Blue Air

Patrick and I had been eyeing the smoke machines all night. It was a large stage, but it seemed like they might have been just a little overkill. Most of them sat idle all night, just one or two giving out controlled blasts during the more atmospheric songs of each band. They hissed, and a few seconds later, like the lightest water, smoke would flood out onto the stage. It would be kicked around until it stubbornly blended with the air, giving definition to the stage lights.

We hung around stage right, finding ourselves restless back at the ropes, done with poker and the other roadies. It was crowded here too, but we found a space with a limited view behind an upstage scrim, free of techs, producers, hangers-on and bands. Just us, a row of smoke machines and the languid drummer of Reel and Rout, his efficient, complicated but slow percussion work hypnotizing the crowd. It was their third song, had gone on at least five minutes already, but showed no signs of revving up or halting. It just traveled, back and forth across the stage, like the smoke, until it blended with the air.

Then they all went off, eight smoke machines let out a long blast, like the coming of a dust storm, you didn’t know how thick it was until you were in it. Eight horizontal mushroom clouds flew out, engulfing the drummer, flowing down the stage. We lost sight of the ground, then the air above it, then anything at all. Patrick put his hand on my shoulder so we knew which way was up. I heard two more hissing bursts and the world disappeared into blue-grey, highlighted only occasionally by the purple, red or green beam of a Fresnel. We’d be in the cloud for a while, the plastic, dry smell of the smoke, the disorientation and the song getting louder under it, all of it mixing with the air.

“This is really weird,” I said to Patrick, but the words were sucked into the music and never heard from again. I felt him pull my shoulder and just made out his features as he pulled me toward him, my face down to him, the smoke dissipating and escaping between our mouths. I felt his breath and then his lips, the sweet tickle of his mouth on mine, then the muscles behind it, moving in my mouth. The music and the smoke blended into this sex, and it was all just his body moving into me. All part of the same conspiracy. We twisted into each other, the warmth of his skin under his shirt and his smell, the taste of salt on him and meat and lemon sour.

I opened my eyes and saw a halo of light around him, reflected off of him into the cloud, you could just make out his fuzzy body glowing in the lights. He opened his too and smiled at me, before his lashes flopped down again and he pulled me tighter, a strong bundle of a man in my arms, his back muscles in my fingers and his slow, delicious dance over my lips. His tongue swept back and forth around my mouth now, vibrating its tastebuds across my teeth and against my own. His breaths throbbed in my mouth, each one a call down, down into him. And I fell as I was asked to.

My arms swirled around his back and finally one dropped, per the suggestion of his back muscle, to the gentle rise of his ass, and I pushed his pelvis into me, as if I knew that the music would swirl up just then. It was there, the steel in his pants against my groin and we rubbed into each other, this suddenly all that mattered, a few pointless cries escaping my throat. His hand came up the side of my face into my hair and he pulled my head sideways, pushing deeper into my mouth. When would the smoke begin to clear? When would we have to stop? When would that drumbeat, the light cymbal crash in 7/4 time simplify itself and end the song?

The machines blasted again, the blur of the world reinforced. A blue light descended on his face and I saw beads of sweat forming, reflecting like opals across his face and in his hair. He looked around and saw that there was nothing to see, took me down to the floor by the shirt, sitting up, our legs intertwined. We pulled each other close again and knelt up partway, our cocks into each other’s hips, grinding, his mouth on my neck. A bite and a nibble and the fog entered my head. It brought sting and heat and a low humming sound. The music, all blending into itself and passing through my body as one wave.

Patrick’s arm came down between us, his tongue staying in my mouth as he backed up a little. There were some sharp movements and pants and his hand, holding me tight on the back of the neck. He pulled his body back all together and shoved my head down, just enough time to get my mouth open before he guided his cock into my mouth and shuddered. He continued to hold my neck, the music building again only to fall into chaos, he fucked my mouth, my fingers dug into the folds behind his knees. Another hiss and another blast, the oily blue dust filled the space between us again and all I could see was his cock. All I could feel was the strain of my jaw and his hand sternly holding me in place. The taste of musty precome and the smell of dirt. My right hand slipped out and he took it, placed it onto the floor.

He began pacing himself, each movement into my throat a little smoother, though he punctuated it at the end, a fierce shiver and twitch. The song continued forever, rising and breaking, rising and breaking. I took his hips up to me and sped him up. We fought each other for a while, my hands on his pelvis, his hand on my neck, and he gave in. I deep-throated him tightly and he fell apart a little. I left him that way for a second and redoubled on him. His back went to the ground, his body pulled up into an arch culminating at my lips.

There were timpani then, and the voice of the singer returned in the distance. I held Patrick up by the ass and he quaked, his body at a halt under me, though it held the slightest vibration. I took his hand and his fingers wrapped under themselves. He came, the choking, numbing shots in my mouth. I drained him slowly, not letting up until he took my face by the cheeks and forced me off of him. I picked him up by the shoulders and kept him in place on his knees. I stood up, unzipped my pants, spit in my hand and opened his mouth with my thumb. I let the tip of my cock rub his lips as I jerked myself off. He tried to get on it, but I held him back. He let his tongue dart out and my head drew back. “Aw fuck!” I yelled, though it was gone as soon as I let it out. “Goddammit, OH!” I let go of his shoulder and could just make out through the cloud my come squirting onto his tongue, under his teeth, blue in the light. I knelt down myself, my hand on his face, our noses together, the smoke dissipating just as I got my pants zipped up. We sat next to each other, cross legged behind the scrim, leaning our shoulders together as the song crashed into entropy, and ended randomly, just as the drummer appeared back through the air.

On Time

I'm late. I'm not so late that I can give it up, sacrifice my job, potential, good standing, but I'm late enough to put it in serious jeopardy. Late again. Four years on time and then I met him. When he's not stealing my time and body, he's stealing my thoughts and ambition, and I give them to him gladly, like flicking away a winning lottery ticket. Every minute with him is better than all that. I've got to be at work on time today, even though I can feel him back in bed, pulling me to him like a stray hair to staticky wool.

I keep my back to Nicolas, who lies in bed with a thin sheet covering him, his skin creating a shadow through it. I can't look at him and he knows why. I pick out my last pair of work pants without a come stain on them. The button on the inside is missing, but they'll hold up. The others lie in a pile in front of the dresser, waxy stain remover reflecting light on them. My mind is arguing again, that I can stay, that they won't fire me, that I deserve just a few more minutes. I show it the clock, 9:50 and I'm supposed to be there at 11:00, and let this argument go on unheeded. I'm here, Nicolas doesn't need to say, but radiates instead from a few feet behind me. I search for my belt, or rather, let my arms do it while my mind fends off this man in my bed.

Belt, I think, then tuck shirt in, find socks, put on shoes, they're under the table in the dining room, and then get the hell out of here.

Hand on my back, I trip on flat floor. Pants undone and thumb and forefinger on the zipper. I inhale deeply, looking for conviction under all this.

"I've got to go."

"You can stay for a little bit. Take a cab."

I can take a cab! Nicolas is a genius!

I don't have cash for a cab.

The hands enter my pants, just as warm as me, but exotic, a puzzle piece that fits perfectly, though it's from another puzzle. My hand grips the door jamb to keep steady. I've done the math. Getting money and then a cab will take just as long as taking the train. I could take him with me! Wrap him around me in the back seat, nourish myself before I face the day without him.

Falling in love is madness. He's not a teddy bear, for fuck's sake.

I turn to the dresser, ready to reach for the socks as soon as the belt is on, but my pants have dropped. Nicolas is on the floor, fingers hooked into my underwear and dropping that too. My cock enters his mouth, my eyes roll back and my hands struggle for a hold on the dresser. If he's fast enough, if I'm fast enough, I can have this and my job.

No, I'm late already!

"No."

But I haven't moved. He has, wrapped my knees in his arms and started to work me. I shake my head violently and hold his chin. "No." With regret like I'm about to jump into a volcano, I slide out of his mouth and look down on him. "I'm really late."

I get the socks and pull my pants and underwear back up. Running now, I make it into a chair at the dining room table. Sock on foot, other sock on other foot. Erection not going down, but will be hidden by coat. Shoe. Shoe. Hands slide down my arms, pull them back. My neck is kissed. My cock presses into my belt buckle and aches there.

"Call in," he says.

"I called in last week."

"You're still sick."

"I really have got to be there today."

"You've got to be here today."

"Shh."

I stand up, feet in shoes, and walk toward the door. He grabs my belt and pulls me back to him. My eyes close and his hands run down my chest, down my thigh, up and over my ass. I'm swaying, but he holds me. He turns to my front, presses his ear to my chest. He's listening to my heart beat. It's for him. He knows that.

"Nicolas, no. I've got to go." I'm whining now, haven't heard that voice since I was fifteen. I hold his head and kiss the top of it, pull away from him with the almost audible rip of velcro. If I leave now, I'll be five minutes late at best. My coat is in the closet. I put it on, make a break for the back door.

"Kiss me goodbye, at least," he says, his lips chapped from our week together. We fall together, and my heart drops into my stomach. The word "no" floats somewhere. Somewhere else.

My belt is undone again. My pants are undone again. They make a figure eight at my ankles. My shirt is twisted in his hand. My cock is in his mouth. I'm home.

He pulls, sucks, lifts me. My mind twists into my body and my knees fall into his chest. A clock ticks with his mouth, in one thousand, out two thousand. My head presses into the wall hard. In. Out.

"Nicolas. I don't want to leave you ever."

Time evaporates. I've been here for hours. I've been here for ten seconds. He holds me up, cupping my ass in his hands. My feet slide and catch on the floor. He pulls off of me.

"What!" I crack out.

"You can go."

I press my cock down and shove it into his mouth, hold him by the ears, fuck his head. I'm coming bigger these days with him. I'm losing whole parts of myself in him. When the drop comes before the orgasm now, it's somewhere underneath the floorboards.

And it is. My arms rip at the air, and I call for gods that I don't even believe in. I empty into him, another piece of myself in him. He pulls it clean from my body, absorbs every drop.

"You hate your job anyway, right?" he says, his mouth pressing into my thigh.

I don't hate anything but leaving.

Flirt

“Come on. Let’s go see some skanks!” I yell in Jerry’s ear.

“Mitch, I’m just not really into strip clubs.”

“That’s because you’ve never been in one.”

“I’ve been in a strip club!”

“Skanks! Skanks! Skanks! Skanks!”

Jerry’s been really flirty with me lately, more than with the other guys. It took us all by surprise when they first sent him to us. We tore him up for weeks, little comments here and there, a few limp wrists in his direction, but then I guess he just charmed us to death, all of us. And our first real job, a three-alarm five kids on the west side, he was the strongest guy there, the smartest, the bravest. We saw him carry a little girl to her mother, and even though their house was gone, and they were petrified, he had them all laughing. The mom kissed him on the cheek and cried about something he said, squeezed his hand and looked at the rest of us the same way. After that, he was one of us, the most popular guy at the station, really. And something I thought I’d never see? When he flirts, we flirt back. Fucking insane.

I don’t think he’s, well I know he’s not completely gay. I’ve never seen a man flirt so efficiently and so effortlessly with a woman. All he has to do is ask them one question about themselves, anything, listen to the answer, make one little joke about it, preferably insinuating that they’re secretly naughty, and they’re hooked. Maybe this is just how he relates to people. Maybe all he knows is flirting. This morning, I woke up to him kissing me on the forehead again. It’s a little uncomfortable, especially with morning wood.

“Fine, whatever, but if you try to pay for something for me, I mean anything, that’s it. I’ll leave.”

“Fine, let’s go.”

“No lap dances.”

“No.”

“No private dances.”

“No.”

“No coochie in my face.”

“No.”

“’Cause those girls gross me out. They’re really just mean and just… gross.”

I hold the blackened out door open for him. He enters in front of me, strutting, to prove he can, and takes a table near the front, the end of the catwalk stopping at only a respectable distance from us. A girl is there, spinning around a pole in the bottom half of a bathing suit. The music, a techno remix of “I See You Baby” by Groove Armada. She’s taking a literal interpretation of the song, shaking her ass each and every time it’s suggested, from various angles, one of which is completely spread eagled face down on the floor.

Jerry watches her and bites his lip.

“You doing alright?” I ask him.

“Yeah, fine.”

“I mean really, you should be taking notes.”

“What?”

“What you should be doing at the firehouse.”

“I knew you all were watching me slide down that pole,” he says, and delivers it perfectly, not a wince or a grin. I’m happy he’s relaxing anyway. What I don’t acknowledge, but what does pop up in my mind at this moment, is an image of Jerry slipping down the pole, his shirt raising against the brass. Unaccountably, it stirs me a little, and I look back up at the girl, who looks right back at me.

The waitress comes by.

“Hi,” I say, “I’ll have a Seven and Seven and Jerry will have a….” I turn to get his order, but almost whack him in the face with my chin. He’s leaning over me, holding my armrest.

“What kind of beer do you have?”

She goes over the list, Jerry nodding in front of my face the whole time. I sit up in my chair, as far back in the seat as I can get. “I’ll have a Corona,” he says, and puts on that wide smile that he reserves for children, management and service employees. The waitress melts to my left, an involuntary smile crawling up her beautiful neck to her cheeks. Going back to his seat, Jerry pushes against my right thigh for balance.

“And two shots of Jack Daniels,” I say to her when he’s out of earshot.

She nods and walks away.

What’s there to say about a strip club? You’re there, looking at women doing things they wouldn’t normally do, you keep up a banter with the guys you’re with about anything but the stripper, you drink, and before you realize it’s happening, you’re staring at a girl, moving in slow motion, incredibly turned on, a hard on in your pants like red steel, and the only thing to do then is leave.

It can’t be like this with Jerry, though I thought it would be. I thought if I could see the guy in him, see him down a beer and make a joke about the difference between a circus and a sorority house, the flirting would seem to stop. Even if it went on, I would know that it was okay. It was a bonehead, macho bullshit idea that I would expect out of anyone but me, but here I was trying it, and it wasn’t working. We’re such good friends, but somehow, the idea of talking about sex with him has been put off so long, it seems unnatural. Like talking to your great-aunt Lucy about who’s hotter, Katherine Heigl or Angelina Jolie.

The shots and drinks come, along with some hope. He looks at them and smiles at me, apprehensive, but picks his up anyway.

“To coochie!” I announce, only loud enough for him to hear.

“To keeping it out of my face!” he answers, just as loud.

We drink, and the burn and warm nausea is offset by the Seven and Seven. After the first drink is downed, he loses his ability to ignore the show altogether. After the second, and another shot, he’s looking at me as much as the girls. After another round, I don’t care. I order a lapdance for myself, though she offers one for Jerry at half-price, I jump in with a no, just me, thanks. He watches it like a movie, looking at me, looking at her, looking down, then at my face and hers. He might as well be shoving popcorn in his mouth.

The truth is, I don’t mind it at all. I should have the willies, but I don’t. It’s like we’re finally getting somewhere, Jerry and me, like we’re finally going to know each other. I pay her by hand when she’s done, exhale and turn to Jerry.

“So, you can’t touch them, right?” he asks.

“Right, but they can touch you.”

“And do they, I mean, usually?”

“They would touch you, I guarantee it.” I smile at him, to see if the compliment hit. It did. He smiles back, and toasts me, the round of shots that had been forgotten on the table.

“To lapdances,” he says, and lets a cackle out into his whiskey. He finishes it, pops it down and kisses me on the cheek while I’m still swallowing. I’m blushing. The hard, simple notion of kissing him back rises in my mind. I slap it away, but a drunk slap, no follow-through and no idea whether I made contact or not. Nope, it’s still there.

Another round and another girl asks Jerry if he’d care for a lapdance. He says no, but he’ll pay for one for his friend Mitch right here. You don’t mind, do you, Mitch? It’s kind of fun, right?

She’s a very cute girl with very fake tits and a silent kind of motherliness about her. She looks over at Jerry a couple of times as she moves above me. His chair is right up against mine now. She reaches over to stroke his cheek. He looks at me when she does, not flinching, but letting his mouth open. I put my right hand on his thigh.

“Do you want to kiss him?” she asks in my left ear.

“Yes.”

As soon as I say it, I know it’s true. Probably had been for a while. The strippers were for my distraction, not his. She moves my hand up to his crotch and I feel it, hot and loose and hard in his pants. My hand flinches, but she holds it there. Jerry inhales deeply and looks ahead of him, shaken, then at her, scared, finally at me, petrified. I look back at him and let my eyes coast down his body and back up at his face. His eyes, his velvet eyes falling into mine. The girl lets go of my hand and smiles at me, kisses me quickly but deeply on the mouth and slides off of my knees. Jerry goes for his wallet and I take my hand off of him, but I see it as he leans back for an angle in his pocket, a thick bulge that no longer fits in his pants.

He gives her a few bills of some kind, leaves forty for the waitress and says, “Let’s go.”

In New Orleans, in The French Quarter at least, there are no alleys, no inlets, no doorways, nothing that isn’t closed off by a thick iron gate, nowhere for a man to kiss a man, to feel a man’s cock against him. He looks around after a couple of blocks of wandering and kisses me anyway, up against a wall under a fire escape, Jerry’s tongue and lips, his hand on my chin, arm holding mine down, those things that it never occurred to me to want, though I did. I have. I do. We hail a cab and get in, apart from each other above our chests, below, my hand around him through his pants, my thumb pressed into the tip. Crossing Canal Street, into downtown, through a traffic circle with a statue of a man on a horse, under an underpass to St. Charles, trolley tracks and trees, restaurants, liquor stores, beautiful houses, ugly new buildings, our driver silent as we are, Jerry’s hand pulling at my thigh. We stop. He pays the driver. We stumble out. His apartment, a third of an old house. He opens the door to his place, lets me in and pushes me to the floor.

We’re breathing through a little space formed between the ends of our lips, the sides of our noses pressed against each other, a numb feeling building in my legs.

“Have you ever fucked a man before, Mitch?” he asks, quickly unbuttoning his shirt and going to mine.

“No.”

“But it’s everything you hoped so far, right?”

He’s done it, hooked me just like the girls. I laugh, and he goes in on my neck. Just where it meets the shoulder, he bites, and I unbuckle his belt. He turns onto his back and takes his pants off, his cock hitting his stomach with a flopping noise.

“In my bag, under the sink and fucking hurry.”

I get it, put it next to him and go down on him, shoving him into my mouth, his hand smacking the bag repeatedly. “No, shit, I’ll come, I’ll fucking come…. I want you up here, come on, Mitch, put this on and fuck me.” He hands me the condom and I put it on, never completely taking my mouth off of him. He hands me the lube and I kneel up, over him, my fingers wet and in him now, never thought it would be so easy, his back arching and his thighs back in his hands. Little squeaks out of him.

“I’m ready. Come on, I need you.”

I press my cock down, pushing his knees to my chest and enter him slowly.

“That’s it,” he says, “more.” I go in further, slippery but squeezed. “Yes,” he says. “Good good good good, oh fuck!” I’m pumping a little now. The muscles in his neck pull against themselves. Me, I’ve never felt anything even close, just trying really hard to keep going, to feel this, to see this man I’ve spent so much time with bent against the floor, teeth clenched. I’m grinding into him, watching his dumbfoundingly pretty face change, feeling him change. “Oh shit,” he says. “I can’t stop it, it’s… it’s… oh fucking MITCH!” He slowly rises and shakes against me, a few pops of come out of him, his knees digging into me, his eyes closing.

I come into him like a concrete block hitting the ground and bouncing, then kiss him on the cheek, charmed like a man who’s just been dragged into a fire and carried out.

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.

Peace

Despite what everyone says, those parental amalgams, holding their children tightly against their chests, petting their downy hair in protective hands, it’s quite possible to surf the web without running into any sex at all. When in doubt, I’ve been going to websites specifically for children, smiling at new media for all those memories, the Sesame Street website, Fisher-Price, Nickelodeon. Believe it or not, some of them have got great games, enough to while away hours in wholesome family fun, just me, twenty-six years old, limp in the dick, in bed with my laptop.

The sight of lips, open, a stubbled beard barely holding my come around his mouth.

I’m in terrible pain, you see, and mysterious pain at that. Every day I wake up to a new and different joint wracked with soreness. One day, my right wrist, the next, my left knee. Never two. Never the same as yesterday. But the pain is what I imagine thumbscrews must feel like, or knee screws, or elbow screws, or whatever. The helpless, throbbing, inescapable cry, and I’ve cried on its behalf, begging, first thing in the morning, when I’ve realized that I’ve got to crawl to the bathroom again, begging invisible Conquistadores to stop! Stop! I confess!

I don’t have health insurance, so I let the doctors charge me for as much sickness as I can afford, and take their word for it. Their word, so far, has been a shrug. Take this drug. Take this one, but not that, and when you can’t walk, stay home. They don’t have any idea what’s wrong, and I’m sure at least one of them thinks I’m making it up. Self-diagnosis is all the rage, and if carefully navigated, also sex-free and on the internet. I’ve decided it’s an allergy, so I’ve been giving single things up for a couple of weeks. In the end, all that becomes is spiritual fasting. Soft drinks for fourteen days (caffeine), cigarettes another (crazy chemical additives), cleaning products (use boiling water and baking soda instead), plastic, alcohol, household plants. So far, nothing. My hopeful fasting has turned to atonement, some guilt left behind from my Jewish upbringing. I’ve given up masturbation for two weeks, and sit alone in my bed, the best sex toy I’ve ever had showing me only fart jokes and old, public domain movies.

The feel of my forearm straining against his waistband, the heat inside.

It’s my ankle today, so I’m staying home. No crying on the way to my hands and knees this morning, just a confused dog, nuzzling my face and barking, my toes high in the air. Later, a phone call to work, and much later, a phone call to Clement, the third time I’ve cancelled on him this month.

“I’m just going to go over there,” he says, all argument-proof and about to hang up before I can protest. There are no spaces in between his words now. “I’mcomingoverataroundseventhirtysoputsomepantsonandanswerthedoor.” Click. Pants? How am I going to get pants on?

It takes about five minutes to put pants on, but I time it so I’ll get them on with plenty of time to look normal if it brings on a crying fit, or yet another inappropriate erection, which have descended upon me like beestings during news broadcasts, tooth brushing, hanging a towel on a hook. I calculate the probability of the seam of my pants touching my balls and causing an erection at about sixty-five percent, and these hard ons take mental effort on the level of three of those spoon-bending kids from The Matrix to hose down.

Fingers, just the tips, testing my balls in soft underwear. He pushes them up and they separate, letting the weight of his hand rise to the base of my cock.

Aching. It aches. My entire body is swollen, the center of gravity is my dick, its borders stretching to my hips, my thighs, my shaking knees. I fall back on the bed and touch, just touch, in a moment of weakness. Pfffffffffffff. Noooooo.

I play Bejeweled until it subsides, my head truly empty except in strategy of making astounding, seven-gem matches. Even the ankle seems to take the argument. When the door buzzer rings I’m grey, sexless, subdued, hopping to the button on one leg.

Clement is pure buzz, though, his stout little body, slightly shorter than me, is lean and muscular, potent, though I’ve never really looked before. I think he said he was a diver or something in college. He offers his shoulder to me and hops me back to the couch while he talks.

“It’s the ankle, huh? Well, I brought booze. You’re drinking again, right? Good. Jesus, you were boring. This car outside? This guy? I think it was a guy, I didn’t look. This guy just about tore my nuts off with his bumper. I don’t think he ever saw me. Probably on the phone. I need six tickets to Tokyo. There you go. You’re having a drink now. I’ll make it. What’s with this wallpaper? I thought you swore it off?”

And so on. The contact with his shoulder was a little dicey, my skin found it unbelievable and nearly crawled off to the kitchen with him. He hands me the drink and I put it down, foot out and limp, on the floor. Clement has some trouble deciding where to sit and finally settles, sympathy for the sickie, on the chair right next to me. We both face the dark grey screen of the T.V.

“What are you giving up this week?”

“Television,” I lie.

He looks right into my pupils. I have no idea why he would suspect that I’m lying, but maybe that’s just part of his intensity, that stare, as if he expects me to expound. He turns his chair so he can face me, and I feel exposed.

“That’s fine. You’ve got the internet. How many times have you come today?”

Clement’s mouth, the way his bottom lip pushes out, open and wet, dropping into my lap, the drag of them across the skin of my cock.

I pick up the glass quickly and cover myself with it. The cold helps too. “Um, a bunch.”

He cocks his head, looks back at the blank T.V., back to me and says, “Hang on, you hate T.V.”

He leans in a little more, his glass perspiring, his lips, I don’t think I’d ever noticed them before, did he have a beard or something, just a little closer to me. They part. He says, “What did you really give up?”

“Orgasms.”

“Joel. That’s not healthy.”

“They’re not necessary to sustain life. They don’t send vibrators and fleshlights to impoverished war zones.”

“That’s alright. Your body’s probably doing it anyway.”

“Only one wet dream.”

“Joel, that’s ridiculous. Do it. My God, it’ll smell like mold or something, but do it.”

“I’m trying to work!”

“You’re feeling guilty, aren’t you? You’ve been out for half a decade and you still feel bad, right?”

“On the same level as soda.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it!”

“I know that consciously, but….”

“Did I ever tell you about my first time? It was my swim coach.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Oh no. It was fantastic.” He stops and waits for me to try to argue. I let him get it out. “I’m nineteen, slower than all the other swimmers, but he doesn’t want me to quit. He’s worked me into this slick new body, all the fat gone, burned away in the pool. Strong shoulders. I can’t believe it.” He shrugs his shoulders forward so I can see what he means. “But he talks about my body like a product, like I’m not in it, so I start to think of it that way. And then he asks me if I’m getting laid, if I’ve got a girlfriend. I tell him I don’t. He says I should get one. Well I don’t say anything, figuring he’s not gonna pursue it, right? But of course he knows why I’m not saying anything. This is his test.” He leans forward a little, as if he has to whisper. The glass covers nothing anymore. “So he starts checking things, takes the robe down over my shoulders and starts to give me a massage as he’s talking to me.” He takes my glass away, gives a piteous look at my self-evident predicament, returns to my eyes.

“Well, by this time I’ve got the biggest hard on of my little life, and I can’t hide it,” he looks briefly at mine and points his chin at my face, “because my arms have got to hang loose while he’s massaging them. I’m kind of waiting for him to see it and throw me off the team, but he’s gotten all the way down to my hands,” Clement takes mine and puts them down on my sides, “and he hasn’t said anything. And it’s not like those little Speedos hide anything. ‘You’re so tense,’ he says. ‘You can’t concentrate.’” My eyes close. It’s my only defense against his lips. “And before you know it, there are his fingers.” Clement’s hands remain on mine. I feel like bucking against the seam of my pants. Anything. “And I kinda just fell into him. The whole world, all this fighting I’d been doing, just went click! It was actually the first time I’d ever really been at peace.”

He pauses longer, so I open my eyes for a moment. “Peace, Joel. That’s sex for me, peace. Before I knew it, he had me on all fours on his desk, teaching me what it feels like to get my asshole licked. That’s how I came the first time. I didn’t even touch. And then I started staying late after every swim practice. That guy taught me everything.” He lets my hands go. “I’d let you give up food before I let you give up coming. Do it now.”

“No, that’s weird.”

He lets his fingers slide slowly across my cock through the pants. I’ve only got time to cringe before I come, my mind lost, my body flooded with liquid joy, its own medicine. My ankle feels fine. When my eyes open, he smiles, kisses the wet spot, and changes the subject to Dancing With the Stars.

Enough

Note: This one's pure whimpering moosh. If you're not into mooshy, don't read it.

I can’t do anything until we get in. Rushing through the airport, the baggage in the car, people looking at us, but no one saying anything, just rushing down moving sidewalks and through automatic doors until the last one opens and there’s the car, rushing into it. For however long it will last, the last piece of him for a while.


I’d looked forward to it for months, though I never said anything, or even thought about it directly. But it was there and we both knew it, a room outside of our lives, away from our homes, the old routine, if only for one night it was something. And the day was fine. We were just beaming, like children, like we’d just met, like it was all in front of us. There would be nights in front of us and I lied to myself, just in case it didn’t happen. I lied and told myself we were together again. Because I didn’t want to think about the next day, today, when we take the limo home and there are more months ahead of us before we can be alone again. Alone without a lying phone call or a time limit, when we would have hours together away from ourselves, the pillow fort that we hide in, a sheet over it, reading stories to each other with our flashlights.


Corey’s room was right next to mine so I didn’t have to wait long. I answered the door and he was there, an expression of something in him, his face vexed and hopeful, like mine. Exhausted with want and worry and dread and happiness. I let him in and he hugged me tightly to him, finally time for affection. Finally enough time to feel each other, not a quick fuck in the back seat or a drunk dial early in the morning. We stood for a long time like that in the hallway of my room and I felt like I was falling apart, but I swallowed it down, like pushing ice through a hose. I finally broke it off and made us a couple of drinks. He sat on the bed and wiped his mouth back and forth in his hand.


“Are you happy?” he asked, his voice split in two.


I didn’t answer him, but swallowed again, chasing it with the vodka and cranberry I’d made for myself. I gave him his drink and he drank it fast. We sat next to each other, our shoulders pressed in harshly to one another. His hand, cold from the drink, trailed up my beard and I kissed it.


He backed up to the headboard and I followed him. He turned to his side, pulled me into him and kissed me. We took our time. And it hurt. It hurt like hell. Every millimeter between us stung.


The first thing we do in the limo is raise the barrier. He pushes me down into the seat and takes his jeans off. I take off my own. He falls onto me and sinks his tongue into my mouth. I sit up and push him down instead, lube from my bag drizzled on his asshole and the look in his eyes that I’m avoiding. In the room, we took each other’s clothes off slowly. I felt his skin against mine and I almost lost it again. We lay there, our mouths moving into each other, our legs wrapped into each other, all the things I wanted to say getting packed down deeper into my gut. “I love you,” I said, finally, this little admission sent up to explain everything below. And that hurt enough, letting that pass through.


I unzip my bag in the footwell and put the tips of my fingers over his bottom teeth. Don’t say anything. Just don’t. I don’t want any of that. There’s just no fucking time. We put it off and this is it. When I’m coated and my dick, my sullen brain not affecting it at all, pulses in the air, I concentrate on that. I raise his knees onto my chest and slam into him, he whimpers three little jittery inhales over his teeth like he stepped on something sharp. I add more lube and press on, stanching the pain in my chest that I’m ignoring. I’ll deal with you later.


“I. Shit, Alec, I love you too,” he said, breaking the kiss. He put his fingers in my hair and pressed his cheek into mine. “I love you too. I can’t live without you. I can’t do anything at the work. Can’t do anything at home. I’m faking everything. I’m a fucking wreck and I can’t, shit, dammit, shit, no, I just. I don’t want to do this. I can’t talk to you about this. I just want to lay here with you, okay? I just want to lay here.” And I didn’t know what to do. So I crushed him to me and I closed my eyes and tried to be happy for him. And they came anyway, branding my fucking cheeks they were so hot.


He’s getting into it and I’m looking down at him, my arms wrapped tight around his thighs and I’ve never gone so hard, so reckless, so desperate and angry at him. I feel like slapping him I’m so mad. But it’s not him I’m mad at. It’s that tomorrow he’ll be next to me again. And I’ll have to lie. And I’ll have to get into my car and go home. I’m sweating and thinking about how I’m going to explain it. And I’m mad about that too. And I just want to fuck him forever. And I just want to come. And I want to hate him. The feel of his body on mine, I want to hate that. He grasps his cock, but I slap it away and take it myself, quick and cold.


We spent the entire night awake and quiet like that, broken up only occasionally by a quaking shoulder and a word or two. In the morning, late for the airport and rushing to pack everything, I patted my jacket from the night before.


“I have something to show you,” I said. I opened up my wallet and pulled out my stack of I.D.s, credit cards and such. Between the Nieman’s and the Blockbuster, I pulled out a lunch receipt. “It’s from the day we met. It’s been in here ever since.”


He looked at it and bit his lip. I put it all back.


“Come, dammit,” I say to him. “Come, Corey. Come.” I feel my fingernails graze him a couple of times, but I don’t care. Sweat drips through my eyebrows and into my eyes and I take that sting too.


“Alec, I… Alec. Alec.”


“Shut up. Just fucking come.” My body is pulsing. I’m burning, but it doesn’t matter. And I’m fighting everything. I just want to fight. I hate all of it. His shoulders lift off of the seat and I feel his ass twist and lock on me and he shoots out all over my hand and I’m seething and trying not to think of anything but that. When I stop thinking, my whole body explodes and it’s not enough. It’s not enough to feel his knees in my chest and call his name out. It’s not enough to stanch anything. Because I want last night back. I pull out of him and pick him up and hold him so close to me and he pulls out of it with a squeeze on my knee. We get to my neighborhood. We put our clothes on silently and I kiss him hard before I get out of the car, a squeeze on the hand that’s nowhere near enough.

Chef

The Chef’s uniform, the one you see in clip art with the puffy, cloudlike toque and the wry mustache, perhaps being twisted by the owner upon serving the meal, isn’t just a caricature. There is a reason for all that stuff. The toque, though lately replaced by a kind of paper corrugation in the style of folded napkins, is there to displace heat in the kitchen and soak up sweat. The pants are thick and baggy so that you may sense contact with a hot stove before burning yourself on it. The jacket is also thick, and can be reversed to hide stains. And there are symbols too. Of course there are symbols. The kitchen is the warzone and the cooks are there to wage war with the organic. There is a strict rank in a kitchen, executive Chef, who’s name is on the door, sets the menu, arguably the make and break of the restaurant, and oversees everything from the hiring to the purchasing to the freshness of the rosemary sprigs. Mostly, the executive is to be found alternately schmoozing VIPs and running into the kitchen to scare the staff and maintain chaos.

Just under the executive is the Chef de cuisine, who runs the place in the absence of the executive, which can be from all the time to never, but is usually just most of the time. Under him are the sous Chefs, or usually is just the sous Chef. The sous Chef is the one with all of the responsibility, who runs the kitchen and beats his or her underlings down with an arbitrary and iron fist, is, in turn, the bitch of the executive and the Chef de cuisine. He or she must cover for the abhorrent behavior of his betters, doing everything from picking up their dry cleaning to mopping up their vomit before the customers smell it. The sous Chef, in turn, bullies everyone else into submission. It’s their ass in the sling if anything goes wrong.

Under them, through a complicated series of ranks and psuedoranks and subranks lies me, the line cook. There is only one answer to anything that is asked of the line cook to anyone who is not a fellow line cook or the dishwasher. Yes, Chef. Yes, Chef. This is a war and there is no time for argument. Chef, after all, means chief.

Milo is my Chef. A sous Chef, to be specific. The one hundred folds in Milo’s toque, etched onto his forehead in boiled blood at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, are symbols of the things that he can do with an egg. His jacket has his name on it, his rank and even a few ribbons, honors and ownerships and bitches he’s broken. He’s already at work, but he’s left an order behind on the scraps of ordering paper that we have all over the house. I read it and walk to the bedroom. Yes, Chef. It’s inserted and I stand straight, sweat appearing in bolt heads on my face.

Down the stairs and walking, the thing beats electricity into my legs. The pants, just lowly line cook pants, are baggy enough to hide my joy. The walk, the burning grin on my face, is only two blocks long, appropriately up a steep hill, which bounces the thing in my ass mercilessly. At the top of the hill is Ile-de-France, my own Pot au Feu, boiled down to my essence in my own blood. I enter through the back, the restaurant’s asshole, and I’m compelled to speak to a few specks, like me, dangling in the shorthairs.

“Hola, maricón,” Manuel says, and the rest of them laugh as if this is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard.

“Just because you keep begging to suck my cock every day doesn’t make me a maricón,” I answer in Spanish. The thing is, they can say the same thing every day, but you’ve got to come up with a fresh answer every time.

“Eh! Ehhhh! Maricón!” Chaco says, flipping his cigarette over the grease dumpster. “You like to suck the cock of Milo, yeah? I see you.” Bwwaaaaa ha ha ha! Funniest thing ever.

“See you cleaned up that pearl necklace I gave you last week, Chaco. Or did you save it in case you run out of truffle oil?”

This is enough for now. They don’t know about Milo and me. It’s just the standard insult for whitey in the kitchen. Milo’s pubes in my teeth, his balls against my chin. Same thing every day. The weight in my ass brings me up again. Milo is there, large, hairy, top-heavy like a bulldog and his own bolt-heads of sweat.

“Hey, you think you got some fucking baby shower to go to or something? Get the fuck in the fucking kitchen, you lazy piece of shit. Get to fucking work.”

I’m a half-hour early. “Yes, Chef.”

“Do I have to tattoo the time that you’re supposed to show up on your nuts or something?” My insides are burning. I can’t even look at him. “Get your mis en fucking place sometime before your cock draws back into a cunt and get the fuck going.”

I’m running as he says this, the slips on the relief mats not greasy enough to worry me yet. The nerves on the insides of my arms are tingling and I can’t remember a thing. His abuse is like wildfire in my pubes and I’m visibly sighing. I concentrate on it, what it’s told me I can do. Sauté station. Pans, bent into the grill, sauces, baskets, fresh meat to be checked, vegetables of all types and slices and spices and oil. It’s run back to the station, placed, unveiled, rejected, replaced and restocked. The hollandaise provided to me is broken. Milo sees this and throws it on the ground. It splatters up the inside of my pants leg and settles in my socks. I run to clean it up, but Milo says, “What the fuck are you doing? Make another batch, you fucking dog dick.”

“Yes, Chef.”

I turn, panicked, to the walk-in and slip in the filth. I fall to the relief mat and don’t say ouch. The vinegar and rancid lemon falls into new cuts, but I’ve got to get the stuff. Milo walks off to go at someone else.

The doors open and the tables fill. Somewhere, a few hours later, my lamb noisettes are found wanting and thrown in my face. Linguini is dribbled, in onion and butter, down my front. And I’m in a trance, on, the food a blur and my mind in a state of half-conscious production and losing time. The cold piece of metal in my ass is a metronome, a cock that never loses blood, in half-erection all day, kept at respectful distance from the flat top.

I know it’s about 9:30 when we begin to slow, when the world beyond the six square feet just in front of me begins to reappear in blotches of stainless steel. I have one moment to myself and take it back to the walk-in, to restock the fennel and the lamb chops, and perhaps to give my face and neck a good wipe. I’m at the shelves, holding plastic bins and turning around when I’m taken by the shoulders and run backward to a metro rack. His, Milo’s, hands take my bins and place them to the side. He adjusts me until my ass, and its attachment, are level with the metal on the shelves. The cold radiates, penetrates my sphincter. My knees wobble.

“Take your pants down.”

“Yes, Chef.”

He has a squeeze bottle of oil and points it at me. It squirts and inhales. “Do it,” he says, his quiet authority in silhouette against the light bulb at the ceiling. His arms are folded. My cock jumps at the cold, but goes quickly hard in my hand. “Can’t you go faster?” he says. I reluctantly nod. I’m going swift as an immersion mixer, the metal in my ass biting in hard. I’m watching him and begging in my head. Let me. Let me.

He stops me. “That’s enough,” he says. He slaps it. I don’t say ouch. “Pull your pants up and cook something.” I suit back up and grab the bins with shaky hands. He takes the ring on the metal in me and turns me to the door. “And try to keep your pigtails out of it, you little girl.”

I want to take a moment to recover, but he kicks the handle of the door and pushes me out, the air hot as a deep fryer, the sweat melting immediately and dripping down my neck. I move to my station and press my pelvis into the stove. I don’t say ouch.

“Maricón!”

“What, Efrain?”

“He take you the cooler and makes you suck his cock?”

Ah ha ha ha ha!

“No, Manuel was in there getting stuck like pork on a spit, so I let them have a moment.”

“Maybe some time you suck my cock, eh?”

Ah ha ha ha ha!

“Your cunt might get offended.”

And that’s enough. I look at my arm. I’ve got a new burn, a pink slash welting up where I’d touched the burner. He’ll like that, I think.

The night goes by slower and clearer now, until news trickles in that we’re done, the hour of cleaning ahead and the disinfectant in my oily wounds. I’ve been here eleven hours and they went by like five. I can feel them only when I lean on something, my hips seeming to creak. My hands are coming apart under the silver roughage of a steel scrubber, when I hear, “Travis!”

“Yes, Chef!”

“Come.”

“Yes, Chef!”

He leads me, his ass like two roasts under the seam of his jacket, to the dish room, which has been empty for a half hour.

“Strip.”

“Yes Chef.”

I lay my clothes on the main machine, but he throws them onto the ground. The floor is clean, but it’s still wet. I await his orders. He stands me in the center of the room and hits me with the dish sprayer.

“What will you do for me!” he yells.

“Whatever you ask, Chef!”

The water is a little hot.

“Good. And what will I do for you?”

“Nothing that I don’t earn, Chef.”

“That is the right answer.”

He sprays me and sprays me. I feel it in cuts and burns, sores and rashes. And I feel it in the toy, the radiation of the heat in the metal. I stand with my legs apart, panting. He looks at me in appraisal. I hope I pass.

“You wore the toy,” he says, dropping the spray onto it from behind. “You did well tonight.” He approaches me, wraps his clothed body around me, still full of grease and splatter, the jets directly on the toy now. “You can come.”

It’s hard to admit what he’s done to me, but there they are, near tears of thanks. He has an oil bottle and coats my cock with it. I go to spread it in and begin, but he slaps my hand away.

“Learn,” he says. He holds the ring of the toy in my ass and twists his hand, covered in scars and the pits where fingertips used to be, around my cock. Then, strongly, he pumps. It’s a few seconds or two minutes, time blurring here too, before he kneels suddenly at my feet, as I come on his face, his expert timing pulling the toy out just at the right moment, and his tongue, what’s made him the man he is, now licking my sauce out of his beard.

Grey

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend….

-John Donne, ca. 1615



My whole existence is flawed.
You get me closer to God.

-Trent Reznor, 1994





“No, I’ve never doubted my faith,” Tonio said. I adjusted my pants, looking at his shoulder. This is what I had wanted him to say. I hoped he didn’t ask me.

“What about you, Hugo?”

“Of course not.” 



“Of course not,” he echoed. 



Tell you the truth, it doesn’t come up too much anymore. Though at the time it meant so much to me. I was giving up a habit that I never told him about, and was struggling to replace my thoughts of it with God, though it wasn’t coming as easy to me as it once had. When I was younger it would. The world was so black and white, so easy to understand. There was good and there was evil and here is what is good and here is what is evil. And even though both things will exist in you, you must only do what’s good. When I did what was evil, I tried to fight it, but it was hard. Especially when all I could see was that I was the only one I had a possibility of hurting. I knew I was supposed to think that it would hurt God, but it wouldn’t. If He didn’t want anyone to touch it, He shouldn’t have let us find it.



The funeral is a full mass. He was a soap star in the eighties. He died of a cocaine overdose the previous weekend. He only took occasionally as far as anyone knew. That might have been what killed him. His body wasn’t dead to it yet. The River Phoenix thing. People are wearing sunglasses, piled up in the church, the flashbulbs going off even during the service, leaving purple-red mottles on our retinae. Father Moses spoke, then stepped down for the wife of the soap star.



“The poem is by John Donne,” she says, “and it was one of Luis’s favorites.”



I’d heard it before, read it in some textbook in high school. We gathered up in the hallway, muttering to each other. Did that mean what I thought that meant? Yeah, I think it really did. Holy shit and they actually read that to us? Maybe they don’t know what it means. We broke up to go to class.



“Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you as yet but knock…”



Tonio never spoke about God much, though it was on his mind all the time. It was a reason for him to say no to a lot of things. It bolstered me. I felt like if I hung around him all the time it would rub off. I’d stopped going years ago, not just over the meth, but because I just didn’t buy it anymore. Since giving it up, I joined the choir, a hell-bent effort recommended by my sponsor, but it just didn’t have as much of an effect on me. Tonio did, somehow. His purity, the way he saw things, reminded me so much of myself back then. I thought it would wash away the filth.



Coming off of meth also makes your heart dry. The only time I ever felt anything at all was when I was with him.



“…breathe, shine and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.”



I slept all the time, waking only in a scentless sweat in time to shower and get ready for choir practice. To act normal in front of him, this substitute priest with his shining eyes.



The room has shut up for once, everyone listening to Luis’s wife, whose eyes are puffy and red, though she always seemed to hate him before. Her bottom lip is quivering, each syllable a fight to get out, her lipstick wearing away, a flashbulb in her face illuminating new wrinkles. 

“I, like an usurped town, to another due, labor to admit you, but O, to no end….”



There was one time that he spoke of it, over a burger instead of a cocktail after a rehearsal. 
”I see the proof of God in the mountains and the dextrousness of your hands,” he said, holding them out in front of himself. “I see Him in children and the digestive system and the water cycle. There’s no way He doesn’t exist. It’s all too perfect. My sister has turned away, you know,” he said, flashing his eyelashes at me. “She let doubt get the better of her. I miss her, but she won’t see me anymore.”

“Why, just because of that?”

“She’s a lesbian now. She didn’t like my disapproval.”

I took a sip of my Coke, letting my hair hide the look on my face.

“Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, but is captived, and proves weak or untrue.”



Tonio squirms a little in his seat. He’s been reading along with the poem, but squinting up at her, trying to make it all out.



I’d been trying to replace the meth with God, but I had been all along replacing it with Tonio. At night, my hand drifted down my front, my eyes slammed shut, my fingers wrapped around my cock and I thought about him, what would happen if I let myself do what I wanted to do with him. My hand, sticky with butter or hand lotion or olive oil or whatever I could find came down over his imaginary body and when I came, his lips parted and he smiled, approvingly.



“Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, but am betrothed unto your enemy.”



Tonio bought some beers one night, the taste of real sin on our lips, we talked for hours. We were on the couch in his living room, watching some stupid show on Animal Planet. Telling him came up a thousand times, as he put his feet on my knees, smiling that unbreakable smile. He was so clean. He was so much of what I wanted to be. I couldn’t tell him about my past, couldn’t tell him what was in my mind now. I stepped gingerly around both things and he let me. Because he assumed they weren’t there, that they couldn’t be, that I was like him. Because I made him think I was like him.



The beer spoke for me anyway. “Have you ever done anything serious? What’s the worst thing that you’ve done?” He sat up a little, hooking the arches of his feet over my thighs, wiggling his toes in his socks. He looked at me and cocked his head.



“Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, take me to you, imprison me….”



The widow is really kind of losing it now. The priest comes up next to her to comfort her but she doesn’t let him. She doesn’t like him. I can see that much. Does she blame him, I wonder? Does she think he didn’t do anything about this, or did too much?



He wiggled his toes some more, examining them. “Um, I let a guy…. Well me and this other guy we…. I had a thing going on with a male friend of mine.”



“What?”



“Me and this guy, we were… fucking for a while. But it’s over.”

He looked at his feet again and removed them from my thigh.



“What?” My brain went cloudy. It reeled, stupid and empty.



“It’s over. I don’t really think about it anymore.”



I took his hand and he let me. He looked to the side.



“…For I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”



The funeral card shakes in Tonio’s hand and he looks at the widow like he’s afraid of her. She covers her face in her gloved hand, waiting to regain composure. The poem is over, but she stands at the dais, afraid to let her husband go.



He pulled my hand and we took each other’s faces hard, the taste of the beer in each other’s mouths, the squeak of his couch and the innocent voiceover on the TV, his cock jabbing into me, his uncontaminated skin which had lied about his soul, silken under my fingertips. He unbuckled his pants. I pulled them off for him.



When he came, my cock deep inside of him, the world turning red around me, he screamed out for God. When I came I screamed out for Tonio, the idea still in my head that that was who he was. I lay on top of him, this strange man, no one I knew. I looked into his face for a while. He looked back at me, petrified. I pulled off of him and got dressed.



“See you for practice tomorrow?”



“Yeah,” I said, though my voice shook. I let the door shut quietly behind me, the sweat on my back like it was every morning. Feeling broken for the first time since the meth. It was something, at least, though not really what I’d been missing.

The Last Petal on the Daisy

You knew it was the last time, but you didn’t tell me. You knew, flipping me on my back, that we’d never do this again. I should have known it from when you did that. You’d never looked into my face before. I remember your green eyes looking down on me, and I remember thinking that you seemed different. That you were trying to tell me something with your stare. You were. “This is the last time,” you should have said. “I love you and this is the last time.” But I put the stare away. I figured I was imagining it. I looked to the side, letting you pump into me without looking at you. Letting you look at me, it seemed for the first time. You’d never wanted a boyfriend. You told me that. You told me you just wanted some guy to fuck every once in a while. I believed you. Every other time, you bent me down to the floor or the table or the bed or the couch by the back of my neck and fucked me hard like a machine. And I would argue with myself. He loves me. He loves me not.

He loves me not, I’d finally driven into my stupid skull after a few weeks with you, showing up at my door and dropping me to my knees. You’d jerk off over my face and I would close my eyes, waiting for the shot of hot, then cold. That was the convincer. When your come turned cold on my face before it dried.

You saw that I wouldn’t look back at you and you turned me on my side. I know that now. You had burned that hope out of me, you see. I’d killed it, torn its heart out, stabbed it with an olive pick and left it there to jiggle. Whatever you thought you could suddenly get me to do I had no muscle memory for. You saw what you did and you turned me on my side so you wouldn’t have to look at it. All I knew was that you were deeper in my ass than you’d ever been, my leg straight between yours, your balls dragging on my thigh. To me it was just another fuck. To you, it was as close as you ever came to telling me.

That I think of you all the time hasn’t been a surprise. I fall in love so easily. I have this way of being in love with someone all the time. I don’t expect anyone to love me, doubt that they ever could, really. I don’t tell them. I don’t want them to know. They’ll leave, you see. And it’s better if I have them near me, even if it’s slowly shattered me into a million pieces. When they leave, another piece is gone and I walk around without it as if it were never there. I’m a fucking Swiss cheese of a man now, just structurally sound enough to be able to bend out of bed in the morning. You took a very large piece with you. I think about you all the time and it hurts where it was.

I should have known, my eyes scrunched shut for the pain of you so deep inside of me. I should have seen that this was the last time. It had to be. When you came you said “I… I… I… I….”

I love you too. Please, fuck off now.

Test Your Strength

There were twenty inches between them in the back seat of Hank’s car. They both had their hands pressed down into the seat, trying to quell the atmosphere between them, the solid air, a fire that hadn’t yet lit. They pressed it down into the seat, feeling it in their fingers. The plasma rush echoed in the space between, freed itself and bounced into their thighs. It tingled. It itched. Their bodies buzzed like they were gripping a machine to test their strength. They held onto the handle. If they let go, if they crossed the naugahyde and crashed into each other, the machine would call them sissies, chide them with red lights and shut off, demanding another fifty cents. They held on, thrilled under the spell and begging for it to stop.



Joe’s mouth was open, as if there were some way to take this in, as if he could absorb Adam through his lungs. He breathed deep and imagined that he could, having read somewhere that your body really inhabits the air around it, having read in class that it stores heat in the space like a blanket, that when you smell someone, it’s actually little bits of them that are landing in your nose, that seventy percent of dust is skin cells, that billions of neutrinos are passing through your body and into the next person every second. He breathed deep and took in the bits of Adam, pressing his hand down into the seat to steady himself. He closed his eyes and pretended to be tired as he was sure he must be and imagined what they had already shared, imagined the tiny subatomia, whether they could take a message to him.



Adam rolled down the window and let the wind blow on his face, figuring the fresh air would do him nothing but good, that it would cool him, that his heart would stop beating so fast, trying to bring something that definitely wasn’t oxygen to his muscles, his blood redder than was really normal, his face pulsing with it. He could feel his clothes draw tight across him and wanted to loosen them, the first thing they tell you to do in first aid, loosen the victim’s clothes, lay them down, put something under their head, ask them questions. “Who’s the president of The United States? What’s your middle name? What year is it?” What year is it? He put his face right up to the open window, feeling like the wind was picking something up from it and was being absorbed just as quickly by Joe. He wanted him to have it. He had too much of it. He wanted to give Joe more than that, but waited for that feeling too to pass. He lowered the waistband of his jeans on his hips, easier to breathe, easier than the full bodily tumescence that would surely crush his lungs.



They’d been through this before, both of them, always after one of Hank’s parties, always on their way back to the dorm, always in the back seat with each other, always at the same time.

They did what they’d done before, fought over who would have the last word with Hank, hip-checking each other at the window, their arms too scared to touch, their feet connecting at the shoe, the metallic rattle of the old Volkswagen engine quietly observing. Whoever lost the battle, this time Adam, would hold the door open at the dorm, inhaling, telling himself he wouldn’t look this time, wouldn’t let his eyes drop as the other walked through.

Adam lost this battle too, and saw the curve of Joe’s right buttock, the tightening bulge before the drop at the thigh. He tried the opposite tack and exhaled hard, figuring it was his lungs that were taking up too much room in his torso, that whatever was hitting him this way was doing so because he’d never pushed it out. He hadn’t really exhaled it. He held as long as he could and didn’t breathe in again until the door had closed behind him, only to catch a whiff of Joe’s cologne. He was downwind of him, occupying the space Joe had just a moment before.



Joe figured a cigarette would help, would occupy his lips and hands for a few minutes, enough to change the subject at least, nothing like a substitute, but perhaps a distraction? He shook his head in the elevator, wanted to slap his own cheek, had been staring at Adam’s waistband, his thumb hooked into the side and sliding around it like it was getting the last of the frosting from the inside of the bowl. He watched the floors count up, a red light display calmly ticking off his pulse. His eyes blurred in the stare and they were a fuzzy glow, a warm reminder of his insides, also warm and red and climbing. Adam got off the elevator first and Joe stepped into his spot for a moment before exiting, seeing if the air was still warm there.



Adam opened the door to their room and asked Joe if he had to take a piss. He was taking a shower. Joe stepped around him without a touch and said no, he was fine. Tired, he said, probably too tired to sleep. Adam closed the door to the bathroom and turned the shower on, the handle all the way to the left and watched the cloud of steam escape around the shower curtain and over the mirror. He watched himself blur in it, taking his shoes off as his face disappeared, taking his shirt off as his chest disappeared, just catching a look at his erection, appearing as his jeans pulled down and then fuzzy in the mirror, a red patch in the steam. 



Joe paced outside of the bathroom door, trying to think of a viable reason for him to rush in there, press himself into Adam, feel his actual skin and flesh on him, his real body enveloping him. He leaned into the door, his hands on either side of it and listened, his eyes closing at the sound of Adam’s zipper, wondering how close he was. He listened to the white noise of the shower and imagined those drops taking parts of him, streaming down his body and carrying it into the drain. He imagined Adam’s eyes closed, his neck out, washing his hair, the soapy excess dripping down his back and over his ass. Joe undid his pants, knowing he had to walk away and change his clothes, but he stood there, his body falling into the door, his cheek against it. It was cold, but the air coming from the gap below was steam.



Adam lowered the toilet seat quietly and sat on it, a bottle of conditioner in his hand and imagined Joe in bed on the other side of the wall, facing him. He imagined lying down behind him and quietly undressing him, listening to him breathing, his warm skin like the steam around him. He imagined himself holding Joe’s cock, sticky and hot like his own in his hand. He imagined that he was making Joe feel what he was feeling, his leg twitching and his back arching. He imagined Joe’s face turning to him, his mouth open, waiting to taste his own, Joe’s wet mouth. Adam felt the droplets fall onto his lips and felt them as a kiss. His tongue swiped a taste of them.



Joe wondered how long he should linger there at the door, but figured he’d have enough time to jump into bed when he heard the water shut off. He wouldn’t be able to change in time, but he made a head start of it, stripping layers—shoes, socks, shirt, pants, underwear taken off and thrown onto the floor next to his bed. He kept his forehead to the door the entire time and when he was finished, pressed the rest of his body up to it, inching up by his toes in the carpet, the pile between them. His toes could feel the steam across them and he looked down at them, imagining they had some part of Adam to them. He saw his own cock, the red eye of it and gently pressed it too into the cold door. He turned his head and listened. His hands gripped the doorjamb tight. He heard a gasp. And another. He felt them as if they were his, or as if he had caused them. His lips opened again.



Adam’s left hand pressed into the wall between himself and Joe’s bed and seemed to fall into it, the sweat in his palm mixing with the now wet wallpaper. How close was his hand to Joe’s body? He lowered it to bed level and switched his rhythm. It was sugary syrup, his blood. His heart was working hard to move it. It gathered in spots, heavy parts of his body while others felt unnaturally light. In his mind, which seemed to get no blood at all except a sweet ephemeral vapor, Joe was somehow sucking him off and kissing his lips at the same time. Adam’s head turned in the yellow bathroom light, coming to rest on a towel rack. His knees clapped with every stroke.



Joe’s face wanted to sink through the door, wanted to fall into the room with Adam, wanted to land solid on top of Adam in the shower. He realized that his hips were moving, that he was humping the door. He licked his fingers and palm, rubbed the morsel of precome across it and encircled the tip of his cock, tremors in his shoulders and knees. He heard two more gasps from inside the bathroom and it was enough. His left hand gripped the doorjamb to keep him from slamming against the door and he pushed away, his come flying up and landing on his toes. He stood and exhaled hard, enough to empty his lungs and held there, not breathing again until he was flat in bed, wiping his feet with his shirt.



Adam heard the springs of the bed and imagined that he had just made Joe come, that Joe was tense in his arms, that he could smell him and somehow taste him, the little bit of Joe that he could taste. He made a fist on the wall and came, flying up and landing on his breastbone, his skin shivering between it and his heart. He waited a moment, the smell of Joe in his nose, and adjusted the shower a little colder before going in, aiming the showerhead at his chest.



The two men slept in separate beds, five feet between them and each hugged a pillow against their chest, imagining it was the other man.

You Came In

I was folding sweaters when you came in. I wielded the folding board like a shield around me, wanting to look at you without being seen. It didn’t work. Of course it didn’t work. There I was, all lit up under those hot lights, my thighs against a display table, just under my cock, when you came in.

It had been years, but I remembered. I remembered because we didn’t kiss. I was still straight then, or I thought maybe I could be. But I spent the day with you, ditching class. We went to the movies. We saw Austin Powers. The first one. You kept grabbing my arm every time you laughed. You laughed a lot. I laughed because you were scaring the crap out of me. I was scaring the crap out of me. I was fighting my neck, which wanted to turn and kiss you so bad it was sore.

I was about to find out if you remembered, faster than I wanted to. If I’d had any time at all, I would have borrowed something from the couture department, hiding the price tags in the seams. I would have run to cosmetics and done something about my hair. But you came in unannounced, more gorgeous than ever, and I bit my lip and folded sweaters and waited.

“Ray?”

And there it was.

“Dan.”

“I haven’t—“

“No.”

“How are you?”

“Folding sweaters. You?”

“Data entry.”

“Health insurance,” I said with a nod. You stared at me too long. You used to stare at me too long all the time. Then, when I made eye contact, it would drift to my shoulder. That day, it was just in the eye. You came in and stared at me right in the eye. You looked the same. I was actually dressed better than you, had a pocket square in, an affectation I’d been cultivating. I wanted to ask you what you thought, but I couldn’t. Affectations can’t be noticed by the affectors.

You held up two shirts, both overpriced and nonsensical. You noticed, in a laugh, that you were gay too.

“Yeah,” you said, and your eyes crinkled up on the side. The adorable difference. “Which?”

“God, neither.”

You looked down. Fucking prissy shopboy. That’s what I was.

“Go over there,” I said, on a high to tell you what to do, wondering if you’d just do it, “to the fitting rooms and I’ll bring you what you want.”

You fumbled around with the hangers, like they were crawling with lice and you had to get rid of them. I took them and touched your fingers, rolled them in my own. You didn’t flinch. I love that you’re not afraid.

I picked out two shirts that would show your form, the one that just came in that day, all the same as it was. And you didn’t know it. You never noticed how gorgeous you were.

That day, the day that we ditched class, you stared at me in the eye then too. We went to get a hot dog, some little bullshit place where the tables were as yellow as the mustard, you looked at me then. I thought you had to know. And I told myself I didn’t. I let you eat the hot dog without pushing the drip of mustard, a spike of relish in it, into your mouth.

I’ll bring you what you want.

Is that what it was? I only noticed after I said it that it could be interpreted that way. I meant, in just as much of an ego trip, that I’d bring you shirts you didn’t know you wanted. Shirts. Time is like that. Puts up barriers, imagined DMZs. Borders, once established, forgotten and eroded.

We hugged after the hot dog, and I’d never hugged you before. I didn’t generally hug after hot dogs. At the time, it was all panic and self-loathing. It took me this long to know it was a come on. I didn’t come on. I fucking ran.

I brought you the shirts. I opened the door, after a knock, and found you there, your jeans below the muscle of your abdomen, life below it, a bulge to the left. Did I imagine it? Was it just the way they bent, your jeans?

Actually, my interpretation didn’t matter. You were on me like a donkey at a salt lick. And everything that I wanted to tell you over the years, the story of my life, an “If only you knew” story, was shrugged off. This was the only way to say it, mouth put to better use kissing yours. We just hugged and kissed for ages, it seemed, though it was probably only a few minutes, your flat stomach, tan with dark hair, against my suit jacket, your arms, the hot cold of them, around me. It was the most comforting thing that ever happened to me, settled a lot of that part of my life, illuminated it, found parts where I’d exaggerated the chaos, now shown to be, well, not really that bad.

“Why didn’t you let me?” you asked me.

“I didn’t know.”

“But you’re alright now.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” you said, and you smiled. And I stopped shaking. I kissed you deeper that day, the day you came in, than I’ve ever kissed anyone before. Your hand drifted around my belt, hooked into it in places, finally pulled it hard and twisted the slack in your fist. You pulled me with you against the mirror on the wall. I saw myself kiss you in it. I saw my arms go around your sides and loosen your jeans. I saw you pull my jacket open, the wrists bent, showing the muscles in your forearms. That’s what pure sex had looked like to me for years, each foray into fucking a replacement of you. They all kind of looked like you.

“You were the first,” you said, before I could. “I’ve been looking for you in other men ever since.”

I laughed. I opened up your jeans and turned us sideways, to the middle of the floor. I pulled your jeans down to the middle of your thighs, muscular and hairy, and I saw what I’d imagined so many times in my dorm room, my hand underneath the quilt that I’d grown up with, I saw your cock, a perfect J shape. I touched it with reservation, like it would disappear if I were rough. You wrapped your hand around mine and squeezed, because you were right, I’d never do it myself.

Our lips had been apart during this transaction, our noses in each other’s cheeks. As if we didn’t know what do. We seemed to notice this at the same time and rushed into each other. We were suddenly nothing but lips and saliva and skin over ribs and our chests, at the inhales, fighting each other for room. My shirt went to a hook. My pants dropped to the floor. We were jerking each other off. Dry, but sincere. It hurt. It was too much. We went to saliva, spit at breaks into our hands. It evaporated like rainwater on sidewalks in the summer. It was replaced just as quickly.

“You,” you said, into my mouth. “It’s been you.”

“Yes.”

We stole looks at each other in the mirrors. There you were from behind, from the side, my cock in your hand. It was unbelievable that I didn’t know this would happen when I woke up that morning. All the years that we didn’t know each other drifted into triviality. We’d always been there.

I came first, it rose and fell in a splat on your stomach, on your cock, on your toes. I used it for lube and you changed in my arm, your hard jolts turned to a smooth hum. I turned you around, marched you to the mirror and settled you with two hands against it. My hand came around again and you watched. I licked the skin on your neck and jerked you off faster, watching your face go slack, your eyelids slide down. And then, your fingers curling into your palms on the mirror, the final electric freeze and petrification, followed by three slaps of come on the mirror and dripping down.

My arms came around you and we held each other up. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” I said. I took my pocket square out of my jacket on the hook and wiped the mirror, then you.

You came in that day, looking for a shirt, trusting someone to know what you wanted. I knew what you wanted. For the first time, I gave it to you.

Pour

Full glass. Full glass. Full glass. Getting there. Empties placed. Tip taken, unfolded, stuffed into jar.

Man. “What can get for you?”

He turns around and asks his buddies, waited this whole time in line and is just now asking what they’re drinking, two Jack and Cokes, two Miller Lites, a Tanqueray on the rocks and a Corona. Beer in cooler behind me, remove caps. Miller Lites open easily, Buds are the worst. Corona needs my key. They’re placed on the mat. Two tall glasses and a rocks glass, ice, the scoop jammed into the bounty, just filled and spilling onto the rubber mat, the ice new and still crunchy and white, chilling parts of the rocks glass now, Turn for Tanqueray, pour one, two, three, four, five, six. Jack in the well just a bit out of reach, seated customer glass now empty and on the rail. Jack in hand, ribbed neck and square body, pour one, two, three, four and one, two, three, four. Coke, not diet, little red C in the upper right hand corner of the gun, adjust for slight kickback by holding the gun deep over the lip of the glass. Couple more squirts and bottles returned, straws in place while they lose their fizzy, grumpy bubbles, ready to be topped again. Math done in head. Beers: Miller Lite four fifty apiece, together nine, Corona five fifty, fourteen fifty. Drinks: Jack shots seven each, fourteen, twenty-eight fifty, Tanqueray, rocks call, nine. Empty customer glass was Ketel and cranberry.

“Thirty-seven fifty.”

“Keep it.”

Forty dollars. Derrick at the register. Start seated customer drink. “You ready?” glass shaken in front of him.

“Please”

Ketel, Cranberry. Money taken from pile in front of seated customer. Needs change. Derrick still at register.

“Sammy,” he says, one finger raised in the air behind him, pointing vaguely at where he guesses I am, “I can feel you when you just stand there, you know.” I walk up to his finger, rub my cheek along it, then lick the tip. “Where…,” he continues, “is the goddamn Campari on this thing?” I suck in the rest of the finger. It relaxes immediately in my mouth. I rub it with my tongue. “You think this is the first time I ever got my finger sucked by some straight boy? Show me the fucking Campari.” I slip back to the third joint and bite in.

“Ere,” I say around his fingertip, pointing with mine, “in de aperteefs.” The barback bumps into me and slams me into Derrick. His face turns and he looks at my lips, removing his finger. He rubs it on my neck, my own saliva cooling my skin. I push him away from the register by the hips.

Change made, two fifty in tip jar, thirteen for the seated customer.

The night patters on, a swirl of repeated customers, most I know, some I don’t. Some I only know by what they drink. A girl or two, neither pretty, but both friendly. I smile deep for them, stretch my t-shirt across my stomach wiping my palm. Derrick’s hands on me, his fingers into the skin of my forearm, or leaning on my back to clarify someone’s order. He’ll say “Behind you” as he passes, the service industry standard warning. I stick my ass out sometimes when he says it, just to feel his hands on my hips, to watch the customers swoon when he dry-grinds me, finishes it with a spanked ass for being naughty. When we pass face to face, me reaching for the J&B, him for the next bottle of Citron, we slow together, our lips close to each other, close enough to feel it. It’s busy tonight and he smells like sweat, looks like sweat. He opens the Citron with a yank, bursting the plastic seal. He whips the cap onto the floor, takes a pourer and shoves it in, all while watching me, all while he’s just inches away, shiny glass rivers curling around his chin, headed for his neck.

An angry drunk is ignored until he goes away, calling Derrick a little queeny prison bitch and me, once he found me, a closeted fucking cocktease. Another angry drunk finally just passes out when he’s ignored, his head down on his arms on the bar, like an ANgel, Derrick says into his walkie-talkie. The angel is woken by a bouncer, who is elbowed in the face for his troubles. There is noise, constant little roaring, the peas and carrots of the English language, broken by an occasional shriek, all over it, the thumping techno beat, a swirling heartbeat, we put glasses on the mats in time.

Shots are bought for us. Shots are bought for the regulars. We ignore the newcomers for this ritual, let them line up. We pour each other Jameson and drink it fast, keep a plastic bottle of the cheap stuff in the cooler for the customers, something I whip up with all the ignored strawberry schnapps, cans of juice and the well vodka before the doors open. I shake it, my thumb over the pourer, while Derrick watches me. Little bits of the sweet stuff christen my clothes for the night, escaping through the seal.

Derrick pours me a few shots of the Jameson without taking any himself. “I like you lubricated on Thursdays,” he says. I drink the first, but ignore the rest until he finds ways to force it on me, tapping me on the shoulder and shoving it to my face, or making the customers insist. They always do. They’re good like that. I drink one facing Derrick, and while my face is in the air, inhaling it, Derrick runs a hand up the inside of my thigh. I don’t react. He grabs my balls. I put the shot glass down and stare at him, arms akimbo until he lets go. He smiles after a little, disappointed pout.

The lights come up, last call, the bouncers finding and rounding up the leftovers, the arguments and the nice guys and the cruisers with their finds. The spills and the stick appear on the floor and the silence hits like a gong, Derrick and I talking too loud, used to talking too loud. A beer for me and one for him, cool in the bottle, the silent jealousy of the seated customer forgiven. I count the drawer. He counts the tips and places them in even piles on the bar. He doesn’t talk and neither do I until we’re done counting, until I’ve counted three times and made the final drop.

“You tease too much,” Derrick says, ashing into thin air. The ashes fall and seem to dissipate before they hit the floor. Maybe it’s because they don’t make any noise. I put the bottle down and slide off of the stool. I try to make him look at me, but he won’t, just stares ahead of him, eyelashes thick like palm fronds blinking slowly. I reach out for his chest, but he doesn’t flinch, simply exhales, a grey fog into the orange lights. I let my hand drop to his stomach, then ascend to his nipple. I flick it with my thumb and rub gently, almost imperceptibly.

“What are you doing, man?” he says, and takes my hand away.

I move in closer, slide my arm around his chest. His head turns to watch it and I go to his neck, under the short dreads and the sweat lines, under the curve of his jaw. A strong neck, large muscles and very dark skin that I lick sweetly. He puts up with it for a while and bends his head to me, pushing me away, forearm against my breastbone.

“Sammy.” I try to kiss him. He holds me away. “Sammy, you’re fucking straight, alright?”

My palm makes contact with the inside of his thigh and slides up, gripping at the deepest part, the backs of my fingers against his balls. He drops his arm and shakes his head, smoking and flicking the ashes with purpose. I kiss his neck again, raise his shirt in the front, over the stomach, flat and precise like a diver’s. His cigarette is over and he flicks it away. The butt skids into a sticky corner and stops.

“Don’t…,” he says, or almost does. I interrupt him at his cock, thick and straight, searching for release in his jeans. I let out the smallest laugh, a little pfft through my nose and pull his shirt up in two hands. He’s panting a little, the chest expanding and contracting deep and quick. I put my fingers in his belt, in his button, in his fly and then on his cock, over the underwear, something expensive and tight. Soft to the touch over his biting hard on. “Sammy…,” he says, more breath than voice, and turns finally to kiss me, to lay his mouth on mine, hot and strong and strange. His tongue in my gums. His lips, his lips like their own creatures.

He takes me by the shirt, bunched in his fist, and pulls me behind the bar. I almost trip on the mats. He presses me into the backbar, unstoppable, heavy and lean. His hard on is in my hip, the button of his jeans rolled into my stomach. He kisses me more, having taken over now, my shirt over my stomach, my jeans opened, my cock manhandled. He knows what to do with it, where to go. My back buckles at the first touch. He takes my shoulders and pushes me down to my knees. I’m confronted with his cock, enormous and uncut. I slide my lips over the tip, lick the foreskin between my lips and suck on it. He gulps air between his lips and grit teeth and stands on the balls of his feet. His fingers enter my hair and he grips tight. I let go and he lets up, then finds a new, stronger but less cruel hold of my head and pulls my face to his cock.

I let it in.

It’s massive and wrenching and awful. It chokes me, muffles me, gags me. He doesn’t relent. My jaw starts to ache. My cock aches too. He fucks my face hard, using long, deep strokes and grinding. Spit and precome drip from my mouth. I wipe my palm in it and start jerking off.

He makes two quick thrusts, yelps and the come itself arrives, explodes into my mouth. I spit it out quickly and return to my work. I haven’t been this hard in years, this desperate and shaky. He pulls out of my mouth, his cock still hard, waving above his zipper. He walks backward and trips a little, falling against the coolers. He watches me, shivering on my knees, my mouth agape. When he sees me begin to grimace, he slides off the cooler and bends over me on the floor. His tongue twists at the tip, little sweet flicks. I look down at the back of his head, amazed that this is finally happening, amazed that I’ve just sucked a man off, let him fuck my mouth. But there is no distraction from the tongue, nothing but an electric current and a panicked grab at the air. I come, pressed into the backbar enough to move the mat, my fingers dented by the corner of the backbar.

When I open my eyes, he is watching me. He smiles and pushes a drip of stray come between his lips with his thumb.

“No, Sammy,” he says, and puts his forefinger on my lips. “This does not mean that you get to keep the tips for the night.”

Sic Semper Tyrannis

The play is boring. Sebastian and I wait outside the box, yet another night of endless staring at each other, his hands toying at his sideburns, running down his chest when he’s sure no one’s looking to play at his breeches. I’ve been trying to forget those nights, after endless drilling and marching and drilling, the sounds of the men in tents gasping, some with the etiquette to escape to the woods, most just unbuttoning their Union suits, grabbing some bacon grease and quickly abusing themselves. It was the only thing to do. The smell of the men would loom in my nostrils, the heavy salt and sour of their sweat, the curdled food too, and the dizzy boring panic. Nauseating fear and lurid scraps of the living. All of us piled too close together in one clearing or another, mosquitoes, hard tack and buggery.

“Do you remember how easy it was for me?” Sebastian asks.

I can’t think of what night he’s referring to. It could be one of several. He could be talking about me or Hubert or Adam or Ogden. A couple walks by, some soldier and his young, pregnant wife, all of us trying to repopulate The Union as quickly as possible. She sees Sebastian and I and seems to test us, to mark if we’re serious enough for our posts. Her husband grasps the back of her elbow and clears her of the alcove.

“I’m going in,” Sebastian says. “Can’t do a damn thing out here anyway.”

I follow. I don’t know how I ever came to outrank him. That I am his thrall is obvious. He stands behind The President for a while, as a formality, then slips behind a curtain. Again, I follow. There are a few moments of listening to each other’s breathing, the smell of Sebastian, distinct enough to render me instantly tumescent, trapped in the folds of the velvet and silk.

“We were marching to Vicksburg,” he whispers, “and our legs were so tired that we made do in the mud. You were down in my breeches, and you remarked upon the beauty of my cock.”

I take his hand and slip it in. I am in an instant returned to the side of that dirt track, the taste of him between my lips.

“We were so tired every part of me felt like a cannonball,” I whisper into his ear.

“And every bit as hard,” he whispers back, before pulling at my mustache and sipping my breath. He grasps my cock too hard and I blurt a nasal moan. He takes it as a sign of weak obedience. It is. His hand withdraws from my breeches and he grasps instead either end of my mustache. He pulls me down. I go to my knees. He rends braces from trousers, dropping them with alacrity, and I pull his drawers down to his boots. “There you are sir. Attend to your man.”

I take him in hand and tease the tip of him with a few licks. His back falls to the wall. A roar waves across the audience behind me. I start at the noise, my hand searching for a weapon, and remember that it is only laughter. That it is a comedy. He knocks my cap off and forces me upon him. “Sergeant, teach your man how to do it. I’m just a bumpkin. I’ve never been under the hand of a superior before.” I take his full length into my throat, such that his short hairs tickle at my nose. He bends his knees into my armpits. My tongue twists along the underside of his cock as my mouth makes its sweet ascent and descent.

“Mmm. That foul evening in the muck and you were down my front, much as you are right now. I glowered at the blood-red clouds at sunset, you taking the last of me. I felt that if I should die the next day, this is what I would want for my last night on this earth, in the earth, really, as we were half sunk in the mud.”

He leans forward a bit, losing balance, and I raise my arm to shove him back against the wall, lest he fall upon me. I redouble my efforts, the laughter of the audience becoming more sincere behind me, the end of the play will be coming soon. He tastes of soap and savory, my tastebuds rubbing at his skin.

“I couldn’t move even if that should have been what I wanted,” he continued. “Your body and mine so lean from the drilling and the starvation, and pounding at each other each night.”

He’s trembling. It’s true that we do have a bit more on our squalid bones now. He has a pouch that my forehead slams into. It makes him more attractive, if anything. More like a real man than the walking specters that we were not so long ago. There is a howl of laughter from The President. It shocks me into a pause.

“No, sir, you must continue,” Sebastian says. “I’m quite beyond the threshold.”

I wasn’t planning on stopping. Sebastian’s cock, harder still than the bodies we had on the battlefield, sure that death was all that was ahead of us, not planning on anything more, is alight and pulsing. He seems to vibrate in my mouth, but it is easily explained by the numb friction in my lips. Pins and needles.

“And when I came, my soul rising from the… squalor… and the… mmm… insects and… it seemed that my balls were… gunpowder… and you… you were the fucking match. Mmmph!”

He’s almost there, epiphany and ecstasy now. I’m going to finish him in time. I hold at the tip of him and work simply with lips and tongue. He squirms like a dying squirrel, trying to force me into thrusts.

"Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap..." I don’t know what the line means, but it makes everyone laugh, including Sebastian. I am wrong, though. He is coming, the sweet and bitter sludge on my tongue and between gum and lip.

“Sic semper tyrannis!” I hear, and then a gunshot. Sebastian and I are recovering, panting, but we must hurry, as those laughs have quickly become screams.