One of Us

"Gus, give me hand, man."

Alec was crouched uncomfortably under the rough-hewn plywood countertop of the stand. Gus was loitering halfway to the stand from the van, a cardboard box full of Starlite globes in his hands.

"Coming, hon," Gus said, quickening his steps. Setting the box down on the counter, he dropped next to Alec. "What's happening here?"

Alec wrestled with an Allen wrench. "Just... having an awkward time of it..."

"Here." Gus took the wrench and chased Alec out of the way. He was better at this sort of thing. Alec's call for help was also his way of acknowledging it.

They used to have a pop-up stand like most of the other vendors, but three years earlier it had given up the ghost. They were expensive, and times were lean; a replacement wasn't in the budget. Alec, who'd become a self-professed handyman over the last nine years or so, had declared that he'd just make them a new stand with his own two hands. He'd been holding on to a stack of scrap plywood for years and years, and now he knew what to do with it.

"It'll be the rub," he'd promised Gus. "Wood is so rare now that even plywood will seem exotic."

"It'll seem backwoods," Gus had snorted.

"It'll be rustic," Alec had corrected, "but that's okay. Rustic is authentic. Rustic is DIY, and DIY is trending."

" 'DIY?' " Gus had said,

"Just trust me," Alec had said.

"The rub" it wasn't, and "rustic" was perhaps too kind. It must have hurt Alec's pride that he'd spent so much time designing and building the stand, only for it to be such a monumental pain to assemble. But Gus bucked up: Six or nine times a year, between the various festivals and fairs, they trucked their stand and their wares to wherever and practiced trending their DIY.

A living as artisans had seemed romantic when they'd first started out together, two twenty-year-olds determined to scratch out a living in culture and art and private commerce. Alec was proud of his handiwork, the leaping whales and graceful deer he carved from wood... mockwood now, except for the few high-end pieces shaped from rare real wood. Those pieces commanded exorbitant sums. of course, and it wasn't like they sold one every day, or even every year. Seasonal trinkets and sculptures of glass were their bread and butter. Alec's glasswork had improved dramatically over the years, attracting notices even from major art sites. Alec's glassworks now provided them with the lion's share of their income.

He was even getting good at turning lumentic into delicate little jewels of balance and form -- not an easy thing to accomplish, when lumentic was so notoriously difficult to work with and Alec was able to afford so little of the hi-tech material. All in all, Alec had every reason to take pride in his handiwork. But it was a hurt pride when it came to the stand, which was sort of ugly and a little misshapen no matter how he tried to fix it. It was also hard as hell to set up.

On the other hand, Alec -- and Gus too, though Gus would admit it only grudgingly -- liked how his plywood creation stood out from the metal and canvas stands. "It looks genuine," he'd say. "Like two genuine guys run it." What it looked was ramshackle. It didn't seem to hurt sales, though, and in the last season or two they'd seen other vendors resort to similar hand-crafted stands when their prefabs gave out. Mostly, they used aluminum frames and plastic tarps, though, and their stands went up with little fuss.

Gus sighed with irritation and turned his attention to the next fasteners that needed tightening. Alec had promised it wouldn't take longer than an hour, tops, to set up the stand this year ("We've gotten good at it, yeah?") but the structure was only now assuming its final shape after two and a quarter hours.

Gus nimbly twisted and scrunched on the big piece of cardboard Alec had laid down. The day was dry, but chilly; it would only get colder as night came on. Already darkness was closing down, and there was a sense of excitement building in the air.

The Blue Star Festival was one of Providence's longest-running local traditions. It had used to be called WaterFire, and had been started in 1994 as a special event. Two years later a second edition of the event had launched an annual tradition that had continued evolving and gaining popularity until now, nearly forty years later, it commanded huge throngs. The traditional bonfires on platforms in the middle of the three rivers that snaked through the city had been discontinued a quarter century earlier, when more stringent controls on air quality were introduced and a wood shortage had, at the same time, made the cost prohibitive. Now the platforms supported large flickering crystals, more abstract than the similar star-shaped crystals that hung from trees and over-arcing banner wires.

The faux fires had a nice golden hue that was comforting and autumnal, but the blue stars were more striking and immensely popular with tourists. Blue stars appeared on garments and thermoses and any number of other, cheaper souvenirs; but the high end buyers looked forward to the Starlite globes, clear crystal balls with bright blue stars situated in the center. The stars glowed an intense, deep shade of cerulean thanks to transperiodic chemical reactions that took decades to resolve. As the reaction continued, the star at the center of the globe grew brighter, swirling blue-on-blue patterns slowly coruscating along its arms and in its crystalline core. The hue would change over time, but whatever precise the star took on, it always seemed to be a remarkable and beautiful blue.

Alec and Gus had started dealing the Starlite globes the very first year they'd been introduced. They were pretty, and they looked expensive, but in fact they didn't cost that much to produce. They were an instant hit. The manufacturer cleverly opted to limit the yearly batch to 6,000 units. In recent years, as the crowds grew, the demand far outpaced the supply, and everybody seemed to want one. There was talk by the manufacturer of tripling production, but the city fathers were against it. They liked the prestige and mystique the limited supply gave the trinkets and, by extension, the Blue Star Festival as a whole.

"Think we'll see any knockoffs this year?" Gus asked as he fiddled with the Allen wrench, closing a gap between boards a little more with each twist.

"Ah, yeah, but they'll be as crappy as always," laughed Alec.

It was true; the plastic replicas made with micro-battery powered pointlight mesh lacked the class and polish of the real deal. So far, no one had tried to produce a true replica using transperiodic chemicals, but that was not a surprise. Very few manufacturers were equipped, licensed, or experienced for such work. Transperiodic substances were still quite novel and hard to fabricate, though they had created a seismic shift in everything from medicine to electronics to the applications the new, more powerful computers could be used for.

Gus rose up, knees creaking, and reached for the tool kit. "There we have it," he said, securing the Allen wrench.

"Thanks, hon," Alec said.

The two men shuttled boxes of Starlite globes to their stand and Alec began setting them out. "Pretty," he said.

"Not the only beauty out here tonight," Gus said, his attention captured once again by the same young man he'd seen earlier - the one who had stopped him in his tracks just before Alec had called him over.

Alec glanced up and followed his husband's gaze.

"He's a nice looking kid," Alec said. "But a kid."

"Yeah..." Gus squinted. His eyes were still pretty good but he didn't have the fine resolution of sight he'd possessed in his youth, and the growing murk was making it harder still to see clearly. "Maybe not," he said. "I think maybe he's in his thirties."

Alec snorted. "Maybe not," he said.

There was a mild frisson of tension around this subject. Alec had broached it: They were approaching their fifties, he'd fretted a few months earlier. They should get out more, make some friends, maybe even play around because in a few years...

In a few years, Gus hoped, they might finally be able to afford rejuvenation therapy. But the economy wasn't picking up the way they'd hoped, and time was still passing, and so he finally told Alec that if bringing home the occasional playmate would make his life more complete, then he should go for it.

Alec had. He'd brought home guys to share; he'd paid Sunday afternoon visits to special friends. Then, a few weeks ago, something had gone seriously awry during one of Alec's extracurricular afternoons. He'd come home pale and seething, and refused to discuss it.

"I'm here to talk if you want," Gus offered, and Alec thanked him. But not a word about whatever had happened was forthcoming.

Since then, though Alec insisted Gus was free to chase after playmates of his own, he seemed to grow uptight whenever Gus hinted that he might find another man attractive. Gus found this a little unfair, because while he's partaken in the pleasures of the men Alec had brought home, he had not, like Alec, gone off solo for sessions with fuck buddies. But Gus wasn't really into the whole open relationship thing, though it was common enough and they had plenty of friends who were into it in a big way. The whole thing seemed more hassle than it was worth. Anyway, if he'd wanted the perils and drama of dating, he wouldn't have married Alec.

But this young guy... he'd jumped out at Gus and literally taken his breath. Gus couldn't identify what it was, exactly; maybe no single characteristic. Maybe a specific combination of size, shape, stance, coloring, and attitude. Maybe the kid simply struck a hard-wired chord in Gus.

Whatever the reason, Gus couldn't stop looking. Alec noticed. "Don't stare, hon. It's gross."

Self-conscious, Gus forced his attention elsewhere, but mentally he was still thinking about the young man. He was also thinking about how, at his age, guys that age were too young... far too young. Most of the playmates Alec had brought him were younger -- around the kid's age, mid-twenties, maybe thirty years old -- and while Gus certainly appreciated their physical attributes, the encounters also had tended to leave him in a funk. They made him feel young again for a little while, but then he felt a little creepy, a little guilty -- more than a little vampiric, as though he'd been feeding on their youth.

And really, wasn't that what they were doing? Alec argued that younger men liked the attentions of older guys -- it could make up for a deficient relationship with traditional male role models; it could make a younger man feel more secure, or give him greater confidence to have an older man showing him the ropes, as it were. Gus wasn't sure he bought into that argument. He also suspected that whatever had happened to turn Alec off to extracurricular adventures had happened with a younger guy. Gus imagined the possibilities: Puppy love gone too far; or else, perhaps, a lack of attention span, coupled with youthful arrogance. Maybe Alec's playmate had simply brushed him off.

That's what happens, Gus told himself. Young guys aren't ready for something more -- or something less, for that matter. They don't know what they want. He laughed at himself, thinking this. As if I do? But what I know I don't want is to have to deal with some kid's dramas, trauma, and uncertainties. I already got through my twenties and thirties. I don't need to do it again.

Maybe Alec didn't, either. Not any more.

Daylight fled and night arrived in its full splendor, with large crustal stars dotting the view. Families wandered the thoroughfares. Behind Gus and Alec's stand, gondolas ferried enchanted couples up and down the river, and the fire crystals threw off an orange glow.

The kid had drifted out of sight as Gus had helped with the stand's assembly, but now there he was again -- just on the fringes of the growing crowd, seeming to circulate past just enough to tantalize, never coming quite close enough to pause and linger or have a conversation. But he'd look at Gus every so often -- a sly, smiling glance, almost a shy flicker of a glance that piqued him.

Alec grew increasingly impatient. Finally, he snapped, "Why don't you just go chase him down, drag him into the bushes, fuck him, and be done with it?"

Alec's tone offended Gus, who had set aside his reservations and been enjoying the flirtation. He made a point to turn his back to his husband and talk to every customer and passer-by, extolling and explaining the Starlite globes while ignoring his mate.

Finally, Alec reconsidered.

"Sorry," he said during a free moment between mobs of buyers. He slid his arms around Gus and nuzzled his ear.

Gus patted his hand.

"Forgive me?" Alec asked.

Gus spun in Alec's embrace and smiled. "You don't have to be jealous. I was just enjoying him cruising me. That doesn't happen so much when you're 48."

"I know, I get it," Alec said. "But you have to be careful."

Gus thought Alec might be about to tell him about the bad hookup, but Alec just nuzzled him again.

"Hey lovebirds." It was a smiling man and his girlfriend. "How do these things work? Is this real glass?"

While Gus explained that the Starlite globes were created using 3D replication technology and transperiodic chemicals -- the couple just grinned blankly at the technicalities -- Alec caught sight of the young man his husband was so fascinated by. Not very tall -- a little under two meters, and slight. Pale. Dark hair, though it was impossible to say, by the scant light, whether it was black or brown. His eyes, too, seemed dark, but they might have been blue, or hazel, or any color. And there was something to him: To the way his eyes engaged Alec. It was almost like the kid was projecting his intelligence and curiosity at him somehow. Maybe he was a telepath? There had been rumors of human telepathy being proven to exist by one of the big research universities, but the research confiscated and suppressed by the university's parent corporation.

Whether it was telepathy or magic or sexual magnetism, Alec couldn't have said. But he did get a sense of why Gus was so taken.

Gus, having sold the young couple two Starlite globes -- the maximum purchase for any single buyer -- broke into Alec's reverie to report that they were down to their last eight units. Eight, out of the five hundred the stingy, controlling manufacturer had granted them. But the profits were good, and Alec wasn't complaining.

Besides, it was cold even for October, and he wouldn't mind packing it in early tonight.

"Look," Alec said, "why don't you go look around some? I'll sell the last of these and then we can break down the stand and go home."

"I thought we were going to walk around together."

"I don't feel like it. This is more your kind of thing. Anyway, if you get out there, you might have a chance to talk to that kid. I wouldn't mind it you want to bring him home."

Gus grinned. "Well, maybe I will mosey around a little bit, at that."

Leaving Alec to mind the store, Gus drifted around a bit, stopping to chat with proprietors at other stands and admiring the sweep and beauty of the night, blue stars of papier-m�ch� and crystal and hard glass and lumentic dotting the darkness all around. Of the young man there was no sign; maybe he'd moved on to other attractions up the river, or gone home. Gus had almost forgotten the kid and was staring at a large blue star lantern attached to a lamppost, when suddenly the shadows seemed to gather into his slender shape.

"Hi," the kid said. His voice was soft, melodious, sexy and suggestive.

Gus smiled broadly. "Well, hey. Quite a night, isn't it?"

The kid looked shy. "I've never seen one of these before. It really is as beautiful as they say."

"Not around here?"

"No..." The kid seemed about to say more, but then his demeanor changed. He seemed a little ore aggressive, suddenly, a little more world-wise. "I saw you looking at me..."

Gus wondered if he were a rent boy. More of them had been coming through Providence lately, or so friends who knew about these things had told him. "I was just looking back," he said, not sure if he should just put the brakes on the discussion before the kid started asking him for money. "I thought you were looking at me."

The kid suddenly looked young and shy again. How did he do that? "I was, but..."

"Yeah?" Gus prompted him.

"I just thought maybe you had something to ask me."

So, here they were, Gus thought. A rent boy after all. But he seemed sweet, and not at all hard bitten like Gus had imagined sex workers might be. "Do you live on the streets?"

The kid laughed. "God, no. But I don't know if that was what you were wondering?" His look was now inviting, playful, intoxicating...

"No." Gus stepped forward. "That wasn't what I wanted to ask."

The kid smiled and their hands drifted close. Then the kid grasped Gus' hand and his touch was cold, but intense. It sparkled. How could a touch feel like sparkles?

"So?" The kid was gazing deeply and steadily at Gus.

"What's your name?" Gus asked.

"You're a nice guy. A decent guy. Thanks for asking, but that's not really what you want to know," the kid said.

Gus stared back raptly, helplessly. What did he want to ask? He thought about Alec, waiting for him back at the stand. It had been half an hour since he'd set out. Alec had probably sold the last of the Starlite globes. He'd be wondering where Gus was. He'd be wondering whether Gus was going to bring the kid back -- whether he was going to share.

Gus had never picked up a trick before. What was he supposed to say? How could he put it delicately?

"I do want to know your name," he said, "but what I was going to ask you was... are you... " He lost his train of thought for a moment. The boy was grinning wider now, a little tooth showing. He was irresistible, delicious, adorable...

Gus gathered his thoughts. "Are you one of us?" he asked. He instantly chided himself for the phrase; it sounded coy, ridiculous.

But the boy's grin only grew wider. His teeth became more pronounced. They seemed to be multiplying, lengthening, sharpening -- he was bristling with teeth, his handsome lips drawing back into an expression hungry and frightening. His eyes, like the transperiodic lining of the blue stars inside the globes, seemed to light up with coruscating inner radiance. Gus vaguely thought about the fact that there were no people nearby -- they stood away from the main thoroughfare, under a copse of trees where blue stars swung on banner wires and clung to lampposts that seemed dim, all too dim...

The kid leaned forward, his breath soft and hot and thrilling, his teeth opening -- savage and lethal, arrows in a quiver, the teeth of a predator --

Before he tore into Gus' throat, the kid paused, gently, gracefully. "Yes," he said, as if in careful consideration. "One of you? Yes, I think so."

Then all was red wetness, red eyes and violence, and the scraping of teeth on bone.