Magic Mansion, Jordan Price [best mobile ebook reader TXT] 📗

Professor Topaz’s hand stilled, just once, to let Ricardo hover there for one final beat on the brink of his release. Their lips met, deceptively gentle, and then another sure stroke sent Ricardo’s spirit aloft. He hovered there, weightless and sparkling, for a glorious moment before he floated back to earth.

Pearly semen webbed Topaz’s fingers when he pulled his hand from Ricardo’s slacks. He snapped his fingers, which would have ended with ejaculate spattered on his cape, for most people. Professor Topaz, however, wasn’t most people. Instead, a translucent white butterfly launched from his fingertips. Ricardo watched it dip and flutter, find an air current, climb higher, then make its way around the side of the bus shelter and out of sight.

“The secret of making something fly convincingly,” Topaz said solemnly, “is to allow it to sink a bit, first.”

“Thanks.” It seemed inadequate, but hell, language itself seemed inadequate at that very moment. “I mean, you’re the master. I mean, not in a weird way. Just that—”

Voices intruded in the extended moment they’d been sharing: chattering, laughter. Topaz took a step back, and Ricardo’s hand slipped from his shoulder. Ricardo hadn’t realized he’d still been clinging to his idol. A pair of teenaged girls talking on cell phones stepped into the shelter, and then belatedly realized they’d done so with two older men, one of whom was wearing a velvet cape and the other with rhinestones on his collar. They looked the men up and down with open, slightly disdainful curiosity, then exited the shelter to lean against the outer wall, instead.

“Forgive me.” Topaz took another step back. “This was not the time, nor the place. Thank you…for humoring me.”

Ricardo scrambled to find something to say, but he suspected “But you’re everything I ever wanted!” would only leave him sounding like a psycho. “Wait,” he said—and would it be weird to ask the Professor Topaz out for coffee? Or that phone number? Topaz was such a living legend, it hardly seemed possible to imagine him doing something as mundane as lifting a coffee cup or sending a text. In any event, Topaz did not wait. He turned and strode across the street, quickly but calmly, in traffic gaps that appeared, and then closed behind him as if they’d been choreographed to obliterate his passing.

Once Ricardo made it across the street himself, Professor Topaz had vanished.

Chapter 3

THE CONTRACT

“You’re not nervous,” Dick asked John. “Are you?”

John glanced up at the studio gates. Nervous? He hadn’t even realized they’d arrived. They’d been winding through overgrown residential Los Feliz side-streets with blue recycling bins out in front of the tile-roofed cottages, and older cars parked in their cracked driveways. Hardly the neighborhood where one would expect soap operas and game shows to be produced. But the residential street took a sharp turn where the terrain grew steeply hilly, and there, before them, the studio’s gates loomed—and beyond a line of screen trees, a parking lot glittered with Mercedes and BMWs, and of course a good number of hybrids, now that conspicuous non-consumption was slightly more in vogue. Slightly.

“I haven’t been nervous in ages,” John said. Which would have been true, if he’d been referring solely to being onstage.

“That’s the attitude. You’re the old pro—they need you. They need a good variety of actors for these gigs—speaking of which, you ever watch Weighty Matters?”

“No.”

“A competitive weight loss show with a bunch of tubbies exercising in front of the camera and crying about how food is their only friend, and they never got enough love when they were kids. A lot of times the oldest contestant is the one who really steals the audience’s heart. No one ever thinks the old fart’s actually gonna win…but they test real high with focus groups.”

John only half listened. He’d been up past midnight guiltily exploring www.ricardothemagnificent.com. Poring over the publicity shots—that mouth. Those lips. The lips he’d kissed. Reading the bio. John had pegged him for thirty, but he was older than that. Watching the clip where Ricardo glided across the stage, head held high, almost cocky, but not quite. Watching the clip, pausing, resuming, lingering over the swell of his chest and the bulge in his trousers…then staring at the “contact Ricardo” button. And realizing he hadn’t the faintest idea what he might type that wouldn’t make himself sound utterly ridiculous.

“Earth to John.”

“Hm?”

“I said, what’s your threshold? We’re probably looking at six weeks of work, if they make you an offer. So how low can I go? Eighteen K?”

“I hadn’t been aware it would be a paying job. I thought it was a competition.”

“For the quarter-mil, sure. But none of the pros do it for free. I’ll start high, of course. Too bad you’re non-union. There’d be a payscale in place.”

“Whatever you think best.”

Dick pulled his Caddy up to the gate and gave the guard his name. The gate swung open, and he pulled into the lot among the Mercedes and BMWs and socially-responsible hybrids. “You don’t come off as desperate. That’s what I like about going into negotiations with you. You’re a total pro.”

Little did Dick know he’d just cornered some poor magician at a bus shelter and thrust a hand down the young man’s pants. If that wasn’t desperation, John didn’t know what was. Watching Ricardo work the stage had been distracting enough, but that crystalline moment in which he’d seen Ricardo’s True abilities had left John completely sideswiped.

When he and Casey were young, it seemed like they met other people like themselves all the time. But these days, there were fewer and fewer True magicians.

So few that John had managed to convince himself he’d never meet another.

“You do seem a little nervous,” Dick said, “not that I’d notice if I hadn’t known you forty-some odd years.”

Nervous? Of course he was nervous. What if he ran into Ricardo? Or…what if he didn’t? He was counting on another encounter to somehow force his own hand, since he couldn’t bear to fill out that online contact