"Come with me some time," Bill says.

"No thanks, I'm booked." They're clinched together close enough to taste each other, close enough to share a smoke like a couple of cheap bastards. A pearl of ash drops from Roman's cigarette and sticks to Bill's cheek. His callused thumb flicks at Bill's temple, the tight trimmed track of a sideburn. This guy must go to the barber twice a week. His handlers must tell him to keep it clean-cut. All it does is make him stand out, but hey, he's got the kind of job some guys'd give their right arm for and his voice isn't half-bad either. Kind of Red Army Choir.

"There's some guys who'd kill to meet you."

As if he doesn't know what goes on at these meetings. One minute you're shooting the breeze in somebody's comfortable lower-middle-class living room and stubbing out a cigarette in a ceramic ashtray shaped like a bullfrog and next they want to write your name down in a ledger, they want to loan you books and pamphlets and manifestos, they want to let you in on their principles, they want to see you this time next week, you know, for the cause. Guys like him can't do this time next week, and his trysts with Bill reflect that.

They get it where they can find it. He supposes it's a queer thing as much as a Village thing. Bill works on his own schedule.

Roman likes him, he really does. He likes his big heart and his achingly square haircut and his principles, the way he believes in stuff. Believes in fairness and stuff like that. Believes in Marx and seizing the means of production and so on. But when he thinks about Bill the unfair stuff tugs at him like a seam. What if that's what all this is about?

"You're a good guy, you know." You don't have to go on doing this, that's what he means, but good luck selling that one. The flake of ash has fallen to the hollow of Bill's bare shoulder, gray against urchin white, and he doesn't bother sweeping it away.

"Yeah, well."

Not that good. Being here and knowing him, mouthing down his naked body, down to the pit of his legs -- Bill drops his eyes and sinks down.

The two of them are there on an unmade bed with another guy's guitar case lying beside their bodies, jostling into the plaster with an unhealthy wooden clank every time somebody's knee hits the wall or an elbow knocks out in the throes of passion. Bill mouths at his balls as he presses back his knee, pressing his hard cheekbone to the soft inside of Roman's leg and making him groan.

Bill's cruel mouth presses in close to the division of him, his tongue explores the hot inside parts -- the parts of him that nobody else has touched before, not like this, with cruel enthusiasm that makes his muscles spasm against Bill's mouth and makes Roman drive his heel against his ribs from misplaced enthusiasm.

He's achingly hard and jerking himself off just makes him feel vaguely guilty for insufficiently appreciating all of Bill's hard work -- wet with come and slipping in his own hand as Bill's talented tongue rasps over his hole. Every tightening twitch of pleasure brings an involuntarily unmusical noise out of his mouth and he has to press against the flattened pillow to stifle it.

Fellow-travelers on a hotel bed -- Roman who cut his teeth on union songs and Québécois weepers, and this fellow from nowhere about whom he knows nothing, whose name probably isn't even Bill. But they're alike in this.