Tangled Sheets Read Online Free Page A

he had stuffed several tissues into the pocket of his jacket as he left the house, and they made a small lump against his side that rustled lightly when he moved his arm. Also in his pocket was a crumpled advertisement that he had found three days earlier while walking from the grocer’s back to his apartment. The ad, printed on a small square of blue paper, was twisted around one of the iron rail posts of his steps, and he had nearly stepped on it as he was ascending to his door. He’d picked it up not because he was interested in what it said, but because it annoyed him to have his freshly swept stoop dirtied.
    He hadn’t actually read it until he’d unpacked the groceries and put them away, the cans marshaled in neat rows behind the glass of the cabinet doors, the milk tucked neatly into the refrigerator. Then he’d taken the piece of paper from the counter where he’d dropped it and started to throw it away, stopping when he noticed that there was a picture of a nude man on it. The man had an unusually large penis, and Albert found himself staring at it helplessly, amazed at the way it hung between the man’s legs demanding to be noticed. The ad had been very well printed, and Albert could see every curve of the man’s big cock clearly, his eyes following it down from the man’s neatly clipped bush to the point at which it flared into a fat, inviting head.
    He’d looked at the prick for several minutes before moving his eyes up to scan the rest of the man’s body. He appeared to be Italian, with a muscular body that had not been overworked and a chest covered in short, dark hair. Too rugged to be considered pretty, the man’s face was what Albert thought of as handsome. His dark eyes looked out from under sleepy lids, the brows over them thick and arched. The shadow drifting over his cheeks suggested that his beard would be heavy.
    He looked like any one of the construction workers Albert often saw standing around roadwork sites, their hands resting confidently on their waists and their deeply tanned torsos filmed with sweat as they gazed down manholes or off into the distance at something he himself could never quite see. He was both attracted to and afraid of them, and if one of them chanced to look in his direction it took him several hours to forget his face.
    Apart from his big cock, what interested Albert most about the man was the easy way in which he stood in the picture, as if he’d just stepped out of his dusty work clothes and was headed for the shower or on his way to bed after a long day. There was nothing self-conscious about either his stance or his expression, and Albert wondered if the man was thinking at all about the many men who would see his picture and want to make love with him. He could not imagine exposing himself like that before a camera, and the idea that someone might look at his picture the way he was looking at the man’s made him distinctly uneasy.
    According to the ad, the man’s name was Tony Gioconda, and he was going to be appearing live on stage at the Showtime three times a day for one week starting the next Tuesday. Albert had no intention of going anywhere near the Showtime. It was in a section of town frequented more by drunks and prostitutes who crawled out of the city’s smaller cracks when dusk settled in than by architects who lived in brownstones. But he kept the ad anyway, folding it carefully and tucking it into his wallet behind his American Express gold card.
    Over the next few days Albert found himself thinking often of the man. His face would drop into Albert’s mind suddenly and without warning while he was doing something completely unrelated, like washing the dishes or drawing up the floor plans for a new restaurant. Once, when he was in the middle of giving a presentation to a client, the image of Tony Gioconda’s prick rose up before him, eclipsing the face of the corporate president sitting