TE16 Turkish Delight

Hakan Günday Koma saw Needlefish for the first time at the JAB. There wasn’t any reason he should catch his attention. They only met each other’s eyes for an instant in the mirror on the wall. He caught the gray eyes looking at him from in between the sweat streaking from the roots of his hair down to his chin. The wet eyelashes, the blond hair just long enough to darken the shade of his skull, the nostrils dilating with each breath pilfered from the hall, the chapped, thick lips…they were all looking at Koma. They looked alike. Needlefish’s fists that swung like a wind-up toy now had a target. He was beating up his counterpart. Koma paid no heed to the hate pouring out of the eyes watching him. Perhaps that was to be his biggest mistake… When the red giant named Pascal began the closing move they knewthe two-hourworkoutwasover. Itwas amodest stretch from the Taomethod. Yet Komawas tense from his shoulders to the tip of his fingers. He was sharp as a steel cable binding together two sixteen-wheelers. No one to this day had ever been able to make him relax. Traipsings ornamented with fragments of some slanty eyed folk dance were supposed to make him relax? Of course not. He was busy. He had locked eyes with the man whom he’d never seen before in the workout group, who was taller than him by at least a telephone book-width and and just as slim. They were in Berlin. Paradise for men who preferred men. Was the man seated to the very left of the group an angel of that paradise? He thought over all possibilities. That was the reason he was here. He was human and he had a brain. The two together had once made the atombomb, so he could surely figure outwhat themanwas, rope-

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