Page 12 of Glitter

“Well, like I said, well done, you. That was quite a pretty fish you managed to catch for yourself tonight.” Turning away from the mirror, all traces of the flimsy façade of congenial congratulatory comradery the stranger had donned completely fell away as his mouth twisted into a sneer and he stated, “But now that he’s sampled the gas station-quality bait you have to offer, I doubt he’ll be coming back for more. So, I hope you enjoyed him while you could. Because, the next time you see him, don’t be surprised if you see him chasing after my rod.”

Without giving me the chance to refute his claim and tell him that my angel had come back for more, for a second time at least, the silver fox—or would he be more of a silver shark within the context of his weird and creepy fishing metaphor—made his own way out of the bathroom, roughly shoving open the door and nearly smacking the man standing on the other side of it, in the hallway, with it.

I knew it wouldn’t be worth it to follow after him, track him down, and confront him with all the arguments about why he was wrong. Even if I wanted to wade through the dense crowd of men in the club to find him, which I didn’t, it wouldn’t be worth it. There’d probably be no claims or boasts that I could throw at him that would convince that arrogantly confident, older man that, of course, my angel would continue to want me over somebody like him.

I knew all that. Which is why I didn’t go after that cocky, condescending asshole.

But there was also the slight—or not so slight—fear that… What if he was right?

Chapter 6

“Benny, Benny, Ben, Ben, Ben.” The gratingly loud voice of my coworker, Dennis, preceded his arrival next to the open side of my cubicle.

Thankfully, I wasn’t on the phone with a customer at that particular moment—that would have been uncomfortable for everyone involved. Well, except for Dennis. I don’t think he has enough social etiquette to know he should feel embarrassed about coming across as unprofessional while at work.

Unfortunately, what I was doing was using my work computer for nonwork-related activities—scrolling through the generated results of an online search I’d done for names for shades of green.

It had been bugging me, not knowing what word to use in my head for when I was thinking about the subtle flecks of pale green in my angel’s blue eyes. Not that I should be thinking about his eyes while I was at work, although I’d already swallowed down my guilt over that. It’s not as though I’d been doing much of anything over the past two days other than thinking about my angel.

But I certainly shouldn’t be wasting time that I was getting paid to answer customer questions and complaints, by electronically scratching at the need itching away at my brain to commit every tiny detail of him to memory, complete with accurate and specific descriptors.

“Dennis,” I greeted him back, politely if unenthusiastically.

Hoping he wouldn’t notice what I’d been up to on my work computer, which he would immediately hound me about incessantly until I told him everything—and then make fun of me for anything I told him—I exited out of the tab I had open on the monitor.

The search hadn’t been that helpful anyway. Who came up with some of these color names? Silvery bog? Shadow lagoon? Mysterious celery? What were those names and how can celery be mysterious? And not one of the squares accompanying the odd color labels had come close to the particular shade of green I remembered. Too gray, too close to blue, too…celery. Tea green had probably been the closest, which puzzled me as I’d always thought of tea as being a darkish brown color, not green. But even that had only been close. Maybe I should just mentally label it angel green and be done with it.

Although, that might get confusing as I’d already been thinking of the light sky-blue of his eyes as angel blue.

“Benjarino. The Benjinator,” Dennis continued, volleying more irritating and made-up nicknames at me. “You, Benny-hana, look like you had agoodweekend.”

The sly emphasis in his statement and the over-the-top wink he sent my way told me that this man, who had a cubicle three down the row from mine and was about as emotionally sensitive as a brick, had somehow divined that I’d had sex between last Friday and today, Monday, the beginning of another brand-new workweek.

“Whoever she was, hope she didn’t leave you with anything more than this glitter,” Dennis said, brushing his hand heavily and roughly over the shoulder of my blue polo shirt. “Something you’ll have to take antibiotics to get rid of, if you know what I mean.” This boisterously jovial statement was accompanied by another series of winks.

I shouldn’t have any glitter on this shirt; the clothes I’d worn to the club on Friday and Saturday had immediately gone into the hamper when I’d gotten home. And yet…Dennis was making jokes about glitter and pretending, ornotpretending, to brush some off of me. Which means either he made a really, really lucky guess or…

As subtly as I could, I tilted my head to peek at my shoulder where Dennis had touched me. Sure enough… Shit, glitter really does get everywhere. A few flecks of sparkly pink and lime green glittered beneath the industrial LED lighting in our office space.

Had I brushed up against my clothes hamper this morning and the glitter had drifted up to settle on my shirt? Had the glitter that had stuck to my skin from touching my angel somehow managed to avoid getting washed down the drain through multiple showers and then been transferred by me while getting dressed?

Or was glitter like some sort of a plague, sneakily infecting anything and everything within its vicinity? The stuff would probably survive an apocalypse, just like a plague, right alongside cockroaches. Huh. Glitter-encrusted cockroaches.

Thankfully—or maybe not so thankfully—Dennis didn’t give me time to respond to his not-so-funny joking. “Oh, wait, no,” he said, an exaggerated grimace taking over his face. “You’re one of those guys in the rainbow alphabet, right? A G, or a B, or a P. Nooo…there’s no P in there. It’s LGBTQ…something, something, something.”

His last few comments were muttered, clearly more intended for himself rather than me. On the plus side, Dennis’ unhappy expression seemed to also be aimed at himself. Not being able to recall what sexuality I identify as and the exclusion of the letter P for pansexual in the acronym for those in the queer community were apparently upsetting to him. For as loud and annoying as I found the man, I had to say, he’d never come across as being a bigoted asshole.

“Either way,” he continued, “it would’ve been a man, right, that left you with that got you some something-something glow?”

“Er…yeah,” I hesitantly confirmed, not really wanting to discuss my sex life—not even whether I do or do not have a sex life—with my coworker. Particularlythiscoworker. “It was a man. I mean… Yes, I met a man this weekend.” I didn’t intend to offer up any more details than that, but I couldn’t help adding, with a besotted sigh, “An angel. He’s my angel.”

Dennis looked thrilled with even that small amount of information, the large obnoxious smile returning to his face. “Well, whoever he was… Next time you see him, angel or no, maybe tell him to lay off the glitter. Or else, you’ll be finding that stuff everywhere—on you, your clothes, on your furniture, in your car…everywhere—from now until doomsday.”

I had no intention of making a promise like that. My angel was perfect just the way he was—glitter and all. And even though the resulting physical transfer exposed me to uncomfortable and embarrassing conversations such as this one, I also sort of liked the tangible proof that it hadn’t all been in my head.

Nonetheless, I mumbled, “Er, yeah, sure. I’ll…make sure to do that,” in the hope it would get Dennis to drop the subject. To double down on ending this line of conversation, I pointed to the blinking light on my phone and said, “Looks like we’ve got more calls coming in. Should probably get back to work.”

“Yep, guess so, Benarito. Fuck knows the customers aren’t going to help themselves. If they were, they’d have all read the instructions that came with their products in the first place. Am I right?”

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