Sleepless in San Francisco Read Online Free PDF Page A

better. So they went back to Mike’s place, had the usual sex, and
     
promised to talk on the phone once a week while Mike was gone. And before Mike left
     
for London, Jonathan made it perfectly clear that while he was gone, they were both free
     
to date other people. He even offered to return the watch, but Mike insisted he keep it.
     
After Mike left, the month passed quickly. Jonathan owned a small studio
     
apartment in Chelsea and he was based in New York, but he’d always wanted to buy
     
something bigger that he could decorate with a sophisticated, shabby-chic style. A real
     
home, with quiet crystal chandeliers, white French country chairs, and large antique
     
armoires. But now that he could well afford a much larger place, it didn’t make sense to move because he was on the road all the time. The show before Ed’s he’d traveled to
     
Vermont to film on location. And before that, he’d gone to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California,
     
to shoot. In the past five years, he’d only spent a few months out of each year in his
     
apartment.
     
This was fine with him. His place only had a full-sized brown leather bed, two
     
French gilded end tables, and a large flat-screen television. The few pieces he owned
     
were tasteful and expensive, but most of the time he couldn’t wait to get out of his
     
apartment and hit the road.
     
So it was a nice diversion when an old college friend of his called and invited him
     
out to East Hampton the weekend before he was to leave for San Francisco. His name
     
was Joel and he worked in the financial district. He’d rented the house for a year on a
     
whim, because he had the money to do it. They’d both been journalism majors in college
     
even though neither one of them had ended up working as journalists.
     
But more than that, Joel and Jonathan had been lovers off and on during college.
     
They’d started out as roommates in their freshman year, then began to experiment one
     
night. Neither one could ever remember who initiated it. Joel loved to receive good blow
     
jobs, and Jonathan loved giving them. But their relationship never went beyond being
     
best friends, because Joel had always considered himself straight. And he’d been married
     
and divorced twice by the time he’d reached his mid-twenties to prove it.
     
When Jonathan pulled up to Joel’s house in a rented car on Friday evening, he
     
looked up the front walk and smiled. This was his dream house. And he’d been working
     
on enough dream homes for other people to know what he preferred. This house had a
     
classic, turn-of-the-century East Hampton design with gray shingles and arched gables. But the trim wasn’t bright white like all the other homes that surrounded it. The trim on
     
this house was a shade of pale blue-green that reminded him of ocean water. If he’d been
     
designing a place of his own in East Hampton, this is exactly the color he would have
     
painted the trim. When he crossed to the front door, he reached out and touched the pale
     
blue-green porch railing. He ran his fingers up and down the smooth surface lightly and
     
he smiled again.
     
When Joel invited him inside, the first thing Jonathan said was, “Great house. I
     
love the color of the trim.”
     
Joel hugged him and said, “Yeah, it’s nice. I saw an extra paint can in the garage.
     
It’s called Waterbury Green. I think the owner decided to compete with Martha Stewart’s
     
house up the road, but wanted to do something really different.”
     
“I like it better than Martha’s,” Jonathan said. He’d seen her house during the day
     
and this Waterbury Green color was more subtle.
     
Joel led him to a glass-enclosed conservatory at the back end of the house. There
     
were four other guys sitting around a large round table playing poker. Joel said they were
     
buddies of his from work. They were all between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five
     
and they were all