FIC: "On the Pier" 1/1 (KU/m) R
Jun. 16th, 2003 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321Finally! A story!
Title: On the Pier
Part: 1/1
Author: Lobelia; lobelia40@yahoo.com
Website: http://www.geocities.com/lobelia321/
Pairing: Karl Urban / man
Rating: R
Summary: Karl on a pier with a fish. But who is the man in black? (Anyone who knows me at all well will no doubt guess the answer immediately, heh. Unlike Karl.)
Category: Fish-fic.
Feedback: Yes, please, I would love feedback! Anything, even if it's only one line, one word!
Content/Warnings: RPS.
Spoilers: None.
Archive Rights: Beyond the Fellowship. My niche. Anyone else, please ask.
Disclaimers: This is a work of amateur fiction. I do not know these people. I am not making money. The events described in this story did not happen.
Author's Notes: Thank you to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gabbyhope for wonderful beta-as-of-yore and to ukcalico for an idea on how to link start to finish.
Dedication: To deareyebrowofdoom -- a belated birthday present (scores of happy returns!) but also a thank-you for much-needed therapeutic beta. May the prose flow ever on, and may the cathected Martins of this world cease to annoy!
-----
Karl squatted on the pier, over the plastic bucket. The plastic bucket was slowly but surely leaking a line of water in a sun-reflecting rivulet onto the timber. The timber was weathered, frayed, cracked. The water seeped and gurgled. Karl gurgled. With glee. With angler's delight.
In the bucket, there was a fish. A whopper of a fish. A huge, belly-bulging, spit-inducing, lip-watering, green-and-steel striped beauty of a blue moki. Fins, not fangs; scales not scabs; the vulval smell of salt and seaweed on the breeze. The fish pursed its pouty mouth. The fish rolled its bulging eyes. The fish was gorgeous, and the fish was Karl's.
Next to the bucket with the fish, propped against a post, stood Karl's fishing rod, and next to the fishing rod, sat Karl's bait bag, and next to Karl's bait bag, lay Karl's prescription-sunglasses-case (filled, at the moment, not with Karl's prescription sunglasses which were perched on Karl's nose but instead with Karl's normal glasses, the ones with the scratched left lens), and next to Karl's sunglasses-case, were planted the black, shining toecaps of a man's lace-up shoes.
Karl looked up.
Above his oxfords, chunky-soled and polished to a gleam that outshone the still-leaking rivulet of fishy water, the man wore cuffed black trousers, ironed, belted and buckled, a black shirt, buttoned to choke the Adam's apple, a black jacket and a purple tie. All this on a pier, in Wellington, with the gulls screeching above and the whales shitting ambergris out beyond the harbour, and the moki making its tiny circles among the faded pink plastic walls of its soon-to-be tomb.
"Do I know you?" said Karl.
The man laughed. He took off his sunglasses (which were not possum-like and utilitarian like Karl's, but thin, sharp and streamlined like gum leaves strained through the Matrix). His eyes were sleek. They cut into his face like slits in a Lucio Fontana painting. They sat aslant, atop his equally knife-sharp cheeks, and they were as black and as shiny as his patent leather shoes.
Holding the sunglasses loosely by the elbow, the man said, "This any better?"
Karl tried to remember the eyes. He jogged his memory. His memory remained in freeze mode.
Next, Karl tried to place the voice. The raspy, rich, New Zealand broadcaster's voice. But no. Zero results in that department, too.
"Sorry," Karl said. He rested his hand on the rim of the bucket. "No." He let his eyes travel down the soft entasis of the purple tie. "No, you're not."
"Not what?"
"You don't look like someone who goes fishing."
The man grinned. He put his sunshades back on and put his hands in his pockets, making the tails of his jacket ride up and revealing slim hips and a not-so-slim shimmering Rolex wristwatch.
"No," he said. "I don't do the fish thing. But I like eating them. That one looks nice." He nodded his head in the direction of Karl's moki.
"This one," said Karl and looked down. "This one looks bloody delicious. I caught it just now."
"Did you?"
"Yeah. Big fucking bastard, eh? You never get them this big off the pier, normally."
"Your lucky day," said the man.
Karl's knees made the sound of sand sloshed among gravel as he stood up. His thighs wobbled, he'd been crouching for so long.
"Hi. I'm Karl," he said to the man.
"I know," said the man.
"You know?"
The man grinned. The man scratched his cheek with the middle finger of his right hand. The man did not look at all familiar.
"You're not a... a fan or something like that?" Karl hazarded.
The man burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that Karl could count every one of his fillings, glinting silver in the back of his mouth.
"No," the man said, and then he did an alarming thing. He reached out and patted Karl lightly on the cheek.
Considering he was a perfect stranger, this seemed a rather overly familiar gesture.
Suddenly, it dawned on Karl where he might have met this man before. Karl looked left, Karl looked right. The pier, swaying on its early-evening wooden feet, sloshed by waves and caressed by algae, dotted with umbrellas and three-legged canvas stools and men in canvas hats and pocket-covered vests -- this angler's haven by day was something else entirely by night.
Karl coughed. "Right," he said. "Okay," he said. "But," he added, scuffing the toes of his ocean-stained sandshoes against the reassuring hinge of the bucket handle, "aren't you a bit early for that?"
The man's expression was blank. His sunglasses glinted evilly, in the manner of Agent Smith transplanted to Sesame Street. Then a grin creased his origami cheeks.
"I'm just," he said, and adjusted his, well...
He quite evidently adjusted his...
Well.
His tackle. His fishing... no, no, not fishing, but tackle nevertheless. Adjusted it. In his trousers. With his hand in his pocket, feeling around, cotton to cotton.
"I'm just taking a little stroll," said the man.
If he winked, it wasn't visible. On account of the shades.
It seemed obvious now. It seemed obvious where and when and in what degree of darkness Karl must have encountered this man. In what degrees of lust he may even himself have fondled that very... that very cotton.
Karl swallowed. Karl tried not to feel hot. Karl tried not to feel bothered. Karl tried to keep the barrier between his daggy daytime life and his nocturnal moseyings hard and erect within his thoughts.
He was not entirely successful. Something else was becoming hard and erect, and it was not the moki's dorsal fin.
The man in black came to the rescue. The man in black had apparently decided not to press the issue. He smiled, he said, "Enjoy your fish", he turned on his snappy heels, jingled some coins in his floppy pockets, and sauntered on off up the pier, flashing purple socks as he went.
Karl took off his sunglasses and stared after the man until he rounded the kiosk at the entrance to the parking lot and disappeared between a Honda Civic and a tractor-tyre RV. The last thing to be heard was the stranger's laugh, weaving in and out of the gulls and the wind and the hoots of the six o'clock ferry to Picton.
By the time Karl looked down again, the bucket had finally drained its all onto the planks and the fish flapped around on dry plastic.
"Shit," muttered Karl and got out his gutting knife.
Twenty-seven months went by.
At the end of the twenty-seven months (two and a quarter years, countless moons, eighteen blue moki and twelve snappers, repeat reelings of the reel and rimmings of the spool and other rimmings, too, but never together, never mixed, also repeat visits to the Pier by Night, repeat rovings of the eyes and lurches of the throat every time a cheek shone in the fluorescence of the parking lot lamps or a voice rasped richly) -- at the end of all that, Karl sat on a bench, knees pushed against unfamiliar gabardine, shoulders straining against seams, lapels, pads, gussets, gores and pleats all pulling him in five different directions at once; and across the aisle, on a similar bench...
Sat the man.
Fans screamed and waved posters. Flags flapped. Polyester ents framed the doorway to the cinema, and 'TTT premiere' banners were everywhere. Someone spoke into a microphone up front, people cheered and clapped and laughed, there was a red carpet and there was the man in black.
He was sitting on the other side of another man, a man with bristling brows and a formidable nose, and both of them were in black and lounged about in their effortless suits like Perth swans out for a photo shoot. Karl bent forward in order to get a better look at the man. Surely... but no. This time his memory did not fool him. This time he knew and was quite sure.
But in the cast seats! And known to others! There was Dom, dazzling in white, the Snow White to the stranger's Batman, turning in his seat and taking photographs. Laughing and gesturing.
Karl tugged at his cuffs. Karl wiggled his toes in his tight new shoes. Karl took a deep breath, leaned across the aisle, wind ruffling his hair, and touched Dom on the elbow.
Dom jumped about a mile high. "Sorry, shit. I didn't see you there. Hi, Karl."
"Dom. Who's that... who're those two guys sitting behind you?"
"Those? You don't know them? They're orcs!"
Karl opened his mouth. Moki-like, no words came out, only gurgles.
Karl closed his mouth.
Before he had time to sit back in his chair, tighten his tie, smooth his beard, a voice rasped across the early evening breeze.
"Well, hello. How's the fishing?"
There were the eyes, quite sunshade-less. There were the cheeks. There was the grin. There was the suited, booted, cufflinked and cahooted, lanky, swanky, equipped with clean hanky...
Karl lost the thread. He stared at the man. The man had addressed him.
"What?" he said, intelligently.
Oh, and that grin.
"The fishing. How's the fishing been?"
The other man next to the man, next to Karl's man, turned with a questioning eyebrow. The man himself kept on looking at Karl, and then threw back his head and burst out laughing. A rich, a raspy, an elderberry laugh.
"You still don't know me, do you, Karl?" the man laughed.
"Well..." stalled Karl, as applause broke out around him and the loudspeakers squealed.
"Move up a bit, Steve," the man said. And then he got up, he negotiated knees, he traversed aisle space, he sat, he actually, literally, physically sat down next to Karl, and Karl had to move to the left to accommodate him, and even so their thighs touched, fabric to fabric, quadricep to quadricep, against the bench.
"I know you don't know me," said the man. "And I know you think you know me from a certain, hm, different kind of fishing activity, but I also know that you don't. But," he added, "it is very interesting to me that you think you do. And, not being from around these parts, it actually took me quite a few weeks to figure out what you meant way back then and what that pier is *for* at nights." At this last, he chortled so much that the vibrations of his vocal cords reached his legs and transmitted themselves straight into Karl's...
Groin.
"You," Karl began, mouth dry, voice shaky, but mind emboldened by the swelling in his frayed-at-the-hem Y-fronts, packed away inside his off-the-rail suit, and by the warmth of the man's thigh, and by the sheer *fact* of the man. "You are a cheeky bastard for not letting on that you're involved with the film."
"Involved? You should have recognised me. But then," Chortle, chortle. "... nobody ever does."
"Okay," said Karl, looking at the man, and neither one of them was breaking the gaze, and each of them was blocking out the outside world. "Mister Orc. You know my name, what is yours?"
"Brophy," the man said. "You may call me Mister Brophy."
And now Karl couldn't help chortle himself. His cheeks twitched upward, the hairs on his moustache quivered outward, and the corners of his lips caroused downward. He was feeling hot again, and he was feeling bothered again, but so was the flannel against his gabardine, so was the calf against his own, and the ankle, purple-socked, against his own cotton-rich, grey, standard knee-hi's. All hot, all bothered, all twitching in unison.
Karl lowered his voice, and, still chortling, still bold: "So, Mister Brophy. What do I have do to find out your first name?"
"Well, Mister Urban, Mister Blue Moki," said the man, voice similarly lowered, and he started fingering the white cuff poking out of the end of Karl's suit sleeve, as if absently but, of course, not absently at all, not out of purely sartorial interest at all, this was quite evident...
Karl had lost the thread again.
It had to be admitted: this was the first time he had ever been groped by a guy in daylight.
"What?" he said, echoing earlier bafflement.
The man, Mister Brophy the Orc, looked so delighted that his eyes slitted themselves into baby's cradles against his temples and his eyebrows fairly danced. "You're losing the plot, aren't you?" he said. "And you know what? I like that. I like that a lot. Now, what I was saying -- are you listening this time? -- What I was saying is that you could find out my name by asking our friend Dom over there..." Quick and casual gesture with the thumb. "... or you could..." Fingers moving upwards, from the cuff up Karl's arm, inside the jacket sleeve, long fingers crawling up between shirt and sleeve, tailor's fingers, the fingers of a gentleman's outfitter. "... you could take a look at my, hm, upper thigh. Where I've got my name tattooed. In very tiny letters. So you'd have to get quite close to read it."
"You have a tattoo?" Even as he croaked it and disbelieved it, the image of green-blue ink-soaked skin, soft and hairy against the rustling luxury of designer trousers lurched into Karl's head and confused his tongue. So that in actual fact what he said was more like, "Yoobabba tattoo?"
Mister Brophy broke the gaze. Karl's eyes almost hurt with the jolt of having Mister Brophy's gaze wrenched away from his. There was, though, the bonus of now seeing Mister Brophy in profile, lips pursed, and the smell of hairstyling cream in Karl's nostrils.
"I may have a tattoo," said Mister Brophy. "And then again, I may not. I may also be staying at the Plaza Hotel, and then again I may not be. Room 148, quite possibly."
"Let's go." Those were the words that popped out of Karl's mouth. Those were the words that drove the elderberries back into Mister Brophy's voice.
"No," the man said. "You've got to see the film first. And you've got to spot me. And then..." The profile turned and became a face. "... you might remember how we first met."
Karl stared. Karl froze. Karl clutched the edge of the bench, which inadvertently also meant clutching the edge of the man's warm thighs.
"Oh my god," Karl said. He closed his eyes.
Latex, prosthetics, teeth, rubber feet. Straggly wig, dripping fangs, hairy claw, and feeling so hot, so light, so light-headed in the early hours of the morning, behind the make-up trailer, where one had gone to piss and where one had found... had come upon... The shaking, the helpless shaking of the thighs (much as they were shaking now, here, on the bench at the Wellington premiere), the sweat pouring out from one's own layer of make-up, never seen before, never met, different sets and blue-screen studios, but...
The grunting had seemed orcish enough. Come to think of it, a touch of elderberry wine...?
"Oh my god," Karl said into his hollow palms. "Fuck me."
"I will," whispered the man against Karl's earlobe, and he was so slick, so smooth, so *unrugged*. "And if you like, I'll keep my suit on. Just like the last time."
The End.
-----
Endnote: Pictures of men and fish here: http://www.geocities.com/lobelia321/onthepierpics.html
If you enjoyed this story, please send feedback to lobelia40@yahoo.com
16 June 2003
An attempt at illustration (but links may break):
The blue moki.
Title: On the Pier
Part: 1/1
Author: Lobelia; lobelia40@yahoo.com
Website: http://www.geocities.com/lobelia321/
Pairing: Karl Urban / man
Rating: R
Summary: Karl on a pier with a fish. But who is the man in black? (Anyone who knows me at all well will no doubt guess the answer immediately, heh. Unlike Karl.)
Category: Fish-fic.
Feedback: Yes, please, I would love feedback! Anything, even if it's only one line, one word!
Content/Warnings: RPS.
Spoilers: None.
Archive Rights: Beyond the Fellowship. My niche. Anyone else, please ask.
Disclaimers: This is a work of amateur fiction. I do not know these people. I am not making money. The events described in this story did not happen.
Author's Notes: Thank you to
gabbyhope for wonderful beta-as-of-yore and to ukcalico for an idea on how to link start to finish.Dedication: To dear
eyebrowofdoom -- a belated birthday present (scores of happy returns!) but also a thank-you for much-needed therapeutic beta. May the prose flow ever on, and may the cathected Martins of this world cease to annoy!-----
Karl squatted on the pier, over the plastic bucket. The plastic bucket was slowly but surely leaking a line of water in a sun-reflecting rivulet onto the timber. The timber was weathered, frayed, cracked. The water seeped and gurgled. Karl gurgled. With glee. With angler's delight.
In the bucket, there was a fish. A whopper of a fish. A huge, belly-bulging, spit-inducing, lip-watering, green-and-steel striped beauty of a blue moki. Fins, not fangs; scales not scabs; the vulval smell of salt and seaweed on the breeze. The fish pursed its pouty mouth. The fish rolled its bulging eyes. The fish was gorgeous, and the fish was Karl's.
Next to the bucket with the fish, propped against a post, stood Karl's fishing rod, and next to the fishing rod, sat Karl's bait bag, and next to Karl's bait bag, lay Karl's prescription-sunglasses-case (filled, at the moment, not with Karl's prescription sunglasses which were perched on Karl's nose but instead with Karl's normal glasses, the ones with the scratched left lens), and next to Karl's sunglasses-case, were planted the black, shining toecaps of a man's lace-up shoes.
Karl looked up.
Above his oxfords, chunky-soled and polished to a gleam that outshone the still-leaking rivulet of fishy water, the man wore cuffed black trousers, ironed, belted and buckled, a black shirt, buttoned to choke the Adam's apple, a black jacket and a purple tie. All this on a pier, in Wellington, with the gulls screeching above and the whales shitting ambergris out beyond the harbour, and the moki making its tiny circles among the faded pink plastic walls of its soon-to-be tomb.
"Do I know you?" said Karl.
The man laughed. He took off his sunglasses (which were not possum-like and utilitarian like Karl's, but thin, sharp and streamlined like gum leaves strained through the Matrix). His eyes were sleek. They cut into his face like slits in a Lucio Fontana painting. They sat aslant, atop his equally knife-sharp cheeks, and they were as black and as shiny as his patent leather shoes.
Holding the sunglasses loosely by the elbow, the man said, "This any better?"
Karl tried to remember the eyes. He jogged his memory. His memory remained in freeze mode.
Next, Karl tried to place the voice. The raspy, rich, New Zealand broadcaster's voice. But no. Zero results in that department, too.
"Sorry," Karl said. He rested his hand on the rim of the bucket. "No." He let his eyes travel down the soft entasis of the purple tie. "No, you're not."
"Not what?"
"You don't look like someone who goes fishing."
The man grinned. He put his sunshades back on and put his hands in his pockets, making the tails of his jacket ride up and revealing slim hips and a not-so-slim shimmering Rolex wristwatch.
"No," he said. "I don't do the fish thing. But I like eating them. That one looks nice." He nodded his head in the direction of Karl's moki.
"This one," said Karl and looked down. "This one looks bloody delicious. I caught it just now."
"Did you?"
"Yeah. Big fucking bastard, eh? You never get them this big off the pier, normally."
"Your lucky day," said the man.
Karl's knees made the sound of sand sloshed among gravel as he stood up. His thighs wobbled, he'd been crouching for so long.
"Hi. I'm Karl," he said to the man.
"I know," said the man.
"You know?"
The man grinned. The man scratched his cheek with the middle finger of his right hand. The man did not look at all familiar.
"You're not a... a fan or something like that?" Karl hazarded.
The man burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that Karl could count every one of his fillings, glinting silver in the back of his mouth.
"No," the man said, and then he did an alarming thing. He reached out and patted Karl lightly on the cheek.
Considering he was a perfect stranger, this seemed a rather overly familiar gesture.
Suddenly, it dawned on Karl where he might have met this man before. Karl looked left, Karl looked right. The pier, swaying on its early-evening wooden feet, sloshed by waves and caressed by algae, dotted with umbrellas and three-legged canvas stools and men in canvas hats and pocket-covered vests -- this angler's haven by day was something else entirely by night.
Karl coughed. "Right," he said. "Okay," he said. "But," he added, scuffing the toes of his ocean-stained sandshoes against the reassuring hinge of the bucket handle, "aren't you a bit early for that?"
The man's expression was blank. His sunglasses glinted evilly, in the manner of Agent Smith transplanted to Sesame Street. Then a grin creased his origami cheeks.
"I'm just," he said, and adjusted his, well...
He quite evidently adjusted his...
Well.
His tackle. His fishing... no, no, not fishing, but tackle nevertheless. Adjusted it. In his trousers. With his hand in his pocket, feeling around, cotton to cotton.
"I'm just taking a little stroll," said the man.
If he winked, it wasn't visible. On account of the shades.
It seemed obvious now. It seemed obvious where and when and in what degree of darkness Karl must have encountered this man. In what degrees of lust he may even himself have fondled that very... that very cotton.
Karl swallowed. Karl tried not to feel hot. Karl tried not to feel bothered. Karl tried to keep the barrier between his daggy daytime life and his nocturnal moseyings hard and erect within his thoughts.
He was not entirely successful. Something else was becoming hard and erect, and it was not the moki's dorsal fin.
The man in black came to the rescue. The man in black had apparently decided not to press the issue. He smiled, he said, "Enjoy your fish", he turned on his snappy heels, jingled some coins in his floppy pockets, and sauntered on off up the pier, flashing purple socks as he went.
Karl took off his sunglasses and stared after the man until he rounded the kiosk at the entrance to the parking lot and disappeared between a Honda Civic and a tractor-tyre RV. The last thing to be heard was the stranger's laugh, weaving in and out of the gulls and the wind and the hoots of the six o'clock ferry to Picton.
By the time Karl looked down again, the bucket had finally drained its all onto the planks and the fish flapped around on dry plastic.
"Shit," muttered Karl and got out his gutting knife.
Twenty-seven months went by.
At the end of the twenty-seven months (two and a quarter years, countless moons, eighteen blue moki and twelve snappers, repeat reelings of the reel and rimmings of the spool and other rimmings, too, but never together, never mixed, also repeat visits to the Pier by Night, repeat rovings of the eyes and lurches of the throat every time a cheek shone in the fluorescence of the parking lot lamps or a voice rasped richly) -- at the end of all that, Karl sat on a bench, knees pushed against unfamiliar gabardine, shoulders straining against seams, lapels, pads, gussets, gores and pleats all pulling him in five different directions at once; and across the aisle, on a similar bench...
Sat the man.
Fans screamed and waved posters. Flags flapped. Polyester ents framed the doorway to the cinema, and 'TTT premiere' banners were everywhere. Someone spoke into a microphone up front, people cheered and clapped and laughed, there was a red carpet and there was the man in black.
He was sitting on the other side of another man, a man with bristling brows and a formidable nose, and both of them were in black and lounged about in their effortless suits like Perth swans out for a photo shoot. Karl bent forward in order to get a better look at the man. Surely... but no. This time his memory did not fool him. This time he knew and was quite sure.
But in the cast seats! And known to others! There was Dom, dazzling in white, the Snow White to the stranger's Batman, turning in his seat and taking photographs. Laughing and gesturing.
Karl tugged at his cuffs. Karl wiggled his toes in his tight new shoes. Karl took a deep breath, leaned across the aisle, wind ruffling his hair, and touched Dom on the elbow.
Dom jumped about a mile high. "Sorry, shit. I didn't see you there. Hi, Karl."
"Dom. Who's that... who're those two guys sitting behind you?"
"Those? You don't know them? They're orcs!"
Karl opened his mouth. Moki-like, no words came out, only gurgles.
Karl closed his mouth.
Before he had time to sit back in his chair, tighten his tie, smooth his beard, a voice rasped across the early evening breeze.
"Well, hello. How's the fishing?"
There were the eyes, quite sunshade-less. There were the cheeks. There was the grin. There was the suited, booted, cufflinked and cahooted, lanky, swanky, equipped with clean hanky...
Karl lost the thread. He stared at the man. The man had addressed him.
"What?" he said, intelligently.
Oh, and that grin.
"The fishing. How's the fishing been?"
The other man next to the man, next to Karl's man, turned with a questioning eyebrow. The man himself kept on looking at Karl, and then threw back his head and burst out laughing. A rich, a raspy, an elderberry laugh.
"You still don't know me, do you, Karl?" the man laughed.
"Well..." stalled Karl, as applause broke out around him and the loudspeakers squealed.
"Move up a bit, Steve," the man said. And then he got up, he negotiated knees, he traversed aisle space, he sat, he actually, literally, physically sat down next to Karl, and Karl had to move to the left to accommodate him, and even so their thighs touched, fabric to fabric, quadricep to quadricep, against the bench.
"I know you don't know me," said the man. "And I know you think you know me from a certain, hm, different kind of fishing activity, but I also know that you don't. But," he added, "it is very interesting to me that you think you do. And, not being from around these parts, it actually took me quite a few weeks to figure out what you meant way back then and what that pier is *for* at nights." At this last, he chortled so much that the vibrations of his vocal cords reached his legs and transmitted themselves straight into Karl's...
Groin.
"You," Karl began, mouth dry, voice shaky, but mind emboldened by the swelling in his frayed-at-the-hem Y-fronts, packed away inside his off-the-rail suit, and by the warmth of the man's thigh, and by the sheer *fact* of the man. "You are a cheeky bastard for not letting on that you're involved with the film."
"Involved? You should have recognised me. But then," Chortle, chortle. "... nobody ever does."
"Okay," said Karl, looking at the man, and neither one of them was breaking the gaze, and each of them was blocking out the outside world. "Mister Orc. You know my name, what is yours?"
"Brophy," the man said. "You may call me Mister Brophy."
And now Karl couldn't help chortle himself. His cheeks twitched upward, the hairs on his moustache quivered outward, and the corners of his lips caroused downward. He was feeling hot again, and he was feeling bothered again, but so was the flannel against his gabardine, so was the calf against his own, and the ankle, purple-socked, against his own cotton-rich, grey, standard knee-hi's. All hot, all bothered, all twitching in unison.
Karl lowered his voice, and, still chortling, still bold: "So, Mister Brophy. What do I have do to find out your first name?"
"Well, Mister Urban, Mister Blue Moki," said the man, voice similarly lowered, and he started fingering the white cuff poking out of the end of Karl's suit sleeve, as if absently but, of course, not absently at all, not out of purely sartorial interest at all, this was quite evident...
Karl had lost the thread again.
It had to be admitted: this was the first time he had ever been groped by a guy in daylight.
"What?" he said, echoing earlier bafflement.
The man, Mister Brophy the Orc, looked so delighted that his eyes slitted themselves into baby's cradles against his temples and his eyebrows fairly danced. "You're losing the plot, aren't you?" he said. "And you know what? I like that. I like that a lot. Now, what I was saying -- are you listening this time? -- What I was saying is that you could find out my name by asking our friend Dom over there..." Quick and casual gesture with the thumb. "... or you could..." Fingers moving upwards, from the cuff up Karl's arm, inside the jacket sleeve, long fingers crawling up between shirt and sleeve, tailor's fingers, the fingers of a gentleman's outfitter. "... you could take a look at my, hm, upper thigh. Where I've got my name tattooed. In very tiny letters. So you'd have to get quite close to read it."
"You have a tattoo?" Even as he croaked it and disbelieved it, the image of green-blue ink-soaked skin, soft and hairy against the rustling luxury of designer trousers lurched into Karl's head and confused his tongue. So that in actual fact what he said was more like, "Yoobabba tattoo?"
Mister Brophy broke the gaze. Karl's eyes almost hurt with the jolt of having Mister Brophy's gaze wrenched away from his. There was, though, the bonus of now seeing Mister Brophy in profile, lips pursed, and the smell of hairstyling cream in Karl's nostrils.
"I may have a tattoo," said Mister Brophy. "And then again, I may not. I may also be staying at the Plaza Hotel, and then again I may not be. Room 148, quite possibly."
"Let's go." Those were the words that popped out of Karl's mouth. Those were the words that drove the elderberries back into Mister Brophy's voice.
"No," the man said. "You've got to see the film first. And you've got to spot me. And then..." The profile turned and became a face. "... you might remember how we first met."
Karl stared. Karl froze. Karl clutched the edge of the bench, which inadvertently also meant clutching the edge of the man's warm thighs.
"Oh my god," Karl said. He closed his eyes.
Latex, prosthetics, teeth, rubber feet. Straggly wig, dripping fangs, hairy claw, and feeling so hot, so light, so light-headed in the early hours of the morning, behind the make-up trailer, where one had gone to piss and where one had found... had come upon... The shaking, the helpless shaking of the thighs (much as they were shaking now, here, on the bench at the Wellington premiere), the sweat pouring out from one's own layer of make-up, never seen before, never met, different sets and blue-screen studios, but...
The grunting had seemed orcish enough. Come to think of it, a touch of elderberry wine...?
"Oh my god," Karl said into his hollow palms. "Fuck me."
"I will," whispered the man against Karl's earlobe, and he was so slick, so smooth, so *unrugged*. "And if you like, I'll keep my suit on. Just like the last time."
The End.
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Endnote: Pictures of men and fish here: http://www.geocities.com/lobelia321/onthepierpics.html
If you enjoyed this story, please send feedback to lobelia40@yahoo.com
16 June 2003
An attempt at illustration (but links may break):
The blue moki.
Spot Karl.
Second row, left: Mister Jed Brophy!!
Next to him on the right: Mister Stephen Ure.
Front row: Miscellaneous other actors.
