Best Gay Erotica 2010, page 14
Together for a year. By now, it’s become an art, pleasing my big bottom Bear, giving him what he wants, even when he’s too ashamed to ask. Earlier tonight, it was five-alarm chili, his favorite fire-station dish, with biscuits and Bud Light, followed by cherry pie with ice cream. Now it’s fire-play. “Aversion therapy,” he calls it, submitting to the element most likely to end him. A gesture mixing defiance with supplication and thanks, I’d say. Last week a toppling wall almost got him.
Since we’ve met, I’ve learned how to truss the big man up, that’s for sure. Tonight, balmy evening in early May, Aidan’s muscle-hard arms and torso are wrapped in heavy chain. His crossed wrists are roped together in the fuzzy small of his back; a cord threaded through his thighs secures his hands to his cock and balls. He’s lying on his back, his knees bent, calves pressed tightly against thighs. His feet are bound together with more chain; a very short rope cinches his ankles to the base of his ball sac. Whenever he tugs on his bonds, he only tortures his own genitals. Add to this setup the thick dildo buried in his broad butt, the alligator clamps’ sharp metal teeth sunk into his nipples, the sodden bandana stuffed in his mouth, and the four strips of duct tape layered over his lips, and my slave’s the helpless sacrifice he wants to be. Amazing, really: he’s big enough to throw a slight guy like me through the wall, but instead he’s allowed me—begged me, actually—to free him from freedom and envelop him in pure surrender. I could cut his throat right now, with one of his collectible blades, and we both know he would be in no position to stop me. The power I hold over him is the most priceless gift anyone has ever given me.
I know, dripping hot wax over his bound-up balls and blood-plump cock, that I feel something for him that I’ve never felt for any man before him. I know, puffing on the fat cigar he brought, blowing smoke into his face till he chokes, that I want to hold him hostage always. I know, holding the cigar’s ember-heat only millimeters from his tender nipples, that I can’t comprehend life without him. I know, tapping the cigar against the side of my hand again and again, covering the black mat of his chest hair with white-gray ash, rubbing the ash into his beard, smearing it on his cheeks, his nose and brow, that I need him to feel the same ardor for me.
Tonight, to commemorate our first anniversary, is the night I’m to mark Aidan as mine. We’ve discussed it earlier. He knows it’s coming. The more he’s refused to live with me, for fear of what the guys down at the fire station might think, the more he’s asked for some proof of my ownership on his skin. This is why his restraints and his gag are extra-tight tonight, though there’s no one in the woods surrounding this trailer to hear the screams when they come.
My cigar’s a stub now, but there’s enough fire left for what needs to be done. I tug on the tit-clamp chain, and Aidan growls with pain. I wipe sweat off his temples, then bend over him, raise the cigar, and ask “Are you ready? Are you sure?”
Aidan stares at me and nods for a good half-minute. His blue eyes are wider than I’ve ever seen them, crazed with his captivity. His face is etched with fear, longing, and awe. I hold the cigar’s smoking tip an inch from his brow, as if I might brand him there. He blinks and gulps. “Roll over on your side,” I say, and he does, with puffing, trussed-up difficulty.
“Move your hands,” I say, and he does, hitching them up toward his shoulder blades as far as the short rope-cinch and his muscle-bound frame will allow.
“I love you.” It’s the first time I’ve said it. “Now I own you; now you’ll never escape me.” Aidan nods, takes a deep breath and holds it.
I touch the burning tip of the cigar to the fur-clouded small of his back. There’s simultaneously a tiny hissing, the smell of burnt hair and skin, and Aidan’s scream, surprisingly loud considering how thick his gag is. I lift the cigar and step back. Aidan thrashes across the bed. The muscles of his shoulders, arms, and back bulge against his restraints. His scream gradually dwindles into sobs and then muffled cursing.
I fetch the burn ointment. I free him from bonds, gag, clamps. I anoint and bandage his wound, strip, blow out the candles, climb into bed, and hold him. “God, Bobby, it hurts bad,” he moans. He rocks against me, his arms around his knees. “I love you,” he moans. He’s never said it before either. I stroke his thick hair and beard, his wax-sheathed dick. “Good boy, good boy,” I whisper, “I’ll take care of you,” as if he were the young one, the small one, the one I might imprison, torture, and protect, one the indulgent years might allow me to own entirely.
Now Aidan’s on his belly and I’m filling him with spit-slick, thick-girthed cock. He’s wincing, chewing the pillow, begging me to screw him harder. Now the bed’s scattered with broken wax, the sheets are smeared with streaks of ash, the room’s saturated with the thick scents of smoke and semen.
Halfway through my second glass of port, Nathan calls. He’s doing fine in D.C., attending conference sessions. He’ll be home day after tomorrow. We’ve been together for five years; the marriage is solid, strong, likely to last. I’ve never told him about Aidan, about that passionate love affair fifteen years ago, about Aidan’s beauty, sweetness, and submission. Nathan doesn’t need to know he lives in a shadow.
Aidan died suddenly, two years into our love affair. All that time in the closet, all those years fighting fires, and he ended up dying off-duty, in a crowded gay-disco conflagration in Florida. He was visiting his retired parents in Daytona Beach, the first vacation he’d taken since I met him. According to eyewitnesses, he helped more than a dozen men escape before succumbing to the smoke. I guess his love for films focused on warriors both doomed and triumphant makes more sense in retrospect. He finally found a way to be heroic, damn him.
In D.C., Nathan hurries off to another late business dinner. In Ohio, I stand by the hearth, dripping what’s left of my port on what’s left of the fire. The charred crumbles smoke and hiss; I keep dripping till there’s nothing but wine-soaked blackness. Tomorrow, I’ll clean the fireplace, empty the ash bucket in the flowerbeds. Tomorrow, I’ll twist up newspapers, crisscross kindling, and heap up logs to fire up as welcome when Nathan comes home.
Aidan was cremated. It’s hard for me to imagine it: that strong, thick body; that soft, musky body hair; that swirling tribal tattoo; that scar I left in the small of his back, all consumed by flame. It’s hard to imagine an inferno that hungry and hot, intense enough to swallow such strength. Since he’d been so closeted, none of his family or friends knew me, which meant—after several days of wondering how his trip was going and why he hadn’t called—I read about his death in the newspaper. No one spoke to me at his funeral. He’s buried back in Virginia, the pretty spruce-edged O’Neill family cemetery in Ellett Valley. There are angels and a fireman’s helmet sculpted into his stone. When it rains as hard as it does tonight, I think about his ashes growing moist in black mountain earth.
Time has passed so quickly since he died. For years, I was sick with sorrow. I broke into tears when I saw a lit candle, a fire truck or firehouse. I graduated, moved to Ohio, found a job as a stage manager, met Nathan and settled down. Soon enough I’ll be as old as Aidan was when we met. Soon this little bit of blond beard I’ve grown will shade into gray. Soon it will be December, then a new year. Soon the rains over Ohio will turn to snow, filling the brittle cornfields with white powder that grows ash gray as night descends.
From my desk drawer I lift it, the tarnished chain and padlock Aidan used to wear to please me, to signify his possession and my ownership, the slave collar he left at my trailer the last time we parted. I run my fingers over the dark stains his sweat left. Every year or so I think about burying it in the backyard, as if that gesture might help me forget him. Every year I relent, knowing it would do no good. Instead I do what I often do when Nathan is out of town: I drape the chain around my own neck, click the padlock closed, blow out the candles, and head down the hall to bed.
COLIN AND GREGORY: 1956
Jonathan Kemp
When old men hang around public toilets while younger men piss, we aren’t out for a glimpse of cock or even a grope. What roots us to the spot is the most profound feeling of envy that we cannot piss like that anymore. It’s a mark of respect. When you reach fifty, it trickles.
He pisses like a horse. I can hear him through the whole house. It’s not a big house—he calls it the doll’s house—and he is forever banging his head on my lampshades and doorjambs, while I totter behind him like a puppy. He strides through my tiny rooms with such confidence and familiarity, as if it were a castle and he its prince; I feel in comparison like the valet who can call nothing here his own.
When I first saw him about a month ago, I thought him quite the handsomest boy I’d seen in a long time. When he removed his clothing, I saw what I had been missing in a model: someone who shone more when he was nude than clothed. Skin with light trapped beneath it. Skin that looked complete rather than exposed. That looked painted, full of color and life, blood blue and flesh pink. Yellows, purples, whites. Tints I didn’t know I could ever reproduce. He is more relaxed when naked, more himself, more at home in his flesh than his clothes. And because of that you don’t really notice he is naked.
He has a masculine grace that is best expressed by the word noble. There is something classical about him; his proportion and bearing suggest Michelangelo’s David come to life, if that doesn’t sound too grand. He speaks with the jagged edges of simplicity, and whilst that is not without its charm, it is clear that the sophistication of his being is concentrated on the surface.
I fill acres of paper with his crouched figure, his legs bent and twisted beyond recognition, his spine an abacus, a string of pearls arching impossibly as he nearly swallows himself like Ouroboros. There is nothing that he will not do, no inch of flesh so sacred to him it cannot be splayed and displayed to my gaze. The damp, dark caves of his armpits. The taut plateau of his belly. The smoothed edges of his muscular buttocks, carved to Hellenic perfection—if I placed my tongue there, I should expect them to be cold and hard as marble. The masculine sweep from his hairline to the right angle of his shoulder as fluid and mesmerizing as any waterfall. The line of gravity that runs the length of his torso, from the hollow of his throat to the jewel of his navel, cruciformed by the stigmata of his nut brown nipples. The pucker of his anus like a knot in a tree. How does he feel, spread out before me? How can he not feel shame, I wonder. Yet nothing he does or says suggests he feels it.
After he left today, I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and muttered like an incantation the words You are old, the distance granted by the second person address in no way diminishing the painful truth of that statement. His presence diminishes me; I am wracked with envy that I am not him. They say desire and identification are almost indistinguishable, but I never understood this till I met him. I stood naked before the mirror, something I have not done since the years of curiosity adolescence entails. I looked at my reflection, at my rounded, narrow shoulders with their tufts of gray hair, my rotund belly, my shriveled privates, my legs like white sticks, and I felt a deep sadness.
I cannot recall what it felt like to be young. I suppose that is because I was too busy being young to think about it, to store it for future reference. Perhaps that is why, as Wilde said, youth is wasted on the young. Or perhaps because my youth does not in actuality warrant recollection. Perhaps it was a nonevent. But I must have been a youth at some stage in my life, all things considered. I must have been in some sense flawless and innocent. Photographs must supply some clue. Another face stares back at me, though, from the few I do possess, never having liked to have my picture taken. I look at a stranger whose passions and fears are irretrievable now. Christ, and I’m only fifty-five.
He came over again today. I should stop saying “he.” He has a name. But it is such a grotesque name I fail to link it with him, with his beauty: Gregory. There’s no nobility in it, no grace. It sounds like the death rattle of an ancient bullfrog. He told me his friends call him Gore, and since this is the name of a novelist whose books I enjoy, I feel happier calling him that. Gore has a nobility that more closely matches the patrician stature of his presence.
He’s not shy at all and strips off as soon as he’s in the studio. Just stands and disrobes. I usually offer a bathrobe and get them to undress before coming into the studio, but he has none of that. It’s as if he can’t wait to be naked, as if that is his natural state and clothes are an encumbrance. I look at him and praise the good fortune that allows me to witness the sight of him naked. We start off with a few short poses to warm up and then move to longer ones. He does not fidget like some of the models I’ve had. We chat as I sketch.
His parents are gypsies—or, as he prefers to call them, traveling people. His mother is French and his father Italian, and he is fluent in both languages, as well as English, having been born here, outside Brighton. He left his parents at the age of sixteen and traveled the world on merchant ships, worked in circuses, on building sites, occasionally whoring. I accept this revelation with a worldly nod, as if I meet renters every day, though inside I am shocked and excited. I wanted to bombard him with questions but beneath his apparent openness he is remarkably guarded.
“Do you find your work interesting?” I say.
He says it gives him plenty of money and sex and saves him from having to work.
He seems to know exactly what he is doing, and why; and I, for one, cannot stand in judgment. I am plagued with questions, having had so little physical pleasure and placed so little value on it. I want to know what it is like to give and take pleasure in that way, to live outside normal society so gleefully and shamelessly. I want to know what it is like to be so fearless.
I ask none of these questions and continue to draw in silence.
“Most of the models who pose for the group do it,” he says at last, and I know I am expected to pick this up as a topic of conversation.
“And does it pay well?” I ask.
“I made ten bob from one fella last week.”
“He must have been well off.”
“A don from Cambridge. You know what he wanted me to do?”
“What?”
“He wanted me to sit down on his face.” He is grinning.
“Clothed or unclothed?” I have never spoken of such things with another human being in my life.
“Unclothed. I had to rub my arse in his face while he played with me. And the whole time he’s trying to speak, but his words are being muffled by my arse. Then I spilt onto his belly.”
I am looking at him by now, my hand stilled, struck dumb by this image he has conjured. I am not at all certain what I might say at this point. I am ill-equipped for this.
“It was all over in twenty minutes and he hands me a fiver. That’s the most I ever had.”
“And will you see him again?” I ask, sounding like a maiden aunt discussing courtship prospects.
“I hope to see him again,” he says with a smile that seems to invite something I can barely recognize.
Long after he has gone I am plagued by the image of him crushing his behind into a man’s face. I cannot sleep for imagining it.
Once a month on a Friday afternoon for the past year I have been attending a local life-drawing group run by a friendly old woman with the kind of scatterbrain so characteristic of those members of the aristocracy who have fallen foul of the arts, or “living la vie de Bohème,” as she puts it. Miss Wilkes is a retired arts mistress from one of the private girls’ schools in the Home Counties. She treats us like schoolgirls. There are five of us, all middle-aged men or older, and all, I imagine, of the same persuasion as myself. Maurice wears rouge and calls everybody “dear.” Kenneth is a retired navigator from the Royal Navy who stands incredibly close to the male models during the tea break, cornering them so they are obliged to listen to him drone on and on about his life at sea. Malcolm is the most verbally explicit. He has a code for rating the standard of the male models’ backsides. The ones he likes best he calls “Harrods.” He does tiny, cramped watercolors—two to a page of his small sketchbook—and sucks on his paintbrush, making a repulsive sound and ending up with a black tongue. Peter, like me, hardly says a word.
Gore came to model for the group about a month ago. During the tea break I found myself arranging for him to model for me privately. I have done this occasionally with models from the group, though none came more than once or twice. They are unreliable, and not being local boys, are often reluctant to travel so far out of town for so little money.
I had been trying without success to recall who it is Gore reminds me of, for there is something familiar about him I cannot quite place. And it finally came to me today, as I was drawing, as I focused on that face and body. He is the spitting image of a young boy I met thirty years ago, under the following circumstances. After leaving college at twenty-one, I worked for four years at an advertising studio in Regent Street run by an acquaintance of my father’s—Frank Symonds. On this particular occasion I had been assigned a job that involved drawing the male figure. It was a catalog of some description, a men’s clothing catalog. During the briefing, Symonds told me he thought I should brush up on my figure drawing. He asked me to stay behind after work, and arranged for a model to come round whom I was to draw for a couple of hours whilst he did some paperwork.
Trevor was a beautiful young man, tall, broad shouldered, with black hair and green eyes. Symonds took us down to a storeroom in the basement, where he had set up some angle-poise lamps and cushions. The room was cold. My heart raced at the prospect of this boy disrobing before me, feeling no concern for his possible discomfort, I must admit. Symonds and the lad were clearly familiar, and they joked while Trevor removed his clothes. “I’ll try and locate a heater,” Symonds said, “otherwise your shivering will be most distracting.” Symonds looked at me and said, “Don’t worry, it gets bigger,” and gave a wink before leaving. It was a side of him I had not seen before, slightly effeminate, repulsive, in thrall to this.
