Markwildyr.com,
Post #234
Clip Art courtesy of Deviant Art:
Last week we met Karl
and AA in their first year of college. Karl’s an unusual fellow, he has a brown
left eye and a green right one. Which gave rise to rumors he can cast an evil
eye curse on those who irk him. Lo and behold, one day on the tennis court, our
evil eye guy discovers he has a yen for the handsome AA. He feigns drunkenness and
lolls against his friend on the drive home.
* * * *
EVIL EYE GUY
“What?” I asked him once.
Mentally, I raged at him. He’d
said we had to talk this morning, so why didn’t he talk? I couldn’t initiate it
because I was supposedly in la-la-land when he muttered the words. Maybe he was
waiting until after the game.
I settled down to playing, but
my mood didn’t improve. It took a dive when one of the opponents declared my
return went long. It hadn’t. It landed right on the line. Incensed, I stalked
to the net and voiced my objections. Things escalated. AA tried to calm me.
“Don’t give me that look,” the
frigging liar on the other side of the net said. “I’m not afraid of your damned
‘evil eye.’ Which one is it, by the way?”
Out of control, I pointed at
my green one. “This one. And that’s the one I’m looking at you with, jerk.”
“You wanna play or you wanna cry.”
I served one of the best aces
of my life, bringing the score to deuce. Then I got off two more and ended the
game. The tall bastard flashed me the finger before he and his partner walked
away. They weren’t out of sight before a skateboarder plowed into the guy and
sent him tumbling. From the way he nursed his right wrist, he was out of
commission for a while.
Unable to hide a grin, I
looked at my companion. His eyes were clouded, wary.
“Karl?” he gasped before
racing to see if he could help the injured guy.
What the hell did “Karl?”
mean? Wasn’t my fault. The skateboarder apologized ten times for crashing into
the guy, but true to the asshole’s character, the injured payer ignored the contrition
and bellowed for all to hear he was out of commission for the upcoming competition.
But he paused long enough to give me a long look, concentrating on my right,
green eye longer than necessary. Did Dumbo think I’d evil eyed him?
After the excitement died
down, AA declined my invitation for a drink at the Student Union Building,
which was odd. We usually celebrated wins and mourned losses at the little café
in the SUB. As I walked back to the dorm alone, I mulled over the last few
days. AA’d been acting funny—maybe not funny, but definitely off-kilter—ever since
our last visit to the bar. My mood dropped when I realized the cause. I’d gone
too far. Practically groped the guy under the guise of being drunk. It came
down to one thing. I was in love with the guy, while he was in “like” with me.
I’d messed up royally. If I couldn’t be… well, intimate with him, I desperately
wanted him as a friend. A buddy. Shit! Next, he’d probably start finding reasons
to pull out of our tennis games.
Sure enough, the next
Saturday, he begged off, and I had to play singles. It was an odd day. I’d get
fired up—incensed, I guess you’d say—and play like a tiger or down so deep in
self-pity I played like a sloth with a hole in his racket.
Before the weekend, I backed
him in a corner and promoted another trip to the bar, but I resolved to limit
myself to a single Long Island Tea and try to repair the relationship. The same
blonde and brunette showed up and gravitated to our table. For a while, it
looked as if my fear of a foursome would materialize, but neither of us was
good company, so they wandered away to a more energetic couple of guys.
Shortly after they left, the
rowdies at the table next to us worked themselves into a fight. One of them
lurched out of his seat and backed into our table, spilling a good part of the drink
I’d been nursing since we got here.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Watch it,
man.”
AA laid a hand on my arm. “Cool
it, Karl. He didn’t mean anything.”
The two combatants moved
outside, pulling half the patronage with them to witness the upcoming fight.
Neither of us moved.
AA drained his drink. “Come
on, let’s go. I’m beat tonight.
From the way he avoided
looking at me, I knew it was finished. I’d never have AA as a lover, and he’d
slip from being a friend to simply an acquaintance. My gut went hollow.
As we drove back to campus
with neither of us speaking, I decided to try to salvage the situation… at
least the friendship part.
“Pull over, will you?” I said
as we approached a small park. “We need to talk.”
He obeyed and switched off the
engine. Then he resolutely stared straight out the windshield.
“I owe you an apology, man.”
He sort of started and turned
to look at me. “For what?”
“For something,” I said,
uncertain how to approach the thing. “I figure it was what happened at the bar
the other night. Or at least on the way home. I was… well, I was outta line.”
“How?”
“I was all over you.”
He snorted. “Hell, you were
drunk.”
“Kinda,” I admitted.
He gave me a sharp look. “What
do you mean, kinda?”
“Well, maybe not as drunk as I
acted.”
“You mean….”
I nodded. “Yeah, I wasn’t
totally out of it. I knew… I knew… Well my hand kinda wandered. Sorry if I
offended you.”
He threw back his head and
laughed. “Offended me? Hell, Karl, I was hoping you’d go all the way and give
me a grope. Drunk or sober. It didn’t matter.”
A thrill ran up my back. “You
wanted me to?”
“Like crazy. All I could do to
keep from grabbing your hand and clapping it to me.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Figured you were just looped
and didn’t know where your hand was. Don’t you know what a good-looking sucker
you are? Hell, when you play net, I have trouble watching the ball instead of
you.”
“M… me too.” I felt a load
lift from my shoulders. My heart pounded. I reached for him, but he put up his
hands as if to fend me off, sending me into a downer.
“But….” My voice faltered and
died.
“I’d like to, Karl. Hell, man,
I ache to. But… but….”
“But what?”
He turned to stare out the windshield
again. “It’s the other thing, man.”
“What other thing.”
“Your eyes.”
“Might not be the most
attractive thing about me,” I said. “But they’re not all that bad.”
“They’re beautiful man, but so
is a coral snake.”
“A coral snake! What’re you
talking about? Make sense.”
“Just saying because they’re beautiful,
doesn’t mean they aren’t… well, dangerous. You know, evil.”
I would’ve laughed if he hadn’t
been so serious. “They’re just eyes, man. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“Do you see me laughing?”
“At what I’m about to say. My
grandmother used to tell me about this old woman she knew who had the Evil-Eye.
She could do things, man. She’d just look at a guy, and he’d go walk off a
cliff or out in front of a car.”
“You think I do that?”
“I’ve heard the stories, you
know, from guys who knew you back home. They told me about all the things that
happened to people who pissed you off. And then the other day on the tennis
court, you got mad at that guy and threatened him with your green eye. A minute
later, he was outta commission.”
“I was just joking. Putting
him in his place.”
“Were you? Maybe you don’t
even know you can put the evil-eye on a guy. But you can. I saw it.”
“My eye? You want to get
together. I want to get together. But we can’t because of my eye?”
“Can’t help the way I feel,
Karl. One day you might get pissed at me about something, and I’d walk around
waiting for a catastrophe.
“So we can’t make love because
of my eye? Can’t even be friends because of my frigging green eye?”
“Sorry,” he said.
The passenger cabin turned
silent while I thought furiously. My first crush, and I couldn’t even touch him
because of his frigging grandmother’s stories and my one green eye. Didn’t make
sense. Then I looked over at my dejected friend and cleared my throat.
“AA. Let’s go home. And
tomorrow afternoon at one o’clock, I want you to meet me for lunch at the SUB. After
that, we’re gonna go back to my room and try out things we’ve been thinking
about but not talking about. Okay?”
“I dunno, Karl.”
“Trust me. At least meet me at
the SUB.
He started the motor. “Okay. I
can promise that.”
****
The next afternoon, AA walked
over to my table at the SUB and came to a dead stop. “What’s this?”
I adjusted the eye patch over
my right eye and smiled. “My solution to our problem.”
He laughed as he slid into the
seat across from me. “So you’re gonna cover that evil green eye.”
“You can’t see it, it can’t
cast a spell over you.”
“You’re going to wear it every
time we meet, huh?
“Maybe not every time, but
whenever the brown one looks at you with
lust, the green one gets covered.”
He smiled broadly. “Might
work.”
Our legs touched under the table
as we ate a light lunch, and then we went to my room, locked the door, and did
things we didn’t even know were possible. Wonderful things. Marvelous things. Things
rife with muscle contractions, electrical discharges and gobs of milky-white
fluids.
* * * *
Lust… love
sometimes drives one on ingenuity, right? Hope the two are happy in their
relationship.
Website and blog: markwildyr.com
Email:
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Twitter: @markwildyr
Now my
mantra: Keep on reading. Keep on writing.
You have something to say, so say it!
See you later.
Mark
