Laraine Pinnone
After a very long hiatus, Laraine Pinnone returned to writing through attending the motivating innovative ABTP workshops and programs. Laraine has had a fiction piece published in The Platform Review, Fall 2025, and she has a poem that will be featured in the 2026 Moving Words film project.
The Want
Lev’s eyes locked on mine, his arm made a sporty baseball like arch as he hurled his wine glass. The glass shattered against the once white wall, splashing red wine across canvas. Lev’s wine glass had missed my face by a fraction.
Everyone was in love with Raymundo in some way, his accented English, his trim slim body, the way he moved, his passion for art and food, and his cooking brought us all together for elaborate dinners. Puerto Rican dishes, his Grandmother had taught him. The French and Italian and others he’d taught himself, reading cookbooks like literature. Raymundo was actual friends with Julia Child, and he knew more about food and how to properly prepare it than any of us ever would.
Our dinners together were late Saturday midnight ones, as we all held down day jobs. The preparations and cooking took Raymundo hours. Whether there were 3 of us for dinner or 27, the table was already set when we arrived—gold rimmed dinner plates from Hermes, Alessi designer flatware, delicate crystal glassware of all sizes, a different style for each wine, waiting expectantly for a pour of the special wine that paired it to its course.
In between the cooking and serving, there was the music, Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.” It was the 1980’s, and there was lots of dancing. Raymundo and I would dance our asses off, dancing salsa-like, shimmying, shaking, snorting, inhaling Amyl Nitrites up our noses. Creating our own chasm, smiling, knowing each other, our hips and lips colliding.
I wasn’t filled with want or desire, but Lev was as he watched us. Lev wasn’t a dancer, but he wanted to be as bodily close to Raymundo as I always was. Everyone loved Raymundo, we were drawn to him as if we were magnets. He always fed us well, and our clothes always stayed on. Raymundo and I moved in a bonding chasm all our own. We kept each other close, always touching, so physical in contact, dancing together as the others watched.
I knew I wouldn’t ever take him off the living room’s improvised dance floor to a bedroom, for me it wasn’t about that. One night I noticed how Lev kept sighing in frustration as Raymundo and I kept dancing. I kept checking in on Lev’s gaze, seeing what he was looking at, us through his eyes. That is when he did it.
Lev threw his glass, full of an expensive red wine, across the room, the wine went one way, but the glass itself nearly took my eye out before it smashed against the wall. My breathing gasped in chasm, the dancing stopped, someone else swept up the glass.
Everyone was in love with my dance partner and chef, Raymundo. Never my lover, Raymundo was born gay. I was the only friend allowed to touch him the way I did those nights. That night, jealousies had drenched Lev beyond reason. Lev didn’t know the moves or how to get what he wanted and couldn’t receive. The want was overtaking.
The 1980’s ended with Madonna singing “Like a Prayer” for all us. Soon Raymundo’s brother would die of AIDS in a New York City hospital bed, quarantined, alone, with no one.