Red Shoes Pt 1

Travis

I was about three blocks away from where I’d intended to be. Why? Well as I wandered along Swanston St, pondering what to do with my day, I encountered a distraction. And what a pretty young distraction he was. He wore red shoes. This was probably the most prominent detail about him that stood out, that and he had a really nice ass. So for about ten minutes I followed that really nice ass around the city.

With a day off, I had nothing of great important to do, and so spending a portion of that day with something really nice to look at wasn’t exactly a bad thing. He was gay too, I was sure of it. Although even if my highly tuned gaydar was wrong, it’s a known fact that the difference between gay and straight is somewhere between six and eight beers, and I wasn’t adverse to the idea of getting such a boy drunk beforehand.

I eventually had to stop following Red Shoes, as he went inside an office building. Following a person around the streets of Melbourne is fine, but as soon as you follow them into a private building that crosses the line into stalking. And I was the kind of person who got stalked, not the other way around.

So with my entertainment for the morning gone, I wandered down to Bourke St, where I figured there were very few better ways to spend an afternoon than spending money on new clothes while flirting with sales assistants. Sales assistants at a lot of the stores in Melbourne could be quite fun, as could the change rooms – I have some very interesting tales I could tell you about the change rooms in David Jones..

While I walked through Myer, shopping equally for new jeans, several new pairs of underwear, and a new boy equally, I spotted him.

The first thing that I recognised was the shoes. It’s a funny thing about colour – red always stands out and draws your attention to it. Of course everything that he was wearing was black – black jeans, a black t-shirt. Colour aside, his clothes were actually really plain – his jeans showing off his ass only when you knew what to look for, and his t-shirt hanging off his body so loosely that it was impossible to tell the kind of muscle definition that the body beneath it possessed.
I was however appalled, because in his hands Red Shoes was holding the most horrendous jacket. It was the kind that a grandfather would wear to the Sunday markets. It was woolly, and a weird green/brown colour. It wasn’t even the kind of jacket that would feel nice, looking like it was made from a horrible coarse material that would irritate skin instead of the smooth material that a truly hot jacket is made of.

To make matters worse, Red Shoes was buying this ugly jacket.

Don’t do it!! I mentally screamed. You’re hot, don’t give in to the Dark Side of fashion...don’t buy the horrible jacket!

Then after purchasing the ugly jacket, Red Shoes put it on. The effect that happened was amazing. I own several clothes that achieve a similar effect – that look ugly when in a wardrobe, but once a person puts them on they draw attention to all of the right places on a person’s body.
In the space of a minute Red Shoes had gone from a guy in plain black clothes to absolute hotness, as the jacket made him appear to have a nicely toned body, broad shoulders and muscular arms. This combined with the ass I had followed halfway across Melbourne almost made me drool all over the pair of jeans I was holding in my hands.

I then realised how much I was staring at him. Not just the vague into space staring that people sometimes do, but the obvious “oh my god I’m looking at you staring” Red Shoes caught my eyes and I was quite worried. If he’d seen me earlier on in the day he’d have remembered me – fluro pink shirts aren’t very common in Melbourne, although it’s not stalking if they keep ending up where you’re going is it? Then he smiled, which I think freaked me out even more.

The smile was one of the hottest I had ever seen, and I walked away, simply because if I didn’t I would have given in to the overwhelming urge I had to throw him into a change room, rip his clothes off and have my way with him. Although normally I wasn’t adverse to such an idea I was hesitant for a few reasons.

Firstly, he might have been smiling for another reason, or at someone else, an oddly un-self-involved thought for me on a Wednesday afternoon. Or he might have had a crap body that was just made to look shaggable by a really good jacket. Most importantly though, the change rooms at Myer, although amazingly roomy, weren’t especially soundproof, and the things I was imagining doing to Red Shoes would hardly have been quiet.

So in something very much unlike me, I got into an elevator and left Red Shoes and his hot jacket to his own devices. I pushed a button in the lift, saw him walking vaguely in the direction of the lift, and had the momentary fantasy of him walking into my lift, and us having amazing sex in an elevator, but then Red Shoes turned a corner and was gone from my sight.

The elevator doors closed, and I was alone in the elevator.

I decided I would eat my sexual frustration, and headed to my favourite cafe in Degraves St, which was perfectly situated to watch the hot young things in suits walking about on their lunch breaks. On my way there I walked through a little arcade I often walked through, and past a little shoe shop.

In the window, there they were, the exact same red shoes that Red Shoes wore, with several big signs underneath them

“SALE!!” “WONT GET THEM LIKE THIS AGAIN!!”“THEY WON’T BE THIS CHEAP FOR LONG!!”

I’m not the most open minded person, I’ll admit them. Fate and destiny are a load of crap for people who are determined to be less lonely, and soul mates are for straight people. Despite this, I’m willing to recognise a sign when I see one. According to the sign, Red Shoes was cheap...just my kind of guy. This combined with my complete lust for the boy meant that I assured myself, and the pair of shoes in the window, that if I were to see that boy I would jump his bones.
About half an hour later, I was sitting in the cafe eating a salad, alone. Suits are an amazing invention, and they are capable of making some of the most plain men look incredibly attractive.

Since the majority of people who work in the city wear suits, this ensured a constant stream of eye candy as I sat there. Then I saw him again. After seeing the shoes on sale I was sceptical, since the chance of running into the same person three times in one day in Melbourne aren’t exactly very high.

But there was no doubt it was him – the shoes were Red, the hair was black and messy, the jacket was ugly, and woolly, but made his body look amazing, and his ass was still one of the best I had seen in recent memory. All the good things were there, and so I decided it was time to fulfil the promise I had made to myself and the little shoe shop.

I flung some money at the waiter, enough that my food was covered and he would get quite a nice tip. The waiter was pretty hot too, so I was happy to give him a generous tip. I then sprinted down the crowded street as fashionably as I could, following Red Shoes as closely as I could, although the sheer number of people made it quite difficult.

He went down the steps into Flinders St Station...I followed him with about ten people between us.

Just as I lost sight of him through the tunnel, I tripped over something and landed on the ground. I then had a shoe’s-eye view of the station, and I saw the red shoes walking up the ramp to a platform.

I was on my feet again within moments and dashed up that same ramp, and caught up with him on the platform, grabbed him and turned him around.
My heart sank, the bulge in my pants instantly vanished as I saw his face.

The red shoes were the same, but the boy I had grabbed was not my Red Shoes. I was too busy focusing on the shoes as I ran up the ramp I hadn’t bothered to check the other essential details, and clearly someone else in Melbourne had decided to buy the shoes in that shop window.
I didn’t bother to apologise, I was too depressed, too shattered that I’d now completely lost the boy I’d ended up spending the entire day lusting after. I bolted down the ramp again and the confused face of the boy who wasn’t my Red Shoes vanished into the crowd...

I spend the next little while wandering around the station. Oddly enough, I had absolutely no interest in most of the boys there. Sure, some of them were hot, but they lacked that something, there wasn’t that absolute hotness that Red Shoes possessed.

It was an odd feeling for me. I’m accustomed to feeling lust for people I’ve never spoken to before, and often I’m able to satisfy that lust pretty quickly too, but I’d never known myself to become so consumed with the thought of someone that I’d actually run after them through a train station. I wasn’t going to fall prey to romantic notions like saying I was in love with Red Shoes, but I was certainly going to miss the excitement that he had bought into my day if I was never going to see him again.

Giving up on it, I decided it was time to head home. I made my way to my platform, and sat down and waited for my train, oblivious to most of my surroundings save the pigeons hopping around in front of me.

The train arrived, I got on and stared out the window until we started going through a tunnel.

The outside of the train became total blackness, turning all of the windows into mirrors, reflecting all of the people inside the train.

It was there I saw them, next to the middle-aged woman in heels to high for her and the hot guy in the suit.

The Red Shoes.

Justin

By midday the next morning, none of the boys had surfaced from their bedrooms. I had heard some yelling coming from the rooms the night before – which was to be expected considering that Travis had gone home with Xander, and Colin had gone home with the guy that had rejected Travis only hours before.

I had gone home alone, in what was the standard fair for me, and I woke up fairly early, and expected there to be a couple of Walks of Shame across my lounge room floor at some point in the morning.

Although there weren’t, and so just before midday I decided to make pancakes, with the theory that the smell would attract the boys.

Surely enough, within minutes there they all were...Travis and Xander, and Colin and his little blonde thing.

The scene was especially awkward – Travis and Colin weren’t speaking to each other, and they simply ushered their boys out of the house as soon as they could before putting in requests for pancakes and heading to their rooms.

Once I’d finished making pancakes I called them both out of their rooms. I was almost tempted to take my food into my room and let them fight it out in the kitchen, but as Travis came out he had something in his hands – Colin’s jacket, which had been left behind by Xander in his hurried rushing out of the apartment.

Colin took it quietly, accepting the peace offering, but Colin was the kind of person who would let the anger about something like this building up for a while, until Travis did something else wrong. In the short term it was an effective strategy, although the frequency with which Travis did things wrong meant that Colin’s anger would be unleashed at some point soon – and I think that Travis understood he had stuffed up and his reprieve was only temporary at best.

So the three of us sat there, in relative silence, eating out pancakes.

“So Justin, I’m guessing you didn’t feel the need to do your hair this morning?” Colin broke the silence.

“Or even put like...proper clothes on, as opposed to those weird pyjamas?” Travis added.

Typical fags, even if they’re at each other’s throats, they still have time to insult other people’s hair and clothing...I just let them go for it and ate my pancakes.