Hold Tight Read Free

itself.
    The smell of cologne returned, and hung there. Hank waited a moment. When he turned around, he found himself looking down on the spotless brim of a hat. The man stood only a foot away. Like most people, he was shorter than Hank.
    The man looked up, his face slowly appearing beneath his hat. He had a smooth, friendly face and a red bow tie. “You’re standing improperly,” he whispered.
    “Beg pardon?” said Hank. “Sir?”
    “If you want to meet people, you should stand with your hands behind you.”
    The man sounded so well-meaning and knowledgeable Hank automatically took his big hands off the partition and placed them at his back in parade rest.
    “And you’re quite tall. You should hold them a little lower.”
    “Like this?”
    “Let me see.” The man stepped up behind Hank and pressed his crotch into Hank’s hands.
    The wool was ribbed and baggy. Hank cupped his hands around a loose bundle inside before he realized what he was doing. His heart began to race.
    The man lightly cleared his throat. “Uh, you interested?”
    Hank let go and spun around. He looked, then snatched the man’s hat off his head so he could see him better. Strands of light from the movie flickered in the brilliantined hair while the man anxiously reached for his hat. He wasn’t so old, maybe thirty, and not at all effeminate. Hank let him take the hat back, then reached down to feel the man’s crotch from the front.
    “Oh? Oh.” The man pulled his brim back over his eyes, glanced around, reached down and touched Hank, tweaked him through the cloth. “I see,” he whispered. “I don’t suppose you have a place where we can go?”
    Hank closed his eyes and shook his head. It felt so damn good to touch and be touched again. The cologne wasn’t so strong once you got used to it.
    “I live with my mother, you understand. But I have some friends downtown with a room we can use.” He removed his hand and used it to take Hank’s hand, rubbing a smooth thumb across the wide, hard palm. “Do you mind going downtown?”
    “Hell, no!” Hank cried and pulled loose to grab his coat.
    “Shhh, please. Discretion.” But the man was smiling to himself as he nervously glanced around and nodded at the curtain over the exit.
    Hank followed him out to the balcony lobby, where the two sailors still waited. “What did I tell you?” said one. “Trade.”
    The man didn’t look at Hank, walked quickly, trying to keep a step or two ahead of him. So even in the big city people were shy about this. Hank buttoned up his coat so he wouldn’t show. He buried his eager hands in his coat pockets to stop himself from grabbing the man’s arm or slapping him on the ass, he was so happy. His shipmates hadn’t been teasing him when they joked about this movie house, laughing over why they wouldn’t want to go there and why Hank might.
    Out on the street it was almost spring, but a city kind of spring, just temperature. The other side of Forty-second Street was deeper in shadow now than it had been when Hank went inside, and the penny arcade there looked brighter. Gangs of sailors charged up and down the sidewalks, hooting and elbowing each other over every girl they saw, not understanding how much fun they could’ve had with themselves. Hank had understood since he was fourteen. Thumbing around the country or working at a C.C.C. camp, he had met plenty of others who understood, too. There had to be others on the McCoy, but living on a destroyer was worse than living in Beaumont. You had to live with them afterwards, which could get sticky if they started feeling guilty or, worse, all moony and calf-eyed. It should be as natural as eating, but people were funny and Hank did his best to get along with them. Most of his shipmates thought Hank was only joshing them or playing the dumb hick when he told them what he liked.
    That Mongo skyscraper with the rounded corners stood at the far end of the street like a good idea. Hank’s man stood at