When Love Takes Over Ch. 02

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked. "I know you bitch about your job sometimes, but I know you love it. And I know you love working on Magazine."

"Yes, I guess. But I have been there almost 5 years, and I'm burned out. I love working for Donna, but she can be exhausting. Besides, I've always planned to eventually start my own design firm and I like more time to work on my art. The potential profit from these houses is much more than a couple of year's salary, and if things work out like last time, I'm sure to get a lot of good press from these. Plus, she's still going to carry my paintings, and I make a decent bit of money from my art. Not enough to live on, but a nice income boost. Besides, I feel like this way I'm working toward our future."

"Whatever you want," he said, pulling me in for a kiss. After two years together, I still felt it down to my toes when he kissed me like that. In fact, I never quite lost the nervous twitch in my stomach when I walked into a room and saw him and realized that beautiful man was mine.

Those two houses again garnered quite a bit of attention after we finished them, and in the emerging excitement surrounded the rebirth of New Orleans, Reed ended up selling both of them for major profits.

As the years moved on, Reed became so excited about restoring properties and so energized by the changes in our city as it recovered from Katrina, he left teaching to focus on real estate. I continued to oversee the design of the renovations, as well as acting as project manager, though I stopped doing any of the physical work. It was fun, and I enjoyed it, but it did lack the magic I had felt when I was working on our own first home.

I was so busy, that I never did take on any private design clients; however, I managed to find enough time to continue to paint, though never as much as I would like, and the paintings sold well enough for Donna that she was continually asking for more.

As our own personal homes became larger and more elaborate and Reed's property development business grew, I also fell into being kind of Reed's social liaison.

At this point, Reed had been in New Orleans for a number of years, but as a Northerner used to directness he was still baffled by all the various rules and customs of the South.

I had been raised in Louisiana, and though I came from small, rural, unimportant town, I had been raised by ladies, so I was taught all the archaic rules and regulations. Before I met Reed, I had largely rebelled against them, and my early years living in New Orleans, I had embraced it's bohemian and tawdry appeal much more than it's decayed gentility. But since he had decided to move into a professional area that required moving among the city's elite, I brushed off my childhood knowledge and put it in practice.

I traded my vintage jackets, graphic tees, and paint stained jeans for seersucker suits and linen shirts. I taught him the difference between fish forks, oyster forks, salad forks, and ice cream forks. I taught him how to navigate a place setting that included a bewildering array of plates, cutlery, and stemware. I taught him about mint julep cups and milk punch. I taught him about "Bless her heart," and the proper usage of "y'all." I started using the approved Uptown decorating conventions in our own house, and the "right" restaurants, and the "right" stores to shop at.

Honestly, none of this was my thing, but he loved it. And when I would stand at yet another one of our cocktail parties, bored out of my mind talking about various Uptown scandals, I would look over our tastefully decorated (if boring) living room and see Reed, so tall and lean, so proud of his accomplishments, dressed in a white linen suit that accented his black hair and olive complexion, holding his sweating mint julep in its silver cup wrapped with a linen napkins, and talking animatedly to our new acquaintances, and my heart would swell with love and pride. What's a little boredom on my part, if a stupid cocktail party makes his face shine like that?

The years went on, and it's now 7 years since we met. Reed, the bastard, still looked as gorgeous as every, with only a handful of lines around those fine dark eyes to mark the passage of time. He worked out regularly, and his careful diet had preserved his lean figure.

I must admit that I was not so disciplined. I had always relied on physical work to keep me fit, and as Reed's success grew, I was doing less and less. We now had contractors and subs working on our projects, landscapers and gardeners working on our yards, and I no longer relied on the streetcars and walking to maneuver the city. At the same time, I always seemed to be picking finishes or meeting with the architects or checking on a job site or, perhaps worse, schmoozing with potential clients and investors over lunch, dinner, or drinks. By the end of the day, working out just seemed like too much.

I also had learned to love to rewind with a couple of Manhattans or some good Scotch at the end of the day, and while I hated the schmoozing, I can deny that I enjoyed eating at the city's great restaurant. At any rate, while I was still fairly muscular, thanks to genetics, the muscles were slowly being covered by a layer of fat. I honestly wanted to grow my beard, buzz my head, and just embrace being a bear, but Reed preferred a preppy look, so I kept my face shaved, my body hair trimmed, and my hair in a conventional hair cut. If that's what he liked, I was okay with it.

But did he still like it? That's really the question, isn't it? That's the thing that had been bothering me lately. Because the reason that I was so horny that I was ogling 22 year old Latinos was that Reed and I hadn't had sex, besides the occasional drunken groping after a long night out or an increasingly disinterested hand job in months.

I had chalked it up to our being busy and distracted by business. Bigger projects bring bigger rewards, but also bigger stresses. And yet, was that the reason? All I knew was that I loved him and our life, even if it wasn't exactly what I had pictured.

I had planned for a life of us together in our first small cottage with me painting in the converted garage in the back and him grading papers on the back porch, potlucks with our neighborhood friends, and trips to the gay bars in the quarter. But somehow, life had had different ideas, and now we lived in an Uptown showplace, with cocktail parties for 100, and only went to the French Quarter to eat with the Uptown crowd at Galatoire's. Those weren't my favorite things to do, but I did them with Reed, so that's what mattered.

*****

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the train passed. I head toward Uptown and Reed, excited to see him again before he left. I had given him a goodbye kiss earlier, but now I was ready to give him a proper send off, something for him to remember while he was out of town, a send off that would remind him of the love he had waiting at home...