Show-Offs, page 2
Apparently all he wanted was an audience.
And that worked for me.
In the intermissions between Robert’s spirited performances, I stood vigil upstairs, watching across the alley, looking for movement, but seeing nothing. There was evidence of habitation: lights turned on and off, items appearing and disappearing from the kitchen counter; clean plates or glasses stacked in the drying rack next to the sink, but I never saw my neighbor.
During the afternoons when the sun slanted down through the high windows of the apartment behind me, I had a clear view of most of the living room, the whole kitchen and what looked like a spare—or at least unused—bedroom. I pulled my binoculars out of a cardboard box I’d never bothered to unpack and meticulously swept the room looking for clues to the identity of my neighbor. The place was nearly as empty as my own apartment. Boxes were piled here and there, along with an old record player and a stack of records, a futon, an ancient television and, in the spare bedroom, a bare mattress and box spring. Nondescript mugs, plates and glasses were stacked in the kitchen. The only item that seemed to hint at the personality of the person living in the house was an enormous movie poster—Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde—tacked up over the futon. On the coffee table there was an expensive digital camera and a row of carving knives, neatly arranged from shortest to longest.
I spent hours staring into the semidarkness of the neighboring apartment, waiting for darkness and shadowy movement.
I’d been living in the Gardens for a month when the approach of a late-season hurricane intruded on my solitude. At the hysterical insistence of the local television anchors, I ventured out into the world in search of storm supplies.
The sky was blue and still, brilliant and ominously empty.
The streets and yards around my apartment were empty as well, the cars having transported their owners north in anticipation of the mandatory evacuation orders that would come too late. Yards had been stripped of ornaments and the houses themselves had been boarded up, their façades obscured by sheets of blond plywood.
Robert’s car was gone.
I walked through the empty streets, thinking of the end of the world.
I discovered a hive of activity surrounding the local Home Depot, where I watched people loading supplies indiscriminately into orange plastic carts. “He looks like a big one,” an elderly woman said, taking down a dozen packs of batteries and tossing them into her cart. “Philippe’s gonna be the biggest hurricane to ever hit this area,” the checkout girl told me as she rang up my stack of batteries and a long, black Maglite.
I walked past shuttered grocery stores and fast-food restaurants, stopping at a neighborhood gas station to buy cigarettes and cereal. I paid nine-fifty for the last bottle of spring water in the place.
I walked back to my house as the rain started to fall.
I fumbled for my key, but found the door unlocked. I stared at the doorknob for a long time, then pulled my Maglite out of the bag and started up the dark stairs to my apartment, leaving my packages on the front stoop.
The apartment was empty, but there was a note taped to the back-facing window of the bedroom above Robert’s room. I could look beyond it into the living room of the apartment behind me. The note said: I’m cumming for you. The ambiguous words, written in plain block letters, sent a chill down my spine. Was this from Robert? Or the knife-collecting muscleman?
I stared at the note until a crack of thunder startled me out of my trance.
The rain became heavier, pounding the roof and lashing against the windows as Hurricane Philippe crawled closer.
I hauled my shopping bags up the stairs and left the front door unlocked.
I paced, smoking and watching the Weather Channel.
Outside the storm began to rage. Branches and debris slammed against the roof. Somewhere in the distance I heard the sound of a window shattering. The power flickered.
I watched a hundred-and-fifty-year-old oak topple over in the wind, smashing through the roof of the house across the street.
When the power finally failed, I stripped off my clothes and sat naked on the sofa.
The darkness magnified the sounds of the storm.
I reached down and started stroking myself.
I heard the door at the base of the stairs fly open, the wind funneling wet leaves up from below and then stopping suddenly as the front door closed.
My cock sprang to life in my hand, a bead of precum oozing out onto my fingers.
I heard footsteps, heavy on the stairs.
I waited in the darkness, my cock erect in anticipation.
IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER (WELL, ALMOST)
Tony Pike
This story tells of things that happened some thirty years ago, at a time when, unlike today, no gay man had to sheathe himself in rubber when he fucked his fellow man…
Gary, just turned eighteen, was in his last year at boarding school. So was his wank buddy of three weeks’ standing, Tom, though he was a year older than Gary and had a cock size to prove it. They were on their way, this Saturday afternoon, to the cliff-top hideaway among the thorn bushes that had become their special place for doing together what they enjoyed most: pulling their trousers down in the open air and fiercely pulling on each other’s cock until they’d both shot their loads. As they walked along this afternoon they were already half stiff inside their trousers in anticipation, but as they were still on the public pathway they had to content themselves with sticking a hand into the other’s pocket and feeling for his slippery dick.
There would still be a minute or two before they reached their secret spot. Time for a question, Gary thought. “You know,” he began, and his voice came out husky and tremulous, “when two guys have sex together—I don’t mean what we do, I mean when they actually fuck—how do they…I mean, how do they exactly…go about it?”
“Well,” Tom answered, his voice also a bit unsteady now, “I’m not sure I really know.” His fingers, unbidden, jiggled Gary’s cock through the thin fabric of his trouser pocket. “I’ve never really thought about it.” (Gary doubted that but let it pass.) “I suppose—I imagine—that if they did it in a bed, or on a bed, then one would lie flat on his tummy and spread his legs a bit, and the other would lie on top and—er—poke in his prick.”
“And would the other one come, do you think, while he was being fucked? Or would he wait his turn and fuck the other one afterward?”
“You think a guy might come while he was being fucked? You mean without touching himself?”
“I don’t know. It’s a possibility, isn’t it? Maybe the friction, as his body was pushed forward on the sheets with the motion of the fuck?” Gary thought back to the time—mere weeks ago—when the only way he’d known how to come was by rubbing his stubby penis against the woolly cover of his bed. How long ago that seemed! How much experience he seemed to have collected since!
“Maybe,” said Tom thoughtfully. “Maybe being fucked does make men come. I really have no idea. Maybe the underneath one simply sticks his hand down under his belly and gives himself a wank.”
“Or the one on the top could, I suppose,” said Gary, his mind forming delicious pictures of the alternative scenarios they were conjuring up. He felt himself harden a bit more against Tom’s fingers, which were still fiddling in his pocket.
“Well, here we are,” announced Tom, his voice now shaky and almost gulping with lust. The narrowness of the path forced him to extricate his hand from Gary’s pocket, and Gary had similarly to let go, as Tom began to lead the way between the springing bushes, parting them for Gary to follow easily as he went. Then suddenly he turned to Gary and hissed urgently in his ear. “Get down, we’re not alone.”
“What?” Gary whispered back.
“Get down. Lie flat. Inch forward on your tummy. You’ll soon see.”
Gary did as he was told. Side by side they slid on their bellies through the grass and yellow flowering fennel, their rigid and forward-pointing pricks slightly impeding their progress and giving them further cause for caution and care.
The place they were making for, the little clearing among the high fennel flowers, with its long view across the sea, was already occupied. Two young men—probably in their early twenties, Gary guessed—had got there first. They were making bolder use of the place than Tom and Gary ever had. They were totally naked. And they were fucking. Actually fucking. Two grown men together were here in the clearing, in the middle of having a fuck. And Tom and Gary had arrived just in time to watch.
The bottom one (there really wasn’t a better word) was kneeling forward, his elbows and his forehead on the ground, his rounded rump raised high. The other man knelt behind, between his legs, also proudly naked and with torso almost upright, gleaming with sweat as he rode his friend. Occasionally he put out a hand to steady himself, either against the ground or his partner’s golden back, as he rammed his cock into the bottom one’s bottom. Discarded clothes lay in neglected disarray all around the clearing—though Gary and Tom barely noticed those.
They watched in almost frozen disbelief. The top man’s bum was peach-like yet mobile, flexing its muscles as it pistoned to and fro. Both men were fit-looking and lightly tanned, neither had much body hair. But it wasn’t even these fine features that were the boys’ main foci of attention. Nor was it the thick and floppy mop of dark-blond hair the bottom one wore, nor the straight raven plumes of the top guy, that swung to and fro in a sweat-matted mane as he thrust his way toward his climax. It was the amazing view they both had, because they were watching the scene sideways on, and from just a few inches above the ground, and barely three feet away, of the two men’s hammering, pulsing dicks.
The young man doing the fucking (Raven-Hair) showed his only intermittently, and even then not the whole length of it, as it slid in and out, in and out of Floppy-Mop’s hole. Even so, Gary could see that it was a mighty one, a sight such as he had never seen. Even Tom’s grand penis (Gary had measured it and made it seven inches and a quarter) would be dwarfed by this. It had a curve to it; it seemed to go on and on; impossible to see if it was circumcised or not, but it thickened toward the base. And as it alternately pulled halfway out and plunged back in, so the tight round scrotum that hung around that base rode back and forth, slamming between the other’s buttock-cheeks so hard that Gary found himself wondering if it hurt.
Then there was the other man’s. Floppy-Mop he might be but no way floppy-cocked. There it was in full view and close-up, suspended below its owner’s belly, and very stiff, so that it pressed up against the belly, only occasionally jerking away from it in time with the impact of Raven-Hair’s harder slams. It wasn’t very long. Considering the age and size of its owner, that is. Gary, the expert now, would have estimated it at a little short of six inches: considerably shorter than Tom’s, though just as thick. Gary found that lack of length reassuring. He whose own endowment came out at five and a half. Grown men didn’t all have to be giants in the dick department then. They could still have plenty of fun with sex.
Floppy-Mop’s penis had a foreskin, though. Gary couldn’t help noticing that from where he lay motionless, his body pressed down on his own ramrod of a hard-on, just a couple of feet away. And Floppy-Mop’s foreskin was a long and ample one, not pushed far back by his state of erection, and so only giving a tantalizing glimpse of the damson-colored tip beneath.
Then, with Gary’s and Tom’s eyes fixed on it, it shot. No hand was near it, neither its owner’s nor that of the still plunging Raven-Hair. Yet Floppy-Mop was able to shoot his load without any such external help. In full view of the watching boys his bursting dick gave a quiver, swelled, opened its little hole and squirted a thick white jet of come. It flew out in an arcing line that landed on the ground right by the young man’s face. He gave a gasp. “I’ve shot,” he said breathlessly to Raven-Hair, as another thick spurt followed the first (such quantities Gary had never seen before now, even pouring forth from Tom) and then the remainder of his load tumbled more slowly out of his dick and fell drooling to the ground beneath.
Raven-Hair reached a hand underneath his friend as if to check that what he’d said was true. He massaged the still oozing dick to help the last droplets find their way out. And then it seemed as though Raven-Hair was coming too. He pushed in hard and Floppy-Mop beneath him collapsed to the ground. All there was to be seen now was Raven-Hair’s squirming peachy bum as he drove home his last few thrusts to an accompaniment of grunts.
“I think I’m going to come,” Gary whispered urgently to Tom. But Tom did not reply. Because—as Gary was shortly to see—there was no time. To Gary’s amazement Tom rose up from his camouflaged position among the fennel plants and grass, knelt up, coming into view of the two suddenly alarmed young men, rapidly fumbled his school trousers open—his cock exploded out of his fly and he took it urgently in his hand—but for no more than a second before his sperm came flying out.
Gary found himself almost unbelieving of what Tom had just done. It was so out of character for lovely Tom, cautious about being seen or getting caught, yet here he was now, brazenly kneeling to attention, facing two young men (who were now rooted to the spot, mouths agape in astonishment) with his cock out and spraying a shower of milky drops that spattered in every direction at once, so frantic was the motion of his fist.
Little by little the astonished expressions of the two immobile young men naked on the grass in front of them changed. From fear and horror they turned to relief, even amusement, though that was still tempered by some vestige of surprise. Raven-Hair, lying on top, was able to twist his body some way round toward them, though his weapon stayed buried up to the hilt inside Floppy-Mop, who remained skewered to the ground as firmly as any butterfly transfixed by a pin on a collector’s board.
“What have we here,” said Raven-Hair, now grinning toward Tom. (Gary he had not yet seen.) “A nice big lad with a nice big dicky.”
At this point Gary was at last overwhelmed by everything that had been happening and knew that he couldn’t hold off any longer. Following the precedent set by Tom he too rose to his knees, unzipping while he did so, and out, predictably, sprang his five-and-a-half-inch knob, like a lively fat lizard.
The eyes of both men darted at once toward the sudden new arrival on the scene and toward Gary’s up-springing cock in particular. “Hey,” said Floppy-Mop, peering around Raven-Hair’s left arm, “and he’s brought his little friend with him.”
Gary had even less time to get his hand involved than Tom had. Didn’t even get as far as touching it. He felt his cock let fly—a sudden automatic catapult—and then all watched in amazement as his load arced out and up, like a harpoon line, then curved down, to land an inch in front of the startled Floppy-Mop’s nose. Floppy-Mop flinched and blinked his thickly lashed blue eyes. “Hey, wow,” he said. “The little guy may not have a big one yet, but he sure has a way of making up for it!”
“You certainly did surprise me,” said Gary on their walk back to school, as they were talking over what had just happened. “I mean, getting up like that and showing yourself off to them, bold as brass.”
“Hm,” said Tom. Did he flush slightly pink, or did Gary just imagine that? “You can hardly talk, doing exactly the same a moment later.”
“Only because you did,” Gary countered, laughing.
“At least I didn’t nearly put someone’s eye out with my shoot,” said Tom, “unlike someone I could mention.”
Not much had happened after Gary had so spectacularly delivered his load. All four of them had just come, after all. Raven-Hair had pulled his long, long organ out of his friend’s behind. Then both pairs of boys had shuffled a foot or two toward each other, and played for a moment with each others’ spent organs with their hands. (I’m holding a twenty-year-old’s cock in my hands, Gary thought in near-disbelief, as he fondled first Floppy-Mop’s standard-size equipment, and then Raven-Hair’s majestic hose. Never mind that they weren’t up for action at that precise moment. He’d seen them both in splendid operation just three minutes before.)
Floppy-Mop said to Gary, “Sorry about calling you little just now. That was only in comparison with your big friend here—with his lovely big thing. You’ve got a good strong dick for a kid of your age. Believe me, it’ll grow into something quite special before too long. Maybe even bigger than your friend’s.” He gave Tom’s still stiff penis a conspiratorial squeeze. “I’d like to see it when it does.” He had smiled then at them both.
After that, Gary and Tom had stuffed their slippery organs back inside their trousers, while the older two got up and put their clothes back on. With vague noises about “seeing you again some time,” the two pairs of boys, or young men, had split and gone off in opposite directions along the cliff path.
The following Saturday Tom was away, on a weekend home visit. Left to his own devices Gary found himself walking along the familiar cliff-top path. He told himself he had no particular idea in mind, although he’d taken the trouble to dress in his running kit—white T-shirt and shorts (with nothing underneath) and plimsolls without socks. He pushed his way through the bushes toward the spot where he’d seen and learned so much a week before. No one was there. Gary sat on the grass and looked out at the glassy sea a hundred feet below. Absently he reached down and began to undo his shorts…
“Hey there! Hallo.” Startled, and beginning to blush, Gary looked around. A young man had shouldered his way through the bushes and stood looking down at him as he sat on the cliff edge from just a yard away. And Gary recognized him.
“We met before,” said the young man. “Remember? Last week. At this very spot.”
“Too right we did,” said Gary. He was looking at, and talking to, the young blond man with the floppy mop of hair whom he’d watched being fucked, and ejaculating, just where he was sitting now. “And we…” He felt his blush turning from pink to puce.
