Best Gay Romance 2013, page 16
David breathes, his forehead on Tobin’s sweat-slicked chest. Closing his eyes, Tobin pets the back of David’s T-shirt, damp and stuck to his skin with sweat. There is a transmutation that happens in these moments, Tobin has decided; there is a kind of magic that happens between when he accepts David’s semen and when David coaxes his own out. The circuit is primed but not closed, and Tobin feels the whole of his being aching for completion, something far more basic and necessary than the urge to come.
David leans up and takes Tobin’s cock in his hand, letting out a low murmur of pleased surprise at its state. It feels swollen in David’s hand, distended like a pregnant woman’s belly, as thick and filled with blood as his belt-whipped palms. David presses in again, his cock still half-hard, and Tobin sucks in a breath, waiting, again. Then David begins to stroke, long, tight passes Tobin knows intimately, as he knows the slow, languid grind David offers in counterpoint. Here, there is nothing but David; he is over and inside and all thoughts of a universe beyond him fade. David’s hand tightens, working the top half of Tobin’s shaft in a perfect squeeze-twist Tobin never taught him but David seemed to intuit, importing the motion from the endless lazy adolescent afternoons Tobin spent sprawled half-naked on his bed, employing the exact same technique till he’d milked himself dry.
Tobin gasps, arching his hips up into David’s next press, and David quickens the pace of his hand, thumb working up the underside just below the ridge, over and over till Tobin tenses from head to toe, holding his breath till the orgasm breaks over him, forcing his cock up into David’s hand again and again, semen hot on his belly as David strokes it out of him, easy at first, then with a firmer grip, seeking to squeeze it all out.
Drained, Tobin lies boneless, twitching sharply as David works the last of the semen from him. Then David’s hand is on Tobin’s thigh, and David gently pulls out; Tobin waits, eyes open in the dark, spent but waiting for that crucial closing of the circuit, so close now, David shifting lower and taking the sheets with him, David’s breath warm against his cock.
There. David’s tongue strokes Tobin’s belly as he takes Tobin’s semen, licking with a slow, concentrated methodology to make sure he finds it all. Tobin’s skin cools where David’s tongue has been, his saliva quickly chilling in the open air.
David moans, and Tobin relaxes; it’s complete. David passes his hand gently over Tobin’s belly as he shifts up and to the side, settling in against Tobin, and then, finally, is the kiss, thorough and quiet, David’s hand at Tobin’s nape, Tobin’s hand at David’s hip.
“I love you,” David whispers in the dark, pressing his forehead to Tobin’s.
Tobin had asked about that the first time, how love fit into David’s mechanical, atheistic worldview. David had smiled, a coy little expression Tobin had rarely seen, and said: I am a realist. I have experienced love, and therefore it exists.
David takes Tobin’s hand off his hip, brings it up to his lips, kisses the still-hot palm.
“I love you,” Tobin whispers in return.
LONELY BOY
Doug Harrison
My pace quickened as I strode from my parents’ car. I glanced back once. Dad waved from the driver’s seat, a nonverbal gesture of support nurtured by his desire for me to begin the life experience he never had. He lowered his arm and flapped his hand, figuratively pushing me forward, as he had literally done many times before to urge me onto the field, any sports field. Mom also waved, sorta, a weak gesture, her hand wavering between encouragement, blowing a final kiss, or wiping a tear.
I heard the familiar sound of the engine sputtering before turning over. It was no longer a family car—I was on my own. Carless and clueless. I suppressed a chuckle. My motor mind still coughed up phrases like a nondescript character in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, but at least I was near Boston, home of the Lamplighters. Not that I would have time or means to wander off campus—I’d come here to study physics and math, and that was that.
I snickered. Julie was sure in for a surprise. No more dating, even though she was majoring in voice somewhere in the bowels of Boston. So she won the Best Voice in New England Contest—got a full-time scholarship. Big deal. I didn’t win any Best Science Student Contest, but I had dug up a scholarship too. I wondered how she was doing during her first week in town. Probably lonely like me.
I winced at the memory of the unending stream of compliments I had shoveled into her voracious ego, and the memory of my inevitable reward—going home with lover’s balls, my jockeys glued to my upper thighs with precum. I was wedded to my right hand. Well, to both hands, since I had such a big dick.
Who had the big ego now?
I rubbed my crotch, and then quickly withdrew my hand, hoping no one had noticed. My mind flashed back to the dark corner of the magazine section of my hometown’s sole smoke shop, where every month I had crouched over the latest copy of Physique Pictorial, pressing my hard-on against the chipped wooden display case, peeking at hunks clad in posing straps. The few nude models with hard-ons didn’t outrank me in endowment, but their physiques sure did. God, how I had yearned to look like them. Did that make me queer? I sure wished prissy Julie had given me the chance to find out.
I bit my lower lip. Fledgling students and their parents flowed around me as if I were an implacable boulder in a turbulent stream. No one smiled or said hello. And, of course, I didn’t make any effort to engage them.
Then a guy about my height pushed his way toward me: brown hair, like mine, but close-cropped, a tailored crew cut. His freshly pressed sport shirt didn’t conceal his gymnast’s physique. He held out his hand.
“Hi, I’m Mark. You a new student?”
I stared at one of my suitcases, then the other. “Yeah,” I mumbled. “I’m Brad Chapman.”
Mark unrolled a single-sheet scroll of paper, glanced at it, and shoved it into his hip pocket. “I’m one of the brothers from Alpha Pi Omega, over there.” I followed the smooth arc of his hand across a grassy field and past a cluster of tennis courts to a row of brick buildings. “We volunteered, well, it was our turn this year, to welcome the frosh and get you settled in. The guys, that is. The sorority sisters help the women.” He leered. “And point them toward the frat houses.”
I managed a weak smile.
“C’mon, let’s get started.” He turned, faced the building I had been reconnoitering, and swept his hand in a grandiose semicircle.
God, was this guy a drama student?
“You must know this is Samuels Hall,” he said.
I nodded and scanned the U-shaped, ivy-covered, weathered-brick building. Its three floors rang with the creak of stubborn windows forced upward, doors slamming, and a few shouts of joy. A long banner, made of wrinkled white sheets held together by large safety pins, displayed a scrawled message: WELCOME, CLASS OF ’61.
“A couple brothers from the house cobbled that together,” Mark volunteered.
At least they tried, I thought. Four years, four long years of…of what? My mood was ironically underscored by Elvis’s big hit, “Heartbreak Hotel,” blasting from a corner window. I wondered if I dared tune in my favorite program, Live from the Met, every Saturday afternoon. I lifted my suitcases.
“I’ll take those for you.”
Before I could protest, he yanked them from my hands. I wasn’t sure if Mark suppressed a laugh at my bargain-basement luggage, but I sure did notice the bulge of his well-tanned biceps. I followed him up two flights of stairs, past communal bathrooms, to a three-room suite, my home for the year, like it or not. We entered.
A rail-thin man several inches shorter than me introduced himself. “I’m Jim.”
“And I’m Sam,” grunted the second.
They both held out their hands and we shook.
“We took the room over there,” Jim announced.
A third freshman meandered out of the second bedroom. “I took the lower bunk in the other room. I’m Winston.” He walked back into the bedroom and resumed his unpacking. I took in the undersized living room—two small desks with matching chairs that probably creaked, and an overstuffed easy chair that needed a stitch job. I went into my room: one desk.
“I took the desk,” Winston announced without looking up as he arranged pens, pencils, and a few mementos from home on the small surface. His open designer suitcases occupied most of the lower bunk. I stared at the upper bunk: no ladder. Good thing I’d hiked miles of rocky terrain and learned to hoist myself over obstacles. Mark swung my suitcases onto what was to be my nightly precarious perch, a nest with one occupant.
“Well, here you are,” Mark said, and again offered his hand. “If you need anything, give me a jingle.” He handed me a scrap of paper. “That’s the house number.” He smacked me between my shoulder blades, but his slap lingered and his hand slid a few inches down my back. He strode toward the bedroom door, quickly scanned the living room, and smiled at me, a smile that lingered like his slap as his periscope gaze traveled from my face to my feet and back to my eyes.
I blushed. He left.
I scrutinized the bedroom. The bunk beds were shoved into an alcove. Two bureaus and Winston’s desk filled the opposing wall. His monogrammed towels were neatly folded over the two towel racks screwed into the back of the door.
Shit! No goddamn privacy. I could retreat to the library to study, but where would I jerk off? In the shower? In the bushes at night? I’d managed at home with Mom and Dad downstairs. But I didn’t have three roommates there, and I wasn’t forced to share an upper and lower jammed into a tiny bedroom to boot. Could I manage a silent quickie under the covers? Would Winston notice? Would he smell my cum? Would he even care?
The four of us finished unpacking and found our way to the cafeteria. I filled my tray with my first nondescript college dinner; Jim, Sam and I sat together chatting about where we were from, this and that, but Winston spurned us for a group of guys wearing prep-school blazers.
After dinner I paid my respects to Jumbo, a huge stuffed elephant—P. T. Barnum’s gift to the school—that was part of college lore. Jumbo was ensconced appropriately in the foyer of the biology building and was conspicuously anatomically correct. I placed a quarter in his curled trunk, as my dorm mates had told me we freshmen were supposed to do, and returned to my room to collapse onto my high-rise bed.
Winston, already in pristine underwear, had taken off his black horn-rimmed glasses and was in the act of inserting earplugs. He switched off the light as I entered. I flicked it back on and flicked him the bird at the same time, threw one set of his towels onto his desk, placed my towels on the rack above his, brushed my teeth, and hauled myself into bed. I tossed and turned while Winston snored, and I vowed to find a drugstore the next day to purchase my first set of earplugs.
No more waking up with a warm cat nestled in the crook of my legs. My coffin-sized enclosure sat over the lair of a selfish, entitled Grinch. The pleasant vibes emanating from a purring cat had been supplanted by sizzling stress, much like a high-tension wire crackling in the night.
The next morning found me seated in a large lecture hall in the physics building. At eight fifty-five, a tall man with a medium build, thin glasses and a crowlike plume of thick dark hair entered. He wore a rumpled, brown, threadbare tweed jacket, despite the early fall heat. He ambled toward the center of the long lecturer’s platform, stared at his captive audience, and stepped into the wastepaper basket. None of us moved a muscle as he leaned over, grabbed the container, and yanked his shoe free. He scrutinized the room as if nothing had happened.
“I’m Professor Knapp, chairman of the physics department. I’m pleased to see so many aspiring physicists in the freshman class. More than we’ve ever had. I’ll spare you the cliché of, ‘Look to your right, and look to your left,’ but the truth of the matter is, only a third of you will graduate with this major. But welcome anyway.” He pointed to a pile of papers on the table. “Take one of these. It’s a list of your respective advisors. Good luck.” He left the room.
With the help of a map, I found my advisor’s office and we worked out my courses for the first semester, the usual for a physics major, except I talked my way into a sophomore philosophy course. I again consulted the map, and headed to the gym to register, where an assemblage of tables on the basketball court, sprouting raised signs like delegates at a political convention, announced each department. I likened the maelstrom of milling students to the interior of a confused beehive. Nonetheless, I obtained signatures for all my class choices and collected the appropriate booklists, then headed for the bookstore.
My physics text was the first in a three-volume set, but I grabbed all three hefty tomes so I could browse ahead to assuage my curiosity about upcoming topics, especially during the summer. My philosophy text was the two-volume boxed set of the complete dialogues of Plato. Would Plato even hint at Greek homosexuality, and if he did, would the instructor skedaddle around it? Math, German and English lit texts quickly followed, until all that remained to pick up was my gym uniform.
I approached the only likely counter to face a young female student, not much older than me. Shit!
She grinned. “You want a gym uniform, huh?”
I stammered a soft, “Yes.”
She looked at my chest. “You take a medium, huh?”
An even softer, “Yep.”
She reached under the glass counter—could she see my crotch through the display case?—and said, “You’ll need one of these.” She pushed a box containing a size-large jock toward me. I blushed and went to the register.
An older woman rang up my purchases. I used my new checkbook for the first time.
“All your books won’t fit into one bag,” she said. “Not even two.”
“I’ll just carry them,” I said. “But can you put these in a bag?” I bunched my gym jersey, shorts, and jockstrap into a clump behind the books.
“Yeah, sure.” She smirked. Salesmen selling bras had to control their reactions better than that.
And with that, I started across the campus, my books stacked precariously in my arms, held from the bottom at waist level, the paper bag with my gym equipment tucked between the top book and my chin. I was reminded of the giants in Das Rheingold sealing off the last vestige of Freia with a final golden brick.
I was staggering across the quad between bookstore and dorm when I spotted Mark walking toward me. He waved and broke into a trot.
“Here, let’s put those down,” he ordered as he maneuvered books and me to the grass. The tower of books toppled. I sat cross-legged amid the wreckage. Mark sat opposite me, leaned back on his elbows, and laughed. He wore black running shorts that accentuated his crotch as he spread powerful legs. His flexed biceps flowed into muscular shoulders that gripped the tops of firm pecs. His nipples and washboard stomach were outlined through a tight, sweat-soaked red singlet. A grungy white facecloth dangled from his shorts; he yanked it out and threw it to me. I wiped sweat from my forehead and tossed it back. We caught our breaths and stared at each other.
“Quite a load,” he observed.
“Yeah,” I answered.
He looked into my brown paper bag and grinned. “I’d like to see you in that.”
“They’re just gym shorts.”
“I mean the jock, man.”
I blushed for the second time that day.
“You have great calves,” he said. “Do lots of running? Let’s back up, what sports are you into?”
“I’m no athlete. But I did develop into a good swimmer at summer camp.” I took a deep breath. “So, I tried out for the swimming team freshman year. Within a week I had the worst case of athlete’s feet the family doctor had ever seen. Had to soak my size elevens in purple glop twice a day for ten days. So that ended that. But, I figured, running can’t be too different from swimming, just opposite body parts moving in sync. Hell, anyone can run around in circles—well, ovals, to be precise. Got to be pretty good. But the guys made fun of me, like, skinny and all that. Hell, I always thought runners were supposed to be thin. Well, it was the sissy part that really got to me.”
Mark grimaced. I continued.
“I’d go to the track after practice to run solitary laps and I’d gaze at the hills as the setting sun cast long shadows. It was very peaceful.”
“You’re poetic,” Mark interjected.
“Thanks. We lived in a valley, a typical New England factory town built up around a river, and I’d walk a mile home from school up steep hills. And often, weather permitting, I’d hike in the woods.”
“You’re quite something,” Mark said.
“Well, along with being a nerd, I do like nature. Especially since trees and brooks don’t poke fun at me. The gift of nature is that she returns, indeed amplifies, whatever you give her.”
Mark leaned back, his hands under his head, bunching his biceps, and stared at the sky. Then he sat up.
“Like to go on a hike tomorrow?”
My mouth dropped. “Er, yes. Where? No, I mean yes, but wherever you want to go.”
“Ever hear of the White Mountains?”
“Of course. I’ve read a lot about Mount Washington, the cog railway, the two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds at the top, fierce weather that can change in an instant. And Franconia Notch and Crawford Notch. And Lucy Crawford and her loneliness.”
