost missed Christmas.
    “It must have been a high quality of foursome,” I said. “Jim and—”
    “When I was cruising, yes,” Peter said, a please-hear-me hand on my arm. “But I’m in love now. I want to concentrate. I know it sounds strange from me, after … I just don’t really see other men’s skins at this point.”
    “Even when they’re six five?”
    “Lars Erich picked them up. I was just dancing.”
    “Why is everyone tall with you? You’re tall, Lars Erich is tall, those two are … The whole thing is big, isn’t it? I rule the world with size. ”
    “It’s not his looks,” Peter protested. “I mean, it’s why you notice him, date him. But then…”
    “No, it’s power, that simple. As in the animal world. It’s antlers and fetlocks, markings, the killer’s leap upon the prey—”
    “I swear no to you,” he