Uncontrollably Torn

I was sure I had not left that out on the desk for Val to see.

I moved into the studio, hoping that I was wrong, that I would find him there, happily painting on our portrait. But, of course I wasn't wrong. The only evidence of Val still there was the painting. I went over and stood in front of it. It took me several moments to really see it, to realize what he had done to it. The painting was finished now, but it no longer was a painting of Val and me at the table, saluting each other with raised glasses of wine. Where his figure had been was now, once again, a lushly painted trellis with a fruit-heavy grapevine winding up it. Val had evaporated. I knew then that Val irrevocably was lost to me. I sat alone at the table in the painting now. Had I really looked so sad in that painting all along?

I went back to the bedroom and sank onto the iron bed and cried myself to sleep. When I awoke, it was dusk. I rose, pulled on a pair of shorts, a T, and a pair of sandals, and gingerly made my way down the narrow cobble-stone road to the café in the Bellapais square. I picked out a table beside the trellis holding up the fruit-heavy grapevine as darkness descended and the fairy lights in the olive trees around the fringe of the stone café terrace began to twinkle. And, in that soft light and twittering laughter of the Mediterranean men and wisps of strong Turkish tobacco drifting up, I eyed the men and I was eyed in return until I got the certain look from one I fancied. I spoke briefly with him and his equally hunky friend and took them back up to the villa and let them fuck me, in succession and then together, in long, slow, sweeping strokes on the terrace under the stars.