Best Gay Erotica 2003, page 4
You take me through rhythms all night long, a dance party where you lose track of time, the DJ slows and speeds the music, sometimes there are voices, a chorus, sometimes only beats, and then this big diva voice brings you up and over and spinning around the room. Sometimes you press into me gently as if you were leaning into the wind, and sometimes you are pounding me like an animal, like television violence. I can feel you up to my stomach, shivering through my legs, to the top of my cock and all through the center of my body. My insides pulse and expand and contract as you slide in and out of me.
We’ve come to the point of orgasm repeatedly, and pulled back with deep breaths, tugs on the scrotum, and sudden changes of pace. But now, they are rumbling up like premonitions, like the nerves of animals before a thunderstorm, or the iron figures of lions in China that wait for centuries and finally, when an earthquake is approaching, metal balls hidden in the animals’ skulls are jarred loose and fall into their mouths. You see them, their mouths full, and you know the moment has arrived.
Although our eyes have closed and opened and our vision has sometimes clouded, now we look at each other clearly. My cock bobs and sways like a conductor’s baton. Your hips are tired. Exhaustion ripples through the xylophone bars of your stomach, and up through the striations in your chest. My come shoots into your chest, wet syllables of laughter, and yours into the condom inside me. We ejaculate simultaneously at the exact moment that dawn breaks.
Whatever happened to liquid paper? I remember a tiny bottle with a black and white label. If you left the cap off too long, or the product was too old, it would brush onto the page in a thick paste, unsuitable for writing over.
A classmate, Al Kershaw, who had a fascination for Nazism and the gym (a frightening combination, I thought), shocked all of us by painting swastikas on his tongue with liquid paper and sticking it out at us. Those were the days.
Now, writing takes such different forms. The paper moves onto a screen, ink from pens moves to printer cartridges. We still have use for paper, erasers, carbon paper, liquid paper, and foolscap, but not as often. For me at least, and millions more, we constantly revise, and when we print out a clean copy, you cannot tell what has gone on beforehand.
This is goodbye: The conference is over. We both have late flights. The night before, you came out dancing with friends. We flirted with each other, and I knew that you had some attraction for me. You wore a short-sleeve shirt and left the buttons undone. Your torso appeared through that curtain, and the definition and contours were more beautiful than I had expected.
Music, celebration, goodbyes. Friends and colleagues all around. A distracting atmosphere. When I looked for you next, you had disappeared, and emerged much later, a Brazilian man with you who hung back at the last minute.
I’m struck again by how handsome your eyes are.
I expect to leave you at the nightclub with your new friend, but when we’re about to leave, you ask if you can get a ride with us. We drop you at your hotel and arrange to meet the next evening for dinner.
The week has reminded me most of high school sexual tension, and I’m giddy with it. Sex is easy as water these days; the fact that this has not been easy makes it all the more exciting. Complicated teenage years where thoughts and worries and words got in the way of anything physical that might have happened. I was not one of those who are called early bloomers.
Rather than my newfound confidence asking “my place or yours?,” instead I search for signals in our conversation, shared glances, body language.
When I knock on your hotel room door, you are in the middle of a phone conversation and ask me to meet you downstairs in the bar. Over a cheap gin and tonic, I plot the night out. I could survive if nothing happens. I have much desire but no expectations. But I’d much rather have something happen. I figure dinner, get a bit sloppy over drinks, and then back to your hotel room for hanky-panky.
This is the conversation you recount:
He had asked what you’d been up to. You’d told him about the conference and about dancing last night. He’d asked if you’d met anyone and you’d told him about the Brazilian. But nothing happened, you had explained. You had only kissed him in the corner, a short giddy drunken kiss, and that was all. Boys will be boys.
“And what are you doing tonight?” he had demanded.
“Dinner with a friend,” your tone sheepish in response to his jealousy.
“And the friend’s name is…?”
“Joseph.”
“And are you going to have sex with Joseph tonight too?” I look at him but he doesn’t quite look at me. Still, it’s like looking through a camera lens and you can’t get the framing right. There’s something in the way: a camera strap, your finger, a tree.
And of course, like you, I know it’s not going to happen. Even if you didn’t have sex with Mr. São Paolo and even if you “kind of” have an open relationship, there is no way that you, or I, can escape the direct question that your boyfriend has asked.
We find a restaurant around the corner, Indian food. It has elegant white tablecloths and glassware, but is too open and bright to be intimate. Still, I spill my confessions.
“Well, and yes, I would, in another circumstance, certainly want to.” You can’t quite get the words out right. I’m not convinced that you would throw yourself at me at another time, but I think if you were boyfriendless and I threw myself at you, you’d take me up on it.
We talk about the week, and about work, and have a long conversation on writing. You’d like to take some time off. You wonder if you could make it as a writer by giving yourself time to do it. I, on the other hand, never imagine supporting myself through mere words. I write when I can, and have somehow managed to have more success at it than you.
I can’t resist dessert, and order gulab jamon. You pass on it, though you taste mine. “Too sweet.” But the rosewater syrup trickles down my throat and the two round balls (of what substance, I’ve never known) are too much of an obvious metaphor.
“You’re not, after a week of sexual tension and mixed messages, going to leave me without anything, after I’ve jerked off all week thinking about you.”
“So it is sexual!”
Of course it’s sexual. As well as emotional, intellectual,psychological, historical, and spiritual. Literary most of all, but yes, of course, it’s sexual. Did I make it sound otherwise, that I was after a passionate sexless extramarital encounter abroad with a man I’d eroticized for seven years?
“I want to say goodbye to you in your room. The two of us. I won’t try anything.”
I do, of course. I turn off the lights, and an oddly weak street lamp pushes bits of white light into the room. My heartbeat quickening, I face you, and you are leaning against the wall. I pull you toward me in an embrace, a chaste embrace to start with, like a friend or a brother, my arms sinking around your shoulders and V-shaped back; the contact between us being at the top of our shoulders. The fingers of my right hand reach up to stroke your bald head. Then I relax, breathe deeply, and let our torsos press against each other. We hold each other in the most chaste and the most sexual hug possible, the words of your boyfriend ringing in our ears. A long time passes. This is as much as I’ll get.
Suddenly, I press my lips to yours. Our tongues begin to dance. You taste as good as expected, better; the Indian meal is a memory but the rosewater trickles in at the edges of our mouths. I rip your T-shirt upward and lean down, my lips, mouth, and teeth sinking into your chest, a perfect chest, the edge of a round cumulous cloud, a freshly printed topographical map for exploring. Your torso is unmarred; not a single hair breaks its surface. Your left nipple is small and round, the tip of it hard. I don’t bother looking at your right nipple, I’m sure it is the same. Delicious.
“Joseph.” You, slightly breathless. “Joseph.”
I put each of my hands to your biceps and press myself up. “I’m sorry,” I say.
A tenderness in your gaze.
But I’m not.
I should probably end here. I mean, why denoue when I could just leave it at that, pre-cum staining my underpants, and I suspect yours as well.
I’d love to make love to you one day. From the way you write about sex, I think you’d be quite hot. The foreplay has certainly been amazing and I can thank you for a number of particularly hot nights stroking myself while stroking you. And there are, after all, those the stories we could write after we’ve done it. First drafts, revisions, and final (or not-so-final) copies. I’ll eat your words until I come.
It’s not as if this narrative demands a particular order— I’ve lost it anyway, and worst of all have completely stopped pretending that I write about other people than myself.
Of course it’s me. My desire on the page.
I learned the word sublimation at an early age.
Guts
Simon Sheppard
Even before he joined the gym, his body wasn’t bad. Tall, lean, twenty-five, Rand looked sort of like a skateboy, only more clean-cut, less hip. But whenever he saw those pictures in the fag magazines, pics of boys with perfect biceps and chiseled chests, he felt somehow…inadequate.
Working downtown as he did, Rand decided against the glossy gay gyms of the Castro district and joined the nearby Central YMCA instead. The Y was big, funky, convenient; he figured he could squeeze in a quick workout during a long lunch. The place was filled with an amazing collection of folks: men and women, young and old, buff and not-so. But, this being San Francisco, there were a lot of other gay guys, including, thank God, other guys like Rand—young, cute, lean, some of them downright skinny. So he didn’t feel out of place, even when he stripped down in the locker room and surreptitiously compared himself to the demigods of the place, pumped-up men with bulging calves and washboard abs. Someday, he said to himself, with enough work, I’ll have a body like that…. He left unvoiced the rest of the thought: and then someone will love me.
Three times a week—well, sometimes maybe two—he’d force himself to change into shorts and a tank top and surrender to the gruesome mercies of the Cybex machines. He stopped working out at lunchtime as soon as he realized he was getting back to his office starving, exhausted, and glum. Instead, he slotted in the gym between the end of the workday and dinner. In place of the elderly, saggy Russians who jammed the sauna every noontime, the 5:30 crowd had a high proportion of queer young professionals. The showers were packed with guys giving each other the eye, some discreetly, others brazenly soaping half-hard dicks for unconscionable periods of time.
And then there was the steamroom, its misty precincts dripping with overheated lust. Mostly the cruising was semidiscreet, but every so often Rand was witness to an unapologetic blow job or even a jacked-off spurt of cum.
He began to recognize the regulars: The muscular black guy with the dazzling smile. The middle-aged queen with too much jewelry who never took his towel off, never took a shower, and never, ever worked out. The matched set of maybe-eighteen-year-old maybe-brothers who slowly, deliciously showered their impeccable bodies and long uncut schlongs; they chattered in Croatian or Italian or something, oblivious, while the trolls just stared and stared. And then there were the ones Rand had crushes on, the boys with perfect V-shaped bodies and flawless faces, the ones he never quite worked up the courage to speak to.
But, he’d remind himself, I’m not at the Y to get laid. I’m here to get hunky so that I can get laid. Some other time. Elsewhere.
“Hello.”
Rand had been toweling himself off; the insistent attentions of a Steamroom Troll had persuaded him to cut short his postworkout lounging. He turned, letting his towel drape over his crotch. A cute guy, cute enough, about his age, but…big. Not fat, exactly, but stocky. Really stocky.
“Hi, I’m Chris. I’ve seen you around.” Chris was naked, not even a towel.
“Yeah, I’ve seen you around a lot, too.” A lie: The guy didn’t look anything more than vaguely, possibly familiar. Nice smile, though. Pretty green eyes, light brown hair that would probably be curly if it grew out. Trim moustache, a close-cropped beard that was hardly more than stubble.
“And you are…?”
“Oh, sorry. Rand.” His gaze slid down Chris’s body. Too big for him. At least two hundred pounds, more. Broad shoulders. Fleshy chest matted with hair. Tits you could grab hold of, nipples you could suck. Down lower, a round belly where washboard abs should have been. At least a thirty-seven inch waist, at a guess. Nope, too big for him. So why, Rand wondered, was his dick getting….
“Thirty-eight inch waist, six-inch dick. You like?” Rand looked up, meeting Chris’s broad smile, then down again, down lower. An average-size dick, maybe, but plump, nestled between big, meaty thighs.
“Yeah,” said Rand, “I like.”
What struck Rand about Chris, once they’d been to bed, was…well, the phrase that kept coming to mind was “his generosity of flesh.” In place of the tense hardness of the muscleboys, Chris offered a body you could grab onto, sink into, surrender to. Surrender not to the power of muscle, though Chris was plenty strong, but to something else, something Rand couldn’t quite name.
Meanwhile, back at the Y, Rand’s efforts were paying off. He’d often sneak a glance at himself in the full-wall mirror, semi-amazed at his swelling chest and shoulders, the bulge that arose when he’d flex a bicep. Watching his reflection using the overhead-press machine, he was gratified to note that his torso looked damn near V-shaped at full extension.
“Hey, there.” It was Chris. Rand had three more reps to go. Two. One. He let the handles return to shoulder level.
“Chris! How’s it goin’?” He still hadn’t figured out how to play things at the gym. Although he’d fucked with Chris four times in the last month, and even gone out with him to see some overrated queer movie at the Lumière, he didn’t want the guys at the Y to know the two of them were having, well, maybe not an affair, but a something. Because Rand didn’t want to get a reputation as a cub-chaser, which would give the wrong idea to the buff boys who were, he had to face it, still his ultimate quarry.
“How’s it going, Rand?” A quizzical smile.
“Fine. Listen, I’ve still got a lot of workout to do. If I talk with you now and lose concentration, I’ll never be able to finish.”
“Yeah, sure.” The smile faded.
“See you down in the locker room.”
“Uh-huh.” Chris turned to go. Turned back. “Maybe we should talk sometime.” And then he was gone.
Yeah, maybe they should talk. About why he, Rand, thought this good-looking, funny, attentive, yes, sexy man was somehow….
Might as well say it: Not good enough for him. Because he was big. God damn it. Big.
Rand had just finished stripping down when Chris walked over, naked too.
“Talk now, Rand?”
“Here?” A few lockers down, a guy was zipping up his fly. “Sure, Chris. Why not?”
“You mad at me?”
“Mad? No. It’s just…I need time.” Or something. Jesus!
“We both know what it is, right? If I looked like them….” Chris gestured with his head across the locker room, toward the Italian-or-Croatian-or-whatever brothers, looking yummy in their little matching Speedos.
“I just…I just want to be, I don’t know, pumped up. Buffed. Hunky.” Rand could feel himself starting to blush.
“It’s important to your, as we say in California, self-esteem, right?”
“Yeah, and you….”
“Don’t fit in?”
“No, you do. I mean I think you’re really great, but…I don’t know what I’m saying.” Rand’s face was hot. He hoped no one could overhear. “Listen, we’re both standing here naked. Don’t you think that….”
“No, you listen. You can like me and sleep with me and that won’t change what you look like. Not a damn bit. What you want to be and what you want to fuck don’t have to be the same. I mean, look at heterosexuals. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Well,” Chris grinned, “you get the point. You like yourself skinny? I like you skinny. Be skinny.”
“Skinny?”
“OK—lean, slim, whatever. There’s this myth that all bears go for other bears. Some of us do. I don’t. Big fucking deal. And, believe it or not, some gym-body guys might actually lust after me. You, for instance. I thought sex was supposed to be where you could want whoever the hell turned you on, with no apologies. But for fuck’s sake, as Mom would say, be happy being who you are, whether that’s a Tenderloin drag queen or the president.”
“I want to be whichever one’s sleazier.”
“Honey, it’s a toss-up,” Chris said.
And they stood there naked in the YMCA and grinned at each other, just grinned. Then Chris grabbed Rand in his big, strong arms and held him to his belly and his chest and his dick. And as soon as their dicks touched, Rand felt himself getting hard. The rest of his body tensed, but then relaxed; he realized he didn’t care who saw.
As the next few weeks went by, Rand underwent a shift in his tastes. The young lean boys started looking distinctly undernourished. The muscle guys seemed armored and contrived. It was the big men who started catching his eye. At first it was just the stocky guys, boys like Chris, the ones whom he used to maybe glance at, then ignore.
Not any more. Whenever he walked into the steamroom, he’d survey the naked guys and pick a nice thick thigh to sit beside. A thigh he could inch toward with his own lean leg, till contact was made and cocks got hard, stiffies in the mist. Sometimes, if they were the only two men in there, there was time for a grope. But while the big guy was playing with Rand’s hard-on, Rand would move his hand upward from the man’s dick to his belly and slide his palm over convex flesh slick with sweat, stroking and stroking until they heard the door inevitably open and they jerked their hands away.
