Show-Offs, page 10
“Well, hurry up and get undressed. We’ve gotta get your ass plowed.”
I tried to laugh but instead produced a strange, sickly sound. The grim reality that within minutes some strange man would be ramming his cock up my ass made me feel tired and slow, like expired gelatin. I didn’t want to be here. What if there were no attractive men? What if Cutter left the bathhouse disappointed? What would that do to the rest of our weekend?
“You been working out more?” Cutter asked, glancing at my naked torso.
“About the same.”
“Your biceps look bigger. Your abs are getting more defined. Keep up the good work.”
I rubbed my hand over my taut abdomen, checking to see if Cutter was correct. “My trainer said it would take a while to see results.”
Cutter, wrapping his white towel around his waist, approached me and pulled me into an embrace. “You’re a very sexy boy, Darren Young.” He said that with such burnt-ember huskiness and sincerity, I knew I’d agree to whatever he requested that afternoon. I had friends who yearned to hear such grand compliments. Yes, I was a lucky boy.
“You should find someone in no time,” Cutter whispered into my ear.
I finished with my clothes and wrapped the towel around my waist. I was tempted to haggle for a little more tweak, but I didn’t want to make Cutter mad or delay his plans. He put such effort into these trips; I didn’t want to appear ungrateful.
“Will you leave the door open for me?” I asked.
“I’ll leave it cracked so if a guy wants to join me, I can wave him in.”
“You mean we might wind up with a foursome?”
“The day is quite young, my boy.”
I giggled, felt foolish, then left the room. As instructed, I left the door cracked so any passing man could glimpse Cutter stroking his stiffening cock. After shaking my shoulders to loosen up, I looked down each direction of the hall, wondering which to take. One led back to the maze’s entrance, the other into the depths of the rooms. I had yet to pass any man in the hall. I chose to venture farther into the maze. The high floodlights dimmed as I progressed until finally that hallway opened up into a wider hall, this one with closed doors on each side all in a row. Actually, not all were closed. I passed one room with the door cracked open. Inside, a young black man stroked his cock, watching with stern concentration his organ pulse. He never noticed me. I turned away. Cutter and I had an agreement: white men only.
A moment later, a young couple passed, their heads tilted toward one another as if exchanging military code. They were my age, and one of them—the brunet—was very hot. A lithe, long body. Mouth like an open cut in the skin. Both boys glanced at me, and I recognized the haughtiness of their glares. They were undoubtedly members of what I called the Dallas Gay Mafia. You ran into these men everywhere in the city. Always dressed impeccably, gym-toned bodies, beautiful, unblemished faces. They had the leisure of condemning anyone less fantastic with a sneer. Even me. And I knew I wasn’t unattractive. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror at Cutter’s house every time before leaving for the bathhouse, as if my appearance might have turned ugly overnight. Despite my confidence, these Mafia boys carried with them the ability to make me or any other man feel worthless in an instant. I looked away as I passed them. One laughed as they continued down the hall. His boyfriend halfheartedly tried to shush him before beginning to laugh, himself. Cutter wasn’t fond of twinks, anyway.
When searching for men, it was customary to simply circle the hallways over and over until you found one. There were so many men leaving rooms, returning from the showers or wherever, a constant influx of new faces was at one’s disposal. I passed an older man, maybe forty-five, with a beer belly and graying body hair pelting his shoulders. I passed a scrawny Mexican kid who flashed me a gold-toothed smile that I did my best to dodge. There was a trio of men, each around thirty, in heated, hushed discussion, none of them gazing at me as I walked by. How long would I have to circle these halls? Some days, some nights, it could take at least fifteen minutes. I wondered whether anyone had tried to enter our VIP room, taking up Cutter on his open-door invite. He might be fucking a guy right now, right now as these strange men either passed by unaware or sneered at me. I decided to leave the halls, try my luck elsewhere.
The hot tub was a brown-tiled in-ground pool with rushing jets placed along the walls, bubbling the water, which was usually only lukewarm. That day was no exception. I slipped off my towel, noticed with gratitude that my cock hung thick and long between my legs, and entered the water. Three other men were in the pool, but my eyes immediately locked on just one. He sat at the opposite end, absently waving his arms through the bubbles. He was perhaps thirty; long dirty-blond hair down to his jawline; a wide, welcoming smile that seemed in response to a secret joke. I began to feel awkward staring for so long, but the man broke from his reverie and met my gaze. My god, such a smile!
“You’re cute,” I said. I’d learned excessive wit was just wasted breath.
“So are you.”
“How long you been here?”
“Oh, I dunno. Maybe two hours.”
I moved closer, the warm water thick around my surging body. The man did not draw away from my approach.
I said, in a lower voice, “You been partying?”
“Maybe. Why? You got some more?”
“I never come here without it,” I said with a gravity I hoped he didn’t notice.
“Is it just you here? You come with a friend?”
“My boyfriend,” I said, affecting a shyness Cutter had encouraged me to employ at this point in the seduction. “His name is Cutter.”
“What I wanna know is your name,” the man replied, hesitantly pressing his palm against my chest.
“Darren,” I said.
“I’m Raymond. So, your boyfriend likes threesomes?”
“Actually, he’s more into watching hot guys fuck my ass.”
“Oh, I see,” he said, his smile never fading. His eyes narrowed. “And what does he do? You know, while I’m pounding your ass?”
“He takes pictures.”
“You mean, for a website?”
“Oh, no, no, no. Just for our personal use.” And then I volunteered something I hadn’t planned: “I think he jacks off to them when I’m not around.”
Raymond’s head rocked back, him howling. I hadn’t believed it that funny, but I laughed too—just as Cutter had taught me.
“We’re staying in one of the VIP rooms,” I said. “You ever been inside one?”
“Once, a few months ago. I got roped into some orgy. It was pretty hot.”
“You ready to get outta here?” I asked, backing slowly toward the hot tub’s tile edge. Raymond followed me, the two of us moving like figures in a time-lapse photo.
“Hope I live up to your boyfriend’s expectations,” he said.
“Oh, you’ll like Cutter. He just sits back and enjoys the show.”
Raymond and I spoke no more as we made our way to the VIP room. When I reached the doorway, I found the door still cracked open. Carefully, I eased it farther away from the doorframe. Cutter had dimmed the lights, so it took me a moment to make out his figure on the bed, him stroking his cock while moans from the television filled the room.
“Looks like he may be busy,” Raymond muttered.
“He’s just waiting for us,” I replied in an equally quiet tone. Then, louder, I said, “I brought company!”
Cutter bolted upright, released his cock, which bobbed in the air above his outstretched thighs. He smiled. Whether it was meant exclusively for me or for both of us, I couldn’t tell.
“Did Darren tell you about me?” Cutter asked, rising from the bed. He didn’t bother with the towel. He extended his hand to Raymond.
“Didn’t tell me how hot you’d be.”
“I’m not the main attraction,” Cutter said.
“Where you want us to start?” Raymond asked, blithely tossing his white towel onto the stone gray floor.
“Just kiss him at first,” my boyfriend instructed. “Move slowly.”
Raymond theatrically slapped his hands together. He then slid them around my waist and gently pulled me toward him. “I can go slow,” he murmured, more for me than Cutter.
He kissed me. Every time a new man kissed me, I compared his kiss to Cutter’s. The strangers’ kisses were rarely better, but Raymond knew how to flutter his thick, plump lips effortlessly over my mouth. After a few moments of that, I felt the tip of his tongue push its way through my still-closed lips. I allowed it inside me. Our kiss deepened. Cutter watched in silence. As my head teetered back and forth under the force of the kiss, I caught a cockeyed glance at my boyfriend. He stood motionless, his digital camera dangling from his hand. This was unusual. Typically, Cutter could hardly wait to begin taking shots. The sudden worry pulled me away from Raymond’s commanding kiss, but Raymond didn’t seem to notice. Finally, Cutter snapped out of his daze and aimed the lens at Raymond and me. He snapped several shots in a row, never changing position. Raymond’s hands grew bolder, one grabbing my ass, the other massaging my crotch. I still wore the towel around my hips. Through the fabric, Raymond’s thick, erect cock nudged me.
“Darren,” Cutter called, his voice soft. Raymond wouldn’t stop kissing me. Finally, I broke free of him.
“What?” I asked, breathless.
“Suck his cock.”
“Now?”
“Yeah, man. I wanna see that shit right now.”
“What happened to going slow?” Raymond asked, more amused than disappointed.
“I just wanna watch my boy suck that huge cock of yours.”
“Sounds fine to me,” Raymond said. He added in a softer voice, “If that’s all right with you, buddy.”
Raymond was a handsome man. His face had yet to register the smile lines and slight crow’s feet that Cutter’s face held. There was a small gap between his two front teeth. I noticed that he instinctively bowed his head whenever he smiled. His eyes were a dazzling cornflower blue. Cutter’s were merely a sad, sterile gray.
“Sure,” I finally replied, easing down to my knees. “I wanna suck this cock.” And with that, I slid the meaty organ between my lips, allowing it to surge into my mouth all the way to the back of my throat. I began bobbing my head, oddly enough in sync with the rhythmic moans of the porn actors onscreen. Raymond’s moans filled the VIP room.
“Good boy,” muttered Cutter, raising the camera to his face. “That’s a good boy.”
Raymond’s dick tasted fantastic. I felt the wild charge I always felt knowing I could bring a man that intense a pleasure. You could go mad with the power. And there was my boyfriend, the man I loved, clicking away with his camera.
I recalled the first time Cutter showed me the photos of a bathhouse encounter. He sequenced them out over the bedspread, beaming like a proud father. “You look hot in that one, boy,” he said. And then, “I thought he was going to scream when you moved your ass like that.” And then, “I’m gonna have to watch you close, or you’ll run off to the porn studio.” I felt nothing looking at these graphic images. Because of the tweak, I rarely remembered performing any of these acts, but I played along, mimicking bashfulness or sneaky pride, whatever reaction Cutter wanted. I knew, for him, this part was just as important as the fucking itself, if not more so. He urged me to keep a snapshot or two, but I always declined. These were for him, I said, and he believed me.
Back in the VIP room, while Raymond gently thrust his hips, sending his cock deeper down my throat, I heard a man wail in the distance. I thought at first it had to be the porn, but this sounded more like a cry of anguish. Also, it definitely came from just outside the closed door. Neither Raymond nor Cutter made any movement to indicate they had heard it too, so I resumed sucking. But then the same cry, only louder.
“What the fuck was that?” Cutter asked.
We heard it again, this time trailing off into a series of jagged sobs.
Even Raymond broke from his bliss and said, “Is some guy out there crying?”
I stopped sucking his cock and turned to face the door. Cutter crossed the room and opened the door. From my position on the floor, I couldn’t see what the other two saw. But then, a young man staggered through the doorway and instantly fell to his knees before us. His thin, bony shoulders shook. His arms wrapped around his narrow chest. His face contorted in bereavement. While Cutter stood still in front of the crying man, our intruder sobbed and sobbed.
Finally, Raymond spoke. “Dude, what the fuck happened?”
The crying man stopped and tried to speak, but no words came. Milky snot ran from his nose and over his lips, glistening in the dim light. He tried to speak again but could not.
Cutter gently placed a hand on his shoulder. “Are you here with someone?” he asked, showing a compassion that surprised me, though I don’t know why it did. Cutter was, of course, the model of kindness. I surely knew that. “Is there someone we can get?”
The crying man settled down, sank onto the floor, bottom resting on the soles of his feet. He wore only the expected white towel around his hips.
“I’m with Jerry,” he moaned.
“Is that your boyfriend?” Cutter asked.
“I don’t think so,” the man stammered. “At least, not anymore!” And with that, he began to howl. I tore my gaze away from this human catastrophe to check on Raymond. It disturbed me to see his features darken, his once-ample mouth shut tightly, the lips thin and severe. He glared at the poor man through slit eyelids. His arms crossed tightly across his chest. I turned my attention back to Cutter and the crying man. Cutter tried to help the man to his feet.
“Let’s go find Jerry,” Cutter said.
“He doesn’t want me anymore.”
“I’m sure that’s not true. C’mon, let’s go.”
“No! No! It is true! He found some young piece of ass in the hot tub, and that was the end of Keith.”
“That’s your name?” Cutter asked. “Keith?”
Keith moaned and nodded. He dabbed furiously at his eyes. By then, Cutter had managed to maneuver the intruder back toward the doorway. Believing the situation would soon resolve, I returned my attention to Raymond only to find him grabbing his towel from the floor. The brisk, violent strokes he made wrapping it around his waist distressed me.
“You don’t have to leave,” I said.
“Sorry, man, that was kind of a buzzkill.”
“My boyfriend’s taking care of it.”
Raymond stomped through the door. Cutter and the crying man had already gone outside. I stood there, helpless. I wondered if any of the pictures Cutter had taken were angled highly enough to capture Raymond’s lovely face. More likely, they were centered solely on my lips around his cock. After all, that’s what my boyfriend wanted to remember: how I looked giving another man pleasure as I would for him soon after.
The door clicked shut behind Raymond. I glanced down and saw my swollen cock begin its retreat beneath the towel’s fabric. This flood of disappointment surprised me. Of course, there were other candidates stalking the halls right now. All I had to do was wait for Cutter to return, then leave to find one. As much as I always dreaded our trips here, when the pursuit was in full bloom, I allowed myself to get carried away on the adrenaline rush. Still, I needed something to numb myself a little further, to guarantee no doubts would descend when I resumed the hunt. I hurried to the side of the bed and found Cutter’s gym bag. I riffled through it, looking for the bag of tweak. Just a couple of hits, that’s all I needed. After locating the pipe wrapped inside a sock, I loaded it with a sizable crystal only to realize I’d yet to locate a lighter. I ransacked the bag once again, but this time had no luck. Could Cutter have forgotten? Or was this his passive-aggressive way of controlling the amount of tweak I smoked. He worried about how much I smoked. Defeated, I sank onto the bed and listlessly watched the screen as one man penetrated another man’s bobbing ass. The two men moved with the certain rhythm of a charging locomotive, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether Raymond and I would have moved with comparable precision.
After a few more moments of watching the men fuck, I slid off the bed, tucked the loaded pipe back into the gym bag and made my way for the door. Even though being alone in the VIP room meant I was spared the ravenous or dismissive glares of the strange men outside, it also meant I had no one to distract me from the sense of rot and doom I felt in this impersonal fuck factory. Just a month ago, I’d spent the night with a man I met while at my cousin’s wedding in Tyler. He was big and charming and insatiable in bed. I managed to forget, at least for a few moments, that Cutter was back in Dallas waiting for me. What would I do if one day Cutter asked me to do something I simply couldn’t face? Would I lose him? Would he leave me stranded in some rented room with damp sheets and faded semen stains on the walls?
“My god, some people are so fucking needy!” Cutter declared as he burst through the door. He crossed the room with long, energetic strides.
“What took so long?”
“He wouldn’t stop crying.”
“Did you ever find his boyfriend?”
“I asked his room number, but the guy flat-out refused to go back there. I asked him where he wanted to go instead. You won’t believe what happened then.”
The two men in the porn playing above increased their volume and urgency. Cutter shook his head and smacked his forehead with an open palm.
“Anyway,” he said, “we’re standing near the hot tub and he just comes out and grabs my dick, says he wants only me to fuck him. Said we could rent a separate room, his treat.”
“Oh, my god,” I said with no affect. It was always painful to be reminded of this: Cutter was a devastating man. Of course, other men desired him. And there was no guarantee they’d desire me too.
“I just looked at him and said—and you should’ve heard how I said it. I looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘I have a boyfriend, you dumb faggot.’” Making that declaration, he sounded like a no-nonsense sheriff from an old sitcom.
“What did he say?” I asked, rising to my knees on the bed.
