“Sure.” We stopped at my apartment to drop off my board, and then walked down Lili‘uokalani to a low-rise building of six stories clustered around a central pool and patio area. The hot tub was off to one side, shaded that late in the day by a big koa tree.
It felt great to slip into the hot water. We both submerged down to our necks in front of jets, feeling the pulsing water massage our tired muscles. The buoyancy kept pushing us up to the surface, and our legs kept touching. I opened the top of my bathing suit to let a big bubble of air out, and then settled back to the shelf inside the tub. The toes of his right foot grazed my thigh. He sat back against the side of the hot tub and his legs rode up and brushed against mine.
After about twenty minutes, not really talking, just looking and each other goofily and smiling, Tim wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. “I’m ready to get out. How about you?”
I agreed, and we dragged ourselves out and flopped onto lounge chairs nearby to dry off.
We lay in the sun for a while, but our suits were still wet when Tim said, “My place is just over there. Why don’t you come over-I’ve got fresh towels.”
“Sure.” We stood and walked across the courtyard to his first-floor apartment. He used his key on the patio door and we stepped inside. I followed him through a simple living room to a vanity area adjacent to the bathroom, where he opened a tall closet and pulled out plush dark green towels from a low shelf.
Standing again, he said, “Ow, that hurt,” and put his hand on the small of his back.
“The hot tub doesn’t do everything,” I said. “Come on, let me rub your back.”
He was still hunched over, crab-like, as he led me to the bedroom, where he flopped down on the big queen- sized bed in pain. “Shit, that hurts.”
I wrapped the towel around my wet bathing suit and sat on the bed next to him. Starting at the shoulders, I worked his muscles, feeling them ease under my touch. At first he twitched with pain when I pulled on sensitive tendons, but gradually he relaxed. “Oh, man, that feels great. Where’d you learn to do that?”
“The North Shore,” I said. “You really work yourself into the ground when you surf all day, every day. A bunch of us used to help each other out.”
“Mmm.” To get a better position I pulled the towel off and straddled his legs, kneading the muscles in his lower back. “Geez, you don’t need to be a cop,” he said. “You could make a living doing this.”
I was hard again in my Speedos. I was confused about what I wanted. I knew that sometime I would go to bed with Tim, but was this the right moment? How would we get there from where we were? I sat back on my haunches for a minute and Tim took that opportunity to twist around onto his back. He looked directly up at me and there was no way to disguise how I felt. He motioned to me with his finger.
“Come down here.”
I did. His skin was cool and his touch was slow and gentle, his fingers barely grazing the edge of my jaw, the center of my nipple, the inside of my thigh. I shivered and twitched under him like a rabid dog, unable to stand the teasing yet unwilling for it to stop. He wrapped his arms around my back and we kissed, deeply and hungrily, and then he pulled back. “Slow down,” he said. “We’re not in any hurry here.”
We explored each other’s bodies. His was all uncharted territory to me, from a tiny, half-moon shaped scar on his right shoulder to the discovery that his insteps were sensitive and responded to tickling. He worked my body like he knew what he was doing, licking and sucking me until just that knife-edge before release and then pulling back. Together we charted the regions of armpit and groin, the inner ear and the erotic zone just behind the scrotum.
I had never made love like this before. With women I’d been a tender and attentive lover, a good technician, making sure the patient was satisfied. My own pleasure had come easily and quickly, and had always seemed to me to be a separate part of the process. But with Tim, pleasing him and pleasing myself were part of one organic whole. We lingered so long over foreplay simply because it was fun. I shut off my brain and let my body take over, as I did on my best surfing days, and when we were both spent and exhausted and I looked at the clock, I saw that hours had passed. I lay there under his arm, my hand on his warm thigh and felt, finally, comfortable.
KIMO COMES CLEAN
“Your suit’s still wet,” Tim called from the bathroom. “Why don’t you borrow something of mine and we’ll get some dinner?”
“Better yet, why don’t we order in?”
He came out of the bathroom and stood in the bedroom door, naked. “You’re a naughty boy. Pizza?”
“Sure.”
We ordered a large mushroom pizza, and he said, “I can’t answer the door like this. I’m going to put some clothes on. You can do what you want.”
What I wanted, I thought, was to stay in bed with Tim all weekend long, practicing, exploring the whole new world that had opened up before me. But instead I went into his closet and pulled on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. “You don’t wear underwear?” he asked.
“I do. I just don’t want to wear yours.”
He burst out laughing. “You’ll suck my dick but you won’t wear my shorts? Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”
I just shrugged. Fortunately then the doorbell rang.
We watched old movies on TV after we finished the pizza, and then made love again before we went to sleep, snuggled next to each other with the window open and the ceiling fan creating a gentle breeze.
I was an old hand at sleeping in strange beds. I did some counting once, and figured I’d slept in rooms in half the hotels in Waikiki. But I stayed awake for a few minutes, thinking about where I was and what I was doing. Though I tried, I just couldn’t feel bad about it. I liked Tim, and I’d had fun with him. There wasn’t anything wrong with that.
The next morning I woke up before Tim. We had separated during the night, and he was curled up on the right side of the bed, one arm on top of the damask print sheets. His skin looked even more tanned against the white on white pattern.
I wanted to reach out and touch him, stroke his shoulder, curl my fingers into his hair, but I thought it would be a shame to wake him. I did feel a little freaky, a little panicked by the speed with which my new life was moving, but I pushed down those fears and tried to concentrate on enjoying the moment.
He woke then, yawned, and looked at me. He smiled. “Morning. You sleep all right?”
“Great,” I said. “You?”
He nodded, then reached out and took my hand. I smiled back at him and snuggled up close to him under the sheets. We fooled around a little, and then read the Sunday paper. We went to one of those big tourist buffet brunches, and then walked on the beach for a while. “This has been great, Kimo,” Tim said eventually, as we were sitting on the sand in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. “But I’ve got work I’ve got to do before tomorrow morning.”
It was late afternoon but the sun was still high in the sky, the beach glittering golden around us. I said, “I understand.” We walked back to my apartment together, and this time we hugged each other, not caring who was around to see.
Monday morning, I didn’t get a chance to tell Akoni any of my suspicions about Evan Gonsalves because he wasn’t at the station. There was a message from him that he’d gone to Honolulu Hale to check out an idea he had.
Around ten, my phone rang, and I thought it was Akoni, but instead it was Lieutenant Yumuri. “I want you and Hapa‘ele in my office now,” he said.
He hung up before I could tell him Akoni wasn’t there, so I went down the hall to his office alone. “Akoni’s at Honolulu Hale doing research,” I said. “Anything I can do for you?”
The lieutenant had a small office at the back of the station, but its size was made up for by its window on the beach. Through the glass I could see sunshine, surf, sand, and hundreds of tourists turning red. I didn’t know if I could ever concentrate on my job if I had that office and that window.
“How close are you to closing that murder case?” he asked. “It’s been almost two weeks. Why haven’t I seen
