I could have sucked his cock forever. My heart hammered in shock as I slobbered over the head, running my tongue over the ridge of the crown, burying it in the gaping, weeping slit, then down the veiny shaft until my forehead was pressed again against the ridged rockiness of his stomach.
But Richie pulled me up, pulled me closer, ridding us of unwanted inches. I stared into his eyes as we went to the ground together. He stared back as I moved on top of him, straddling him, reaching behind me and finding him. We struggled together to find a way to get rid of this last unwanted space between us. There was spit, and there was pressure and a searing pain that made me feel like everything could be good again. Then he was sliding into me and saying my name and grabbing my head and pulling me in for a kiss.
We sat like that for a moment, scared and breathing in catches. Then Richie shifted, and a look almost like pain crossed his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to do this.”
He pushed into me the rest of the way, and I arched my back so hard I thought I might break.
Then it was fury. He rolled me onto my back, pulling almost all the way out of me. He hovered over me, his face as open as a child’s, his broad chest corded with muscles stretched as taut as cables. Then he slammed forward and lifted his head and opened his mouth in a scream that emerged as only a sigh. Every inch was gone. We were fused.
I remember pain breaking into something else, and then he couldn’t be far enough inside me. I wrapped everything I had around him and pulled him deeper. Every unspoken word that had passed between us as our eyes met in the high school hallway poured into that moment on the riverbank, with the mud squelching around our bodies and the sun beating down and slicking us with sweat. We were making sounds, but I don’t know if they were words. Those inches, inches, inches, all of his inches, all of them inside me. Him. His body. His sweat mingling with mine. His arms around me. His mouth on mine again and again. And the never stopping, never slowing, rhythm of the connection we had made.
Then chaos and shattering savage thrusts, and then Richie was rolling backward, me fully shanked on him, his huge calloused hands finding me and pulling ribbon after ribbon of heat out of me. I couldn’t breathe or move, I could only watch as I sprayed all over him, white droplets running down his chest in streams to the place where we were still connected, giving him a slippery path to move even faster inside me. His thighs slammed into the back of my legs, and I clamped my palms down on them, feeling the muscles straining against my hands.
And he was still. His hand grabbed at the back of my head and pulled my face toward his. His mouth latched on to mine, and he groaned deep into me. Inside me, I felt him swell and break apart as the first blast of heat shot toward my heart. There were more, but that first one, the first shot, hit me hardest, this thing he was leaving inside me. It was him. And now it was mine.
After that, there wasn’t anything to say. We couldn’t talk about it. We clung to it for as long as we could, but I could feel him slipping out of me. Silently, we walked into the river and washed. We stood on the riverbank naked and looked at each other, knowing that the thing that made this possible would never happen again. If it did, it would be something else, and rather than draw us closer, it would drive us apart. So we dressed.
Richie returned to his log, and we silently surveyed the wreckage of our raft.
“You know, that…” he pointed at what was left. “That was Joey’s idea.”
“I know.”
“You gonna tell him?”
“Are you?”
“I don’t see why.”
Joey came clomping up the riverbank a few minutes later, and the three of us walked back to where he had parked the truck. Joey didn’t say anything when he saw the blood around my nose, but he shot a look over at Richie and then back at me to see if we’d tell him. We didn’t. To tell him that would be to tell him everything. When I saw him, I felt like I had betrayed him, but there was no way to share this.
We stopped in town for a beer.
“Our raft was the worst one, I think,” Joey said.
“Probably,” Richie said. “You think there’s a prize for that?”
I lifted my beer, “To truly shitty rafts.”
Richie nodded, and raised his beer. “I’ll drink to that.”
“You’ll drink to anything,” Joey said and then raised his beer. “Shitty rafts forever.”
But there was no forever. The summer drifted by, and all I saw of Richie was the shape of him behind the wheel of his truck, a hand lifted in greeting as we passed each other on the county road. As for the inevitable moving on and moving away, I never said good-bye, and whatever space I left behind became something I never thought about.
When I returned, for Christmas or sometimes in summer, the space I filled was something new. I heard about marriages and children, but I never tried to connect, and the pile of years became too large to climb over.
But Richie was walking around the fire, his eyes on me, and I didn’t look away. Somewhere inside me, there was something of him. We still owned each other.
BOY CURATION
Rob Wolfsham
Uri Vitko pointed a large, black DSLR camera with a lens like a cannon at Rich Smith, his presently shirtless boyfriend of one week. Rich was a lithe, scruffy twenty-one-year-old with buzzed blond hair and a pierced eyebrow and lip. A cigarette scrunched and glowing down to the filter drooped from his bottom lip. The bones of his spine bisected a vulture tattoo, brown wings spread across his shoulder blades. He stirred a pot of chicken stew on the stove. Steam joined cigarette smoke and the aroma of curry. His left arm had a sleeve tattoo of a steel blue eagle, feathers fluttering down his skin and veins, merging into silver scales of a viper coiled around a dull yellow skull resting on his wrist. His earlobes accommodated two-gauge black rings.
The shutter clicked two times.
Rich glanced at the large lens several feet away. The shutter clicked two more times.
“You should cook shirtless more often,” Uri said, voice muffled as he looked down at the LCD screen, reviewing the last image of Rich’s pale tattooed body, straw goatee and blue eyes in gold light. “This is going to get so many likes, a hot indie boy who can cook.”
“Don’t upload that,” Rich said smashing his cigarette in the sink. “I look like shit. And don’t call me indie. Don’t call anything indie.”
“I’m not going to put all of them up,” Uri said. “Maybe like three. Don’t be so label phobic.”
“Don’t be so identitarian,” Rich said, one eyebrow vaulting at Uri.
“The Internet needs labels. Tags. It’s how people find my blog, the one you never look at.” The shutter clicked again.
“Internet’s evil,” Rich said. He leaned over the pot and sipped from his spoon, frowning thoughtfully, chin and goatee pushed out. The shutter clicked and caught his expression in the lens.
Uri looked up from the little glowing screen. “That’s like saying cars are evil. The Internet is just a vehicle for content.”
“Cars
are
evil. Jesus.”
Uri started walking away. “I’m uploading these now.”
“Wait, babe.” Rich held a big spoonful of soup toward Uri. “Try this.”
Uri leaned over, black shoulder-length hair falling over his square Eastern European face. He slurped from the spoon. “Too salty. Wait, hold on.” Uri set the camera in macro mode and held the lens up to the quivering spoon, almost touching. The spoon came into razor sharp focus, each pearl of broth and saliva glistening. Rich stood blurry in the background at a dramatic angle. The shutter clicked.
Rich dunked the spoon in the pot. “Now you’re being ridiculous.” He tried to grab the camera from Uri, but Uri wouldn’t let go. Rich pulled him close against his pale inked body. Uri tugged on the camera again, then pressed his nose into the nook of Rich’s neck and shoulder where blue feathers tapered off. They both cradled the camera. Rich smelled like smoke and curry. He grinned at Uri like a joker with curling dimples. His teeth were slightly crooked with canines a little too sharp. Uri’s nose slid up Rich’s neck to his blond chin scruff, then his lips. They kissed and tongued each other. The lens of the camera prodded Rich’s ribs as Uri pressed his crotch against the subject of his photography, the bones of their knees under their jeans rolling over each other.
“Don’t be shy,” Uri said against Rich’s jugular vein.
“I’m not,” Rich purred and let go of the camera to unbuckle Uri’s jeans. He yanked the belt out like a whip and turned the stove to low. With the devotion of a famished wolf, he tore apart the fly of Uri’s jeans and yanked them down hairless thighs. He folded to his knees and buried his nose in the bulge of Uri’s blue briefs, sniffing and mouthing the soft cock under the fabric. His lip piercing rolled over the cotton where the head of Uri’s cock pulsed.
Uri gritted his teeth and smeared his palm on the kitchen counter. Rich snuck his hand through the gap between Uri’s thighs and palmed the back of his balls. He rubbed his middle finger into the soft stretch cotton against Uri’s asshole.
Uri moaned and leaned against the counter and held the camera up to his face, pointing the lens down at Rich’s eager lips.
Rich rubbed the fabric of Uri’s underwear into his hole, gnawing on the cock straining against cotton. He heard the click of a shutter and looked up, grinning but with eyebrows furrowed.
“Don’t be shy,” Uri said.
“I’m not when I’m off the record,” Rich said, latching his thumbs under the brim of Uri’s briefs. He pulled them down and let Uri’s firm five inches breathe inside his mouth. Rich’s tongue shined and slurped Uri’s uncut cock, lips slipping fast from head down to hairless base. The warm ring in Rich’s bottom lip rolled over vein and foreskin. Rich pulled off. The strong male tang and scent of Uri’s uncut cock overpowered the curry and spices of the kitchen.
“You’re fresh,” Rich said, a string of saliva connecting his lip ring to Uri’s foreskin.
“Sorry, I need to shower,” Uri said. He still held the camera in his sweaty hands, the shaft of the lens aimed at the detail of the saliva bridge between his foreskin and Rich’s mouth.
“No, I like it. Shower less often.” Rich sucked his own middle finger to the base and snuck his hand between Uri’s thighs again. His wrist pressed against the taint behind Uri’s balls, and he rubbed his middle finger against the hairless hole, sneaking in.
Uri sucked in air and parted his legs, squatting into the hand. Rich gulped down the slick cock while curling his bony middle finger into Uri’s warmth, sliding in second-knuckle deep, clutching him closer in his palm.
Uri groaned as Rich took his cock down his throat and slid the tip of his finger around Uri’s pulsing prostate. Rich mashed his sharp nose into Uri’s smooth navel. He swallowed his length down, swishing his head around to attack the uncut cock from all angles with his tongue. Uri dragged his nails through Rich’s prickly buzzed hair. Rich gagged and the back of his tongue gulped against the underside of Uri’s cock with each slurp and gurgle. Uri growled and Rich recognized the need and shoved his middle finger deeper into his boyfriend, flicking around his insides, at the same time grabbing the base of his cock and jacking him furiously, tonguing his slit and foreskin.
“Fuck, I’m gonna cum,” Uri moaned and held his breath in his throat, lips parted, still aiming the camera lens at the tongue worming under his foreskin. His ass clenched the finger inside him. Spurts of a four-day load seared through his cock with each pump of Rich’s fist. Spunk filled Rich’s mouth, spilling out the corners and smearing across his lips. Rich swallowed what he could. A spurt of cum webbed into his lip ring. He rubbed his middle finger around Uri’s quivering prostate, wheedling what leftovers he could before he slid out and polished his finger with a dish towel. Uri shuddered in post-orgasmic delight; he couldn’t resist when Rich grabbed the camera from his hand and deleted pictures on the memory card one by one.
“Come on,” Uri exhaled, shoulders slumping.
Rich turned the camera on Uri. “If you need to remember anything, just ask.” The camera flashed, blinding Uri for an instant.
Uri mashed his hair against his face. “No, no pictures of me.”