I put my hands in his hair, feeling the soft black curls, the coarse gray strands. Jesus, I want to unbutton this man right here, I want to bend him over the kitchen counter and take him. I try to tell him these things with my hips, the curve of my cock against his. He answers with his tongue, scraping the edge of my teeth, licking the inside of my cheek.

  The fridge squeaks as Seth and I press into each other, harder and harder. The sound makes Annie bark, once, sharp.

  All at once, we’re a tangle of flowers and dog bone and tongues and panting. I step back, away from Seth’s dark eyes. A flower petal brushes my ear as I break from his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know…”

  He smiles, and for the second time today, I am aroused by straight, white teeth. He seems to have recouped his lost confidence. His face is still flushed, but I don’t think it’s embarrassment this time. My own cheeks feel overly warm.

  Seth goes down on his knees to give Annie the bone. She pushes the healthy side of her face against his palm before she takes it between her teeth. Still on his knees, he holds out the slightly crushed bouquet of flowers. “Would you have a vase for these?” he asks.

  We do what’s civilized. I refill the calla vase with water and try to rearrange the flowers in a way that makes them look less like they were in the middle of a lust crush. And then I offer him lunch and he accepts.

  I slice up cheese and salami. Pull yesterday’s tomato and mozzarella salad from the fridge. He takes the knife I offer and slices a loaf of bread at perfect diagonals.

  “Beer?” I ask.

  He seems relieved.

  “I’d love one,” he says.

  We eat while Annie gnaws her bone in the corner of the kitchen. We don’t say much. It’s the lunch of two men who were too nervous to eat all day. The lunch of two men who know that dessert is going to be the best—and longest—part of the meal. I watch his hands while he dips slices of bread into olive oil. I want to suck the oil from his fingers. Better yet, suck it from his tongue. But I hold myself steady. I eat. I mention how well Annie’s doing. How healthy and happy she seems.

  At the end, we clear the table as though we’ve been doing this for years. There is no sidestepping. Seth doesn’t ask where the dishes go, or how to stack things. He just does. And then there is no more to do. Annie is asleep with the bone holding her jaws apart. Her breathing is nearly silent.

  Seth straightens a towel that’s hanging on the fridge. “What now?” he asks, without looking at me.

  I touch his back, at the curve-in place just above his ass.

  His voice low, still looking at the towel, Seth says, “I want you to fuck me.”

  It makes my cock pulse. Oh, Jesus. I bury my face in his neck. Even here, he smells of herbs.

  “I want that, too,” I say against his skin. I take his hand and pull him away from the towel rack. I mean to go to the living room, something less personal, but that’s where Thom is, the memories of his last months and days, and I lead Seth into the bedroom instead. I think it surprises us both, this wide, carefully made bed waiting in the middle of the room.

  Seth stops in front of it. I realize that if I stop now, I’ll back out. I’ll send Seth on his way, and Annie and I will live out the rest of her days in the safe, lonely rooms of this house.

  Instead, I push my hands against Seth’s chest. Somehow, in pushing him away, I pull him closer. My fingers open the buttons one by one. I’m shaking, and I have to hold on to each button tightly. Seth kisses my neck while I work. His hands slide down the back of me, from my shoulders to my waist. I hear my belt buckle open, feel the warmth as he slides it from my jeans.

  Everything’s too slow for me.

  “Please undress. I want to see you,” I say.

  Seth lets go of my jeans. He undresses quickly, dropping his clothes in piles. His body is lean but muscled. His cock swings up, long and thin, the smooth head a beautiful pinky-purple. His body is so alive, so much muscle and blood pumping, that I’m afraid to touch him.

  It doesn’t matter. He comes to me, undresses me as fast as he did himself. Even so, I marvel at his hands everywhere: buttons, sleeves, sliding my underwear down my thighs so my cock springs up.

  “Oh,” he says. And he never comes up from taking my underwear off. He stays on his knees, and I can see the lean muscle of his back, and just below that, the perfect curves of his ass. He licks his lips and presses them to the head of my cock.

  It’s been so long since I’ve felt anything other than my own hand that just the press of his lips there makes me want to grab the back of his head and fuck his mouth. I try to keep still. When he opens his lips, lets me slide inside him, against the press of tongue and teeth, it’s almost too much. I grit my teeth to stem the rising pleasure. His tongue finds the sweet spot just beneath my head, laps at it.

  “Ah, Jesus,” I say. Through my gritted teeth, it comes out as something less awed, more primal. I pull Seth up from his knees. His lips are cherry red and wet. He licks a drop of precum from his big bottom lip.

  “What are you doing to me?” I ask, even as I’m laying him down on his back on the bed. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. The way his cock jumps as I position myself over him, the way he puts his legs up to give me access, says it all.

  I lick my finger and use it to find the swirl of his asshole. I press against it, and Seth opens for me, already pushing down on my finger.

  “More,” he pants. I enter with a second finger, let his body settle over it. He wraps his fingers tight around the base of his cock. The color darkens even more. My cock is jumping every time Seth’s ass tightens around my fingers. It wants in. I want in.

  “Seth, I want…”

  “Yes,” he sighs. “Yes.”

  I fumble in the nightstand drawer for lube and condoms, hoping there’s something left over. Hoping I won’t break down when my hand hits a cellophane wrapper.

  Thankfully, Seth puts his other hand around my cock. He’s wet his palm and his fingers slide over my skin, slick enough to take my mind off everything that came before this moment. I find a half-empty bottle of lube and one lonely condom in the bottom of the drawer.

  Seth wraps his fingers around the base of my cock while I roll on the condom. He tightens his grip, a human cock ring that makes me pump my hips against his hand as I spread lube over the surface.

  “It’s cold,” I say.

  Seth’s already raising his hips to me, the perfect circle of his asshole waiting.

  “Don’t care,” he says.

  I push my way inside him. Just the head at first. How much I’ve missed this entering is something that I feel in my whole body. This is how I try to be: Slow. Careful. But Seth is sucking me in with his low moans, with his fingers tight on my ass.

  The slide inside is: Oh, fuck. And then I’m buried in him, his ass contracting and releasing around me. I stop.

  “I don’t know how long I’m going to last,” I say. “I can’t promise—”

  Seth pulls my face down to his, offers me that big bottom lip to suck on. It shushes me.

  “Just fuck me,” he says against my mouth.

  I do, oh, god, I do. Rising and falling inside him. Seth pushes his hips upward to meet my thrusts. We are greedy together, wanting it all.

  And then I close my eyes, just for a second, and see Thom’s face. For some reason, it’s okay, though; he looks happy. Or at least he doesn’t look unhappy.

  When I open my eyes, Seth is pumping his cock at the same rhythm as I’m fucking him. His head is thrown back, and he moans low. It’s visceral: the sound, the feeling of his hot skin around me. I come.

  Coming is like this: Everything emptying. Everything filling. The long, slow release of something I’ve been holding on to for too long. It is liquid leaving and me becoming liquid and the way Seth says “Aw, god,” and Annie’s low whine from the other room.

  When I wake up, I’ve got a big white paw in my face, and I realize that while we were sleeping, Annie must have crawled in bed.

  Seth’s already awake. His fingers are back in the fur at Annie’s ear.

  “I need to tell you something,” he says.

  My soul says: Oh, shit. My mind says: Wait and listen.

  “I got assigned to you on purpose,” he says.

  “What?”

  Seth drops his eyes, pretends to pick something out of Annie’s fur. And then his words come out in a tumble.

  “Thom came into the shelter in person when he signed up. He was so sweet, told us the whole story. He wanted you to have something after. It was supposed to be sooner, that’s what he wanted, but there wasn’t a good match. I asked to be assigned to you.”

  I shift Annie’s paw off my shoulder, lean up a little. “Is that kind of creepy?” I ask.

  The tips of Seth’s ears are growing a dark red. I can’t help it. I think of his cock.

  “Maybe,” he says. “But Thom was so nice, and I thought, ‘A man who’s in love with this man must be amazing, too.’ I just wanted to see if it was true.”

  “And?”

  He swallows audibly. The sure man who was in my bed minutes ago has disappeared.

  “And…you were not only nice, but you were so sexy. I got sucked in.”

  His lip is pouting out so far I’m tempted to bite it.

  Instead, I ask, “Would you like to get sucked in again?”

  The tips of his ears still showing red, he nods.

  I run my finger along the edges of his lips.

  “Let me feed the small horse, then,” I say. “And when I come back, I’ll see what I can do.”

  It’s been three months and two days, and Seth has moved in. He’s brought his life with him: paperwork and photos from Pawspice, a shed full of gardening tools, his ability to grow herbs and tomatoes like he’s made of fertilizer.

  Annie’s days are switching from mostly good to mostly bad. Something has speeded up inside her, is pushing her quickly toward the end. Five times a day, we coax her to eat by cupping Alfredo sauce in our palms and letting her lick it out.

  This morning, while Seth cooks breakfast, I mix up the solution to wash Annie’s coat—mostly water, a little lemon juice, and hydrogen peroxide. She lies on the rug in the kitchen, the ball between her teeth. She has it almost all the time now, and still she needs the meds.

  I wring out the sponge—my skin is permeated with the scent of lemons—and I run it carefully over Annie’s face. She closes her eyes when I get near her nose, and I talk low to her, tell her I’m sorry if I hurt her.

  Seth chop-chops the onions on the board. The room smells of acid and tears.

  “I think it’s almost time,” I say. I’m talking to Annie and to Seth. Somehow, they both nod.

  Not today, not tomorrow, but soon, we will lose Annie and all she has brought to us. Well, not everything she has brought to us. We’ll still have: Memories. Tennis balls filled with holes in every room in the house. A bed that sags on one side. Each other.

  TOTAL PACKAGE

  Michael Bracken

  Political correctness hadn’t reached my part of Texas back then and the locals still referred to me as a mailman. As a substitute letter carrier, I covered rural routes on a rotating basis, a different one each day when the regular carriers had their days off. Saturdays I ran RR#2 southwest of town, puttering along the shoulder in a right-hand drive Jeep that had seen better days, stopping every so often to fill roadside mailboxes with bills and bulk mail.

  I knew more about the people on my routes than they realized. Five-foot-two, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Ethel May Raditz told everyone she was on a diet but received a package nearly every week from Godiva. Tom Jobe seemed to be preparing for the apocalypse because he subscribed to a dozen survivalist magazines. And Vince DiMarco, at that time the newest stop on the route, had something to hide because he received more than the usual amount of mail in plain brown wrappers.

  He wasn’t the only one around town with something to hide. I was so deep in the closet I wasn’t sure I would ever find my way out. I’d suspected I was different in high school because I snuck glances at the other guys when we showered, and had no interest at all in the girls—even after Billy Roy Johnson found a way to sneak peeks into their locker room through a hole in the wall of the equipment room—but I’d never told anyone about my proclivity and I had certainly not done anything about it at the time. Not where I lived. Not in rural Texas.

  My family didn’t have the money to send me off to college, so I worked various jobs around town until I got on with the USPS. Once I had a steady income, I rented a small house three blocks from the station and proceeded to lead a double life. Derek to my family, Rick to most everyone else, I shot pool with my friends at Gully’s on Saturday nights, attended the Methodist church Sunday mornings, and spent all of the holidays with my family.

  Sexually frustrated because I wasn’t interested in the available women my age—most of whom had been through at least one marriage and were either available to every man who bought them a drink or were seeking baby daddies—I sought release during occasional trips away from town. Dallas and Austin became my favorite travel destinations, but after a few years of casual encounters with men who had no interest in sharing phone numbers or last names, I resigned myself to the probability that I would never experience the kind of relationship that my parents—married thirty-five years and showing no signs of wear—enjoyed.

  As much as I desired sexual congress with a hard-bodied young man, I wanted something more. I wanted a relationship measured in years and months, not hours and minutes. I wanted the total package. And I despaired of ever finding it.

  One Saturday morning, about two months after he moved into the old Denton place, I found myself with a plain brown envelope addressed to Vince DiMarco that had been stamped with a postage due notification. I knew most of the people on my route—I’d gone to school with them or their kin, worshipped in church beside them, or was related to them in some way—so I usually left postage-due mail in their boxes. Charlie Waterson, the carrier who worked Monday through Friday, would find the appropriate amount of money waiting in the mailboxes the next delivery day. But I didn’t know Vince. I’d never met him—had never even seen him—and the only things I knew about him, other than what I could discern from casual glances at his mail, was what my second cousin Sally Jo, the real estate agent who’d sold him the old Denton place, had told the family during one of our occasional Sunday afternoon cookouts. He was handsome, single, and worked out of Waco as a claims adjuster for an insurance company.

  I glanced at my watch. I was ahead of schedule and nosey, so I eased the Jeep past Vince’s roadside mailbox, turned up the short drive, and stopped behind a recent-model Lexus. After killing the engine, I unfolded myself from the Jeep, walked past the Lexus and up the steps to the porch, and leaned on the bell. I heard it clang somewhere deep inside the house. I waited a few minutes and then I leaned on it again.

  Just as I was getting ready to leave a pink form telling Vince when he could collect his postage-due envelope from the post office in town, he opened the front door. Wet, ripped, and wearing nothing but a royal blue towel wrapped loosely around his hips, he seemed as surprised by me as I was by him.

  His gaze quickly traveled from my white pith helmet down over my blue short-sleeve sport-style knit shirt with the U.S. Mail emblem above the left breast pocket, over my navy blue shorts—worn the regulation three inches above midknee—with the dark blue stripe on the outside seam, over my calf-length blue-gray socks with two navy rings at the top, on down to my polished black work shoes, and then back up to my eyes. Unlike many of my coworkers, I looked good in my regulation uniform. I groomed myself appropriately, took care of my body, bought uniforms that fit, and cared for them as well as I cared for my street clothes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing for his appearance. “You caught me in the Jacuzzi.”

  I held up the heavy envelope. “This came postage due—”

  A black-and-white Border collie shot out the door and grabbed the envelope. My free hand instinctively reached for my pepper spray before I realized the dog wasn’t attacking me; it was attacking the plain brown envelope and whatever was inside. For a moment we played tug-of-war with it. Then the envelope tore open and its contents fell to the porch, revealing a familiar magazine, one that I received at my post office box two towns north of the town where I actually lived.

  “No, Elroy, no!”

  Vince grabbed the dog’s collar and wrestled it back into the house as I bent to retrieve the magazine. As he struggled with the dog, Vince’s towel dropped to the floor. He wore nothing beneath it and I found myself eye-to-thigh with his muscular legs. His thick phallus and heavy scrotum hung mere inches from my face. If he had experienced any shrinkage from his time in the Jacuzzi, it wasn’t evident.

  I licked my lips and slowly straightened up with the magazine in my hand, unexpected desire flooding through my entire body.

  Vince, still struggling to control the Border collie, made no effort to cover himself. He asked, “How much do I owe?”

  I told him.

  “I’ll get it. Wait here.”

  He pulled the dog back and closed the door, which pushed the wet blue towel onto the porch at my feet. I nudged it with the toe of one black shoe, wondering if I should pick it up. I decided instead to step away from the door, and I waited on the edge of the porch near the steps.

  When Vince reappeared, he wore chinos and a pale green polo shirt that hugged his thick chest and trim waist. He stepped onto the porch and closed the door behind him to prevent the Border collie from darting out again.

  He handed me the appropriate amount of change.

  I handed him the magazine.

  As he took it from my outstretched hand, our fingers touched. The warmth spreading through me turned into a raging fire. I felt myself stir within my uniform shorts. I said, “I—”

 

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