Key Lime Pie and Custard

Chapter 1Will As I sat there high above the clouds in the jet that was speeding me to Jacksonville, I didn’t know whether to be resentful or grateful. I supposed that would depend on how the trip turned out. You see, I’d been ordered to take two weeks of vacation. That’s right, ordered. * * * * “Will,” my boss Jake had said, “I want you to get out of town. Go somewhere fun. Go somewhere warm. Just get yourself straightened up and come back ready to do the kind of job for us you’ve always done. Until recently, that is.” “Christ, Jake, I don’t want a vacation. I’ve never enjoyed traveling alone, and I sure as hell don’t have anybody to travel with.” “Yeah, yeah, I know all about Sean. But that was months ago. You’ve moped around long enough. And, frankly, your work is suffering. I’ve tried to cut you some slack, man, but we can’t afford accountants whose minds are wandering. You’ve got to pull yourself out of your self-pity and shape up, or I can’t promise you’ll be with us much longer.” I worked as a bean counter in the Cleveland branch of an international company, and for a guy who was just shy of thirty, I was doing okay. It was the kind of work I’d trained for, and I was making enough money to live comfortably, if not lavishly. Not wanting to cope with finding a new job, I realized I’d better humor Jake. “Go somewhere warm,” he’d said. As I looked out of my office window at the snow being driven almost horizontally off the lake and across Euclid, I decided maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. But where? I sure as hell wasn’t going to see my folks. I hadn’t told them about Sean until I called them on Christmas day. Mom had tried to sound sympathetic, had tried very hard not to say “I told you so,” but she hadn’t quite managed either one. They’d never approved of Sean. Although they’d never actually said so, I think they were never able to forgive me for being gay. Something inside told them my being gay shouldn’t matter, but somehow to them it did. If I went there they’d interrupt their golf and dinners at the country club and try to make me feel welcome, smothering me all the while. Being effusively kind to make up for what they really felt. No, no way was I going to Arizona. My only other relative in a warm climate was my cousin Stacie in Florida. We’d been pretty close as teens, but I’d never visited her since she moved to Naples. I couldn’t very well call now and say I wanted to spend two weeks with her. The evening after Jake announced my enforced vacation, I went online. I stumbled onto a site that featured “deluxe” motor coach tours of Florida, found one that looked acceptable if not promising, and signed up for it. I’d only been to Florida once before, and that was a disastrous spring break trip to Daytona Beach with some straight college buddies. I spent that week in an alcoholic haze, sometimes enhanced by weed. So, I thought, why the hell not see Florida when I’m sober? At least it would be, as Jake said, warm. * * * * The captain came on the PA and asked us to fasten our seatbelts because we were going through some “turbulence.” I knew all about turbulence. That’s what I’d gone through when Sean dumped me. * * * * Sean and I had known each other since we were working on our MBA’s at Case Western. He’d gotten a job much like mine at another company in Cleveland. What had begun with friendship and some hot s*x turned into a partnership of six years. Then, the fall before my mandated trip to Florida, he’d found somebody else. Somebody younger. Somebody who wasn’t such a stick-in-the-mud, he’d said. Before then I’d never had a clue he wasn’t happy in our partnership. Part of the reason I was so devastated was that I’d never expected a guy like Sean could find anything attractive about a guy like me in the first place. At 5’9” and 140 pounds, I wasn’t very impressive physically. I had medium brown hair and uninteresting brown eyes. Oh, and I wear glasses. Sean was always after me to get contacts, but I’d tried them and hated them. So, I was ordinary looking at best. Maybe not that good. Face it, I was a nerd. A gay nerd. Sean, on the other hand, was gorgeous. He had black hair and blue eyes and was sexy as hell. He was about my height but built like the gymnast he’d been at Kent State. And he’d been fun to live with. His outgoing personality and his enthusiasm were a good complement to my bookishness and my tendency to be a homebody. When he left I was a mess. I’d hated him for seeing Lawrence behind my back, but I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I’d never been good enough for him. I began to think I was lucky to have had him for as long as I did. With neither looks nor personality to offer him, I realized his leaving was all my fault. Jake was right, I suppose. My work did suffer. I spent most of my time feeling sorry for myself. I had season tickets for the Cleveland Orchestra concerts at Severance Hall, and I gave them away. I hadn’t seen anything at the Playhouse that fall, hadn’t even been to a movie. I didn’t leave the condo except to go to work or buy groceries. I hated eating in restaurants alone, so despite all the good places to eat near where I lived in Shaker, I tended to heat TV dinners or open cans of soup. My colleagues at work tried to be sympathetic. They all kept saying I’d find somebody else, somebody better than Sean. Before long, though, they began to comment that I was “letting myself go,” not dressing as well as I used to. Who cared what I looked like? My work was in an office. Except for occasional trips to conferences, I never had to meet anyone outside the office. Oh, I showed up in the requisite jacket and tie, but I admit I didn’t pay much attention to matching up colors or to whether things needed to go to the cleaners. And shining shoes just seemed like too much trouble. In Cleveland winters, you’ve got to polish your shoes regularly or they look like s**t. Mine looked like s**t. So shortly after the first of the year Jake called me in and banished me for two weeks with the clear message that I’d better come back sporting a new attitude or I’d be history. * * * * The turbulence didn’t last long. The rest of the flight was smooth. Somewhere over South Carolina the clouds disappeared and not long after that we landed in the “Sunshine State.” In the baggage claim area I found a part of our group milling around a driver who was holding a sign with the name of the tour. Apparently people who’d registered for our tour had been arriving all day, so instead of a large motor coach, they’d been shuttling back and forth between the airport, which is on the north side of Jacksonville, and St. Augustine, which is a half hour or so south of downtown, in a mini-bus. At any rate, there were about ten of us in this load. My heart sank when I saw they were all over fifty, and all couples. Except for one guy. A kid. A gorgeous kid. About six feet, with brown hair, darker than mine, which he wore cut short. He had blue eyes, a sparkling smile, and a nice package. Also, I soon discovered, he had an English accent. We didn’t sit together on the van, even though we were both unattached males. He was sitting alone when I got on, but I went toward the back and sat by myself. The rest of the group were couples, as I said, so there was the Brit in the front of the bus, alone, and there I was, in the back, alone. Soon, however, he was being engaged in conversation by the people behind him and across the aisle from him. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but he was smiling and responding animatedly to their questions. I’d worn a warm jacket and a sweater to the airport that morning. I carried the jacket off the plane and as soon as I was on the van I pulled off the sweater. Florida was living up to the hype. It was brilliantly sunny that afternoon. At least, I thought to myself, I might thaw out in the Florida warmth. When we got to the hotel we were told we’d have some time to get settled into our rooms and freshen up. At five o’clock there would be complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres in Party Room B. Afterwards we were guests of the tour for dinner. Our leader told us the hotel would serve complimentary continental breakfasts, but we were on our own for lunch and dinner the rest of the time we were in St. Augustine. He told us there were restaurants catering to all tastes in the area near our hotel. I’d brought shorts and was hoping to wear them most of the time in Florida, but I decided to put on fresh khakis and a short-sleeve shirt for the evening’s get-together. I ran the electric razor over my face and then washed it. What the hell, I thought, and I jumped into the shower. That English kid flashed through my mind while I was washing myself, and my d**k plumped up a bit. I mean, I wasn’t interested in a guy that young, but he was kind of cute. “Down, boy,” I said, and finished my ablutions. There was a table just inside the door of Party Room B where the tour leader, a pleasant guy about my age, was asking our names. I assumed he was checking to see that no one crashed the party, but it turned out he had printed name tags for each of us. They fastened to our clothes by means of a magnet which went on the other side of the shirt from the tag. He asked me to wear the tag for the rest of the trip. It would identify us as members of the tour, and it would help us all to learn one another’s names. I hated name tags. I’d worn enough at conferences and business meetings I’d had to attend. But I could see the usefulness of them here, at least from the tour company’s point of view. They assumed everyone on the tour would want to get to know everyone else. They didn’t know about me. Ha! A look around the room wasn’t encouraging. Except for the Brit and me, every f*****g one of the others was in the fifty-plus bracket. There was a pair of old biddies who were obviously together. The rest were all apparently married couples. And there were, as I learned later, forty-six of us on this particular tour. Oh, well, I sighed, grabbing a glass of red wine, I didn’t come here expecting to meet Mr. Right. I came to warm up and to see Florida. And forget Sean! As I munched on a jumbo shrimp, I wondered whether I had in fact expected to find Mr. Right. One can always hope. But except for Jim, the smiling tour guide, there was no male of eligible age in the group. I consoled myself that at least in Key West and South Beach there’d be lots of cute gay guys to ogle. And maybe I could hook up with somebody at one or the other of those places. During the get-together I did do some handshaking. People usually wanted to know first where I was from and then what I was doing there alone. I told them I was escaping Cleveland in January. Most of them smiled and nodded, saying they were escaping Syracuse or St. Paul or some other equally frigid and snowy place. Nevertheless, I felt like a complete outsider in this group. I was beginning to think, not for the first time, this whole tour thing was a mistake. But I’d been ordered to get out of town, to pull myself together. And I simply hadn’t come up with a better idea. Finally, as I was reaching for a second glass of wine, I turned to find the English kid, holding a glass of Coke, looking pretty sour. When he noticed me he smiled, shifted his drink to his left hand, and held out his right. “Hi. I see you’re Will Thomson. As you can see, I’m Graham Knight. Looks like we’re the only two single blokes in the whole bloody group.” “Hi, Graham. Yeah. It looks like there’s just the two of us. You seem to be hitting it off with the old folk.” “Well, can’t be impolite, can we? Me mum didn’t bring me up that way.” “Hey, man, I wasn’t criticizing. I just think it’s going to be a long trip surrounded by all these old people.” “Aww, give ‘em a chance. Some of ‘em are sweet old codgers. It’s just too bloody bad there aren’t any loose birds here.”