With Love

“Hasn’t anyone told you it’s a bad idea to talk to strange old men in the park?”

Jimmy ignored all the warnings his friends called out to him as he walked away from the picnic table they’d been sitting around for over an hour, waiting for the rest of their group to arrive. His attention was entirely on… Well, when it came down to it, he guessed it was on the strange old man who was standing in the middle of the park.

As Jimmy approached, he studied the figure carefully. The guy wasn’t moving a single muscle. He just stood there, perfectly still, staring down at a random patch of the old concrete path that snaked through the park, as if it was the most important thing in the world.

In a city centre park where pretty much anything went, even on a sleepy Saturday afternoon, an old man doing a statue impression probably wouldn’t have been anything weird enough to catch Jimmy’s attention. If the guy hadn’t been wearing a thin leather collar around his neck, just visible past his open shirt collar, Jimmy wouldn’t have given him a second glance.

But he was wearing a collar, and leather was leather. Guys that were interested in it had to stick together—they had to look out for each other. If they didn’t, it was damn sure no one else would. Pretty much everyone sitting around the picnic table had already learned that the hard way.

“Are you okay, sir?” Jimmy asked, stopping a few feet away from the old man’s side.

The guy didn’t look up.

Jimmy cleared his throat and tried again, a little more loudly. “Sir? Are you okay?”