Elliot 2

Elliot finally showed up at ten till nine, just as Gordie was headed off to work and Doc and I were going home. He looked a bit worse for wear but grinned like crazy. So go figure: he got laid. I mean, that's no major surprise — Elliot knew how to get around with the best of them...

... except there was something about that grin...

On Thursday, he was there before any of us, with a grin far wider and more annoying than yesterday's. Instead of lounging in the sun as he usually would, he drank his Irish Dark in record time, then ran off to the gym before any of us could ask anything...

... not that we would, of course, but...

By Friday, things seemed normal — or at least, more or less so. Ellie was there, enjoying his Costa Rica Decaf like the rest of us, but at the same time he was far, far, far away. He kept grinning to himself, which was starting to seriously get on my nerves, since no one knew jack about what was going on, and Ellie being Ellie wasnt about to come out and just tell us. Instead, he just sat there, staring at nothing as usual and grinning, while Gordie and I argued why this summer had been especially mild...

... when suddenly Ellie interrupted, in a voice barely above a whisper, "It's just so damn hot..."

Hot? It wasnt hot at all. What on earth was he talking about?

We might have guessed. He'd met someone. No, not just someone. The one. A towering hunk of masculinity, an insatiable love god, a... man named...

Frank.



To hear Ellie describe him, he was Tom of Finland, Albert Einstein, and Saint Augustine all rolled up in one neatly pressed, incredibly built package. Handsome. Witty. Astute. Ruthlessly nice. Almost pathologically well-mannered. And one of the Truly Great Kissers of Our Time.

For almost an hour and a half, Ellie continued describing Frank in some detail, and the rhapsody grew less Gershwin and more Montiovani. Of course we had our doubts: we all knew what Elliot liked, and there were three, perhaps four men throughout all recorded history that could meet his demanding standards of masculinity. But Ellie was thoroughly and hopelessly convinced he'd met his very own Mister Right. They'd met at a bookstore — one with real books in it — and Ellie'd been swept off his feet over a shared love of Tom Bianchi photography. Frank's penthouse apartment, overlooking the lake, was the nearly too perfect site of their first kiss. The sex that night was, in Elliot's words, the best he'd ever had: Frank's catalogue of positions exceeded Ellie's own.

That alone was no small feat.

To be continued...