Best Gay Erotica 2006, page 20
My orgasm is a long time coming. For ages it seems I am almost there. I keep going, harder, faster. I throw my full weight on top of him, my hips hammering. When it finally comes I roar with relief, squirting gobs of spunk inside him. I pull out straight away. My cock, his buttocks, the back of his thighs are streaked with blood. Shit. He must have been a virgin after all. He raises himself slowly, testing his body. He’s come onto the covers.
“Use the bathroom in there,” I say. “There are towels under the sink.” Alan nods, climbing off the bed. His steps to the door are unsteady. I grab a handful of tissues to clean the mess off the bedclothes. I go to take the condom off my still-hard dick. Something isn’t right. I wipe up some of the blood with a tissue and look again.
The rubber has split right down the middle. There’s no semen in the ragged tip. Must have happened inside him. Fuck. He’s left a folder on the carpet, plastic folder he must have dropped in his excitement over my laundry basket. Idly I open the folder, a clutch of 8 by 10 glossies slithers onto the floor. Kylie in a bedsheet, closing a blind from the Light Years era. Gareth Gates, his mouth a stuttery pout. And there I am, sliding out, my cheery mug from Making Waves, hideous yellowing headshot of young Chris, hair in tight curls, my autograph sprawling across it from a dozen years ago. No more. “For Alan, who must be my only fan in the USA, cheers, Chris from Making Waves, 1987.”
JAILBAIT
Darin Klein
Jailbait wasn’t technically jail bait anymore, but he had earned the nickname fair and square working chicken hawks on Polk Street during the years when he really was jail bait, and that wasn’t too far in his past. He was definitely still among the youngest of the punks on the scene. Rough around the edges, spiky haired, slightly acne-scarred, skinny, disastrously tattooed, he nonetheless exhibited an endearing child-like fascination for new and exciting experiences.
Barging into the Hole in the Wall one night after last call, eyes wild, he came straight at me and grabbed me by the arm. “Let’s fuck,” he said. I wouldn’t argue with that. We had hooked up several times before and it was always hot. One time he blew me on the front steps of the Mission Dolores, not even bothering to stop when the 22 bus rolled by on 16th Street full of late-night passengers. A friend and I had even tag-teamed him once, tossing his scrawny, hairless body between us like a rag soaked in baby oil. He would ride a cock all night. You could just relax and enjoy his hot hole engulfing you completely, his magic ass muscles tensing and gripping you like there was no tomorrow.
Outside the bar, Jailbait and I braced ourselves against the San Francisco cold and headed into the night. I was surprised when he produced a set of keys and opened the driver’s side door of a car parked on Folsom Street. “Borrowed,” he said. I didn’t even know he could drive. He flipped a reckless U-turn and gassed it in the direction of home. He already had one hand down the front of my pants and was working my boner. He apparently couldn’t give a hand job and drive at the same time, because the next thing I knew he ran a red light at full speed, and we were broadsided by an oncoming car. He gave the other driver a fake phone number, showed him a fake I.D., and told him Triple-A would cover the damage. We sped off high on adrenaline.
Back at his place he cranked up the Shangri-La’s on some makeshift sound system, muted a hot jail-action porno, and poured us whiskey in a glass the shape of a cowboy boot. To top it off we ate a bunch of the homemade magic mushroom– infused raspberry chocolate truffles he was supposed to be selling for rent money.
When the drugs kicked in I became aware of the intense heat of our bodies. We were like touching machinery, embers, a star. We were passionate and riled up, desperate and tender, maybe even clumsy. We 69’d and somewhere angels were singing Give Him a Great Big Kiss, Right Now and Not
Later, The Dum Dum Ditty. We thrashed around and whiskey got in our bellybuttons, I pissed in his ass. We came on each other’s faces and chests, slaked the mess with sticky fingers. He rimmed me and I felt that life really was worth living. He sat on my dick in a way that made me curious about where I ended and he began. I flipped him onto his back and pulled out of his ass, shooting come the length of his torso and into his mouth, bull’s-eye.
Eventually the sun came up and the TV was reduced to a useless bright-blue electrical hum on the periphery. Any role that music had played in the course of events was relegated to distant memory and we were shaky and weak, crashing in the blank air the notes and melodies had hung in. We took something prescriptive and curled into one another in a destroyed nest of bed sheets. For all I know, we were asleep after that.
DEPRESSION HALVED
PRODUCTION COSTS
Sam J. Miller
We’re crouched in a pool of darkness, behind a small bush in Madison Square Park, which is nowhere near Madison Square Garden. Eventually I’ll have to ask Earl about it, about which one is the real Madison Square. He’s fifty-five and has lived like every day of it here in the city—point out any odd building or street name and he knows the backstory. For the moment, though, all I want from him is the fingers down my throat, the face pressing into the back of my neck. I want us totally naked but it’s freezing.
Yet when I get Earl’s pants down and stick in my face his crotch is slick with sweat, as is my own, from all the layers we have to wear. The cold air invigorates us, excites us, and we fuck as freely and noisily as anybody who had a bedroom to fuck in. No cops come through.
“You tire an old man out,” he says, while we lie there balled up together. We breathe heavy, watching it steam in front of us.
“Whatever,” I say. “You big baby.” He’s almost four times my age and has about twice as much sex drive as me.
“That was great, Sol, I’m telling you.” My head is cradled in his lap, and I can smell him through all the layers.
For two weeks I’ve been stuck to him like glue. For a month before that I’d been chasing him through Marcus Garvey Park, sharing cigarettes, making my advances more and more advanced. Now I’m trying to shake this sense of him as a conquest, as something I saw and wanted and went for. Because I’m starting to feel strongly about him and I want him to feel the same, and that might be a tougher proposition.
Afterward we walk through the park, talk, smoke cigarettes, just like any other couple after sex. He points to the Empire State Building: “Did you know they built that in, like, a year? It was all set to start in 1929, but then the Great Depression came, and cut the production costs in half.”
“Because they could pay people only half as much.”
“Exactly. That was the beginning of New York’s homeless problem. It’s like the pyramids—this architectural marvel that was totally dependent on the misery of slave labor. Every time I see it I think of all the poor workers whose wives were in bread lines while they were up on those platforms with no safety harnesses. Did you know six workers died in the course of building it?”
We sit on a bench on the north side of the park. It’s a Sunday night and 26th Street is quiet, except for one building people keep going into.
“Must be a party,” Earl says, pointing up to the fifth floor where people are standing around smoking on a balcony. Or is it a veranda? Earl would know the difference.
More and more people go in, mostly young handsome men. I’m picturing something gay, a magazine launch or a graphic designer ball.
“Let’s crash it,” I say. “The party.”
“Are you kidding? Look at me, I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Not only will I be the only black guy, I’ll be the only guy over forty.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “I think I just saw a South Asian guy go in. It might be more diverse than you think. And I bet there’s an open bar, and women walking around with trays of expensive rich food. It’ll be nice to get out of the cold for a while.”
“Let’s do it.”
“Good.” We get up, cross the street, join a straight couple going in.
“Fifth floor?” asks the girl when the elevator door shuts.
“Where else?” Earl asks, flashing that smile that got my attention right off the bat. The elevator goes up slowly, no one says anything, the couple is well dressed and they smell nice. When the doors swing open on the fifth floor there’s such a crush of people no one sees us slip in, hang up our coats, head for the booze.
The macaroni and cheese is crusted in some kind of Gruyere, or Roquefort, or some other fancy cheese I’ve seen in supermarkets and always wondered about. I’ve shoveled five spoonfuls into my mouth without chewing when a girl comes up to me and says: “You and I must be the youngest people here.”
“Might be,” I said. “I’m Solomon.” We shake.
“Hi, Solomon. I’m Maggie. Do you work here?”
“No, to be honest, I don’t even know what this place is. My boyfriend got invited by somebody who works here.”
“Yeah, a friend asked me to come along. What do they even do here? She said it was a design firm. Must be a hell of a firm to have a space this big. In a building like this. They must make some kind of filthy money.”
“I know, right? What do you suppose they pay in rent?”
“I have no fuckin’ idea. I moved to Williamsburg when it was affordable. Manhattan rents blow me away.”
“Oh god, yes. I don’t know how anybody in this city can afford to pay rent, unless you’re making, like, a billion dollars a year.”
“I bet you’re not even twenty, Sol. Are you even eighteen?”
“I’m eighteen.” My age just jumped by two years; this is why I love talking to strangers.
Earl’s right; he can’t blend. I try not to leave him alone for too long but I’m enjoying the way that I can move into and out of conversations, talk to people, fit in. The last party I went to was for Ortega’s birthday, at a bowling alley near our high school, six months back or more. The guy at the bar doesn’t card me when I ask for a martini. Something I’ve never had before—the very name stinks of power. Men cruise me. I’m tempted to try for some phone numbers, just to see if I can.
“We could go all week and never get a chance to use a bathroom like that,” Earl says, when he comes out of it.
“Yeah? They got a solid gold crapper and an attendant handing you individual squares of toilet paper?”
“And breath mints and lube and condoms. And a bidet. I’m not joking about the bidet. Puts even Grand Central to shame.”
In the back are a series of offices. Earl scopes them out and beckons for me; we find the cushiest one. From the business cards on top of a filing cabinet—whoever thought a mere filing cabinet could be so chic?—we figure out the office belongs to Luccia Stevenson, who’s the executive director of Krell & Stevenson, which presumably is where we’re at. Luccia has one of those expensive swivel chairs, which I sit Earl in. The room smells like money. I kneel between his legs, unzip him, pull both pairs of pants and his thermals and his boxer shorts down to midthigh. He’s only half-hard and I stare until it swells all the way out, pointing lazily past the top of my head. I seize it, I jerk it twice, I guide it all the way into my mouth in one gulp. As he strokes the top of my head I unbutton shirt after shirt, letting him out of my mouth at the end of it to pull my thermal undershirt over my head.
“Wow, we’re really going all the way,” Earl says when I stand up and take his shirts off too. For a second I’m confused: We’ve done everything imaginable already. Then I realize we’ve never been naked together before. Life is hard when you have no private space. “Luccia could walk in at any moment.”
“Let her, it’s her office.”
I sit on him, my back to him, facing the door to the office and the hallway and the party. With his hands on my sides he lifts me up, puts me back down, starts fucking me. His hands hold me in place and his hips dart in and out, in and out. “Lean back,” he whispers, and I do, pushing him back, pushing my shoulder to his chin, floating in space in that fancy darkened office, in this ghost world of graphic designers and expensive hors d’oeuvres, where we don’t belong, where we are the ghosts that haunt the house.
Earl asks, “What do you think she’d be madder about— that we crashed her party or that we got jizz all over her desk?” I’m wiping it up but I think some got in between the keys of her keyboard.
In all the time it takes us to stop kissing, get all fifty layers of clothes back on, no one even comes anywhere near. I take my martini glass back into the crowd. I don’t feel bad about taking advantage of Krell & Stevenson’s hospitality; in fact, I’m feeling sort of smug and contemptuous about them. All the money that flows through that office…. Letting me steal their food and fuck my boyfriend is the least they can do.
Earl is in the bathroom and I’m waiting for the elevator. I overhear a queeny boy in horn-rim glasses say to someone else, “Who let the homeless guy in?” My face turns red with shame and then I realize they’re not talking about me.
NOW FIX ME
Duane Williams
In his dreams, while he was asleep, nothing could frighten Rayne. Not walking into fire. Not shark-infested waters. Not Dr. Lovely, his psychiatrist, whom Rayne blamed for fucking up his brain with experimental drugs. In his dreams, fear was simply an emotion. In the real world, fear was stalking Rayne, following his every waking thought, ready to pronounce its dire warnings inside his head.
At three o’clock in the morning, in Harold’s backyard, Rayne stood naked at the side of the pool, stretching out the silhouettes of his long, swimmer’s arms. On the back porch, in his bathrobe and slippers, Harold stamped out his third cigarette and whistled quietly. He’d been watching Rayne glide through the water for the past hour, back and forth, from one end of the pool to the other, the moon’s light shimmering in his wake. “How was your swim?” Harold asked as Rayne moved toward him in the dark. “How many lengths?”
“I lost count.” Beneath the glare of the porch light, Rayne was dripping a large puddle at his feet, his nipples cold and alert. “It’s those stupid, fucking drugs. My brain got distracted.”
“Well, it’s a beautiful night for a swim,” Harold said, scanning the star-littered sky. The moon’s face was beaming. “It’s so incredibly quiet.”
“What happened to the crickets?” Lately, whenever Rayne couldn’t sleep, he climbed out his bedroom window and jumped the fence between his mother’s yard and Harold’s. In spite of Nancy’s pleas, he’d flushed the sleeping pills that Dr. Lovely prescribed, claiming the tiny blue tablets would cause his limbs to shrivel up and die like worms on hot pavement. “I don’t know,” Harold said. “Do crickets sleep?” This wasn’t the first time they were having a late-night encounter in Harold’s backyard. It was getting to the point where Harold was lying in bed awake, breathing softly as he stroked his erection, waiting for the splash of Rayne’s naked body as he hit the water. “Do you want a towel?”
Rayne looked him straight in the eye for a moment and didn’t move. It was the look of a wild animal in a cage. “Will it hurt my body?”
Harold was accustomed to his unusual questions. He held Rayne’s gaze, as cold and distrustful as it was. “No, it won’t. You’re shivering a little. Thought you might want to dry off.”
“Are you inviting me in, Mr. Fix-It?”
At first, Harold hesitated. Rayne had never called him that before. Mr. Fix-It. And why was he scowling? Harold was becoming increasingly uneasy around Rayne, which was only making the sex more enticing. “It would be my pleasure,” Harold said. That was the routine. Harold would ask him if he’d like a towel and Rayne would ask to be invited in. Although the pretext was no longer necessary, the routine persisted, unfurling on those summer nights like the nocturnal lilies that filled Harold’s backyard with the smell of oranges.
It probably wasn’t a good idea to get involved with Rayne, Harold’s twenty-year-old schizophrenic neighbor who was inclined to storms of unpredictable emotion. Nancy had cautioned Harold during one of their Saturday morning chats in his garden. Rayne was showing more signs of aggression. He’d been removed from university for throwing a textbook at his psychology professor, whose nose and glasses were broken as a result. Rayne believed the professor had been spying on him for Dr. Lovely. “I’m just not sure what to do for him anymore,” Nancy said. “I feel helpless.” Her husband was dead; she was raising Rayne as a single mother. For nearly fifty, Nancy was gorgeous, a statuesque redhead with a body she’d developed in her work as a cop. Rayne was her only child, which was just part of the reason his illness was eating away at her heart. “I’m afraid of my own son,” she said. “That’s the worst part, Harold.”
In the two years since he had left Toronto and moved in next door, Harold had become Nancy’s confidant. The doctors felt that Rayne was well enough to be living at home, but Nancy wasn’t sure she agreed. “Maybe it’s best that he’s home so I can keep an eye on things,” she speculated. She believed that a recent hospitalization had only made Rayne’s condition worse. That’s all that she could bear to call it: his condition. Schizophrenia sounded threatening and permanent. Nancy was drinking alone in the evenings and needed someone to talk to. Harold was a good listener. He was an electronics repairman. He fixed people’s televisions and computers. That’s how he first met Nancy. Shortly after Harold moved in, she knocked on his front door one evening in a tight blouse to ask if he fixed coffee makers. “I know your van just says computers and televisions, but I thought maybe you’d know how to fix a coffee maker.” There was a lonely-widow glint in Nancy’s eye. He made haste in telling her that he was gay, which he did the next morning in her kitchen while he was fixing the coffee maker.
