“You.”
Everyone in the room looked at me expectantly. I was the only person who had shown no interest in Andrew. I didn’t like whatever game he was playing.
“Okay, Andrew. For the record, are you interested in me?”
I’d already turned and was halfway down the hall when I heard him say, “Yes.”
Not what I’d expected.
People suddenly realized how late it was or how tired they were or else were just so pissed off they couldn’t stand it, and the house emptied quicker than an inflatable sex doll with a pin prick. Nathan gave me a peck on the cheek and whispered, “Lucky bugger,” as he went off to bed. The only person who resolutely refused to leave was Andrew’s leechlike hopeful, who sat peevishly, casting a pall over our enthusiasm and interrupting our very personal snogging with sarcastic observations about my shortcomings for about twenty minutes. We carried on as if he weren’t there, and—at last!—he huffed his way out the door.
I swept the hair off Andrew’s pale forehead and leaned down to kiss his pimples.
“No one’s ever done that before,” he said, wistfully.
I unbuttoned his shirt slowly as I moved from his chin to his mouth, running my tongue across his pink lips, which parted to receive me. I gently probed his mouth and sucked in his tongue with just enough force to mean business. I found his nipples and ran my thumb across the pink-brown nubs. He shuddered his appreciation, and I bent down to lick and bite them lightly.
His cock sprang to attention and I ran my fingers along the outline in his jeans before I unbuttoned and pulled them, along with his briefs, down over his tight butt. He peeled off his shirt so that now he was naked. His body was perfection: a swimmer’s body, slim but muscular, not overblown.
He settled semiprone on the settee, luxuriating—I assumed—in my stare.
He knows he’s beautiful and my gaze is his due
, I thought. I ran my fingers over his chest and belly deliberately teasing his cock, which jolted as I neared it. I turned him over and traced the outline of his spine. His body delivered the tactile sensation of a beautiful marble sculpture.
I slid my finger between his asscheeks and sought out his hole. It was moist and I knew it would taste sweet. I parted his legs and pushed my face into the crack, easing in my tongue. He groaned and began to stroke his cock, but I swatted his hand away.
His cock was musky as I ran my tongue around his knob to lick away the light layer of precum. I tongued down the ridge under his cock to his balls, sucked them into my mouth and washed them with my saliva. I was worshipping him like priceless porcelain, careful lest he break, and he was responding like a beautiful object—as a perfect body, but not as a turned-on person. My sexual ministrations were one sided. He lay passive. I was doing all the work. I wanted sexual reciprocation.
I stood and stripped off my clothes as seductively as I could; Andrew watched, at first without reaction, but he must have eventually liked what he saw because he beckoned me to come back to him. He took my cock in his warm mouth and leisurely sucked me into his velvet throat. I turned my body to keep pace with him, and we eagerly devoured each other’s prick. I couldn’t hold off much longer, which he must have sensed: “I like it on my face,” he said.
I stood up and over him. He looked so vulnerable.
“Shoot it on me. Blow your load on my pretty fuckin’ face,” he groaned, pounding his meat with a sudden, surprising ferocity.
I jerked my cock and it didn’t take long because his tongue had already brought me close to the edge. I shot strings of warm spunk across his face, in his hair, and even a few squirts in his mouth, which opened in ecstasy as his own cock spewed over his stomach.
“Rub it on me,” he begged.
I ran my fingers through the puddle of cum in his navel and smeared it across his face and lips. He sucked my fingers clean and I soothed my own cum into his forehead and hair, then leaned in to kiss him, tasting our comingled juices.
“Now, piss in my face,” he said as I fetched a towel.
“Why do you want that?”
“I hate being good looking,” he said, and I detected a bitterness in his voice that I’d previously missed—or ignored. “Most guys won’t do it. They don’t like the idea of defiling beauty. Pissing on me is almost the equivalent to them of defacing a work of fucking art. I’m not a work of art. I’m more than a beautiful body. I’m a person.”
I picked him up and took him to the bathroom and laid him in the tub, then released a bursting bladder of beer onto his face and into his mouth, finally soaking his hair.
He smiled, contented. In that moment, through the shower of hot piss, he was more beautiful than most people would ever see.
A LITANY OF DESIRE
Dan Cullinane
Like floods. Like fires. Like droughts and ice storms and oceans and rivers and desert landscapes. Washing, wasting, wilting, waiting. Like cities at night and open roads under Wyoming skies and bridges reaching into the sky. Promising, postponing, pointing.
There was Joe, all those years ago, sitting on the floor in Randy’s trailer, his eyes on the TV watching Peter Gabriel sing “Sledgehammer” on MTV. I watched the spirals of hair disappearing up his thighs into the shadow of his shorts, and I wanted to follow it to places I had never been but knew I wanted to understand.
There was Jim, who lay under a tree in Duncan Park, shirtless and laughing, tipping his head back to empty his beer, and spilling it. Desert mouthed, I watched the spill run down his chin and into the hollow of his neck, and farther into the curls of hair on his chest. I was scared of what I wanted, and I didn’t move, and I averted my eyes. There were people surrounding us, and I wanted bad things to happen to all of them. I wanted to lap the beer on his chest, and I didn’t want to know that that was what I wanted. Late one night, I fell asleep in Jim’s house, and when I woke my head was in his lap, and he was smiling down at me through miles of darkened living room. Planets were born and civilizations fell in the moments between waking and when his head found its way to me, and I wrapped my fingers in his blond hair and tasted his bourbon and his cigarettes.
Desire is a mirror and I am nothing or no one without its reflection. Desire shines and lies and flickers like Saint Elmo’s fire. It leads you forward and it leaves you in the dark and you can still feel it glowing.
There was Steven, who pushed me backward over the bar at the Gallery in Baltimore and kissed my neck before returning to the pinball machine. It was our first date, and afterward we took an endless taxi ride through night streets to his basement apartment, and I wondered if I would ever enjoy fucking, because it seemed like nothing but pain. But falling asleep made it worth every inch he forced into me. He kissed me like a starving man, over and over, on street corners, in restaurant booths and at the end of the pier overlooking the harbor. He towered over me and he moved like mercury, and being naked with him was as close to love as I had ever known, and when he vanished I burned for him and learned what a squirrelly bitch desire is.
There was Michael, who jerked me off in the front seat of his car in an empty parking lot in Dundalk, while his lover was at home dying of AIDS. I followed him from place to place, taking whatever small things he had to give, showing up at the garage where he worked and eating lunch with him in the alley. He took me to the beach, and I gave away whatever pride I still had over dinner with his friends, who stared at me and wondered how I could be so inhuman. I was sick for his crooked smile and the way his hair flopped over his forehead and for the way he told me we were two peas in a pod. It didn’t matter that nothing would ever move forward and that the front seat of his car would always be as good as it could ever be.
There was Dan, who kissed me under the spinning lights on the dance floor at the Hippo, and I kissed him back because my ex-boyfriend loved him. I don’t remember his face, not anymore, but I remember his lips and his taste, because they felt and tasted like winning. He took me home, driving fast and dangerous up I-95 and braking, smoking and screaming, at the end of the off-ramp. He looked at me funny when I got out of his car, and I smiled and said good night, and I walked up the walk without looking back, and the tires squealing when he pulled away from the curb gave me chills.
Untrustworthy and unworthy. Along the way I learned to set it aside and sought out something less. When the fire was cold, it was safe to move forward, so I lived with men who I never wanted to touch. Sex was penance for lying and payment for safety, and when I got caught I did it again and again. Until it stopped working, and I found myself again chasing the blue flame across the horizon.
The savage, singular beauty of men is their relentlessness. There is nothing I have that can’t be taken, and it is in the taking that I find my rapture. It is always a surprise to find out how much more there is.
There was a guy who pulled my hair back and kissed me by the pool table at the Brit in Long Beach. He grabbed my wrist and dragged me to the door as people around us laughed and cheered. I felt tossed and owned and I was drunk so I didn’t question it. I rolled with him, naked in my bed as he fed me his iron cock, and forced my mouth down onto him until I choked. I had watched him playing pool, and I had caught his eye. What he saw in me that made him want to bitch me out like that I didn’t care. The stale beer odor rising from the floor and the bathrooms that always smelled like puke made me feel filthy, and I wanted him: his mustache and his powerful body and his white trash raspy voice, and the way he spit his beer into my open mouth in front of everyone, like I had no choice. I smiled. He lifted my legs and pushed inside me and grabbed my head and forced it onto his nipple, and I ran my tongue over the metal spike that pierced him and he whispered, “Nurse, baby…” and I did, and it was everything.
There was Michael, who took me to watch a sunset over the Pacific and told me that tonight was the night we would have sex. He told me his pizza theory about sex, how if you eat it when it first arrives you can burn yourself, but if you wait too long it’s chewy and cold. He was imperfect and shorter than I was, but I looked at him, at his bright eyes and black hair and the way he never really smiled, and I didn’t care whether the time was right or wrong. Later, as he leaned over me, buried inside of me, and kissed the inside of my legs, he whispered, “What am I going to do with you?” I wanted the answer to be forever, not because it was right but because it was there, and it ripped me apart and hollowed me out over the months, and when it was over I lost my bearings and drifted in the dark.
There was a man who negotiated me away in a sex club in Alphabet City. He was fat, and he was old, and when he kissed me I could feel the hair on the mole on his lip. But he stripped my underwear off and spanked me in front of a circle of guys who stroked themselves as my flesh grew pink and mottled. One by one he told them what they could do to me, and they did, and I lost myself on a wave of use that shocked me and left me panting and dizzy and starved for oxygen, and he pulled me out from under and held me until I stopped shaking. And I dropped to my knees and I gave him my service because he saved me.
Saved me.
It’s opportunity and it’s education by an elusive teacher. Fire burns but it also illuminates. Floods destroy but they also purify. Roads to nowhere are also roads to somewhere.
There was a guy whose face was pitted and hollow from the effects of protease inhibitors, but whose long bony body settled over me like a comforter, and who stroked me for hours as the sun went down through the patio windows. I never knew his name; he never bothered to mention it. His skin was brown and his scalp was tattooed and his cock was enormous. He licked my back and settled himself there and fucked my spine, and I stretched like a cat and inhaled his sweat. If we’d been in two separate rooms it would not have mattered, we were so given over to the satisfaction of our own sensations that we became invisible to each other. It was wordless and selfish and we both came hard.
There was Scott, who was straight and leaned out of the window of his red pickup on a street in Manhattan and kissed me. Ginger haired and runner taut, he offered himself to me as his first, and I took him facedown on my bed, pushing myself to give him something to make it worthwhile, and he shot over my pillows and collapsed smiling and sweating in my arms and fell asleep while I lay awake and stared at the ceiling and wondered if I had ever enjoyed sex like that. We met up in Provincetown one summer and walked through the artists’ shacks out in the dunes and took off our clothes in the sun and gave ourselves over to the joy of limitless possibilities because we knew we had to make something out of what was never going to be possible.