Love Has Reasons

Chapter 3: Danny-2

Having Ashok in his own backyard wasn’t exactly a hardship, either. Parting company after dinner wasn’t even considered as an option, but sharing the gently unfolding evening with a Plaza full of strangers or staring at each other between the buzzing thump-thumps of the bass in a bar held limited appeal. Danny hadn’t hesitated to invite Ashok up the hill, and Ashok had accepted ever so casually but without delay.

Danny did not live in a mansion by any stretch of the imagination, but nor did he live in a hut. Without being excessive for a single person, his home stretched across one tastefully tiled floor around a bend in the hill so that his xeriscaped back patio overlooked the city of Santa Fe nearly in its entirety. Sliding glass doors gave access to the patio from the kitchen and the living room, and double French doors led from the poolside hot tub directly to the master suite. Ashok had lived in Santa Fe all his life, nearer to the base of this very hill, but he had an appreciative whistle for the vista that unfurled even as Danny stood aside to bid him enter through the front door.

“Nice place,” he said.

“Thanks,” Danny said. “I don’t have much of an eye for decorating, you’ll notice, so I just keep the curtains open.”

“What art are you going to hang that’s better to look at?” Ashok asked. “Not very many gay dudes hang Georgia O’Keefe.”

“Well, exactly,” Danny said with an appreciative chuckle. “I looked, too. Wanted something ‘uniquely New Mexican,’ right? Schwartz finally said, ‘You’ve got actual New Mexico outside your window right down to the f*****g roadrunners—enough with the chili peppers.’”

Ashok laughed. They detoured through the kitchen just long enough for Danny to open a bottle of wine and rustle up two glasses, then adjourned to the patio, where they toasted each other anew. “To gorgeous works of New Mexican art,” Ashok said. “Such as myself.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Danny said with a clink and a wink.

“Is your dad from New Mexico, too?” he asked, setting his wine on the low stone ledge atop which he shortly propped his feet.

“Kind of,” Ashok said. “You know my mom’s from Albuquerque, right?” Danny did. “Her parents are both from India, and so are my pop’s. He was born there, but they left India when he was a kid. They spent three years in Kenya with his uncle, my grandpa’s brother and his family, but my grandpa had his heart set on America. They came to Houston in the early seventies, and my grandpa tried everything to make it big. He opened a restaurant, a dry cleaners, a skating rink…I think even a dance academy and a preschool. His timing was always off, or his investors always pulled out. My ammaji only knew how to cook like five things that anyone would order in a restaurant and she wasn’t that much of a dancer. My pop was in high school by the time they started talking about going back to India, had no interest in going ‘home’ to a country he barely remembered. He ended up at UNM cuz they gave him the most money, and here we are.”

“Wasn’t your mom telling me your grandma lives with you guys?”

Ashok nodded again. “She does now. She came back after my grandpa died a couple years ago.”

“Oh.” Danny said. “I guess I just assumed she’d been in this country all along. Did you go visit them a lot when you were growing up and all that?”

“Nope.” Ashok said. “Never. My pop had zero interest in going back to India, and my mom didn’t exactly nag him, at least not about that. She went a lot as a kid, but hasn’t gone at all since I’ve known her. I’ve never been.”

“Really?”

“Nope. It’s far, for one thing.”

Danny laughed. “I know that’s right. But I thought you had a brother there?”

“My sister-in-law is from Mumbai. Mikey—my brother Makhan—went there just for the f**k of it about five years ago. Met Kala on the flight over—she flies for Air India—and never came home.”

“And doesn’t your dad spend like half the year there?”

“Well, he does now,” Ashok said with a laugh. “He went for like thirty years pretending he couldn’t point to India on a map until his mother came to live with us. All of a sudden he managed to drum up all this ‘business’ in India.”

“Really?”

Ashok shrugged. “I notice you don’t live with your mother.”

“God no.” Danny shuddered. “She’d make me crazy.”

“So you see where my pop’s coming from.”

“But you live with your mom…”

“I definitely see where he’s coming from,” Ashok said. “Hell, I’d go with him if I could get the time off work.”

“And you live with his mother, too.” Danny said.

“Actually, that’s kind of fun.”

“Yeah?”

Ashok sipped from his wine with a mischievous grin. “For one thing,” he said, “she drives my mom nuts.”

Danny let loose with a slightly disloyal laugh. Monica had made it quite plain to all and sundry that Ammaji, as she called her husband’s mother, drove her up the wall. The gist of her lament seemed to hinge on little more than Ammaji’s presence in the home, coinciding as it did with her husband’s long and frequent absences. “He stays in her house,” she’d groused more than once. “The least he could do is take her with him.” Ashok’s characterization of his father’s sudden fascination with his homeland shed some light on Monica’s point of view, and it tickled Danny just the littlest bit to imagine the little old lady who could manage to burrow under Monica’s unflappable executive skin. She was quite used to getting her way, Danny knew—at least at work. He imagined it would take very little rebellion against Monica’s agenda to fluster her, and he laughed at the vision of an old-country mother-in-law in a sari and outdated glasses choosing Monica-flustering as her hobby in her new home.

The evening was cool but not chilly, the wine went down without argument, and time slid away unnoticed.

“It really is kind of a cool city, huh?” Ashok observed. He’d stepped onto the stone ledge that separated Danny’s yard from the wild hillside beyond and was appreciating his hometown from this new vantage point. Danny did the same from two steps behind. “Especially on a clear night like this one,” Ashok went on. “You could just reach right out and touch it.”

Ashok had his back to Danny, but Danny recognized an invitation when he heard it, and he stepped forward to wrap his arms around Ashok’s slender, solid waist. The ledge was just tall enough to close the gap in their height difference from a little over a foot to barely an inch or two, and when Ashok turned into Danny’s embrace, they were face to face. The surprise in Ashok’s eyes was synthetic and playful, and Danny grinned as he pulled him tight, basking in the glow that spread through him from where they touched, front to front. “It’s gorgeous,” he said. “But it’s not the most gorgeous view from this patio.”

When Ashok lowered his eyes coquettishly, Danny gave his waist a playful shake. “I meant me, Conceited,” he scolded with a squeeze. Ashok laughed, and when their eyes met again, Danny moved in. Ashok’s lips were pert and purple in the darkness, his top one peaked, his bottom one plump, and as they parted, Danny—finally—drank him in. Of all the morsels Ashok had put in his mouth that evening, his lips were by far the most tender and tasty, and Danny nibbled at them greedily, oomphing for more. Ashok reached for Danny’s broad and steady shoulders when he feared he would lose his balance and fall right off the Earth as it spun through space, and, once thus stabilized, leaned into the wide solidity of Danny and entreated his lips to make way for his tongue. Danny groped Ashok’s tongue with his own and felt Ashok go limp in his arms. He braced his mighty thighs and held him aloft while they kissed, feeling Ashok, pressed against his belly, stir.

“Thanks for not asking me if I play basketball,” he said eventually after they’d pulled their mouths apart and pressed their bodies together.

Ashok turned his head to make sideways eye contact. “You’re welcome?” he said. “I mean, I kind of assumed…”

Danny chuckled low, loving the feel of Ashok against him as he did. “Lacrosse, actually,” he said. “But everybody asks me if I play basketball. It’s kind of the main reason I never did. I hear it literally every day. It’s super refreshing to go through a whole date without hearing it.”

Ashok pulled a pouty frown. “Does that mean the date’s over?” he asked.

Danny felt a languid smile spread across his own face. “I mean, it doesn’t have to be. It’s not so late. What do you have going on tomorrow?”

Ashok smiled, too. “I work.”

“What time?”

“Early,” he said, setting his luxuriant eyelashes to fluttering. “Why? Are you asking me if I’ll sleep with you on the first date?”

Danny’s cheeks dusted pink even on the dark patio. He locked his hands around Ashok’s waist even as he stammered to find a less lecherous answer. Finally he just came out with it: “Well…I guess so, yeah.”

“Took you long enough,” Ashok said, stepping down from the ledge and pulling Danny houseward by the hand.