Daring Young Men

Demetrios hung onto the trapeze, timed his breathing and lost himself in his exhale. He became concentration, the look in his eyes too far away for any audience to see. Otherwise, one might accuse him of faking. He tested the slip of his hand, a small cloud of chalk billowing between calluses and the bar, and reset them. There was silence in the tent. I wanted to scratch my toes in the dust to break it, but he began. Tight, formed like a boomerang and just as rigid, Demetrios and the trapeze descended a curve, a perfect one, unbroken by weakness in the arms. He turned into back-end splits, his feet pointed east and west, his arms slightly bent, taking his weight easily, the trap close to the bulge of his cock in his practice sweats. Your average father, distracted by the cotton candy left on his pants by his jaded six-year-old, or the six-year-old himself, would never notice the form in Demetrios’s swing, wouldn’t take note of his hands as they switched him out of the splits into a pike and back into a catcher’s lock, waiting for me, if I were to be there then, the trap caught tight in the triangle of his knees.

I didn’t actually have to be there then, and neither did Demetrios. We could spend our night separate from each other, seeing whatever town we were in, but we were here instead, because this is where our lives were, the whistle of the air in our ears, the familiar shape of the bar, the ever-changing pull of gravity our only homes. And with each other, the excuse that we’ve got to remember everything about our moves before they happen paralleling so easily with the way we finish each other’s sentences, communicate only in our shoulders, leave words out of our mouths, the lips more about our bodies than our minds. We knew each other very well, though our pasts were never examined, our motives never investigated. We simply knew what was going to happen next because we knew it.

He pulled out of the catcher’s lock and swung himself back into an arc. My subconscious, playing on the same trigonometry that would have taught me how to calculate an arrow into the breast of a wild turkey, counted the right time for launch. I flew, purely on muscle memory, with a few swings, into a backend plange and knew that he would be ready to catch again, knew his thumb and the thick muscle that runs the other side of his palm would be enough to hold and hook me. The air battered my eardrums as I flew free to him, my hands twisting, and I was stopped without breaking the swing. We used to laugh when we’d do this, surprised that we’d never dropped each other, but now I simply pulled myself up to him, with the help of his biceps, and kissed him upside down, the toast we always made to each other. Job well done. Even when we were performing it happened in our minds.

I swung us into larger dips and heights, enough room to play around a little. He swung me up and I held onto the rope in my ankles, then down with a flip to grasp the launching board in my fingers. I tuned us around a few times, twisting the trapeze hand over hand, and let us go, my hands out, rolling like a vertical wheel at the air. We laughed and swung some more, seeing tent, light, tower, ladder, floor, net, ladder, seats, tower. I closed my eyes sometimes, though it made me a little seasick, just to prove to myself that this had nothing to do with sight.

Twenty minutes passed, thirty, and it was time to head for the ground, like two kids who had to give up playing when the street lights came on. I let go of Demetrios and fell into a suicide landing on the net, jumping up in time to get out of his way, and walked, walked instead of flew, in the bulges of the net to the ground, firm and disappointing, though my head was still in the air. I waited for him and he walked right past me, to the little practice rig on the side. In a prestidigitatious move, he was upside down on this one too while I blinked. He hung and crossed his arms, the slight squeak in the rig the only sound, his head about five feet above the mat. I moved to him and examined his face. The air turned to gravity between us and I pushed his shoulder. He swung, the slightest squeak, and came back. I pushed again and he swung some more, silent and stoic. I let him keep time like that for a while and watched him, until his hands moved up to his sweatpants, untied the cord, let his shirt drop over his shoulders. I approached slowly, looking at the ripples of his body, the balance of muscles, my appreciation growing in my own sweatpants. He pulled his knees closer to each other, the material falling on the corner of the muscles in his thighs, and reached out when I was in range, grabbed me by the cock, though I whined, and pulled his own sweats up under the bar.

His cock pointed at his chin, mine at the same. I winched the bar lower so that his was in reach of my mouth, his head now just a few feet above the ground. I made adjustments until I had the right angle and turned my head, sucking the tip of him into me now, sucking the sweet part of the shaft and then forward onto the veins. He reached for me, but I wouldn’t let him touch, letting go of his cock when it was necessary, trying to distract him with my mouth when it wasn’t. My fingers played at his thighs, turned the hair wrong and slipped between them. I twisted him inside of my mouth as if he had to be screwed in, then set myself, my feet where they needed to be with his cock at the back of my throat. He tried to caress my thigh, but I wouldn’t let him. I waited for him to settle, put one hand on his pelvis, another on his chest and pushed.

His cock pushed air and saliva in and out of my mouth with the momentum, making squishing sounds that seemed to echo against the canvas. Then came his moans, little popping exhales in his nose. I met the rhythm of his pendulum with my jaw and pumped him hard and deep. He gave up trying to touch me and simply watched. I untied my own drawstring, pulled the sweatpants down and let my cock hang free in his sightlines, occasionally touching his nose or chin. He kissed when he could, but I pushed him harder when he did, swinging him out of reach. I held for a moment, let him drop out and spit in my hand. I combined it with the pre-come and cupped the underside of my cock for a moment, the warm enclosure of it, and finally wrapped my hand around it, my thumb at the ridge, squeezing for his view.

My mouth went back to him and the tent seemed to collapse upon us, the air itself the pressure of canvas walls and ceiling, the two of us closed into each other. I sucked him into my mouth again and swung him only slightly now, just enough to bring tension, friction, the back of my tongue swinging itself on the tip of him. My hand quickly made me ready, but I studied his body, Demetrios’s familiar shakes and gestures, the buzz of his cock that I knew better than he did. I felt us both at the bottom of the arc and pulled us up, gasping, groaning to the peak. I pulled two fingers out of my grip and opened his lips with them. His teeth gaped into a gasp, his orgasm, I could feel it in a drop in his pelvis. I put the tip of my cock against the roof of his mouth and we went rigid for a moment, a high note in my chest, and then broke, released, drawing each other’s come in, an exchange of joy and salt and love for each other, our arms around each other’s backs, holding and jolting. My eyes had been closed here too, forever, it seemed, and I had the world mapped in the gestures of one other man, my guide and my source of gravity.