Tags:
Fiction,
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Literature & Fiction,
Gay,
Gay & Lesbian,
gay romance,
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Gay Fiction
“That Patrick is the love of my life, and I am ecstatic to be married to him.” He’s vibrating with so much rage and hurt he doesn’t even feel like he’s lying.
Hartley raises one eyebrow and Ryan stares at him in shock. Will runs out of the square before Ryan or anyone else can stop and question him more.
Patrick doesn’t eat the entire time Will’s away. Even his stomach has a limit. Though, given how good some of the food is, he wishes it didn’t. He flops back on the bed, stuffed to the gills.
His mind drifts to his other favorite thing: sex. His body tingles all over remembering how he and Will had clung to each other and explored pleasure for hours. He groans, remembering the humid breath between their bodies and the sticky, hot jizz pulsing out of their cocks. It’d been the delicious end-all and be-all of his world for long, glorious hours.
Analysis of his memories proves one thing beyond dispute: the night with Will had been the most intense interpersonal experience of his entire life. But that information is relatively useless now. Will’s not interested in a repeat performance, and given how complicated everything has become, Patrick’s sure getting in any deeper is a bad idea anyway.
So today, Patrick’s going to be smart. He’s going to google up everything he can find about Will Patterson. Amusingly, the first hit for Will’s name isn’t related to Good Works, but instead an online tabloid/slam book called The Hurting Times . It sounds like a porn movie and he finds it reads a lot like one too.
Quick perusal of its pages reveals that it’s a gossip site, pure and simple. But, from what Patrick can tell, based on a cross-examination with the more reputable papers, The Healing Times and West of Rez , almost everything in The Hurting Times is pretty damn accurate. The site details not only truly newsworthy events such as shootings, rapes, attempted murders, and drug busts, but also features not-so-blind items about who’s sleeping with who, and a scintillating message board that gets down to the nitty-gritty filth of Healing’s citizens. The town is a Jerry Springer episode on drugs. And Will’s name is all over the backlog.
The first mention of Will in The Hurting Times is a birth announcement from the archived remains of the original Yahoo listserv. A week later there’s a follow-up blurb: Baby Molinaro has a name! Sources close to Tony and Kimberly Molinaro say the boy will be called Guglielmo ‘William’ Michael Molinaro.
Guglielmo. Will’s real name is Guglielmo . Patrick already knew that of course, but seeing his full name in print like this…well, it makes him feel strange inside, like he’s looking at baby photos. It’s gross, or maybe cute in a way. His gut twists up but he focuses on the next trove of information on Will.
Tony and Kimberly Molinaro’s divorce scandal! One Vanessa Miller of Minneapolis gave birth to a baby girl, Ellen Elizabeth Molinaro, last week. Sources say Kimberly filed for divorce the next day.
Holy drama, Batman!
Patrick clicks on the message board thread detailing Kimberly’s string of short marriages, including one to a Roger Flemings. Apparently, despite being heavily pregnant with Roger’s child, Tony and Kimberly were caught by police in flagrante on the hood of his car behind the movie theater.
“Dirty, dirty. Guess Will comes by it naturally,” Patrick murmurs to himself.
Connor was born a month after that, and, according to the gossip, had red hair like Roger Fleming. Rumors that he might have been Tony’s son are extinguished with that small detail. Four weeks after Connor’s birth, Roger drowns in the YMCA swimming pool in the middle of the night, leaving many questions behind. First, Roger had no keys to the facility, no known way to get in, and most suspiciously, Roger possessed a terrible fear of water: the man couldn’t swim.
The gossip pages don’t hesitate to point the finger at the Molinaros. The same
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