Show-Offs, page 18
Jeff grabbed the extra sheet and the blanket from the bottom of the bed and pulled them over us. Then he spooned himself up against my back and wrapped his arms around me. I clenched my butt muscles, enjoying the stretched feeling and the sticky, tacky pull of his drying cum on my skin. The movement caused another trickle to leak out of my asshole and run down my leg. I shivered and pressed back against my lover, against his—for once—softly heavy cock.
“What are you two doing now?” Marco was beyond exasperation. He sounded genuinely perplexed. “What the fuck do you do for an encore?”
“We’re rolling over and going to sleep,” Jeff growled. “Just like in real life. Now shut up.”
“Oh, fer chrissakes!”
Something heavy hit the floor. It sounded like Marco’s clipboard. Then somebody started laughing—a lot of somebodies.
I closed my eyes and smiled as Jeff’s breathing deepened. I knew we’d be getting our percentage. Marco was too greedy not to use a scene like we’d just given him. Jeff started to purr. I drifted right behind him. Marco’s video was going to be great. And Jeff and I were even getting paid to sleep.
THE LOCKER-ROOM SCENE
Shaun Levin
I see the two Spanish guys first, but with him I take my time. No need to hurry. Not exactly a Nubian prince, him being a man in his midfifties, here in the changing rooms of the public swimming baths at the sports center at the top of Holloway Road. I’ve just walked in from the gym and there they are, all three of them naked. The two Spanish guys—beautiful in their own right—talking softly between them, but their gaze is on him, their bodies lean and tall, dark sprinklings of hair on their chests. One of them is using the locker next to mine and he stands so near I can see the soft hairs on his arse cheeks, the way they grow thicker toward the crack. His back is slim, streamlined. They head for the showers. But the black guy takes his time. He has, not long ago, emerged from the pool, then showered; now he towels himself near his locker, one leg up on the bench so that his thick circumcised cock pendulums between his legs, parallel to the leg he’s balancing on as he rubs the light-blue towel between his thigh and scrotum. Soft cotton against smooth skin. As if there is no more than this audience of three. Vultures, hyenas, any animal, any beast hungry or in heat, nostrils flared for food and fucking. I am obliged to take note. To look. Because every now and then I am rendered breathless by a substantial cock glimpsed in a public place. Like him, I take my time: my shorts come off to expose the tattoo on the side of my thigh, a large bird in flight, then my T-shirt to show him, and them, too, my stomach, flat, yes, flat (I will shower at home). They move slowly, all of them. The light-brown men—to be called white, although at moments like this their identity is nothing, they know nothing of themselves, see nothing of their reflections, the only thought is their desire (our face is a hole, invisible to us, but public, scrutinized), a blinding truth, an engulfing need. Now, one of the light-brown men walks slowly toward his towel, his own towel that hangs on a hook attached to the other row of benches, opposite the bench where the man who is toweling himself, the dark-brown man who has not one drop of water left on his skin, continues to towel himself. And my tracksuit bottoms go on, my chest bare for them to look, the result of genetics and ritual, then a dry T-shirt. I’m covered. The Spaniards could be twins, light-brown men watching the dark-brown man. The other twin is still in the shower, his hand, his fist, his fingers stroking his thick light-brown cock. A shower scene on a loop: over and over washing his cock, rinsing it, soaping it, rinsing it. To the onlooker (me, but also not me, not me as I am now, my face a hole) these are two white guys and a black guy. One of them in the shower soaping his tubular uncut cock that hangs from a sparse bush of lathered, frothy pubic hair, a pipe, not hard, but definitely not soft. This is not the first time. I am twelve. I am ten. I am sixteen, closer to twenty, witnessing what should not be witnessed in public, should not be seen if we are to avoid becoming the animals we are bent on becoming.
The other one walks slowly, no thought of his own body, driven by a craving, bare feet on a wet floor, terra-cotta, ridged to avoid slippage. His everything is fixed on the black guy, who still towels himself. The roundness of his belly, the softness of his breasts—not soft…full, fleshy, not fat, he is not fat—but the two (all three of us!) care only about his cock. No, it is more than that (be precise): we follow the movements of his towel, the towel that moves, but does not leave his thighs, and always the cock is exposed. Everyone’s is growing fatter. “They” being him and him, but they could be one, both of them with light-brown tubular uncircumcised penises, foreskins intact, weighed down by them, elongated.
I keep to myself, put my running shoes back on, feel sweat build up on my skin, sweating, but weak, weak from a cardio workout—I am not the audience. I came in after the scene had kicked off. I am not late, but I am too late to be part of it. I am neither the show nor the audience (which are one). The other two are audience; I am the audience beyond that. The one who is toweling himself is definitely not audience. In a room of three, the audience is in constant flux. But for now, the white guys are the audience. The one who performs, who stands, still with his leg on the bench, still with his small pale-blue towel between his legs—doing what he does for his audience of two (three), one still in the shower and one still walking slowly toward his towel (lime green).
A cat approaches a bird on the grass.
As if to say: I am performing a cannibal’s dance, a hunter’s dance, a predator’s dance, a dance of prey—watch me! The man with the towel and his leg on the bench moves at the same pace, a dance slowed down, like in a Bill Viola video, like a dance of temptation, Bathsheba in the privacy of her roof garden, King David peering over the wall. To move any faster would break the spell, scare away the audience or invite attack. Pounce! It’s all so fragile, it’s hard to tell what will happen next.
He is in no rush to put on his underwear, but when he does they are clean and white, and they support everything he has. What is it about a substantial cock? I know men who like to look at big cocks in porn (pictures or movies); I very rarely watch porn, maybe now and again I’ll go to the videos on XTube, but that’s about it. Is it something to do with being blessed? Something men with big cocks have that the rest of us don’t. Something hidden that only a select few get to see. Big cocks should not be on show. Seeing his thick cock between his legs in the locker room is breathtaking. I want to stare at a man who has been given something beautiful. By whom? God? Being close to a substantial cock can make one believe in God. Or luck. I had a lover who used to say my cock had magical qualities; he liked to suck it when he was on his knees looking up at me. His cock was bigger than mine, a cock that was perfect in every way. Very rarely do I feel inspired to go down on my knees. Now is one of those times.
Is it to do with entitlement? Are the feelings a substantial and unavailable cock invokes primal? Has it got something to do with impregnating women, how far one’s penis can go into a vagina, farther than any other’s, so that your semen will be the semen that gets to where it needs to get to first? The weight of his penis anchors him to the ground, gives him a stronger sense of here-ness in the world as he pulls up his jeans and buttons up his shirt and sits on the bench to tie his laces. And that’s all I have to say for the moment about him. I will leave them there—a call from outside the changing rooms, for me, a young boy of ten, a man of forty, to come out already, to get the show on the road, because we’re going home for dinner, and we don’t want to be late. Again.
MY BEST FRIEND’S DAD
J. M. Snyder
The first man I ever fell in love with was my best friend’s dad. Mikey didn’t know about it, of course, and neither did Mr. Pierce.
The dad was nothing like the son. I’d known Mikey since kindergarten, when he pushed me off the swing set on the school playground and had to sit in time-out for the rest of recess. His dad had a hard voice: rough, burned out from too many late evenings with his friends huddled around the dining room table, cigarette smoke stinging their throats and watering their eyes as they played hand after hand of poker. Whenever I stayed over on one of those nights, Mikey and I were confined to his room upstairs, out of the way, though not out of earshot. The men’s raucous laughter and coarse language made us envious. How I longed to have Mr. Pierce call me a dirty bastard one second, then clap me on the back and roar with approval at something I’d said the next.
Though most boys outgrew sleepovers once they reached high school, I still stayed at Mikey’s house a few nights every month. It got me out of my own home, and it gave me a chance to be close to Mr. Pierce, who probably never said two words to us on the nights I was there, but any small glimpse, any gesture, fueled my teenage crush. I wasn’t too worried about the kids at school finding out I slept over at Mikey’s, because we’d been friends for so long most people assumed we were a set. Wherever Mikey went, I wasn’t far behind.
The last time I spent the night was the Saturday before I left for college. My mother had begun to get weepy whenever she saw me, sniffling into a tissue and babbling about losing her “baby boy.” Please, I was eighteen, and the college I’d be attending was only a two-hour drive away, but to hear her tell it, I was practically taking classes on the moon. When Mikey called to see if I wanted to come on over, just for pizza and a movie, I couldn’t pack an overnight bag fast enough.
Sleeping over at Mikey’s meant an evening leafing through pornos, playing video games and watching horror movies on DVD. Mr. Pierce’s poker buddies started showing up around six. While Mikey and I duked it out on one of his wrestling games for the Playstation and kicked the shit out of each other, I could hear the men downstairs laughing and cussing. As much as I liked Mikey’s company, I wished I could join them.
We lost track of time. Finally Mikey tossed the controller aside and gave me a wicked grin. “How about you sneak downstairs and grab some beers out of the fridge?”
I gave him an incredulous look. “What? Hell, no. What if someone sees me?”
Mikey stood, stretched, and flopped sideways onto his bed, the springs creaking beneath his weight. Flicking up the bottom of his curtain, he craned his neck to look out at the street below. “Two of the cars are gone,” he said as he rolled onto his back. “It’s kind of late. I think the card game’s over. No one will see you.”
“Your dad,” I argued. I hadn’t heard Mr. Pierce’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, which meant he hadn’t gone to bed.
But Mikey shrugged that off, too. “Probably passed out on the couch in the den. You’ll be fine. Just go down, grab two bottles, and run back up here. If he sees you, tell him you’re getting something to drink. He doesn’t have to know what.”
I still didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t see any flaws in Mikey’s logic or any reason why I couldn’t do it without looking bad.
“Come on,” Mikey cajoled. “What’s he going to say? You probably won’t even see him.”
Pushing myself up on my feet, I announced, “I have to take a leak.” I’d worry about the beers when I came back from the bathroom.
The moment I stepped into the hall, Mikey’s braying laugh erupted behind me as he shoved the bedroom door shut. I heard the insidious click as he locked me out. Angry, I stormed across the hall into the bathroom and kicked the door shut behind me. “Asshole.”
Looked like I was going downstairs after all.
I considered hammering on Mikey’s door until he had no other choice but to open up. Then I figured Mr. Pierce would hear the commotion and come upstairs to yell at us, so I settled for hitting Mikey’s closed door with my fist, which set him snickering inside the bedroom—I know, I heard him when I pressed my ear to the wood. “You’re dead,” I growled, my mouth against the doorjamb. “See if I bring you any beer.”
“You better!” Mikey hollered. The closeness of his voice startled me—he was right on the other side of the door. I wriggled the knob but it didn’t turn, which meant he held it tight to keep it from rattling. “You ain’t getting back in here without at least two beers. One for each of us.”
I waited, silent, until I could hear him breathing; he must’ve pressed an ear to the door, listening to see if I’d left or not. So I hit the door again, harder this time, and heard a satisfying “Ow!”
Before he could open the door to retaliate, I hurried downstairs.
The first few steps disappeared quickly beneath my feet, but halfway down I paused. The darkness wasn’t as complete as I had first thought. The lights in the living room were out, and if I moved a little to the left, I saw the kitchen was dark as well. But another step brought me closer to the bottom of the stairs, where I saw a warm glow of light spread in a small circle from the doorway where the living room and dining room met. As I crept closer, one step at a time, I realized that the folding louvered doors separating one room from the next had been pulled shut.
That gave me pause. The glow I saw came from under the door, where the wood was warped just enough that it didn’t sit flush against the floor.
Straining to hear anything, I held my breath and listened. Someone cleared his throat, a discreet sound that told me Mr. Pierce was still in the dining room. Cards purred as he shuffled them, and a few poker chips clattered to the table as if he’d been stacking them out of boredom and they’d finally fallen over. But there was no other sound—no one talking to him, no nervous scuffling, nothing to indicate he wasn’t alone in there. If he caught me…
At the bottom of the stairs, I peeked around the wall to get a good look in the kitchen. To my surprise, those louvered doors were also shut, though they didn’t close all the way and the gap they left between the wall and the door allowed a shaft of light to penetrate the darkened kitchen. It illuminated an empty beer bottle that had been left on the counter so it cast an amber glow over the sink’s faucet. If I were quick, I could probably sneak in there, open the fridge really slowly so it wouldn’t make any noise, grab two bottles of beer and dash back upstairs before Mr. Pierce even knew I was there.
My socked feet were silent as I inched across the carpet onto the tiled floor of the kitchen. My heart hammered in my chest, every nerve was on end, and my hair felt puffed in fear all along my arms and the back of my neck. If I were caught…
I wouldn’t be caught. In my mind’s eye I could see myself getting the beers. I crept closer, watched my hand reaching for the refrigerator door, felt cool metal as my fingers closed around the handle. I wouldn’t get caught. I wouldn’t…
From the dining room came that sound again, half cough, half clearing the throat. With a voice steeped in gravel, Mr. Pierce spoke. “So you owe me what, three hundred?”
My hand froze on the handle. Oh, fuck. He wasn’t alone.
I heard another sound, something sexy, a mingled laugh and moan. “Three-fifty. Don’t round it down just because you’re hard for me.”
The words drew me closer. Without conscious thought, I relaxed my grip on the handle of the fridge and turned toward the partially shut louvered door. “Hard for me?” Was that what he had said?
Oh, Jesus.
I expected an angry shout, a denial, something fast and quick that sent this fellow packing. Instead, I was surprised to hear the hint of a smile in Mr. Pierce’s voice when he answered, “I was cutting you some slack. I know you ain’t got the cash.”
With a throaty chuckle, his friend replied, “I know it’s not cash you want from me.”
I couldn’t help it—my feet moved forward, heading for the louvered door. I stopped at the counter and tried to peer around the gap where the door and jamb didn’t quite meet, but all I saw was blank wall. Were they talking about what I thought they were talking about? What I hoped they were talking about?
Then I heard muffled moans, a slight gasp, indistinct words. I inched closer and prized the louvers up slowly, careful not to let them squeak. Through the wooden slats I saw Mr. Pierce sitting at the head of the dining room table. He was turned toward me, facing a friend of his I recognized as RC, who sat on the bench closest to the kitchen, the same seat Mikey always preferred to use. Only RC wasn’t exactly sitting any longer. Both hands leaned heavily on Mr. Pierce’s thighs, rumpling the work pants he wore as RC fisted the dark blue material. RC stretched above Mr. Pierce, face buried in his neck, and as I watched, Mr. Pierce’s thick lips parted in a low, guttural moan. One hand rubbed over RC’s strong arm, kneading through his shirt. The other trailed down RC’s chest to tug at the waistband of RC’s jeans.
Suddenly my own jeans felt two sizes too small. Without thinking about it, I thumbed open the fly and felt the zipper part beneath the erection straining at my crotch. My whole body flushed at the sensation of my hard dick released from confinement and I pressed my palm against it before my fingers encircled my shaft through the cotton of my briefs.
When RC’s mouth covered Mr. Pierce’s, I bit my lower lip to keep from whimpering. Yes, I prayed. Thank you, God, for letting me see this.
Apparently Mr. Pierce didn’t share my appreciation. With his hand flat against RC’s chest, he held the younger man at bay. “Sweet as they are,” he purred, “your kisses aren’t enough to pay your debt.”
“You’re the one who knocked off fifty bucks.” The coy smile I heard in RC’s voice excited me and I rubbed the front of my briefs, which had grown damp beneath my growing erection.
Mr. Pierce’s laugh was like a warm hand that wrapped around my balls and squeezed gently. I almost moaned at the sound, but bit down harder on my lip to keep quiet. “I can get these for free whenever I want,” he murmured.
The thought of these two men doing this—this!—after every card party with Mikey and me upstairs, ignorant, made me want to weep. I had never loved anyone as much as I did the both of them, right at that instant. Though I knew I should just tiptoe back up to Mikey’s room without a word, before they knew I was there, nothing could force me to move. I wanted to see this, I had to see it.
