I kiss a ticklish spot on his neck, letting my sandpaper chin scrape against his smooth skin.
“You fell asleep with your iPod on again,” he tells me.
I run a hand through my hair, pulling on the silver curls, glancing up from beneath my thick eyelashes, posing like the subject of an old George Hurrell portrait, all drama and lighting and archetypal beauty. I was once told I looked like a young Burt Lancaster, all curly hair, broad cheeks and cocksucking lips, the way he looked in
The Killers
with Ava Gardner. My lips pout, but I can’t hold on to the moment. I break into a grin. I feel overweight and hairy and apelike in his presence. I do a well-worn comic bit, hopping around, arms dangling, body swaying from one foot to the other.
“Oh, monkey,” he whispers.
“Me Oliver,” I grunt.
Nick’s dark eyes open, slow as a morning bloom, and then narrow, watching me in the mirror.
“You need me to shave your back,” he says finally. There is an understated smile inching across his lips, the wrinkle damage of such movements minimized by periodic injections of Botox.
I’m naked; my erection slides between the twin globes of his perfect ass. He rubs his puckered hole against me, daring me to enter him. He’s always been a wildcat in the sack, willing to do anything, eager to do everything. He’s as compartmentalized in his life as the Post-its on the fridge. He’s got all these little note-sized worlds: Office, Home, Body, Face, Family, Sex. He will stand worrying about his wrinkles; methodically touching up his hair; peeling and exfoliating his face, his heels, his hands; smoothing everything to porcelain perfection; pulling back when I touch his cheek for fear I will somehow upset the alchemical balance that keeps him youthful and perfect. But then flip to the next Post-it and he’s on his knees on the kitchen tile behind me pushing his thumbs into me and rimming out my hole like he’s devouring a nectarine, wallowing in the smell of sweat and the salty fruit between my asscheeks. Flip to the next, on which he’s written the words
water sports
in neat block letters. He leaves that one on the mirror in the master bathroom one night, then pulls me naked into the cold stone of the shower stall and kneels, grinning and stroking his cock, whispering a string of stinging, sexy profanity as I piss across his stomach and chest and finally his perfect face. A week after the pool-poll thing, he leaves a Post-it note on my pillow that says
Poll my ass
and then moans and thrashes, perfectly manicured fingers smearing oily lube across the sheets and scraping the skin off my arms when I wrestle him onto the mattress, strip off his boxers and plow into him.
Nick’s always been direct like that. That’s how we ended up with Andy. He left a Post-it that said,
Three’s Company Too
next to the coffeepot one morning. We drank the last of the organic blend we bought in Guatemala and started looking at the possibilities.
Now, in the bathroom, he reaches back and gives my cock a nice, slow tug. He turns around, grabbing our cocks together in his hands. They’re as opposite as we are. His is long and pale and thin with a small pinkish head. Mine is shorter, thicker, more blunt and bluish, the shaft heavy and veined like a darkly living creature. I lean back against the bathroom wall letting him work me over until I splatter a load of cum all over his hands. He comes right after that, pushing his head against my soft belly, leaving a trail of thin milky cum entangled in my hair. He kneels down and licks us both clean; my skin shudders under his tongue. As the flame of orgasm fizzles and finally drops from the sky above me, a dying flare in the winter sky, the dimming light behind my eyes triggers a memory: the night I first saw Nick.
It was the fall of 1996 and my best friend Jonathan and I were at an amateur production of
Pippin
. When the music died at the end of the finale, a puzzled, uncomfortable silence hung over the room. The pause was so long the cast started to react, faces changing, smiles altering at the corners or behind kohl-lined eyes. When the roar of applause finally arrived, tears of relief wet thespian cheeks.
I watched the relieved actors taking their bows, Pippin still bare-chested and barefoot from the finale in which the other players had stolen away everything but his linen pants, pushing the scenery into the wings, stripping his life down to an empty stage and the stark glare of a single overhead bulb. The actor, Jamie, was laughing now, smiling and waving to the audience, but moments ago his voiced had cracked under the weight of his heartbreaking choice: live your life fast as a supernova or slow as a candle. “Think about the sun, Pippin,” sang the chorus. I wanted him to fly, like Icarus into the inferno of an extraordinary life.
Live it for me
, I thought. But as he has done every time I’ve seen the show, Pippin chose life, domestic and slow and steady.
This show always makes me anxious and peevish.
When the lights came up, we stood and looked in the direction of the greenroom, where we had been promised free wine. We were standing behind a herd of chattering, slightly puzzled theatergoers trying to exit. “What happened at the end?” one woman asked another. “I don’t know, it’s too artsy for me, with that bare stage and him half nekkid and that lightbulb.”
“It was good till then,” the first woman said.
Jonathan was bouncing on the balls of his feet, clapping his hands rhythmically, his lips moving as he processed the show’s startling finale. He’d been going through this cheerleading phase and everything was converted to a cheer, repeated with hand-claps as punctuation and a few precision arm or leg moves for emphasis.
You might not be an eagle
(clap)
that soars down to the sea
(clap).
But if you’re tied to nothing
(clap, arms up)
. You’re never really free.
(clap, clap)
A fat man in front of us whispered “Faggots,” to his wife; I touched Jonathan’s hand in an attempt to waylay another cheer, but I was too late.
Love me or hate me
(clap)
, you don’t have to date me
(clap, clap)
.
We let them move ahead of us, the woman using her wobbling arm and an aluminum cane to leverage herself from one step to the next. Her eyes blazed with anger; her breath was ragged from the exertion of the stairs.
In the greenroom a buffet of cold, unappetizing food had been carefully laid out on gold plastic tablecloths, but the actors were too amped to eat anything, fluttering around the crowded room sweating and giggling and fawning over the handsome Pippin. I’d known Jamie for a couple of years. He reminded me of the old porn star Casey Donovan, with his straight, windswept brown hair and darkly drugged, lost eyes. He looked startled by the attention, shifting his weight from one bare foot to the other, holding a dozen red roses against his finely muscled chest. He was self-consciously pretty. “Strike a pose, girl,” I whispered as I passed him.
He shifted his weight to one foot, hips tilting, giving his body an
S
-shaped twist that showed off his trim form to beautiful effect. He bit his lip to let people know he was having deep thoughts. When he laughed, it was in a singer’s voice, controlled and beautiful as if he had never left the stage. I watched him talking to a hunky guy who touched him repeatedly on his bare shoulder. I imagined the two of them naked, the hulking hottie pushing Jamie’s head down with meaty fingers and fucking his tiny, curved ass.
“Oh, baby, slide me between those fine buns,” Jonathan whispered, arms circling my waist. I laughed.
“You hate it here,” he said.
“No, of course not.”
“You do,” he insisted. “And you hate me for bringing you here.”
I turned around and pulled him into a hug.
“I love you, Johnny Boy,” I whispered.
“Knock it off, you two.” Jonathan’s friend Brenda waved us over to meet her niece, who had played Pippin’s love interest, Catherine. She was quite pretty, with plain hair and delicate features. Jonathan and I tossed superlatives at her for a while, watching her smile fade to an uncomfortable mask. I noticed and stopped, but Jonathan kept going. The movement of the crowd gave me vertigo, the pious clucking of the Old Gainesville matrons making me suddenly queasy. I was going to need a drink to survive the next ten minutes.
I found a plastic cup that looked pretty clean and a bottle of merlot that looked pretty cheap and I introduced them. And then I saw Nick: dark-eyed, dark-haired perfection. I literally gasped; my knees felt weak and I thought I was going to throw up. When I told Nick the story later, all he really got from it was that he made me nauseous. For me it was an epiphany of sorts, as if the universe was saying,
Think about the sun, Oliver
. But rather than floating up into his brilliance, I looked down at my shoes, my mouth watering in desperate preparation for vomit. I pressed the palm of my left hand to the wall and tried to breathe.
A woman in a flowered jacket touched me with long pink nails. “Are you all right, honey?”
I nodded.
“Are you choking?”
I looked up at her, startled. “What?”
“They say you’re supposed to ask that,” she said.
“I’m fine, really,” I said, glancing back at Nick.
I felt like my soul was retrieving some past-life memory that would guide me through this moment to make sure I didn’t fuck it up. Maybe it’s that feeling of recognition that made me afraid to speak to him. What if I fucked it up anyway?
Luckily he was looking away, his eyes sliding up and down Jamie’s body, from dark hair to bare feet and back again. He was staring so unabashedly I was getting an erection by proxy, but I couldn’t move or stop salivating, so I stood, stiff and still as a statue, watching. I knew if this guy wanted Jamie, he would have him. And I wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Honey, you’re sure I can’t help you?” the flowered lady asked.
“No, really, I’m fine on my own.”
“Well, if you say so,” she smiled, patting me on the shoulder and gliding away in a lavender-scented cloud.
I looked back at Nick, who had not moved. I studied his crisp beautiful Greek features: dark wavy hair, thick eyebrows, prominent nose and bottomless eyes. He was a pale beauty, his cheeks thin and slightly pink. He had long piano player’s hands that extended from the pressed cuffs of his white oxford. I looked at him and knew that he was watching Jamie. I wondered if they would go home together and whether he was a top or a bottom and whether he had a treasure trail to point the way to his hidden charms.
He turned toward me and I pretended to be looking beyond him. He took no notice of me. I blushed and surreptitiously wiped my eyes as I stumbled toward Jonathan’s laughter.
He was that beautiful.
We didn’t meet that night. Nick went home with Jamie and they fucked semiprivately and fought publicly for a couple of months. Jamie actually introduced me to Nick at his birthday party, grabbing me by the shoulder, pushing me toward Nick and sneering, “You two shits are perfect for each other. Oliver, Nick. Nick, Oliver.” He was right, of course, but he could have been kinder about it.
Now, in the bathroom, the air smells like cum and toothpaste. Nick is pulling himself up off the floor, his knees cracking in protest. He grins and shrugs, tossing his head and letting his gorgeous dark hair fall forward over his forehead.
“I smell teen spirit,” Andy says from the hall. “You kids started without me.”
I glance over at Andy’s lean form. He’s standing stretched against the door frame, backlit perfection, his body graceful and feline, like the Rum Tum Tugger, all limbs and pelvis and, in Andy’s case, cock. He’s wearing a tight, pink midriff T-shirt that says SARAH PALIN 2012 in purple letters across the front. And that’s it. A trail of flaming ginger hair descends from his navel to the nest of curls that surround the base of his enormous, pendulous cock. His bright pink balls hang loose and low, swinging with his cock like an invitation to the tropics.
Andy sips from an oversized coffee mug.
“Did I get the reference right, Daddy?” He’s talking to Nick, who hates it when Andy calls him that. But Andy likes playing the age game, reveling in the indignant look he gets from Nick’s beautiful, dark eyes. Andy’s tongue slides across his upper lip and his cock starts to move, the girth beneath the loose skin shifting like a python reaching down from a low-hanging branch to snatch a careless finch. I watch it move and feel my own cock growing thick again in response.
“Go fuck yourself, pretty baby,” Nick says, leaning into the shower to turn on the jets. Steam starts to rise almost immediately from the cool stone and Nick steps inside, closing the glass door.