Best Gay Romance 2012, page 5
Well, one Friday night, Justin decided he wanted to go out. He asked me, but I turned him down again. I had a big chemistry exam that following Monday, and I had to get in all the studying before then I could. He looked at me like he couldn’t believe I would turn down a chance to go barhopping because I had to study. He just thought that was the most pathetic thing and told me I was letting life pass me by. It pissed me off some, and I let him know. I told him I was studying to be something and didn’t want to end up a no-count bum like him. Well, that pissed him off, and he left, cussing me under his breath. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or anything, but I was stressed out from studying and didn’t feel like putting up with anybody’s shit, you know?
I worked so hard that night I fell asleep at the kitchen table with all my books and papers underneath me and almost didn’t hear the doorbell ringing. My head shot up. I looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. Through blurry eyes I saw that it was three thirty in the morning. The buzzer kept sounding. I got up, all groggy, to answer it. I opened the door, and there stood a police officer, a young guy in his suit and hat and with his gun belt on and everything.
“Yeah. Yes. What’s the matter?” I managed to say to him.
“You live here?” he asked.
I started to say something smart-assed back but didn’t think it was a good idea. “Yes.”
“Do you share this apartment with a Justin Michael Thulon?”
I nodded.
“And your name?”
I told him.
“And what’s your relationship to Mr. Thulon?”
I broke. Couldn’t help it. It was so late, and I was still stranded, at least partway, in dreamland. “My roommate. My friggin’ roommate. My best friend. Now could you tell me what the problem is, Officer?”
For some reason he didn’t smart-ass back at me, and when I looked him in the eye, I could see there was more than a “matter.” Something bad had happened. He had come to tell me something really bad about Justin. The panic knocked my irritation out of the way.
And he did. He said Justin had been at the Look-Out bar that evening and had gotten into some kind of argument with another man. They were going at each other with fists, although about what the police didn’t yet know. The bar manager told them to get out. They did. But the fight resumed in the parking lot. They cussed each other and finally went to hitting. The other fellow pulled out a gun and shot twice. Both shots hit Justin in the abdomen. He survived the trip to the emergency room but died once they got him on the operating table.
I tell you, the next few hours were like a bad dream. I can’t possibly explain in words how I felt. It was like some wild animal had got loose in my insides and was just gnawing away. That police officer told me I’d have to go down and identify the body, and I’d be the one to have to tell Justin’s family and all that, and the only thing I could think of was, We argued, me and Justin. He left here mad at me, and I didn’t get to tell him I’m sorry! Man, you would have to look in a baby carriage to find something that cried as much as I did. Oh, I did. Right in front of people. It didn’t matter. That was my best friend on that cold slab in the morgue. That was my brother, and more, in that casket in that little church in Bolt, Texas. They had him all dressed up in a suit and tie, something I’d never seen Justin in, and his face shone so shiny and bright, I almost leaned down to kiss it.
When we got back to South Carolina after the funeral, my mama and daddy had to take me home with them. There was no way I could go back to that apartment, empty of Justin Thulon. No, I went back home and lay on my bed and stared at the walls until, eventually, I went on off to sleep.
Well, some time passed, but the hurt from losing Justin was still pretty tender. He stayed on my mind all the time, 24/7. It seems everywhere I went I could see him, and these were in places he had probably never even been. It occurred to me in a sorrowful way that while Justin lived in South Carolina we had not really done the things we used to do growing up as boys in Texas—play sports, go four-wheeler riding, or fishing. And I thought, I’ll dust off my rod and reel and head to the water and catch a big one for ol’ Justin.
My granddaddy owned some land outside of town, with a pond. I didn’t know if there were even any fish. But it didn’t matter. It was just the idea of being outside in the warm, wonderful, sunshiny weather, the grass green as a frog’s back, the breeze coming cool off the blue face of the pond. I lay back in the grass at some point and closed my eyes. Right away I saw Justin—the naked Justin, the way I had pictured him that night in my bedroom at home: naked and muscular and sporting a big ol’ boner in front of him. It seemed obscene in a way thinking about him like that and him gone and all, but I couldn’t help it. And pretty soon I saw myself with him, naked too, us coming together, embracing, and this time something more—kissing. Hungrily, our mouths just fierce for each other, our hands going crazy up and down each other’s body. The image got me all tingly. My hands went down to the crotch of my pants. I was hard. I rubbed myself. I shouldn’t have. It seemed, well, kind of sacrilegious. Then I had an even crazier idea. I stood up and took off my clothes. That’s right! I got naked as a jaybird in the great outdoors, not a stitch on. If somebody came along, I’d say I was about to go skinny-dipping. But really I didn’t care. This was for Justin, I figured. I lay back down in the grass and brought up the image again of me and Justin going at it and played with myself, jerking myself really hard. It felt good but hurt too—the idea of something that never would be. I moaned and cried too, the tears rushing down my face while my right hand went crazy on my dick. I called Justin’s name over and over while I watched in my mind how we loved each other with our hands and our mouths and our dicks. I got real close to coming, right on the very point, when I heard a voice over me: “Damn, Brandon, I never knew you were hung like that, boy!”
My eyes flew open. I let out a holler. The sun blinded me a minute till I shielded it with my hand. And there above me stood…it couldn’t be him, but who the hell else could it have been? Justin Thulon! Right over me. Naked as I was. Dripping wet, the pond water flashing over his skin like diamonds and rubies. He smiled down at me and pointed at my dick. “Of course I never got a chance to see you when you were grown, now did I?”
“Justin!” I sat up.
“Who the hell else, man?” he answered with a laugh. I rubbed my eyes once, twice, three times, three times more, and never did I get rid of him. He was still there, naked and piled with golden-brown muscles and a hard-on that nearly touched my chin.
“But how?”
“Huh?”
“How did you get back here? You’re gone.”
“I reckon there was a little bit of unfinished business that had to be taken care of.” And then he quit smiling and the humor left his voice and he went down to me right there on the ground, taking me back to the ground with him with one of his huge, smooth arms. He didn’t say any more. He leaned over to kiss me. It felt real! It felt like a man’s mouth and a man’s moustache and goatee. It sure tickled like one. His tongue flicked out of his mouth and danced on my lips a minute before moving down to my hard and sweaty nipples. He sucked one and then the other, bit them, then let his tongue do its little dance on them again and went on. He circled my navel with his tongue, and pretty soon he reached my crotch, where my dick stood hard and heavy like some flagpole in the middle of things.
“So damn big,” he repeated in a breathless voice and then licked it like he had everything else. He was thorough. He didn’t let one inch of my dick escape the swipe of his tongue. Pretty soon he had the head in his mouth and he was pushing his face down the length of the whole shaft the best he could. He choked and came back up then went down again. This second time he held the thing longer and tickled the head with his tonsils. I just squirmed on the ground and dug one hand in the grass and the other into his beefy shoulder. He bounced up and down on me with his face, taking in as much as he could. His free hand wandered over my balls and farther down. He even played with my feet a minute. Then the hand crept back up and found its way between my legs.
“I always thought you had the cutest damn ass, Brandon,” he told me, once he’d let my dick go. I spread my legs so he could explore me further. He had his middle finger between my asscheeks and was wiggling it into the crack. He had trouble getting into the hole right away, but pretty soon he was finger-pumping me and sucking my dick again at the same time. It was all too good to believe. It had to be a dream, but it felt so real! It felt selfish too, me getting all that pleasure. So I worked myself around on the ground so that I had hold of his thick dick and was sucking it too. It was the first time I had ever done it. I was sure I was no good at it, probably not putting the kind of pressure on him that made him feel good. But I tried. And he moaned and told me it was good. And he must have been right, because it wasn’t long before he called out to me that he was about to shoot off, and sure enough, almost as soon as I had him out of my mouth, he was firing long strings of cum into the grass. His body tensed up then released. But he never stopped sucking me until I felt my own climax coming on. I told him so. He took me out of his mouth and jerked me real good. And then the most intense feeling went through me, coming up through my nuts into my belly to the tips of my nipples, and I fired my stuff into the air and onto Justin’s hand. It was the best thing I had ever felt in my life.
He lay next to me afterward and caressed me while I got my breath back. Then, overcome, I fell onto him.
“I’m sorry, man,” I told him as I sobbed into his shoulder, “about calling you a bum and all. I didn’t get to tell you before you left. Then I never saw you again.”
He laughed softly. “I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“It doesn’t matter, I guess,” I said. “It only matters that you’re back. For good. Right?”
He shrugged. “For a little while anyway.”
My eyes got wide. My voice went hoarse like it was changing for the first time. “You mean you’re going to leave again?”
He kissed my wet cheek. “Don’t worry about that. Just enjoy right now. Okay?” I nodded kind of halfheartedly. Then he lifted my chin and said, “You know what I’d like right now?” When I shook my head, he went on. “I’d like you to fuck the living meanness out of me!”
I laughed and shook my head. “What?” I had always thought, in my fantasies anyway, that if anal sex went on, it’d be Justin skewering me. Then I said, joking, “I ain’t sure I got enough dick to do that!”
I lay on my back. Justin worked between my legs with his mouth and hands to get me hard again. When I was hard enough, he squatted on me, lowering himself down on my dick. It went in easy, which made me wonder how many dicks had been up his butt, or if this easiness was on account of his being a spirit and all. It didn’t matter. He rode me like I was a bronco and seemed to enjoy every minute of it. He had such a sweet smile on his face the whole time, with his eyes closed. He jacked himself hard and played with his right tit, squeezing and pinching the tip, till I took over the job for him. He looked so…well…beau-tiful, riding me like that and smiling. The sight of him put as much of a feeling in my heart as it did my dick.
“I love you,” I told him as he bounced away. “I love you, Justin Thulon, and always will, no matter where the hell you are or what the hell you are. No matter.” And the tears just streamed down my cheeks and blinded me for a little bit. But through the shimmer I could make out Justin nodding and smiling even wider. Then he grunted and whimpered, and my hand and belly were soaked with his white stuff. And at the same time the switch turned on in my balls and the tingly feeling was rising up in me. Justin knew it and clamped down hard on my dick to get the most of it. And I bucked on the ground and twisted and cried out until I had every last bit of that hot stuff out of my system.
Justin fell on me and embraced me and I hugged back, and it was the best feeling I ever had. I held him so tight, just damned and determined he wouldn’t get away again. I wouldn’t let him! He kissed my face and ruffled my hair and rubbed up gently against me so our bodies were stuck together with sweat and goo. The wind came gentle off the pond. The sun was warm gold on our bodies. There wasn’t any way I wouldn’t nod off to sleep with so much goodness and comfort around me. And that’s what I did. I slept.
When I woke, my arms were empty. “Justin?” I called out right away and sat up. I looked around. He was nowhere. I stood, still naked, and walked around looking for him. Nothing. I went to the edge of the pond and stared into it, wondering if he had gone back there (if that had been the place he’d come from, that is). But there was only water and silt and a stray bass or two shooting through the coolness. My heart was heavy. I sat on the ground and put my head in my hands and started to cry again. It had all been a dream, the whole thing. A sweet dream that seemed so real. But now it was gone. I’d never really touched Justin or tasted him like I had always wanted to.
I fell back on the grass and looked up at the sky, and through my tears I saw something really peculiar. Hot almighty! And I’m not making this up, I swear. I’ll swear it on a stack of Bibles and my own dear mama’s grave that I saw what I’m saying I saw. In the sky, which was otherwise blue and clear as could be, there were words written in heavy white letters, like they had been made out of clouds, and they said this: TO BRANDON WITH LOVE, JUSTIN.
And I cried, and I cried. And, years later, I still do.
THE CURTAIN STORE
Anthony McDonald
It wasn’t love at first sight. But it was attraction at first sight. And it was mutual, though I didn’t know it then. We were both sixteen.
I’d landed a Christmas holiday job at our local theater, thanks to my grownup sister who worked there. I was going to operate one of the follow spots during the run of the pantomime: Aladdin this year. I met the chief electrician a few days in advance, and he took me up the seemingly endless staircase to the back of the gallery. Two big spotlights were installed there, with a seat for each operator, on either side of the central aisle, behind the back row of seats. I say seats, but right up there in the gods they were actually benches. (Downstairs, the stalls and dress circle were all gilt and red plush.) I was shown how to swivel my light and move the barrel up and down. Like an antiaircraft gun, I thought. I was shown how to use the dimmer, following instructions received through headphones from the lighting box behind the stalls. My sister obligingly walked to and fro across the front of the stage, far below us and brilliantly lit, so that I had the chance to practice making the beam follow her, instead of waiting till I made an idiot of myself at the tech.
All casuals, as we were called, were summoned and met each other for the first time, in the green room an hour before the technical rehearsal started. Green room sounds grand, but it was nothing of the sort. It was a wide, windowless, linoleum-floored passageway between the dressing rooms and the stage. It was furnished with threadbare sofas from which the stuffing was escaping, a sink, a kettle and a fridge.
The stage manager divided the backstage crew into teams and handed them black clothes to wear. The assistant stage managers took charge of them and off they went. Which left the two of us.
I’d noticed Charlie at once, of course. Couldn’t not. Our eyes met across a crowded green room… I know, but it really was like that. We were easily the youngest there. I guessed he was about sixteen, like me, and he, like me, was small for his age. Small but not scrawny. Now that the room was nearly empty I could see more of him. There was space for me to notice that his very tight jeans were roundly filled with muscular, trim thighs and calves, prominent buttocks and, at the front, a jaunty little dome that seemed to announce: look what I’ve got. I knew already that I was attracted to boys, not girls, and this worried me quite a lot. But all I’d ever done, and all I thought I’d ever do, was look.
“Know what you’re doing and where to go?” the stage manager asked us. We said yes. He showed us where we could stow our coats and pullovers. No blacks for us: just the jeans and T-shirts we already had on. We pulled off our redundant pullovers. It was cold in the streets outside but at the top of the house it would be hot, especially behind those lamps. “I’m Tim,” I said. “Charlie,” my new acquaintance answered, and stuck out his hand. We climbed the stairs together. Not one in front and one behind but side by side.
There is a special kind of darkness in a theater when the houselights are down and the stage lights are up. It’s dark yet not dark at the same time. Emergency lighting brands the word EXIT on your retina in underwater green. This is how the night must appear to cats.
There was enough light for me to see in my peripheral vision the side view of my fellow follow spot. During the next days I memorized every contour of that view, across the aisle, just out of reach. (We could have held hands across the aisle, I suppose, but obviously we did not.) I can bring it all to mind today: the springy, taut, bow curve of his thigh; his short, straight nose and biggish lips; the proud young muscles of his forearm and bicep. Little by little, then, I learned those details of beauty, as technical rehearsal was followed by full-dress, then day after day the people poured in by the hundreds, until even the gallery was full. I remember the noise, the kids, the heat.
Because we were the youngest two, we gravitated together in the green room during breaks. We went to different schools. Otherwise we’d have known each other already. But because we were both easygoing characters, inclined to like rather than compete with new people we met, we got along together very well. You could almost say we became friends. But all the time we stood or sat together, drinking oily tea and talking about school or last night’s TV, I was imagining myself tearing off his tight jeans and… My imagination failed to come up with exactly what would happen next. I only knew that, whatever it was, I wanted it. I felt like King Lear, in the play I was then studying. I will do such things, what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth. Although Lear was talking about something else.
