(This is the last of the Will series. Thanks for putting up with it.)
I’ve never been one of those romantics who believes in One True Love. Any adult with a certain maturity and an openness of emotion encounters a number of people throughout a lifetime who, if they were to communicate and work hard together, could form an admirable and loving partnership.
Life is abundant in its offerings, and anyone who’s not a hermit or a misanthrope, if he keeps his eyes open, will spot many chances for not one, but many true loves. I’ve fallen in love many times in my life, and recognize and honor the feeling for what it is—a joyous thank-you to the heavens for the plenty in my life. I loved Spencer. I loved Will. Neither man made me want to throw over my longer-lasting, much deeper relationship. (I might not believe in monogamy, but I believe in commitment.) But while they lasted, I loved as best I could.
After his return from the failed attempt to become a monk, Will found a boyfriend. He was a younger guy, chubby, naive, only two years older than his son. The pair broke up and got back together with roughly the same frequency and regularity as the high and low tides, but during the good times, they seemed to be compatible together. Will and I were still friendly when we saw each other, though we hadn’t had sex for well over a year—long before he’d gone off on his aborted holy mission. I’d moved on to other fucks. My butthole had begun to close up again.
Then one Saturday afternoon, I went to the baths. I seem to recall being lonely that day, and restless, and not even so much horny as in need of human contact. So I drove down the freeway, rented a room for the afternoon, stripped down, and sat on my bed with the door open and the lights low. Men passed by. Some slowed down, others whizzed by.
After a long time, one man stopped in the doorway and leaned there. He was naked, save for a skimpy towel around his waist and a dark blue NYPD baseball cap. His hands rested on his hips. He stared at me. “I saw you come in,” he said in a low voice.
It took me a moment to realize it was Will.
At the time, Will to me was the essence of masculinity. His hairy body was like Alec Baldwin’s in his prime. Though his waist was slim, his chest was broad and muscular. It had been so long since I’d seen him undressed that it was difficult for me to look him in his brown puppy-dog eyes.
I kept wrenching my own eyes away from Will’s perfect pecs. He looked like an gym equipment model come to life. “So, I’d been thinking about coming to this place for a while,” he said to me, since I was still obviously too surprised to speak. “But I didn’t really think it would be my thing, and then I ended up near here for dinner, so I said what the hell, and then I saw you walk in, and wow, here you are.” He looked down. It was obvious he was mentally adding the word naked to his sentence.
“Yeah, here I am,” I said. My arms folded over my body like a Botticelli Venus. “And here you are.” I felt embarrassed by his presence, though it was obvious we’d both come for the same reasons.
“So . . . you wanna make out?” he asked, finally. Tentatively. As if he expected a no.
My hands trembled as I pulled him in and closed the door. I instantly remembered all the things I loved about my previous times with Will. The smell of him—soap and faded cologne and armpit and crotch. The way his hands touched me. The feel of his mouth on my body and his lips on mine, soft and needful. The taste of his salty skin. The way he enjoyed holding me down, even as a formality I protested and begged him to slow down a bit, before forcing himself inside me when he’d had enough foreplay and couldn’t hold off any longer.
The way he fucked, long and deep and rough, his nails digging into my shoulders and his hot breath on my neck as he pushed and panted his way to orgasm. Then afterward, turning me over and wiping me off, and gently using his mouth to help me climax. Once I’d shot, he held my cock in his mouth until it was completely soft, and crawled up beside me.
I felt sad. Sad that I didn’t have twin lives to lead, with him dominating one. Sad that I spent my time with him in regret, instead of enjoying him as the blessing he was. I felt sad that I thought of sex with him as something that’s bad for me, like a rich dessert that I enjoy but deep down suspect I shouldn’t have.
“This is the worst of all possible places to have had this reunion,” he said, as both of us listened to the crappy music thumping from the loudspeakers.
“You’re the best person I could have met here, though,” I murmured, still sore and dozy from exertion.
“That’s a little over the top to say, don’t you think?”
I laughed. “It did sound cheesy. But you know I think you’re one of the kindest, nicest, most gentle-hearted people I know, though. I’ve never kept that a secret from you. Even when we weren’t, well. . . .”
“I know, I know,” He lay there for a moment. “And you are loyal, obedient, thrifty, brave. . . .”
“Liar. I bet you were a boy scout, weren’t you?” I asked, suddenly sure of it. I could see him as a kid in the uniform. “I bet you were an eagle scout.”
“No, no,” he laughed. “Never an eagle scout, though I was a boy scout for a while." He paused. "Do you want to hear my boy scout story?” I nodded, and he put his arm around me as he murmured in my ear.I felt safe in his arms once more, and luxuriated in the sensation of his warmth, the rumble of his voice, the fur against my back, his presence. “Okay. I went through cub scouts and then Webelos and then into the boy scouts—I’ve never told this story to anyone before. You sure you want to hear it?”
It felt like we were in the dark again, at his old bachelor apartment, in the early days. The days when our love had been pure and unaffected by awkwardness. I smiled. “Of course I do.”
“Well, okay, but you’re the only person in the world I’ve ever told this story to.”
I nodded, honored.
“I joined the boy scouts and everything was cool at first, then within a couple of weeks the scoutmaster said that we’d be having a boy scout jamboree. Some of the other kids got excited about that. They started holding up their fingers like this.” Will closed his thumb and forefinger into a circle, and then held up his three remaining fingers in the traditional OK sign. “I didn’t know what it mean, but it was like a secret signal from the kids to the scoutmaster. They had this tradition of de-pantsing the new kids at jamboree, you see, and they were asking the scoutmaster if they could. He gave them the signal back, telling them it was okay. You’re sure you want to hear this?”
"Stop asking me that."
“I didn’t know it until the week before, but the jamboree was like a camp, except just for the weekend. My dad went along as a chaperone. It was cold, and we were all put into these cabins that weren’t much warmer. One of the things they did right off was to tell me and the other new kid from our cabin was to go looking for a ‘bacon straightener.’ We were going to have bacon for breakfast in the morning, you see, and they needed this bacon straightener to make it. There wasn’t such a thing of course. We went to the cabin they told us, and they said, ‘oh, the bacon straightener’s in cabin thirteen,’ and then we’d get to cabin thirteen and find out they’d lent it to cabin eight, and so on.”
I smiled and nodded, expecting the story to go on in the same comic vein.
“So they make us go from one cabin to the next until we’d gotten to all of them, and were catching on. Finally we get to the last destination and we’re cold and tired, and these guys grab my friend and they start ripping his pants off. He was yelling and screaming and it sounded like the most horrible thing in the world. Then they started in on me, but they only got as far as taking off my shoes before I struggled free and ran off.”
I’d always hated the cruelty of boys, growing up. “Fuck,” I said.
He had to clear his throat before he continued. “I don’t know why I was so ashamed. I was only what, eleven or twelve? I was a shy kid, and Catholic, and I didn’t want other guys seeing my body. So I ran off in the woods and wouldn’t come back. I only had my socks on. It started to rain, and it was freezing cold.
“At last when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went back. It was a couple of hours later. I was soaking wet. All the kids were standing out in front of the cabin with the scoutmaster, and my dad was there too. I walked up, all cold and wet, and my dad just looked at me. He said, Why didn’t you just let them take off your fucking pants, you little shit? Then he hauled off and slapped me across the face. He hit me so hard that it left a mark.”
I held my breath. I hadn’t expected it. It was only then that I remembered he’d never, ever mentioned his father to me before. I’d heard about the rest of his family, but not about his father.
Will was quiet for a moment, and his voice was husky. “I don’t know what upset me more. The fact that he didn’t mind slapping me in front of all those other kids, or the fact that he thought I should’ve just let them de-pants me. So we went home after the jamboree and two weeks later I told him I didn’t want to be in the boy scouts anymore." He paused again. "And that’s my boy scout story.”
I thought for a moment, and said what I was feeling. “That was a terrible story.”
He chuckled, sounding as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “Well. Yeah. I don’t know why I wanted to tell you that.”
But I knew.
He’d told me that story because he was afraid of me. He felt vulnerable, after letting himself have sex with me after we’d been separated for so long. He was that cold and wet boy who’s spent two hours out in the woods. He was worried I would slap him down, or that I’d set him up for humiliation.
Will was still that little boy scout, who’d run away into the woods and come back with his tail between his legs. He was still that kid who was perpetually frightened of doing wrong, when all he’d wanted to was save himself. He’d handed me the key to himself by sharing that story. I turned and kissed him deeply to thank him for the gift that he probably never even knew he’d given.
It was the last time we kissed, as it turned out. The last time we made love. It felt like closure, though. It felt like the end of a mystery, when much is explained and loose ends were tied. I took it for what it was, and folded it up and stored it away, so I could remember it later.
I often noted that Will had looked at me with skittish, frightened eyes—the eyes of a frightened doe in the woods, suddenly encountering a hunter. Now I knew they were really the eyes of a frightened boy scout, afraid of the mean boy who might yank the pants from him.
Showing posts with label will. Show all posts
Showing posts with label will. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Will: Fair Shake
(This is a continuation of Will: In the Dark, part of the Will series I started last week. The series will be concluded in the next installment.)
Will and I had a very natural, loving relationship for some time. He spent that Christmas at my house, guest of honor at one of the big dinners we used to have for friends and acquaintances who didn’t have family in the area. He sat by my side, and spent the evening having such friendly and in-depth conversations with my father that my dad still asks after him, to this day. He was my companion at my birthday party in the middle of winter. We helped each other with our gardens come spring.
Summer was supposed to be when he was leaving for the priesthood, and I spent most of the first half of the year dreading its arrival. The order with which he was supposed to become a recluse, however, had some kind of change of heart, and told him they wouldn’t be accepting him. It was a blow, pure and simple. He’d spent almost a year at that point studying and preparing himself. He’d made plans to put what little furniture he had into storage for his sons, he’d begun the process of putting his finances in order, of ridding himself of his apartment in preparation for the move. The wrench of having to jam on the brakes jarred him.
It jarred the both of us, really. I know that in this kind of story there’s always a moment in which the relationship starts to go bad. Ours didn’t rot; it didn’t grow so rancid that it’s difficult to look back upon. It did grow awkward, though. And it started soon after his rejection from the order.
“What did your advisor at the order tell you?” I asked, a few nights following the news, after we’d made love. He was in my arms, that small and perfect body curled onto mine in fur-covered curves and angles. I already knew the answer. He was moping enough, however, that I wanted him to say it aloud, so it would sink in.
“He told me to apply again next year,” he said, reluctantly. “That the entire board would be different next year, and that with him at its head, I’d be able to join.”
"A year," I pointed out.
“It’s a year,” he said, stubbornly.
“It’s only a year. You’ll apply again. You’ll get what you want. A year’s not long to wait.” Secretly, though, I was basking in the thought of another year with him.
He sighed. I knew he was thinking it over. I thought that inwardly he was agreeing with me, that he was seeing the rightness of what I was pointing out to him. I thought that in a moment he’d nod and agree with me, and I’d stroke his head until he was smiling once again. Obviously, I didn’t know him as well as I thought. A few moments later, he spoke up again. “Would you be upset if I started seeing someone else?”
I blinked. I wasn’t expecting that question. “What?” I asked. “No. Of course not.” It was, in a small way, a lie. I minded very much the thought of him with someone else. A selfish side of me wanted him all to myself, forever. Fortunately, that side was outvoted by the part of me that knew how stupid and irrational it was of me to expect such a thing. “Sweetie,” I said, very slowly, keeping my voice calm and level. “I want you to do what makes you happy. I've always said it’s unfair to ask you to love me.”
“I still love you,” he said, quietly. He meant it, that night. His eyes were still full of fear as he spoke. “I love you. I do. It’s just . . . now. . . .”
“I get it,” I told him hastily, so he wouldn’t have to say the words. I did get it. Before, I was a safe repository for his affections. I had an official status of temporary. We'd both knew that the relationship as it was, wasn’t going to last. It had an expiration date. Now, though, with an open-ended future, perhaps I wasn’t as practical for him. “I totally get it.”
“You’re upset,” he said, looking at me with the eyes of a scared doe.
I was. “I’m not,” I fibbed. “I’m fine. Really. I love you. I want you to do what you need to do. If you want to date someone, date someone. We'll still be friends. Nothing's different with us.”
Things had changed, though. I left a few minutes later, knowing and hating the fact.
Will hadn’t anyone in mind when he’d asked that question. Within the month, though, he had a guy he was dating—a six-foot-six hulk of a man with drooping shoulders, shaggy blond hair, and a jaw like a bludgeon. He looked like the son of Lurch, of the Addams family. In my journal of the time, I derisively called him ‘Lunk.’ The first time I met him, I saw him as a cruel parody of myself—the height exaggerated, the facial features rendered in broad strokes that were vaguely reminiscent of mine, in a funhouse mirror kind of way. Lunk weighed about a hundred pounds more than I, and walked like a hunchback. I was the first to shake his hand, though, and I spent nights at the bar talking to him and making him feel welcome and part of the group, just to prove there were no ill feelings.
Lunk didn’t last. There were others. There was a blond, chubby artist with the stammer. There was a floppy-haired literary type who, save for the fact that his features were dark where mine were fair, could have been my twin. Every new dating partner seemed to be some kind of attempt to find a man in my image, twisted and distorted as it sometimes seemed. And every time there was a new fellow introduced to me at the bar, I was the first out there with a handshake and a welcoming smile.
Even though inwardly, sometimes, that smile would be through gritted teeth.
Under the circumstances, it was normal that we’d grow apart. We were still friends, though gradually our sex died down to nothing. I felt as if sex with me kept him from a love life of his own. On his part, I think he imagined I was angry with him. We would stand close to each other when we went out together. He came to family occasions, still sat at the table at another Christmas.
But it wasn’t the same.
The final blow to the relationship came a year later. True to his advisor’s word, when Will applied again to the same order, he was accepted by the new board. All the plans he’d put on hold, he suddenly needed to put into motion again. He said goodbye to the last of my stand-ins, and gave up his apartment, and finalized his plans for a vow of poverty. At a party at my house, friends and family gathered to say goodbye. He and I hugged, and parted with tears in my eyes.
He was getting what he wanted. That should have been the end to it. But a week later, I was on gay.com chatting when a private message popped up from Will’s account there. What are you doing on? I asked. Is something wrong?
In my temporary confusion, I honestly thought that there was some kind of emergency that he’d been given special dispensation to resolve on the internet. Though why through gay.com, it never occurred to me. Nope, he typed back. Just so fucking bored.
I prodded him a little more. He was at the order of the brotherhood or whatever they called it, he told me. He wasn’t supposed to be on gay.com, or on the computer at all, but he was tired of everything monastic. He’d had a week of studying and praying and doing good work at the local bread bank, and apparently was over it. So he’d logged onto the biggest time waster of all, and declared himself bored.
I was a little stunned, to be honest. The admission of boredom seemed particularly puerile to me. Will had gotten what he’d wanted. He was doing what he’d wanted to do for years. He’d fucking given away his life, to do this. And after a week, he was bored?
Every day after that, he logged on to chat in the Michigan room about how bored and dissatisfied he was. It pissed me off, more than a little. Will had been heroic, in my eyes; he’d been a larger-than-life figure for wanting what he wanted, and going to extremes to achieve it. Listening to him bitch about the bad food and the lack of internet and the tediousness diminished him. He sounded petty. His reasons for dissatisfaction were picayune. It was like listening to a secretly-taped conversation from that U.S. Airways pilot who managed to his crash-land his plane in the Hudson a couple of years ago and save his passengers, confessing in confidence that he’d really only done it because he didn’t want all those packets of in-flight peanuts to go to waste. I wanted to fucking shake him. Besides. It's a religious order. What had he really thought it was going to be like? I don't think they're known for their spa-like facilities and in-cruise entertainment.
A week later, he was home again. Somehow he got a new apartment, and his furniture out of storage. He started looking for a job much like the job that had given him such dissatisfaction. The priesthood wasn’t for him, he told people. He was just glad to be back. And I, on some level, couldn’t forgive him.
It was unfair of me, but I couldn't help myself. Will had been the man who had always encouraged me to follow my heart and my artistry and do the one thing in my life that made me happiest. I thought he was doing the same. He was my model, my inspiration. I'd upheld him as an ideal, defended his choices to friends and family. I'd thought him noble.
Two weeks, he’d spent at that dream of his. Two fucking weeks before he’d given up and returned to the exact same life from which he wanted to escape. It wasn’t that he hadn’t given the dream a fair shake. He hadn’t even given it a shake at all.
I’d see him at the bars, and I’d wave and smile. I’d hug him, occasionally, in a friendly way. We’d make small talk. But it wasn’t the same. We’d look at each other across the crowds of people—him with those big, sad eyes, and me with my chipper smile, which was a mask, really.
It was a far, far cry from those nights when we’d be in the corner, pressed against each other, making out as if our lives depended on it. Every time I thought of those times, and of the nights of passion, and of the love and closeness we’d lavished upon each other, it sent a pang through my heart.
I thought the friendship was ruined, forever. And then, a year later, we made love one final time.
Will and I had a very natural, loving relationship for some time. He spent that Christmas at my house, guest of honor at one of the big dinners we used to have for friends and acquaintances who didn’t have family in the area. He sat by my side, and spent the evening having such friendly and in-depth conversations with my father that my dad still asks after him, to this day. He was my companion at my birthday party in the middle of winter. We helped each other with our gardens come spring.
Summer was supposed to be when he was leaving for the priesthood, and I spent most of the first half of the year dreading its arrival. The order with which he was supposed to become a recluse, however, had some kind of change of heart, and told him they wouldn’t be accepting him. It was a blow, pure and simple. He’d spent almost a year at that point studying and preparing himself. He’d made plans to put what little furniture he had into storage for his sons, he’d begun the process of putting his finances in order, of ridding himself of his apartment in preparation for the move. The wrench of having to jam on the brakes jarred him.
It jarred the both of us, really. I know that in this kind of story there’s always a moment in which the relationship starts to go bad. Ours didn’t rot; it didn’t grow so rancid that it’s difficult to look back upon. It did grow awkward, though. And it started soon after his rejection from the order.
“What did your advisor at the order tell you?” I asked, a few nights following the news, after we’d made love. He was in my arms, that small and perfect body curled onto mine in fur-covered curves and angles. I already knew the answer. He was moping enough, however, that I wanted him to say it aloud, so it would sink in.
“He told me to apply again next year,” he said, reluctantly. “That the entire board would be different next year, and that with him at its head, I’d be able to join.”
"A year," I pointed out.
“It’s a year,” he said, stubbornly.
“It’s only a year. You’ll apply again. You’ll get what you want. A year’s not long to wait.” Secretly, though, I was basking in the thought of another year with him.
He sighed. I knew he was thinking it over. I thought that inwardly he was agreeing with me, that he was seeing the rightness of what I was pointing out to him. I thought that in a moment he’d nod and agree with me, and I’d stroke his head until he was smiling once again. Obviously, I didn’t know him as well as I thought. A few moments later, he spoke up again. “Would you be upset if I started seeing someone else?”
I blinked. I wasn’t expecting that question. “What?” I asked. “No. Of course not.” It was, in a small way, a lie. I minded very much the thought of him with someone else. A selfish side of me wanted him all to myself, forever. Fortunately, that side was outvoted by the part of me that knew how stupid and irrational it was of me to expect such a thing. “Sweetie,” I said, very slowly, keeping my voice calm and level. “I want you to do what makes you happy. I've always said it’s unfair to ask you to love me.”
“I still love you,” he said, quietly. He meant it, that night. His eyes were still full of fear as he spoke. “I love you. I do. It’s just . . . now. . . .”
“I get it,” I told him hastily, so he wouldn’t have to say the words. I did get it. Before, I was a safe repository for his affections. I had an official status of temporary. We'd both knew that the relationship as it was, wasn’t going to last. It had an expiration date. Now, though, with an open-ended future, perhaps I wasn’t as practical for him. “I totally get it.”
“You’re upset,” he said, looking at me with the eyes of a scared doe.
I was. “I’m not,” I fibbed. “I’m fine. Really. I love you. I want you to do what you need to do. If you want to date someone, date someone. We'll still be friends. Nothing's different with us.”
Things had changed, though. I left a few minutes later, knowing and hating the fact.
Will hadn’t anyone in mind when he’d asked that question. Within the month, though, he had a guy he was dating—a six-foot-six hulk of a man with drooping shoulders, shaggy blond hair, and a jaw like a bludgeon. He looked like the son of Lurch, of the Addams family. In my journal of the time, I derisively called him ‘Lunk.’ The first time I met him, I saw him as a cruel parody of myself—the height exaggerated, the facial features rendered in broad strokes that were vaguely reminiscent of mine, in a funhouse mirror kind of way. Lunk weighed about a hundred pounds more than I, and walked like a hunchback. I was the first to shake his hand, though, and I spent nights at the bar talking to him and making him feel welcome and part of the group, just to prove there were no ill feelings.
Lunk didn’t last. There were others. There was a blond, chubby artist with the stammer. There was a floppy-haired literary type who, save for the fact that his features were dark where mine were fair, could have been my twin. Every new dating partner seemed to be some kind of attempt to find a man in my image, twisted and distorted as it sometimes seemed. And every time there was a new fellow introduced to me at the bar, I was the first out there with a handshake and a welcoming smile.
Even though inwardly, sometimes, that smile would be through gritted teeth.
Under the circumstances, it was normal that we’d grow apart. We were still friends, though gradually our sex died down to nothing. I felt as if sex with me kept him from a love life of his own. On his part, I think he imagined I was angry with him. We would stand close to each other when we went out together. He came to family occasions, still sat at the table at another Christmas.
But it wasn’t the same.
The final blow to the relationship came a year later. True to his advisor’s word, when Will applied again to the same order, he was accepted by the new board. All the plans he’d put on hold, he suddenly needed to put into motion again. He said goodbye to the last of my stand-ins, and gave up his apartment, and finalized his plans for a vow of poverty. At a party at my house, friends and family gathered to say goodbye. He and I hugged, and parted with tears in my eyes.
He was getting what he wanted. That should have been the end to it. But a week later, I was on gay.com chatting when a private message popped up from Will’s account there. What are you doing on? I asked. Is something wrong?
In my temporary confusion, I honestly thought that there was some kind of emergency that he’d been given special dispensation to resolve on the internet. Though why through gay.com, it never occurred to me. Nope, he typed back. Just so fucking bored.
I prodded him a little more. He was at the order of the brotherhood or whatever they called it, he told me. He wasn’t supposed to be on gay.com, or on the computer at all, but he was tired of everything monastic. He’d had a week of studying and praying and doing good work at the local bread bank, and apparently was over it. So he’d logged onto the biggest time waster of all, and declared himself bored.
I was a little stunned, to be honest. The admission of boredom seemed particularly puerile to me. Will had gotten what he’d wanted. He was doing what he’d wanted to do for years. He’d fucking given away his life, to do this. And after a week, he was bored?
Every day after that, he logged on to chat in the Michigan room about how bored and dissatisfied he was. It pissed me off, more than a little. Will had been heroic, in my eyes; he’d been a larger-than-life figure for wanting what he wanted, and going to extremes to achieve it. Listening to him bitch about the bad food and the lack of internet and the tediousness diminished him. He sounded petty. His reasons for dissatisfaction were picayune. It was like listening to a secretly-taped conversation from that U.S. Airways pilot who managed to his crash-land his plane in the Hudson a couple of years ago and save his passengers, confessing in confidence that he’d really only done it because he didn’t want all those packets of in-flight peanuts to go to waste. I wanted to fucking shake him. Besides. It's a religious order. What had he really thought it was going to be like? I don't think they're known for their spa-like facilities and in-cruise entertainment.
A week later, he was home again. Somehow he got a new apartment, and his furniture out of storage. He started looking for a job much like the job that had given him such dissatisfaction. The priesthood wasn’t for him, he told people. He was just glad to be back. And I, on some level, couldn’t forgive him.
It was unfair of me, but I couldn't help myself. Will had been the man who had always encouraged me to follow my heart and my artistry and do the one thing in my life that made me happiest. I thought he was doing the same. He was my model, my inspiration. I'd upheld him as an ideal, defended his choices to friends and family. I'd thought him noble.
Two weeks, he’d spent at that dream of his. Two fucking weeks before he’d given up and returned to the exact same life from which he wanted to escape. It wasn’t that he hadn’t given the dream a fair shake. He hadn’t even given it a shake at all.
I’d see him at the bars, and I’d wave and smile. I’d hug him, occasionally, in a friendly way. We’d make small talk. But it wasn’t the same. We’d look at each other across the crowds of people—him with those big, sad eyes, and me with my chipper smile, which was a mask, really.
It was a far, far cry from those nights when we’d be in the corner, pressed against each other, making out as if our lives depended on it. Every time I thought of those times, and of the nights of passion, and of the love and closeness we’d lavished upon each other, it sent a pang through my heart.
I thought the friendship was ruined, forever. And then, a year later, we made love one final time.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Will: In the Dark
(This is a continuation of Will: Perfect, which itself is part of a series that took up most of last week. It has a couple more installments to go.)
I'm most myself when I'm lying down in the dark with someone else, just talking. That darkness, that place where we rely on every sense save sight, is where we fill the quiet room with furnishings of our own words and imaginations. It’s a liberating space between sleep and consciousness. Nothing in it is more important there than memory and past experience. There's no worry about whether my hair's a mess, or whether I’m spitting when I talk. There's just me, and the person I'm with, and our words and touch.
I used to bask in those evenings with Will. The first night we spent together was not the last, by any means. About once a month, or sometimes more if it wasn’t a problem at home, I’d arrive at his house with a small overnight pack, a smile on my face, and a hard-on hanging down the leg of my jeans. Even on the weeks in which we weren’t overnighting together, we’d connect either at his place or at mine and spend the evening together.
It was the one period of my life, after I’d flipped to the top, that I returned to bottoming on more than a once-every-dog’s-age basis. I knew with him that I’d be fucked, that within a few minutes of closing the door behind us, he’d have me face-down on his mattress, clothes discarded on the floor, his strong, relentless dick buried seven inches inside me. I loved giving that to him. I loved that my ass was his playground, where he got to do all the things of which he’d always dreamed during his marriage but never tried. I liked knowing I’d been his first, and cherished knowing that handsome man had chosen me over anyone else as the man to take his gay virginity.
It was the last period in my life in which I once again grew accustomed to the sweet security of surrendering myself and my body, while being held in another man’s arms. I never feel warmer, or more secure.
But then, afterward, when my hole was sore and he was panting and spent, we would fall back onto the pillows and reach out for each other in the darkness. We wouldn’t hold back, when we talked. Anything was fair game.
It was during one of the first evenings we spent naked and talking on his bed that I found myself emboldened to ask about what he’d told me, the night he met. Will wanted to be a priest. Normally the Catholic church wasn’t interested in accepting older candidates for study and ordination, but there were certain orders, in remote sections of the country, that secluded members and set them on that clerical path. It was in the dark that Will confided in me that he felt his everyday job was unfulfilling. He looked in the mirror, he told me, and saw an old man staring back at him. He couldn’t bear to leave his fifties without making a change. Even if it meant abandoning it all—friends, security, family—he wanted to spend the remaining years of his life committed to doing good works. He wanted to comfort those in need.
I admired him for that. He was ready to take a big leap in his life—bigger than the divorce, bigger than his own admission, late in life, of his sexual desires. In my eyes, Will was heroic. He was going after what he really wanted.
I wanted to know how he reconciled being gay with his Catholicism; I was not a fan of the Catholic church, then or now. It has always seemed to me to thrive on on the cultivation of fear and inadequacy. I didn’t agree with its policies or its politics, or even really with its tenets.
He said that he doesn't believe God can make anything bad. Will regarded his sexuality as a gift to be enjoyed with the ones he loved, which always made me feel giddy inside. And yet it's a gift that he was willing to give up, along with the gifts of friends and family and music, in service to an entity he’d never seen or heard speak. There really was something admirable in that.
Every once in a while I believe I'm graced with a glimpse of how different my life could be if I'd chosen another path. Now and again I meet people at forks in the road. I continue down the crazy thoroughfare I've chosen for myself, happy to be traveling it, for the most part. But I often turn back my head, see the smaller artery disappearing off in another direction, and I wonder what might have been.
I could see so easily a life with Will. We both knew it would never happen. Yet in private moments I could imagine myself partnering with him and doing the things I did best—fashioning a home for him better than that apartment for the newly divorced. Making him meals. Encouraging him to do the things that were important for him. Yet when the things that were most important for him were the ones that would soon take him away, what was the use of the dream?
During my time with Spencer, readers occasionally would accuse me of not understanding what it was like for him to love someone who was leaving. But I did, because ten years ago, I was in the same position. I knew that another fork in the road was rapidly approaching. The day was arriving, and soon, when Will would be waving goodbye to me from another car headed a different direction from my own.
It really was an act of grace that made us friends. For a spell, he was the closest male friend I’ve ever had. Every time I think of Will it's still with an affection I don't even feel for most of my birth family. I didn’t want him to go. But I didn’t say anything. If I did, it would be as a joke—I’d tell him it would be a lot easier on me if he'd join one of those monastic communities that makes fudge or cheese, so at least I could get a good hamper from him every Christmas. Making jokes was easier than admitting to him how bereft I really felt at his eventual, but certain departure.
Don’t ever suggest to me I didn’t know how Spencer felt, during our time together. Will, my dearest friend, my lover, each day was coming closer to making a choice to discard our friendship behind with the detritus of the rest of his life. It haunted me, though I spoke of it as little as possible.
He knew, though. When I’d grow silent and teary-eyed lying next to him, thinking of it, I thought the dark would conceal my pain. Then I’d feel his hand searching for mine, warm and strong, giving me the comfort I never told him I needed.
I'm most myself when I'm lying down in the dark with someone else, just talking. That darkness, that place where we rely on every sense save sight, is where we fill the quiet room with furnishings of our own words and imaginations. It’s a liberating space between sleep and consciousness. Nothing in it is more important there than memory and past experience. There's no worry about whether my hair's a mess, or whether I’m spitting when I talk. There's just me, and the person I'm with, and our words and touch.
I used to bask in those evenings with Will. The first night we spent together was not the last, by any means. About once a month, or sometimes more if it wasn’t a problem at home, I’d arrive at his house with a small overnight pack, a smile on my face, and a hard-on hanging down the leg of my jeans. Even on the weeks in which we weren’t overnighting together, we’d connect either at his place or at mine and spend the evening together.
It was the one period of my life, after I’d flipped to the top, that I returned to bottoming on more than a once-every-dog’s-age basis. I knew with him that I’d be fucked, that within a few minutes of closing the door behind us, he’d have me face-down on his mattress, clothes discarded on the floor, his strong, relentless dick buried seven inches inside me. I loved giving that to him. I loved that my ass was his playground, where he got to do all the things of which he’d always dreamed during his marriage but never tried. I liked knowing I’d been his first, and cherished knowing that handsome man had chosen me over anyone else as the man to take his gay virginity.
It was the last period in my life in which I once again grew accustomed to the sweet security of surrendering myself and my body, while being held in another man’s arms. I never feel warmer, or more secure.
But then, afterward, when my hole was sore and he was panting and spent, we would fall back onto the pillows and reach out for each other in the darkness. We wouldn’t hold back, when we talked. Anything was fair game.
It was during one of the first evenings we spent naked and talking on his bed that I found myself emboldened to ask about what he’d told me, the night he met. Will wanted to be a priest. Normally the Catholic church wasn’t interested in accepting older candidates for study and ordination, but there were certain orders, in remote sections of the country, that secluded members and set them on that clerical path. It was in the dark that Will confided in me that he felt his everyday job was unfulfilling. He looked in the mirror, he told me, and saw an old man staring back at him. He couldn’t bear to leave his fifties without making a change. Even if it meant abandoning it all—friends, security, family—he wanted to spend the remaining years of his life committed to doing good works. He wanted to comfort those in need.
I admired him for that. He was ready to take a big leap in his life—bigger than the divorce, bigger than his own admission, late in life, of his sexual desires. In my eyes, Will was heroic. He was going after what he really wanted.
I wanted to know how he reconciled being gay with his Catholicism; I was not a fan of the Catholic church, then or now. It has always seemed to me to thrive on on the cultivation of fear and inadequacy. I didn’t agree with its policies or its politics, or even really with its tenets.
He said that he doesn't believe God can make anything bad. Will regarded his sexuality as a gift to be enjoyed with the ones he loved, which always made me feel giddy inside. And yet it's a gift that he was willing to give up, along with the gifts of friends and family and music, in service to an entity he’d never seen or heard speak. There really was something admirable in that.
Every once in a while I believe I'm graced with a glimpse of how different my life could be if I'd chosen another path. Now and again I meet people at forks in the road. I continue down the crazy thoroughfare I've chosen for myself, happy to be traveling it, for the most part. But I often turn back my head, see the smaller artery disappearing off in another direction, and I wonder what might have been.
I could see so easily a life with Will. We both knew it would never happen. Yet in private moments I could imagine myself partnering with him and doing the things I did best—fashioning a home for him better than that apartment for the newly divorced. Making him meals. Encouraging him to do the things that were important for him. Yet when the things that were most important for him were the ones that would soon take him away, what was the use of the dream?
During my time with Spencer, readers occasionally would accuse me of not understanding what it was like for him to love someone who was leaving. But I did, because ten years ago, I was in the same position. I knew that another fork in the road was rapidly approaching. The day was arriving, and soon, when Will would be waving goodbye to me from another car headed a different direction from my own.
It really was an act of grace that made us friends. For a spell, he was the closest male friend I’ve ever had. Every time I think of Will it's still with an affection I don't even feel for most of my birth family. I didn’t want him to go. But I didn’t say anything. If I did, it would be as a joke—I’d tell him it would be a lot easier on me if he'd join one of those monastic communities that makes fudge or cheese, so at least I could get a good hamper from him every Christmas. Making jokes was easier than admitting to him how bereft I really felt at his eventual, but certain departure.
Don’t ever suggest to me I didn’t know how Spencer felt, during our time together. Will, my dearest friend, my lover, each day was coming closer to making a choice to discard our friendship behind with the detritus of the rest of his life. It haunted me, though I spoke of it as little as possible.
He knew, though. When I’d grow silent and teary-eyed lying next to him, thinking of it, I thought the dark would conceal my pain. Then I’d feel his hand searching for mine, warm and strong, giving me the comfort I never told him I needed.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Will: Perfect
(This post is a continuation of Getting a Room, and will itself be continued.)
“Hi.” Will stood before me bare-footed. One of his compact, fleshy hands was thrust deep into the pocket of his athletic shorts. The other lingered on the knob of his front door. He wore a red T-shirt. Red was one of his colors. It suited his dark skin; it directed the eyes to his body, his ass, his face. Will was a full head shorter than I, and he looked up at me with long, scared eyes. “I’m really glad you came.” In afterthought, he added, “Welcome to my home.”
It sounded like the kind of line he’d been taught by a parent, as a child, oddly formal in the face of what I’d come for. “Thanks,” I said, stepping inside. It was not a fancy place. The apartment complex might as well have been named The By-the-Highway Hideaway for Newly-Divorced Men. The rent here was cheap, the apartments cramped and dark, their windows occluded by hulking air conditioning units and the despair of the single. I had to edge my way in through the narrow hallway and into the cramped living room, where on the second-best furniture from his marriage Will had strewn newspapers and framed photographs of his sons. There wasn’t much in the way of decor, or frills. Everything was functional, and sparse, and obviously salvaged.
“So,” he said. His dark eyes rested on me, mournful. “I hope you didn’t have any problems getting away.”
I hadn’t. I swallowed, and licked my lips, slightly nervous. “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“And you can . . . stay all night?”
I nodded. It was the year 2000 and I’d been in my relationship for a good decade by that point. I’d never once broken the first and foremost of my own rules; that is, I’d never spent the night, the entire night, with anyone else. I’d had a few encounters from which I’d stumbled home at one or two in the morning. When I’d gone traveling, I’d stayed out mighty late, or had people back to my hotel room until well after midnight. But never before had I ever intentionally slept over with anyone, all night long, in a premeditated fashion. (Not until Spencer would I do it again.)
“You don’t have to,” he said. “We can mess around, then you can leave if you need to. I don’t know what you told—“
“Will?” I interrupted. He blinked, and stopped mid-sentence. “Shut up.”
I pulled him to me, tipped my head so I wouldn’t collide with his baseball cap, and then kissed him deeply.
We went upstairs to his bedroom. When he opened the doors, I was taken aback by the heat inside. At some point before my arrival, Will had collected every candle he’d owned, and probably had picked up a few at the dollar store, lit them, and placed them around the room. Tea lights shone from the dresser in massed bunches. Fat chunky pillars adorned the television. On the nightstands were an assortment of white, waxen lights burning at different heights. The bed itself was adorned with a coverlet that was turned down to expose its homespun border of periwinkles.
I blinked in astonishment. It was really one of the loveliest things that anyone had done for me. “Oh my gosh,” I said, turning to him.
He looked sheepish. For such a handsome and buff guy, Will honestly had very little in the way of self-confidence. “Is it okay?” he asked. “I wanted it to be perfect for you.”
I melted. “It’s very okay!” I told him.
In some ways, it was difficult to believe he was fifteen years my senior at that point. Case in point: his next statement was, “I’ve just never . . . you know. Had intercourse with a man before. Like we did last week. And I was hoping this time I could . . . do it right.”
I swallowed, hard. My stomach seemed to have hatched hummingbirds. “I want you inside me again,” I told him at last, once I could speak. “I want you to fuck me.”
“Do you want me to put on a condom this time?” He’d probably gone out and bought them in all sizes, colors, and varieties, if I knew him.
“No,” I said. “I want to feel you in me. Nothing between us.”
He nodded. Obviously he wanted that, too.
I’d hosed out earlier, and made myself sweet-smelling. He lay me down on the bed and undressed me, his short and strong fingers tugging at my buttons, pulling down the zipper, gently unlacing my boots. Then it was his turn to remove his clothing. He did it both with a charming self-consciousness, knowing my eyes were upon him, and the grace of a stripper.
His body was beautiful. His dick was angry and hard, and already laced with pre-cum. When he climbed between my legs, they automatically parted for him. He kissed me deeply, as his hips pushed against mine, raising them up so that my hole was exposed for him. He didn’t bother to eat me out. He didn’t know how, probably. He’d told me that his experience with guys had been limited to a couple of blow jobs and a lot of fantasy; he hadn’t even watched any porn, at that point.
Married men, though—divorced men too—know how to fuck. He didn’t need me to teach him.
I’m not usually fond of Vaseline as a lube, but it was all he had. I’m not usually able to relax enough to be fucked without being eaten and loosened slowly. That night, though, his desire and mine were enough. The candlelight was enough. My ass rose to meet his cock, once I was face-down on the bed and he had gently arranged the pillows to support my chest and head. He pushed his red and angry flesh against my hole. It parted, and he slid inside without effort, and without any pain for me.
I remember that night vividly. I felt as if my hole were afire with him in it. He penetrated deeply and without any of the awkwardness or pain we’d had during the aborted fuck at Mark’s place the week before. Because we had the entire night, neither of us was in a hurry. He fucked me slowly, pausing between thrusts, his cock rigid and insistent inside a hole that miraculously responded as if it were fucked regularly.
We didn’t talk much. I let out small, contented sighs. He would kiss my neck and grunt to himself with every thrust. From time to time he’d pause to wipe away the sweat from my forehead, caused by the heat of the massed candles and our bodies. Never did he completely stop the rhythm of in and out, in and out, deeply in and slowly out.
For close to an hour he fucked me, several times bringing me close to orgasm without touching myself. I’d seem to get there, and cry out to beg for him to make it happen, but then that delicious sensation of dissolving and dissipating would ebb away until his dick brought me to that point yet again with another dozen or so sharp thrusts. “I’m getting close,” he finally told me. I could have told him that. No longer was he taking his time. He was battering away at my hole, holding himself up by the forearms and using his hips as a jackhammer. “I’ll pull out,” he promised.
“Please don’t,” I begged him, genuinely afraid he might.
“I really should,” he whispered. “I don’t want to put you in danger.”
This was from the man whose sexual experience outside his marriage had been on the receiving end of two blow jobs. I could live with that level of risk. “I want you to stay in,” I begged him. “I want you to shoot in me.”
“Really?” he asked. I knew that if I looked over my shoulder, I’d see surprise in those large eyes. But I was too much the cunt at the moment to turn. I wanted his release as much as he did. I buried my forehead in the pillow and waited for it. My ass clenched at his dick, willing it to shoot.
I could tell the moment he was on the verge. My hole ached as his dick swelled and buried itself to its deepest point. I had to catch my breath, because he seemed to grow to twice his previous size as the first blast of semen erupted from him. “I think I’m in love with you,” he blurted out as he came, and then followed it up with an anguished cry. It was a howl of pain and pleasure, of need unleashed after so long. It was the first orgasm he’d ever had from fucking a man. I knew he’d remember it for the rest of his life.
I would, too.
“Don’t pull out,” I begged him, when he was quiet and still atop me. I felt him nod against my shoulder blades.
It was a few moments before he answered, “I’m sorry that I—“
“I love you too,” I told him, shushing the apology before it came. I didn’t want to hear he was sorry for saying that. “Don’t. Just don’t.” I sighed, contented, knowing that his cock was softening inside me. “There’s never enough love in this world. Don’t regret having it for anyone.”
“Okay,” said the strong and built man in a very small and quiet voice. Then, after a moment more, he reached for my hands, to hold them tight. His voice was sleepy when he asked, “Did I do all right?”
“Oh god,” I whispered back, squeezing his fingers. “More than that.”
He rumbled, happy to hear it. A few moments later, he was asleep, his dick and sperm still in me.
I lay like that, with a hundred and seventy pounds of fur and muscle atop and in me, for what seemed like an eternity. The room was stuffy and their heat and the human blanket were making me sweat again. My ass was beginning to ache; it hadn’t been used like that in an awfully long time. I had difficulty breathing, and was being pulverized into the mattress.
But you know what? It was perfect, and I was perfectly happy.
“Hi.” Will stood before me bare-footed. One of his compact, fleshy hands was thrust deep into the pocket of his athletic shorts. The other lingered on the knob of his front door. He wore a red T-shirt. Red was one of his colors. It suited his dark skin; it directed the eyes to his body, his ass, his face. Will was a full head shorter than I, and he looked up at me with long, scared eyes. “I’m really glad you came.” In afterthought, he added, “Welcome to my home.”
It sounded like the kind of line he’d been taught by a parent, as a child, oddly formal in the face of what I’d come for. “Thanks,” I said, stepping inside. It was not a fancy place. The apartment complex might as well have been named The By-the-Highway Hideaway for Newly-Divorced Men. The rent here was cheap, the apartments cramped and dark, their windows occluded by hulking air conditioning units and the despair of the single. I had to edge my way in through the narrow hallway and into the cramped living room, where on the second-best furniture from his marriage Will had strewn newspapers and framed photographs of his sons. There wasn’t much in the way of decor, or frills. Everything was functional, and sparse, and obviously salvaged.
“So,” he said. His dark eyes rested on me, mournful. “I hope you didn’t have any problems getting away.”
I hadn’t. I swallowed, and licked my lips, slightly nervous. “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“And you can . . . stay all night?”
I nodded. It was the year 2000 and I’d been in my relationship for a good decade by that point. I’d never once broken the first and foremost of my own rules; that is, I’d never spent the night, the entire night, with anyone else. I’d had a few encounters from which I’d stumbled home at one or two in the morning. When I’d gone traveling, I’d stayed out mighty late, or had people back to my hotel room until well after midnight. But never before had I ever intentionally slept over with anyone, all night long, in a premeditated fashion. (Not until Spencer would I do it again.)
“You don’t have to,” he said. “We can mess around, then you can leave if you need to. I don’t know what you told—“
“Will?” I interrupted. He blinked, and stopped mid-sentence. “Shut up.”
I pulled him to me, tipped my head so I wouldn’t collide with his baseball cap, and then kissed him deeply.
We went upstairs to his bedroom. When he opened the doors, I was taken aback by the heat inside. At some point before my arrival, Will had collected every candle he’d owned, and probably had picked up a few at the dollar store, lit them, and placed them around the room. Tea lights shone from the dresser in massed bunches. Fat chunky pillars adorned the television. On the nightstands were an assortment of white, waxen lights burning at different heights. The bed itself was adorned with a coverlet that was turned down to expose its homespun border of periwinkles.
I blinked in astonishment. It was really one of the loveliest things that anyone had done for me. “Oh my gosh,” I said, turning to him.
He looked sheepish. For such a handsome and buff guy, Will honestly had very little in the way of self-confidence. “Is it okay?” he asked. “I wanted it to be perfect for you.”
I melted. “It’s very okay!” I told him.
In some ways, it was difficult to believe he was fifteen years my senior at that point. Case in point: his next statement was, “I’ve just never . . . you know. Had intercourse with a man before. Like we did last week. And I was hoping this time I could . . . do it right.”
I swallowed, hard. My stomach seemed to have hatched hummingbirds. “I want you inside me again,” I told him at last, once I could speak. “I want you to fuck me.”
“Do you want me to put on a condom this time?” He’d probably gone out and bought them in all sizes, colors, and varieties, if I knew him.
“No,” I said. “I want to feel you in me. Nothing between us.”
He nodded. Obviously he wanted that, too.
I’d hosed out earlier, and made myself sweet-smelling. He lay me down on the bed and undressed me, his short and strong fingers tugging at my buttons, pulling down the zipper, gently unlacing my boots. Then it was his turn to remove his clothing. He did it both with a charming self-consciousness, knowing my eyes were upon him, and the grace of a stripper.
His body was beautiful. His dick was angry and hard, and already laced with pre-cum. When he climbed between my legs, they automatically parted for him. He kissed me deeply, as his hips pushed against mine, raising them up so that my hole was exposed for him. He didn’t bother to eat me out. He didn’t know how, probably. He’d told me that his experience with guys had been limited to a couple of blow jobs and a lot of fantasy; he hadn’t even watched any porn, at that point.
Married men, though—divorced men too—know how to fuck. He didn’t need me to teach him.
I’m not usually fond of Vaseline as a lube, but it was all he had. I’m not usually able to relax enough to be fucked without being eaten and loosened slowly. That night, though, his desire and mine were enough. The candlelight was enough. My ass rose to meet his cock, once I was face-down on the bed and he had gently arranged the pillows to support my chest and head. He pushed his red and angry flesh against my hole. It parted, and he slid inside without effort, and without any pain for me.
I remember that night vividly. I felt as if my hole were afire with him in it. He penetrated deeply and without any of the awkwardness or pain we’d had during the aborted fuck at Mark’s place the week before. Because we had the entire night, neither of us was in a hurry. He fucked me slowly, pausing between thrusts, his cock rigid and insistent inside a hole that miraculously responded as if it were fucked regularly.
We didn’t talk much. I let out small, contented sighs. He would kiss my neck and grunt to himself with every thrust. From time to time he’d pause to wipe away the sweat from my forehead, caused by the heat of the massed candles and our bodies. Never did he completely stop the rhythm of in and out, in and out, deeply in and slowly out.
For close to an hour he fucked me, several times bringing me close to orgasm without touching myself. I’d seem to get there, and cry out to beg for him to make it happen, but then that delicious sensation of dissolving and dissipating would ebb away until his dick brought me to that point yet again with another dozen or so sharp thrusts. “I’m getting close,” he finally told me. I could have told him that. No longer was he taking his time. He was battering away at my hole, holding himself up by the forearms and using his hips as a jackhammer. “I’ll pull out,” he promised.
“Please don’t,” I begged him, genuinely afraid he might.
“I really should,” he whispered. “I don’t want to put you in danger.”
This was from the man whose sexual experience outside his marriage had been on the receiving end of two blow jobs. I could live with that level of risk. “I want you to stay in,” I begged him. “I want you to shoot in me.”
“Really?” he asked. I knew that if I looked over my shoulder, I’d see surprise in those large eyes. But I was too much the cunt at the moment to turn. I wanted his release as much as he did. I buried my forehead in the pillow and waited for it. My ass clenched at his dick, willing it to shoot.
I could tell the moment he was on the verge. My hole ached as his dick swelled and buried itself to its deepest point. I had to catch my breath, because he seemed to grow to twice his previous size as the first blast of semen erupted from him. “I think I’m in love with you,” he blurted out as he came, and then followed it up with an anguished cry. It was a howl of pain and pleasure, of need unleashed after so long. It was the first orgasm he’d ever had from fucking a man. I knew he’d remember it for the rest of his life.
I would, too.
“Don’t pull out,” I begged him, when he was quiet and still atop me. I felt him nod against my shoulder blades.
It was a few moments before he answered, “I’m sorry that I—“
“I love you too,” I told him, shushing the apology before it came. I didn’t want to hear he was sorry for saying that. “Don’t. Just don’t.” I sighed, contented, knowing that his cock was softening inside me. “There’s never enough love in this world. Don’t regret having it for anyone.”
“Okay,” said the strong and built man in a very small and quiet voice. Then, after a moment more, he reached for my hands, to hold them tight. His voice was sleepy when he asked, “Did I do all right?”
“Oh god,” I whispered back, squeezing his fingers. “More than that.”
He rumbled, happy to hear it. A few moments later, he was asleep, his dick and sperm still in me.
I lay like that, with a hundred and seventy pounds of fur and muscle atop and in me, for what seemed like an eternity. The room was stuffy and their heat and the human blanket were making me sweat again. My ass was beginning to ache; it hadn’t been used like that in an awfully long time. I had difficulty breathing, and was being pulverized into the mattress.
But you know what? It was perfect, and I was perfectly happy.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Will: Getting A Room
(This is a continuation of Will, from yesterday.)
“Holy cow,” growled Matt in my ear, in the middle of Detroit’s Gold Coast bar. “Get a fucking room already.” It was over a decade ago, and nominally a bunch of us who’d met at the gay.com social had gone out on this particular Saturday night to watch the strippers. I didn’t even notice the beefy boys aimlessly gyrating from the poles onstage, clad in nothing but their socks and underwear.
It was the vogue in the Detroit male strip circuit back then for the strippers to stuff their shorts with a dildo, at both ends of which they would occasionally wrap their hands and expose a latex inch or two. The more nearsighted (or beer-sighted) among the crowd would think they were getting a flash of dick, the strippers were keeping it legal, and everyone was happy. Will and I, however, weren’t looking at the strippers. We weren’t hoping for flashes of their faux dicks. We were pressed up against the wall, lips locked and tongues so tangled they felt like the crazy roots of water-thirsty swamp trees, grown in a twist.
Almost more guys were watching us than the bored strippers.
Will’s dick was rock-hard. I hadn’t seen it yet, but my hand rubbed up and down its length beneath his jeans. He, likewise, fondled mine. His fingers tickled at the underside, and tweaked the head, poking and prodding to find all every outline, every ridge, almost every vein. Our bodies were so pressed together that our sweat had turned to glue.
Without affection, Matt yanked me away from Will. I was dazed. We both were, We’d had eyes only for each other when we’d met at the bar that night. Two weeks had passed since the night he and I had made out at the Eagle. We’d met to make out in between the previous Friday night, at another of the local bars. On the weeknights, after we both got home from work, we’d meet on gay.com and talk and flirt. The talking we saved for online. In person, we just wanted to mack on each other. Matt shook me until I look at him. “Go to my place,” he said, almost angrily. He took the keys and pressed them in my hands. “Get him to drive you there. I’ll drive your car back when I’m done here so you don’t have to worry about it. Just get it out of your fucking system already.”
The implication was that everyone was sick of watching me make out with the man I thought was the handsomest in the room. I thought it over for about five seconds, agreed, and ran out with Will to the parking lot.
Back at the house we stripped down almost immediately. Will’s body was even more perfect than I could have imagined. His pecs were enormous, his stomach flat and ridged with definition, his waist narrow. He was a massive slab of muscle frosted with dark, thick hair—like one of those athletes from the Jockey underwear ads over which I used to masturbate as a kid. His dick jutted out angrily, like some kind of rock projection from the flat face of an ancient mountain. It wasn’t large—a good solid six inches—but it was beautiful. It was his. And I was seeing it for the first time.
Will looked at me with something in his eyes almost akin to fear. “Do you like it?” he asked. “Is it okay?”
“Oh god,” I told him. “It’s more than okay.” He was beautiful, and I wanted him more than anything.
The only clothing he had left were a pair of ankle-high white socks that he removed, and his baseball cap. I reached up and took it from his head. He tried to stop me for a moment, then let me. Beneath the baseball cap he was balding. Not just a little thin spot. He had a pretty advanced case of male pattern baldness, and it was obvious it mortified him. Again he looked at me with fear in his eyes, as if afraid I might run off because his only remaining hair was a short dark black fringe around his head.
I looked him in the eye. “You are so fucking beautiful,” I told him.
To show him how I felt, I got down in the middle of that strange bedroom and sucked his dick, taking it in my throat to the base and letting my tongue and cheeks cling to its slick skin as I moved back and forth over it. I loved the taste of him, and the scent of his sweat and pubes and of the powder he would apply to his skin after a workout. I made love to his dick to make him gasp with pleasure, and every sharp intake of his breath was my reward. Somehow we moved to the bed, where I continued to suck him. I alternated my lips between his mouth and his dick, making him groan with every new pleasure I invented for him. I tweaked his nipples, and rubbed his thighs, tugged at his nuts, and even let my fingertips glide across the forest of hair growing on his hole. “I want to do something,” he finally said, pushing me away. He looked me in the eye. “I want to do something with you, and I don’t know if I can.”
“What?” I asked. I would’ve worshipped his feet, shaved myself for him, crawled across gravel on my knees if it meant I could make him feel good, at that moment.
“I want to . . . to . . . .” He couldn’t say the words. I urged him on. “I want to be inside you. Anally.” He almost whispered the last word.
I hadn’t been fucked in a while at that point, but it was a damned sight closer on the horizon than it is now. My last bottom experience had been maybe a year and a half before. I didn’t care. I wanted it. “Yes,” I told him.
“But I don’t know how,” he said. I didn’t understand, so he explained. “I haven’t done it before.”
“You haven’t fucked a guy before?” He shook his head at my question. “Have you been fucked?”
“No. I don’t think I’d like that. I think I’d like to fuck, though. I know I want to fuck you.”
He had a way of talking that was simple. He wasn't stupid, but any means. His sentences were direct, and honest, and sometimes sounded as if they should have been spoken by a child. If I hadn't already been naked, he would have charmed off my pants. We looked at each other on that stranger’s bed. I took his hand. “You know how to do it,” I told him. “You’ll know, once you’re inside.”
I pulled him to me, and kissed him. I maneuvered myself onto my back and managed to get him on top of me, so that my hole was teasing his dick. His meat hardened even more, if that was possible. Precum was flowing liberally from the tip. When he seemed anxious to begin, I opened the bedside table and was lucky to find some lube in there. Together we spread it over his dick and into my hole, and I flipped over on my stomach. “Just go in slow,” I asked him. “We’ll make it work.”
I think Will tried to follow my instructions, but I saw stars before my eyes when he jabbed his way into the hole. “Too fast!” I gasped, holding him still. I panted and began to sweat a little as I attempted to accommodate him. Eventually the sharp pain receded. “Just go in and out,” I begged him. “Just a little bit. Then you can start to go deeper.”
I’m not sure whether it was the angle, or the fact I hadn’t been fucked in a while, or whether he was simply too hard and too aroused to be gentle, but every thrust felt like a knife up my ass. I bit my lip and grunted, trying to relax but finding it difficult. “I’m doing it wrong,” he said. But his hips didn’t stop.
“No,” I said. “It’s me. Don’t stop. We’ll get it.”
“I’m doing it wrong,” he repeated. He sounded mournful.
I didn’t give a fuck about the pain. I just wanted him. “Just fuck me,” I whispered. “Fuck me. Please.” He picked up the pace, thrusting faster and harder. “Do you like it? Do you like my ass?” I wanted to know.
“Yes,” he whispered. He sounded as if he were in church. “I love it. I love your ass. Don’t make me stop.”
“You don’t have to stop,” I told him, glad at what he’d said. “Don’t stop.”
It still hurt, but he fucked me on and on for several minutes. I’d just started to relax and enjoy the ride when I saw a flash of light. The bedroom was mostly dark, and I’d though that perhaps there was lightning outside. But then I saw the flash again, and heard a whirring. I turned my head, blearily looked up through the bedroom door, and saw Matt standing there with a digital camera in his hand. He snapped another photo.
“What are you doing?” I asked. The flash and the camera, the sudden and unexpected presence of another man in the room, broke the spell. Will stopped what he was doing and peered up as well. His hips stopped their sweet motion.
“You guys look hot,” he said. He held out the camera. “Want to see?” Will rolled off. Embarrassed, he started to look for his socks and underwear. “You guys want a three-way?”
I still have those photos from that night. I dislike them, because I was carrying more weight back then, and because with Will on top of me, my mid-section is distended and squashed to grotesque proportions. He looks hairy and muscular and tan and compact; I look like an oversized, albino gummy bear that some giant thumb has poked in the belly, forced to a bloated extreme.
I hated Matt for taking the photos at that moment and interrupting what was a very hot fuck. But I’m grateful to have those only pictures of Will and I together, so I can remember the moment we first connected, with him deep inside my hole.
“Holy cow,” growled Matt in my ear, in the middle of Detroit’s Gold Coast bar. “Get a fucking room already.” It was over a decade ago, and nominally a bunch of us who’d met at the gay.com social had gone out on this particular Saturday night to watch the strippers. I didn’t even notice the beefy boys aimlessly gyrating from the poles onstage, clad in nothing but their socks and underwear.
It was the vogue in the Detroit male strip circuit back then for the strippers to stuff their shorts with a dildo, at both ends of which they would occasionally wrap their hands and expose a latex inch or two. The more nearsighted (or beer-sighted) among the crowd would think they were getting a flash of dick, the strippers were keeping it legal, and everyone was happy. Will and I, however, weren’t looking at the strippers. We weren’t hoping for flashes of their faux dicks. We were pressed up against the wall, lips locked and tongues so tangled they felt like the crazy roots of water-thirsty swamp trees, grown in a twist.
Almost more guys were watching us than the bored strippers.
Will’s dick was rock-hard. I hadn’t seen it yet, but my hand rubbed up and down its length beneath his jeans. He, likewise, fondled mine. His fingers tickled at the underside, and tweaked the head, poking and prodding to find all every outline, every ridge, almost every vein. Our bodies were so pressed together that our sweat had turned to glue.
Without affection, Matt yanked me away from Will. I was dazed. We both were, We’d had eyes only for each other when we’d met at the bar that night. Two weeks had passed since the night he and I had made out at the Eagle. We’d met to make out in between the previous Friday night, at another of the local bars. On the weeknights, after we both got home from work, we’d meet on gay.com and talk and flirt. The talking we saved for online. In person, we just wanted to mack on each other. Matt shook me until I look at him. “Go to my place,” he said, almost angrily. He took the keys and pressed them in my hands. “Get him to drive you there. I’ll drive your car back when I’m done here so you don’t have to worry about it. Just get it out of your fucking system already.”
The implication was that everyone was sick of watching me make out with the man I thought was the handsomest in the room. I thought it over for about five seconds, agreed, and ran out with Will to the parking lot.
Back at the house we stripped down almost immediately. Will’s body was even more perfect than I could have imagined. His pecs were enormous, his stomach flat and ridged with definition, his waist narrow. He was a massive slab of muscle frosted with dark, thick hair—like one of those athletes from the Jockey underwear ads over which I used to masturbate as a kid. His dick jutted out angrily, like some kind of rock projection from the flat face of an ancient mountain. It wasn’t large—a good solid six inches—but it was beautiful. It was his. And I was seeing it for the first time.
Will looked at me with something in his eyes almost akin to fear. “Do you like it?” he asked. “Is it okay?”
“Oh god,” I told him. “It’s more than okay.” He was beautiful, and I wanted him more than anything.
The only clothing he had left were a pair of ankle-high white socks that he removed, and his baseball cap. I reached up and took it from his head. He tried to stop me for a moment, then let me. Beneath the baseball cap he was balding. Not just a little thin spot. He had a pretty advanced case of male pattern baldness, and it was obvious it mortified him. Again he looked at me with fear in his eyes, as if afraid I might run off because his only remaining hair was a short dark black fringe around his head.
I looked him in the eye. “You are so fucking beautiful,” I told him.
To show him how I felt, I got down in the middle of that strange bedroom and sucked his dick, taking it in my throat to the base and letting my tongue and cheeks cling to its slick skin as I moved back and forth over it. I loved the taste of him, and the scent of his sweat and pubes and of the powder he would apply to his skin after a workout. I made love to his dick to make him gasp with pleasure, and every sharp intake of his breath was my reward. Somehow we moved to the bed, where I continued to suck him. I alternated my lips between his mouth and his dick, making him groan with every new pleasure I invented for him. I tweaked his nipples, and rubbed his thighs, tugged at his nuts, and even let my fingertips glide across the forest of hair growing on his hole. “I want to do something,” he finally said, pushing me away. He looked me in the eye. “I want to do something with you, and I don’t know if I can.”
“What?” I asked. I would’ve worshipped his feet, shaved myself for him, crawled across gravel on my knees if it meant I could make him feel good, at that moment.
“I want to . . . to . . . .” He couldn’t say the words. I urged him on. “I want to be inside you. Anally.” He almost whispered the last word.
I hadn’t been fucked in a while at that point, but it was a damned sight closer on the horizon than it is now. My last bottom experience had been maybe a year and a half before. I didn’t care. I wanted it. “Yes,” I told him.
“But I don’t know how,” he said. I didn’t understand, so he explained. “I haven’t done it before.”
“You haven’t fucked a guy before?” He shook his head at my question. “Have you been fucked?”
“No. I don’t think I’d like that. I think I’d like to fuck, though. I know I want to fuck you.”
He had a way of talking that was simple. He wasn't stupid, but any means. His sentences were direct, and honest, and sometimes sounded as if they should have been spoken by a child. If I hadn't already been naked, he would have charmed off my pants. We looked at each other on that stranger’s bed. I took his hand. “You know how to do it,” I told him. “You’ll know, once you’re inside.”
I pulled him to me, and kissed him. I maneuvered myself onto my back and managed to get him on top of me, so that my hole was teasing his dick. His meat hardened even more, if that was possible. Precum was flowing liberally from the tip. When he seemed anxious to begin, I opened the bedside table and was lucky to find some lube in there. Together we spread it over his dick and into my hole, and I flipped over on my stomach. “Just go in slow,” I asked him. “We’ll make it work.”
I think Will tried to follow my instructions, but I saw stars before my eyes when he jabbed his way into the hole. “Too fast!” I gasped, holding him still. I panted and began to sweat a little as I attempted to accommodate him. Eventually the sharp pain receded. “Just go in and out,” I begged him. “Just a little bit. Then you can start to go deeper.”
I’m not sure whether it was the angle, or the fact I hadn’t been fucked in a while, or whether he was simply too hard and too aroused to be gentle, but every thrust felt like a knife up my ass. I bit my lip and grunted, trying to relax but finding it difficult. “I’m doing it wrong,” he said. But his hips didn’t stop.
“No,” I said. “It’s me. Don’t stop. We’ll get it.”
“I’m doing it wrong,” he repeated. He sounded mournful.
I didn’t give a fuck about the pain. I just wanted him. “Just fuck me,” I whispered. “Fuck me. Please.” He picked up the pace, thrusting faster and harder. “Do you like it? Do you like my ass?” I wanted to know.
“Yes,” he whispered. He sounded as if he were in church. “I love it. I love your ass. Don’t make me stop.”
“You don’t have to stop,” I told him, glad at what he’d said. “Don’t stop.”
It still hurt, but he fucked me on and on for several minutes. I’d just started to relax and enjoy the ride when I saw a flash of light. The bedroom was mostly dark, and I’d though that perhaps there was lightning outside. But then I saw the flash again, and heard a whirring. I turned my head, blearily looked up through the bedroom door, and saw Matt standing there with a digital camera in his hand. He snapped another photo.
“What are you doing?” I asked. The flash and the camera, the sudden and unexpected presence of another man in the room, broke the spell. Will stopped what he was doing and peered up as well. His hips stopped their sweet motion.
“You guys look hot,” he said. He held out the camera. “Want to see?” Will rolled off. Embarrassed, he started to look for his socks and underwear. “You guys want a three-way?”
I still have those photos from that night. I dislike them, because I was carrying more weight back then, and because with Will on top of me, my mid-section is distended and squashed to grotesque proportions. He looks hairy and muscular and tan and compact; I look like an oversized, albino gummy bear that some giant thumb has poked in the belly, forced to a bloated extreme.
I hated Matt for taking the photos at that moment and interrupting what was a very hot fuck. But I’m grateful to have those only pictures of Will and I together, so I can remember the moment we first connected, with him deep inside my hole.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Will
(This is the first in a shorter series of entries. Shorter than the Earl series, anyway.)
I’d like to take advantage of my down time to write out the story of Will. He was an important lover of mine. A gentle man and a gentleman both. Will was a man with whom I was in love very deeply, and who for a time was even a party of my family. And despite all that, our relationship was a bittersweet comedy of bad timing and misunderstandings that ended, if not horribly, at least not well.
There was a time about a dozen years ago when gay.com was not the blueberry-colored atrocity it is now. Now I find it a slow, empty wasteland in which all but a few rooms are empty, and in which no one chats save through private messages. Around the turn of the millennium, however, the service was new, and young, and full of energy. The local and state rooms were often doubled up on capacity.
Users could make their own special interests rooms, and those were full of usual and funky fetishes. The chat bots were spamming people to follow links and buy natural Viagra at well below pharmaceutical rates, and there were any number of gay.com-appointed room monitors lurking about to bounce out guys who abused the site’s rules.
I loved the local rooms not for cruising . . . though admittedly I did some of that . . . but for the socializing. I actually made friends in those rooms. Friends who were my social companions for most of the following decade. One of the more active chatters in the local room organized a gay.com party within a couple of months of my establishing a presence there. It was held in the basement of a local bar. Guys brought potluck appetizers, wore nametags, associated screen names with faces, and had a great time socializing and getting to know each other. There were a few weirdo types who lurked at the bar’s periphery, refusing to don a tag although it was clear they were hoping to see who was whom, but even a few of those eventually warmed up to the social fun and joined in.
The party was such a success that we held a second one a few weeks later, at a larger and busier bar.It was there that I met Will for the first time. He was introduced to me as part of a pack of people, and he stood at its back, hands in the pockets of his tight jeans. He was older than me—about fifty-three at the time, though I would never have guessed his age. To me he was astonishingly handsome. His eyes were the first feature of his I noticed. They were large and dark, almost perfectly round. Anime-character eyes set deep in his face, of a clear and uncomplicated brown that was almost like toffee. His body was astonishingly fit. His waist was narrow and snugly contained in denim. His chest was buff and muscular. His arms were perfect specimens of ropy muscle, and his forearms were taut and covered in fur. He wore a baseball cap and a T-shirt that hugged tightly every curve and definition of his chest, and stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. When we were introduced, he just nodded at me, and averted his eyes.
I thought to myself, Stuck up. Then I tried to think no more about it, though I found myself looking at him from across the room and wishing. Just wishing that I had a chance.
I remembered him by his screen name, though, and when I was on gay.com in the evenings sometimes I’d see him there. His profile didn’t say much about him beyond his stats and his age, and I never saw him speak in the room. I assumed he was too busy having cyber sex with some other jock stud and tried to dismiss all thoughts of him from my mind.
He was so good looking, though. And those eyes. It was a little difficult not to think back at the sight of him, so easy to rest my eyes upon.
I saw him next at the Detroit Eagle, which locals referred to as the leather bar, though it was rarely any such thing. More of a denim bar with the occasional flash of leather. It was a slow Friday night, and my new friends were crowded downstairs, in the middle, ordering drinks. I was sitting at a bar stool, sipping on a Diet Coke, when I saw him. He was wearing another of those clinging, elastic T-shirts of his that hugged his pecs, and a pair of shorts that gave him the appearance of just having stepped out of the gym, or some porn flick nominally set at a gym. A Detroit Tigers baseball cap covered his brow; its brim curved along the same arc as his thick eyebrows. When he was reintroduced to me, he pulled his hand from his right pocket, thrust it at me, then buried back in its warm depth once he’d done.
Silly as it sounds, I was almost afraid to look at him. He was so handsome in a way that appealed deep down to my core. It warmed my heart simply to look at the guy, to let my eyes trip over the handsome chin, the blunt nose. I looked at his brawn and cool, conscious good looks and immediately thought, way out of your league, dude.
But he was still so pretty to think about.
My friends liked to move around the Eagle at that time. I’d learned that it was pointless to drift to the patio unless there were a crowd, or to stand in the balcony where no one went. So I stuck to my bar stool. I was surprised that Will lingered in the vicinity. He stood with his back against the railing a few feet away, sipping on a rum and Coke, while I occasionally cast sidelong glances at him and mentally kicked myself for being so bashful and plain.
I was even more surprised when Will sat down in the chair next to mine. “So, Rob, what does your screen name mean?”
I was surprised he even remembered my actual name. Astonished, even. He looked at me sideways from those toffee-brown eyes, studying me. He was a quiet man, I realized. Here was I, who had been accused throughout my life of stand-offishness more than anyone I knew simply because I was quiet and observant, thinking the same of someone with similar traits. Immediately I felt awkward, and guilty.
I told him that my gay.com screen name was a minor character from a Shakespearean play. “Shakespeare,” he said, nodding. For a moment I feared he was going to be derisive, or say something that proved he wasn’t as high-fallutin’ as I. Instead, in a soft, deep voice, he launched into a story about how, when he’d been still married a few years before, he’d carried his two kids to a production of Shakespeare in a local park, and how he’d been the only one of the three of them who’d remained awake. “So what do you do?” he asked.
I was still working full-time in education at the time; I hadn’t yet begun my artistic career. I told him my job. “Do you like it?” he asked.
He was so serious in his question that for the first time in a very long time, I was taken aback. “Not really,” I admitted.
He nodded, as if he’d known it all along. “So why do you keep doing it?”
“I need the money.”
“What would you be doing if money wasn’t the issue?”
He was so interesting, and his questions kept me so off-guard, that I couldn’t help but respond with the absolute truth instead of something polite and circumstantial. I told him of my artistic ambitions, which I’d been deferring because of my career in education. “Are you meant to do that?” he asked. I said that I thought I was. “It seems to me that you should be doing what you’re meant to do, plain and simple.”
He said it with such conviction that I began to believe it myself. “Are you doing what you're meant to do?” I asked. He was facing me by then. He’d left his drink on the bar. His knees were open and almost touching mine. It was tough not to look down and stare at the hairy, muscular calves blossoming from the tops of his sneakers. He let loose the first real smile I'd ever seen from him, exposing his slightly crooked teeth, and he shook his head. "What are you meant to do, then?"
We were close enough that I could smell the rum on his breath. “I might be a little drunk right now,” he said. “But only a little. And you are very, very cute, and I really want to kiss you very badly.” I was stunned enough by his words that I couldn’t move. “May I?”
I had enough presence of mind to nod. It was a slight thing, a bare tilt of the head, but it was permission enough for him. He leaned forward and cupped the back of my head with his hand, and pulled me close to him. His lip was covered with a five o’clock stubble that ground into my then-clean-shaven upper lip. He kissed me hard, his lips pulling mine, his teeth nipping gently at the flesh, his tongue dancing through the opening and into me.
In my memory it lives on as one of those movie kisses, one of those romance novel kisses that set my body afire. What it mostly did, however, was give me a massive boner in my pants. I leaned into the kiss and returned it. Soon we were making out at the bar, not caring who watched. “Come here,” he said at last, pulling me to my feet. He tugged me toward what the Eagle called their dance floor, a part of the first floor that was dark and had a few flashing lights to impart a sense of conviviality over what was really a gloomy area covered by the balcony. It was dark, though, and we could stand body against body, boner against boner, my scrawny ribcage against his manly, muscular chest, making out like our lives depended on it. I didn’t think. I didn’t over-consider what was happening. I just kissed him, and enjoyed every fucking minute of it.
Our friends came back in at some point to look for us, then saw us making out on the dance floor, and left us alone. Or really, they sat across the bar and talked about us, but at least it was out of earshot. For a half hour or more we locked lips and let our tongues get acquainted, until at last, out of breath and thirsty, we came up for air.
He held my hands and looked up at me. “You wanted to know what I’m meant to do?” he asked. I nodded. “Well. I’m finalizing plans to leave the country, and move, so that I can become a priest.”
After the unexpected make-out session, it seemed so completely random a thing to say that I could only blink. “Really?” I finally asked.
“Really.” He licked his lips and looked at me. “Does that put you off?”
“I’m not single,” I blurted out. “Does that put you off?”
He shook his head.
I shook mine.
Then, after a moment of looking in each other’s eyes, we started to make out again.
I’d like to take advantage of my down time to write out the story of Will. He was an important lover of mine. A gentle man and a gentleman both. Will was a man with whom I was in love very deeply, and who for a time was even a party of my family. And despite all that, our relationship was a bittersweet comedy of bad timing and misunderstandings that ended, if not horribly, at least not well.
There was a time about a dozen years ago when gay.com was not the blueberry-colored atrocity it is now. Now I find it a slow, empty wasteland in which all but a few rooms are empty, and in which no one chats save through private messages. Around the turn of the millennium, however, the service was new, and young, and full of energy. The local and state rooms were often doubled up on capacity.
Users could make their own special interests rooms, and those were full of usual and funky fetishes. The chat bots were spamming people to follow links and buy natural Viagra at well below pharmaceutical rates, and there were any number of gay.com-appointed room monitors lurking about to bounce out guys who abused the site’s rules.
I loved the local rooms not for cruising . . . though admittedly I did some of that . . . but for the socializing. I actually made friends in those rooms. Friends who were my social companions for most of the following decade. One of the more active chatters in the local room organized a gay.com party within a couple of months of my establishing a presence there. It was held in the basement of a local bar. Guys brought potluck appetizers, wore nametags, associated screen names with faces, and had a great time socializing and getting to know each other. There were a few weirdo types who lurked at the bar’s periphery, refusing to don a tag although it was clear they were hoping to see who was whom, but even a few of those eventually warmed up to the social fun and joined in.
The party was such a success that we held a second one a few weeks later, at a larger and busier bar.It was there that I met Will for the first time. He was introduced to me as part of a pack of people, and he stood at its back, hands in the pockets of his tight jeans. He was older than me—about fifty-three at the time, though I would never have guessed his age. To me he was astonishingly handsome. His eyes were the first feature of his I noticed. They were large and dark, almost perfectly round. Anime-character eyes set deep in his face, of a clear and uncomplicated brown that was almost like toffee. His body was astonishingly fit. His waist was narrow and snugly contained in denim. His chest was buff and muscular. His arms were perfect specimens of ropy muscle, and his forearms were taut and covered in fur. He wore a baseball cap and a T-shirt that hugged tightly every curve and definition of his chest, and stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. When we were introduced, he just nodded at me, and averted his eyes.
I thought to myself, Stuck up. Then I tried to think no more about it, though I found myself looking at him from across the room and wishing. Just wishing that I had a chance.
I remembered him by his screen name, though, and when I was on gay.com in the evenings sometimes I’d see him there. His profile didn’t say much about him beyond his stats and his age, and I never saw him speak in the room. I assumed he was too busy having cyber sex with some other jock stud and tried to dismiss all thoughts of him from my mind.
He was so good looking, though. And those eyes. It was a little difficult not to think back at the sight of him, so easy to rest my eyes upon.
I saw him next at the Detroit Eagle, which locals referred to as the leather bar, though it was rarely any such thing. More of a denim bar with the occasional flash of leather. It was a slow Friday night, and my new friends were crowded downstairs, in the middle, ordering drinks. I was sitting at a bar stool, sipping on a Diet Coke, when I saw him. He was wearing another of those clinging, elastic T-shirts of his that hugged his pecs, and a pair of shorts that gave him the appearance of just having stepped out of the gym, or some porn flick nominally set at a gym. A Detroit Tigers baseball cap covered his brow; its brim curved along the same arc as his thick eyebrows. When he was reintroduced to me, he pulled his hand from his right pocket, thrust it at me, then buried back in its warm depth once he’d done.
Silly as it sounds, I was almost afraid to look at him. He was so handsome in a way that appealed deep down to my core. It warmed my heart simply to look at the guy, to let my eyes trip over the handsome chin, the blunt nose. I looked at his brawn and cool, conscious good looks and immediately thought, way out of your league, dude.
But he was still so pretty to think about.
My friends liked to move around the Eagle at that time. I’d learned that it was pointless to drift to the patio unless there were a crowd, or to stand in the balcony where no one went. So I stuck to my bar stool. I was surprised that Will lingered in the vicinity. He stood with his back against the railing a few feet away, sipping on a rum and Coke, while I occasionally cast sidelong glances at him and mentally kicked myself for being so bashful and plain.
I was even more surprised when Will sat down in the chair next to mine. “So, Rob, what does your screen name mean?”
I was surprised he even remembered my actual name. Astonished, even. He looked at me sideways from those toffee-brown eyes, studying me. He was a quiet man, I realized. Here was I, who had been accused throughout my life of stand-offishness more than anyone I knew simply because I was quiet and observant, thinking the same of someone with similar traits. Immediately I felt awkward, and guilty.
I told him that my gay.com screen name was a minor character from a Shakespearean play. “Shakespeare,” he said, nodding. For a moment I feared he was going to be derisive, or say something that proved he wasn’t as high-fallutin’ as I. Instead, in a soft, deep voice, he launched into a story about how, when he’d been still married a few years before, he’d carried his two kids to a production of Shakespeare in a local park, and how he’d been the only one of the three of them who’d remained awake. “So what do you do?” he asked.
I was still working full-time in education at the time; I hadn’t yet begun my artistic career. I told him my job. “Do you like it?” he asked.
He was so serious in his question that for the first time in a very long time, I was taken aback. “Not really,” I admitted.
He nodded, as if he’d known it all along. “So why do you keep doing it?”
“I need the money.”
“What would you be doing if money wasn’t the issue?”
He was so interesting, and his questions kept me so off-guard, that I couldn’t help but respond with the absolute truth instead of something polite and circumstantial. I told him of my artistic ambitions, which I’d been deferring because of my career in education. “Are you meant to do that?” he asked. I said that I thought I was. “It seems to me that you should be doing what you’re meant to do, plain and simple.”
He said it with such conviction that I began to believe it myself. “Are you doing what you're meant to do?” I asked. He was facing me by then. He’d left his drink on the bar. His knees were open and almost touching mine. It was tough not to look down and stare at the hairy, muscular calves blossoming from the tops of his sneakers. He let loose the first real smile I'd ever seen from him, exposing his slightly crooked teeth, and he shook his head. "What are you meant to do, then?"
We were close enough that I could smell the rum on his breath. “I might be a little drunk right now,” he said. “But only a little. And you are very, very cute, and I really want to kiss you very badly.” I was stunned enough by his words that I couldn’t move. “May I?”
I had enough presence of mind to nod. It was a slight thing, a bare tilt of the head, but it was permission enough for him. He leaned forward and cupped the back of my head with his hand, and pulled me close to him. His lip was covered with a five o’clock stubble that ground into my then-clean-shaven upper lip. He kissed me hard, his lips pulling mine, his teeth nipping gently at the flesh, his tongue dancing through the opening and into me.
In my memory it lives on as one of those movie kisses, one of those romance novel kisses that set my body afire. What it mostly did, however, was give me a massive boner in my pants. I leaned into the kiss and returned it. Soon we were making out at the bar, not caring who watched. “Come here,” he said at last, pulling me to my feet. He tugged me toward what the Eagle called their dance floor, a part of the first floor that was dark and had a few flashing lights to impart a sense of conviviality over what was really a gloomy area covered by the balcony. It was dark, though, and we could stand body against body, boner against boner, my scrawny ribcage against his manly, muscular chest, making out like our lives depended on it. I didn’t think. I didn’t over-consider what was happening. I just kissed him, and enjoyed every fucking minute of it.
Our friends came back in at some point to look for us, then saw us making out on the dance floor, and left us alone. Or really, they sat across the bar and talked about us, but at least it was out of earshot. For a half hour or more we locked lips and let our tongues get acquainted, until at last, out of breath and thirsty, we came up for air.
He held my hands and looked up at me. “You wanted to know what I’m meant to do?” he asked. I nodded. “Well. I’m finalizing plans to leave the country, and move, so that I can become a priest.”
After the unexpected make-out session, it seemed so completely random a thing to say that I could only blink. “Really?” I finally asked.
“Really.” He licked his lips and looked at me. “Does that put you off?”
“I’m not single,” I blurted out. “Does that put you off?”
He shook his head.
I shook mine.
Then, after a moment of looking in each other’s eyes, we started to make out again.
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