Best Gay Romance 2012, page 15
All summer long, Cody and I had power-raked people’s Bahia lawns for cash. It was hard, sweaty work but paid well. In ten weeks we’d earned more than we could have bagging groceries an entire year. We were both tanned and fit, but skinny as ever. The muscles in my back and arms ached from the day’s labors and I shifted my weight on the mattress, trying to get comfortable.
In a week, we’d return the power rake to the rental place. Then my dad would drive me to Orlando with my belongings and my college days would commence.
“Promise you won’t pledge a fraternity,” my mom had begged me.
I promised. What fraternity would pledge a guy with toothpick limbs and hair past his shoulders?
Now, in my room, Cody drew from the deck. “I’ll miss you when you go,” he said.
I nodded. How would it feel, not waking next to Cody each morning?
I told him, “At least you won’t have to sleep on the cot. You’ll like this bed.”
After discarding, Cody looked up. “Will you do something for me, before you leave?”
I asked what.
He placed a hand on my knee and squeezed.
My eyebrows gathered. I looked at Cody’s hand, then his face.
“Just once,” he said. “It’s been a rough day and I don’t want to sleep alone.”
I didn’t know what to do. I thought of Dean’s perfection. He’d been way out of my league; there was no way I could measure up to him and what he’d meant to Cody.
Say something.
“I’m not your brother,” I told Cody. “I’m just a skater with zits.”
Cody reached for my cheek and stroked it with his thumb. “It doesn’t matter, Zach. You’re my best friend; my only friend.”
I hadn’t touched a man sexually since my arrest. Already my cock was stiff and my pulse quickened.
Do it, stupid; do it for Cody.
Do it for you, too.
We lay naked on my bedsheets, Cody and I, each guy gripping the other’s erection. Our lips smacked and our tongues rubbed. My heart thumped while my belly did flip-flops. I kept running my fingers through Cody’s hair, marveling at its thickness and texture. I kissed his eyelids, his forehead and the tip of his freckled nose. When he took my cock in his mouth and sucked the glans, I groaned so loud I’m surprised my parents didn’t hear me.
Actually, I think they did.
Cody worked my cock with his tongue and lips. It felt heavenly. His mouth was warm and wet, so sensual. I shifted position so I could return the favor. Then we both slurped away. I loved the scent of Cody’s crotch. How different this was from sex in Oleander Park. I was making love with my best friend, the guy who’d stood by me when no one else would.
What a fool I’d been, turning down Cody at the beach motel. Sure, I’d been angry because he’d hidden his sex life from me all those years, but hadn’t I done the same to Cody? Now that he was in my bed, I couldn’t get enough of him. I wrapped my arms around his waist and squeezed as hard as I could.
Okay, I wasn’t Dean Barton—I didn’t have his looks or his athleticism—but at least I was there for Cody. I found Cody’s lanky frame sexy; I liked touching him intimately. Maybe I could offer him a small measure of what he needed. Not just tonight, but in the future, if he’d let me.
UCF’s only a ninety-minute drive from Clearwater. Maybe—
“Zach?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you fuck me?”
I greased my cock with lube from the nightstand drawer. Then I greased Cody’s. He straddled me and sat on my erection. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I felt the clench of his pucker, the warmth of his gut when I entered him. Moonlight let me see the expressions on Cody’s face while I thrust inside his body and he stroked himself. He looked drugged, as though he were far removed from reality.
A shiver ran through me when I came. My lungs pumped and my body jerked each time I shot. I closed my eyes while fireworks exploded in my head. Moments later, Cody cried out my name when he blew his load. His semen sprayed my chest and collarbone; it felt warm and viscous, teeming with his life force.
My cock still inside him, Cody bent at the waist and kissed my eyebrows. “That was wonderful, Zach. Is it okay if I tell you I love you?”
Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. Snot crowded my nose and my lips quivered. I felt completely overwhelmed.
This is all you’ve ever needed: Cody’s love. Screw Oleander Park and screw the kids who bullied us at school. Screw Cody’s parents, too. They never deserved him, but I do.
I’ve earned Cody’s love by being his friend.
My mother called to me from beyond the bedroom door.
“Zach, are you and Cody okay?”
I wiped my eyes and sniffled. Then I cleared my throat.
“Yeah, Mom,” I said.
“We’re both fine.”
HELLO, YOUNG LOVERS
Simon Sheppard
Can anyone—anyone—dance around wearing a harness and well-filled codpiece nearly as well as Jake Shears?
Shears’s band, Scissor Sisters, is onstage, and Buster, though at work, is loving every ultraqueer, retro-disco moment of it. It’s not a bad job, really. He’s been employed at the venue for well over a decade and a half, since some of tonight’s audience was prepubescent. Since before a few of them were born. Now he’s shockingly middle-aged, but not too old to rock and roll. Nor too old to appreciate a handsome, nearly naked hunk singing about taking your mama out all night, while prancing around a stage just forty feet away.
The audience is, of course, wildly into the band, too. Packed like sardines into the pit—the area just below the front of the stage—they jump, shimmy and all but dry-hump one another while Buster, perched at the top of the staircase to the pit, looks down and smilingly surveys the scene. Lots of cute guys, some of them already shirtless, plenty of them bears, others hairless and thin. If many of the shows he works at—metal, thrash metal, death metal, whatever—attract a near-unanimous crowd of hets, the Sisters’ fans are flagrantly, gloriously non-straight.
Buster is enjoying himself. Thoroughly. He wishes that Charlie were with him. Not that Charlie would have enjoyed the show; dance music was hardly his thing. Beethoven and Vaughn Williams, more likely, and maybe some ambient electronica when he’d wanted background music to do his work to. It was one of the things he and Charlie had disagreed on, even when they were living together, even when they were desperately in love.
Buster had first met Charlie one morning in the park. It hadn’t really been love at first sight, more like lust. “Cute dog,” Charlie had said. Caesar was often a conversation starter, worth his weight in Milk-Bones.
“Thanks. What’re you doing?” As though the binoculars around the stranger’s neck and the field guide in his hand weren’t clues enough.
“Birding,” the good-looking man said. “There’s a tree full of cedar waxwings just over there.” He pointed, but Buster kept looking at the man’s face, not at the tree. He was out cruising for hum jobs, not hummingbirds.
“Am I too nerdy for you, y’think?” The handsome guy smiled, shatteringly.
“Nah,” Buster said.
And that had been pretty much it. Within an hour they were in bed together, within a month they were sharing an apartment. Buster had never believed in love, not really, but there they were, sharing an immoderate amount of happiness.
After several failed relationships—one of which had crashed and burned quite spectacularly—Buster had become pretty cynical about the possibility of Happiness Ever After. Charlie changed that. Love, Buster finally figured out, was not some great, overwhelming object, but rather a succession of shared moments. At first it was things as simple as making waffles from scratch together every Sunday morning. But as their lives became more and more entwined, they came to share one another’s interests. Charlie taught Buster about birding, and though it initially made him feel like a geek, he soon could distinguish between a Brewer’s blackbird and a boat-tailed grackle. For his part, Buster persuaded his lover to overcome his fears and learn to scuba dive; it wasn’t long till handsome Charlie was putting on his buoyancy control device and descending to seventy feet.
And then there was cruising…the boat kind, not the sex kind. It was something neither had been interested in, not till their friends Henry and Ian sold them on the idea. But they came to love it. When, following a day of diving on Grand Turk, Buster and Charlie had stood on the aft of the promenade deck, watching the sun set over the wake, the world had never seemed so achingly beautiful. And then they went back to their cabin, where Charlie gave Buster the greatest blow job of his life.
It’s not that they became identical twins, not quite. Buster never grasped Charlie’s enthusiasm for the astringencies of twelve-tone music. Charlie, for his part, had no love for Nick Cave or the Velvet Underground, and he damned as “pap” Buster’s favorite dance-pop guilty pleasures: the Pet Shop Boys, and even more shamefully, Erasure. Mid-period Madonna. And Gaga, of course. (Sure, they did, good homosexuals both, share a love of show tunes, but Buster gravitated toward the schmaltz of Rogers and Hammerstein, while Charlie preferred the more cerebral Sondheim.)
Still, schisms in musical taste didn’t prevent them from spending year after year together. Even when Charlie’s trips to the park became more about cruising than birding, even after Buster started going to dance bars to pick up men, their mutual affection and respect remained firm, only grew.
Somewhere along the line, Charlie’s very wealthy father passed away, and Charlie no longer had to work; he approached his very early retirement with alacrity and joy. Buster, though, decided to keep his job, despite Charlie’s offer to support him. He cherished his self-sufficiency, and besides, he liked teaching. Loved it, really. And there was his part-time gig at the rock venue, too, a job he’d held since the days when Jerry Garcia was alive and almost well. When Charlie spotted a too-good-to-pass-up bargain flight to Cozumel, Buster encouraged him to take a break while he, Buster, was busy grading midterms, and go do some diving at Palancar Reef. In a way, Buster was semi-guiltily happy to have the place to himself for a while.
“Bye, sweetie. Don’t work too hard.”
“No worries. Say hi to the fishies for me.”
“See you soon.”
Buster was listening to Radiohead—he remembered that vividly—when the call came through. There’d been an accident. And though Charlie’s dive buddy had done his best, that was that. Charlie was gone.
Gone.
And it was, Buster couldn’t help but feeling, his fault.
Scissor Sisters have just finished up a song Buster has never heard before. Maybe it’s from their new album. “You’ve really got to keep these stairs clear,” he says to a couple of teenage girls. They move, reluctantly.
Ana Matronic launches into “Tits On the Radio” while bandmate Shears, singing backup, cavorts, half-dressed, beside her. Buster scans the gyrating mass of flesh in the pit.
And that’s when Buster sees The Boy.
It’s not the first time he’s noticed him. Earlier, during the walk-in, before the forgettable opening band had taken the stage, The Boy, making his way into the pit, had headed down the stairway Buster had been assigned to. Before The Boy got down the stairs, though, he had turned to Buster and said, “Nice glasses.”
“Thanks.” Buster prided himself on his choice in eyewear. And on his taste in young men; this one was fairly astonishing, a bit geeky, unbelievably cute, with a little goatee and a big smile, wearing glasses himself, albeit nondescript wire-rims. Buster could easily imagine The Boy’s body: skinny, smooth, quite unlike Charlie’s hairy, chunky form, and all the more desirable for that. He idly hoped The Boy’s dick was on the small side; Buster liked to be the well-hung one.
Not that the skinny kid was in any real way a sexual prospect. He liked Buster’s glasses, he was being friendly. There were guys The Boy’s age who liked older men, true; Buster had ended up in bed with more than a few of them. But it was stupid, he knew, to get his hopes up, especially while he was on duty. A sexual-harassment complaint was the last thing he needed…not that the kid would have lodged one, but still…
And Buster hated humiliation.
After a shared smile, The Boy descended into the pit and made his way toward the other side, to be lost in the mass of heaving flesh when the lights went down.
During intermission, though, they crossed paths again. The Boy descended Buster’s stairs again, this time holding a beer. So he was at least twenty-one, which came as something of a relief, both legally and in terms of Buster’s self-image. This time The Boy merely grinned and nodded, barely slowing his pace. So that was that. That. The Boy will remain a mystery forever, he thought. It would still be another ten minutes or so before Scissor Sisters took the stage.
And now he’s watching The Boy, the cute one who’d complimented his glasses, whom he wishes had been flirting but probably hadn’t been. The Boy, his thin arms waving in the air, is pretty close to him now. And beside him is another young man Buster had seen earlier, blond, compactly muscular, stripped to the waist, his face just a bit on the pugnacious side. Not as cute as The Boy, no, but he would do.
In fact, the two young men aren’t just side by side, they are, apparently, together. Because they turn to one another, stop dancing for one long moment, and kiss. And not just a friendly peck. Buster can tell, even from a moderate distance, even illuminated just by the lights on the stage, that it’s a deep, sexy kiss. The kind he and Charlie used to share, but only in private.
Those teenage girls are back on the stairs again. “I told you twice already,” Buster yells over the music. “Off the stairs!” And when he looks back into the pit, the two youngsters have moved on, both literally and figuratively. They’re closer to him now, The Boy leaning up against a wall. And they’re really going at it, face-to-face, mouth-to-mouth, hands groping everywhere. Buster is a bit envious, a bit erect.
He’s also—he has to remind himself—still at work. He checks to make sure everything is okay in his area, which prompts a short trip to clear some folks who are dancing in the aisle. And when he gets back to the head of the stairs, things have gotten, incredibly, even hotter. Now, despite the crush of the crowd, it’s pretty obvious that Pugnacious is jacking off The Boy. Which means that The Boy has his dick out. Buster strains for a better angle, but to no avail. He could, of course, grab his flashlight and dive into the pit himself, maneuvering over to catch a glimpse of the skinny boy’s cock without arousing particular suspicion. Or maybe not. Maybe it would be too obvious, too awkward if The Boy were to spot him. He’s still pondering whether to take the first step when he feels a tap on his shoulder. It’s his supervisor. “Want to take a break?” Rachel asks, just audible over the omnipresent throb of sound.
“No thanks. I’m fine here.”
Once the supervisor is safely out of sight, Buster walks over a few steps to his right and looks in the two boys’ direction. The crowd has shifted, and so have the two young men. Now it’s pretty easy to see that both of them have each other’s cocks in their hands, jacking each other off as they kiss passionately. As the crowd swirls around them, barely seeming to take note, they cling to each other. Buster once read, he seems to recall, some old porn story about a guy cruising a cute boy in a mosh pit. This is better than that and for real. He thinks it’s the most romantic thing he’s seen in a long while.
Buster thinks Yes, I know that most straight people, maybe even some Respectable Gays, would look askance at whipping it out at a concert, much less at thinking of that as “love.” But fuck it. Breaking the rules: it’s one of the best things about being queer. He remembers back to when he and his pal Don watched an arty, sensitive movie about doomed poet John Keats and the woman who loved him. In the midst of one heavy-breathing scene of thwarted desire, Don turned and said, “Wow. Back in the olden days, people sure behaved weirdly because they couldn’t just fuck.”
The mutual masturbation continues. Buster is hornily riveted. He’s also a bit envious. Charlie is, after all, gone. His youth is gone, too. And his chances with The Boy? Nil. So…
Oh, fuck, he can actually see their dicks now. And he was wrong, thoroughly wrong, about the size of The Boy’s cock. It is, if not enormous, at least huge. And Pugnacious is pretty equally endowed. Not that Buster is in any sense a size queen. But still…
And that’s when something happens that truly astonishes Buster. As a jubilant, stoned, drunk crowd swirls around them, Pugnacious drops to his knees and starts sucking The Boy’s dick.
Buster wants to weep. He wants to jack off. He wants to be Pugnacious, sucking The Boy’s cock. He wants Charlie back.
The mob in the pit erupts in cheers and applause as Scissor Sisters leave the stage. It’s time for the encore, but the fellatio continues. Buster’s a bit concerned for the boys’ safety; it’s not the most ideal place to give head, nor the safest spot to get it. But as the first few people begin leaving the pit, some of them glancing over to the twosome, not one complains to Buster that there’s passion transpiring in the pit.
After a minute, Scissor Sisters retake the stage. Jake Shears is half-dressed as a horny Minotaur, Ana Matronic done up as a glamorous toreador, complete with flowing scarlet cape.
Buster realizes it will only be ten or fifteen minutes before the music ends and the lights come up, but the blow job heedlessly continues. Buster can see, in the illumination provided by the flashing lights from the stage, that The Boy’s head is thrown back, a blissful expression on his face, his hands on Pugnacious’s blond head.
There’s a commotion somewhere in Buster’s aisle. He tears his attention away from the twosome and goes to straighten things out. When he comes back, Pugnacious is back on his feet and the two have apparently put their dicks away, which is a good thing: as the final strains of “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” fade away, followed by thunderous applause, the houselights come up.
