drink, wrong background. And his dick was definitely not reacting to attractive guys around him. He was even more confused than he’d been an hour ago.
“Seriously? I figured you for a farm boy. Somewhere they grow apples or goats or something.” Sticky was reading Griff’s body from behind the safety of the
counter, a slow head-to-toe appraisal with scenic detours. He laughed, but he wasn’t teasing, just being sexy and friendly. “And you got to nap a lot in the hayloft with your cousins. They built like you?”
“Yeah. No. I mean. That sounds nice, but I’m 100 percent city mouse.” Griff sighed and took a careful sip of his beer.
Why wasn’t he turned on? Griff could tel this hipster underwear model was interested, but apparently his own interests were stuck somewhere else.
Like
over the Brooklyn Bridge
.
These days he couldn’t sit next to Dante without popping wood, and he couldn’t check his e-mail without itching to go to that damn pornsite.
Hel, Sticky was probably a fucking HotHead member and would be downloading Dante later for his personal use. Griff tried not to feel angry and possessive, but the panic weled up in him again.
“You’d look hela fine in overals, bub. That blazing hair and those cannonbal shoulders and nothing else. Trust me. I gotta pair.” Sticky winked. Even his
eyelashes were platinum around his hazel eyes.
“Thanks.” Griff winked back and nodded because it seemed polite, but he didn’t want to lead the bartender on. Was that what he was doing? It felt so weird
for other men to mack on him like this. If Dante could see this, he’d piss himself laughing.
With a little crease of disappointment on his brow, Sticky rapped his knobby knuckles on the bar between them as if putting a period on the flirting. “You get thirsty again, you come find me, farm boy.” And then he was taking an order from three suits carrying briefcases, pouring sambuca shots.
Feeling like he’d been rude somehow, Griff pushed back into the crowd and found a corner where he could watch the other Pipe Room patrons unobtrusively as they surged around him with their eight-dolar beers and cool shoes.
Griff heard the crack as the NYUers started up another game of pool. On the sofa, the tal Asian was teling a long story to his friends, and the rugby team
was watching the flirty fireplug Marine open a present. Sticky scooped up a couple folded tips and tucked them into a jar while he talked to a burly black bouncer who’d come to the bar for a bottle of water, just like Griff did on a slow night at the Stone Bone.
That could be me
.
Just guys.
Nothing that made him uncomfortable at al, but also nothing that made him feel the frantic hunger Dante aroused in him. This wasn’t his world or his life. He
felt like a spy. Again he had the thought that if he hadn’t known it was a gay bar, that these were gay men, an hour could’ve passed before he figured it out.
Dumbass
.
How could he know if
he
was, if he couldn’t even tel if
they
were? Griff felt so relieved and so confused at the same time. He’d cool off and finish his beer and head back home.
He stil didn’t know the right question to ask, but he knew his answer was waiting on the other side of the river.
GRIFF kiled another beer before he cut out, figuring he should give his dick a chance to speak up if it was ever gonna get interested. No luck. He left a healthy tip for Sticky by way of thanks and apology. He ducked out the side door, which led to a short aley with a dumpster and a couple dead kegs.
He didn’t see the two men fucking until he was almost on top of them.
He had slipped outside quietly, not wanting to attract attention inside the bar. He didn’t attract attention out here either, apparently. He turned toward the streetlights on East 7th, and from the shadows of the aley behind him, he heard someone yelp in pain.
Instantly alert, Griff doubled back to investigate, sticking to the shadows.
If it was a mugging, he needed to surprise them. If someone was injured, he didn’t want to startle them.
When he reached the Dumpster he saw them: two men in their thirties standing braced against the brick wal, fucking hard in a puddle of brightness thrown by
an overhead safety light.
They faced the same direction, mostly dressed and pretty built, their pants just open enough to line up ass and cock. Their muscular butts were framed by
their shirt hems and their lowered jeans.
The man humping away looked Middle Eastern and covered in dense hair; his hard, fuzzy glutes clenched tight every time he impaled his noisy partner.
The guy getting fucked was shorter and whining a little, but his dick was a wet iron bar under him and he was jerking it roughly. He almost yelped whenever
he arched and took the whole dick inside him—like it hurt, but it hurt weird and good. That was the pitiful sound Griff had heard.
Griff hesitated, crouching in the shadow of the Dumpster and watching them with quiet fascination. He’d never watched two guys boning, so this felt like
sneaky research.
Both men were strong and weren’t careful with each other. It didn’t seem like being with a woman at al. Was that hot or scary or both? It seemed so real
and so fast and almost angry. This wasn’t romance, just guys getting off.
Griff scootched closer, not realy turned on by the roughness but sort of turned on by spying on them.
The short guy taking it under the safety light didn’t seem to have a problem getting railed hard. He panted and sank fuly to his knees so that the hairy guy had to folow to stay inside his ass. As the smaler man slid down, the man behind literaly spat at him, at the tongue arching out of his open mouth, and he groaned as if grateful and licked his lips.
For some reason, Griff’s ass felt funny inside his pants, inside his boxers, like it was imagining how much it must hurt taking something that huge. He’d never thought about his butt as sexual, but something about the rawness of these men felt real. He could sort of understand what they wanted from each other.
Next to the dented kegs, they fucked like dogs, angry and fast on the rough concrete, getting close to getting off. The guy on the bottom showed scratches on
his knees and hands. The arm he was using to hold himself up in a frog crouch was bruised. The swarthy man pumping into him slapped those plump asscheeks and
pushed a long finger in beside his hard shaft, stretching the hole wider and making his partner shout.
The sight made Griff horny, and that was a new piece of information for him. What if it were Dante? He wasn’t hairy like this guy, but he was dark, and Griff
was pale. He could almost imagine it.
If Dante wanted him like that, forced him, he’d do it gladly. If Dante held him down in an aley and bred him like a dog…. If his best friend fucked him rough
on his knees with his round ass up and split open and filed like that, Griff knew he would shoot the first time Dante’s dick touched bottom inside him. Just the thought of that and Griff started to get an erection and his bals shifted, but before he could wrap a guilty fist around it, the finale started under the safety light.
The hairy dude in back tensed his asscheeks and crammed himself inside. As he unloaded, his face stretched into a scream, but he made no sound as he
tugged his partner roughly onto the ful length of his erection.
The smaler guy under him was squeezing his dick until it turned purple, the head swolen as he yanked it, his knuckles bloody from scraping the concrete.
Without warning his partner pushed his face into the ground, holding his hips to keep his ass high, and hammered at it a few times; the bottom growled low
and squirted twice—
tthhit-tthhhit
—onto the ground, sliding forward and faling free of the greasy condomed erection behind him.
Griff was holding his breath, half aroused and half ashamed.
The guy on the bottom roled, and his Arab buddy offered a hand and puled him up to stand in the light. At some point in the rush to hook up, his face had
been scraped raw against the bricks, a pink rectangle on a cheekbone.
That was when—
Christ on a crutch
—Griff recognized the guy who had taken the pounding: Tommy. Tommy Dobsky. Tommy, with the scraped face and
bloody knees and bruised arm and sore, fucked-wide-open ass, and a smile like Christmas morning.
Tommy was from the neighborhood. Tommy was married and had kids. Tommy was a paramedic, ferchrissakes! They worked together. Tommy was a total
joey with a share down the Jersey Shore and a thing for Hispanic chicks. Not here, apparently.
Here, Tommy liked getting half raped on his knees and forced to the ground drooling and moaning. Here, Tommy was buckling his belt and wiping his raw
hands on jizz-stained pants, nodding at something the Arab guy said and chuckling. Tommy snuck into Manhattan to do this. Griff had snuck here and watched.
What worried Griff was that he had loved watching it a little, long as he was imagining Dante in the equation.
What if Griff had been seen? What if Tommy said he’d been in that bar? What if Tommy knew what he’d seen in that aley? He had just watched Tommy
Dobsky get fucked on scraped knees by a big Arab gorila and love it. Tommy had begged and eaten that guy’s spit. Tommy would kil him for knowing.
They were dressed now, and their voices were murmurs from the rear of the aley. In a second they’d see him. Griff thanked the Lord he had worn black. If
Tommy saw him, he’d be in shit to his neck, and not for being a peeping Tom. He had to get the fuck out of here, before—
They turned toward the Dumpster!
Griff slid back into the shadows along the wal, keeping to the dark until he’d put a safe distance between them. Before Tommy could take two steps in his
direction, Griff hauled ass out of the aley and sprinted up the street and halfway to the 2nd Avenue train stop before he paused to puke in a trashcan ’cause he was so relieved and anxious.
Guh
. Nasty.
Down in the subway, the F train took forever ’cause it was almost midnight now.
Tommy likes dudes. And I think maybe I like dudes
. Definitely one dude, at least. Griff prayed he could keep it together. He kept thinking about the
sounds Tommy made getting humped and the way he’d smiled at his fuckbuddy after. His brain felt scrambled.
He kept looking at his watch so much that finaly he took it off and put it in his pocket. At the exact moment when Dante’s video went live on the HotHead
website, Griff was underground at East Broadway, tapping his feet and reading the ads overhead to distract himself from the second hand sweeping around the little dial on his wrist. At least he knew his dad would be watching television when he got home. That would keep him from going online and out of his gourd.
For once, he needed his dad to be rigid and detached. For once, Griff was weirdly relieved to be going back to the same law’n’order house he’d grown up
in—an adamantly porn-free zone and al the safer and saner for it.
The late-night subway meant Griff didn’t get back to his dad’s until nearly one. Walking in the dark streets, he’d taken the long way from the Carrol Street
station and stopped at the Korean deli to buy ice cream and toilet paper he didn’t need. He had a ten-minute conversation with a homeless man about global
warming to waste some more seconds. He went to an ATM to check that his paycheck had cleared. It had.
Al the way through Carrol Gardens, Griff kept teling himself he was exhausted and needed to crash because he was working a ful moon over the weekend,
and that always meant crazy shit for the station. This was what rehab must be like, fighting alone in the dark against something you needed to hide. He’d seen guys kick destructive habits. It came at a cost.
As he walked past sleeping brownstones, he made a deal with himself. He wouldn’t promise he’d never watch the video. He was just going to try to get
through tonight without giving in to the impulse. He could make it through the dark in one piece.
One night at a time.
His body wasn’t listening; his body was thinking some realy inappropriate things about Dante that forced him to carry the groceries in front of his zipper. He thought about the guys who’d watched Dante already since midnight and wondered how many there were, where they lived. He wanted to punish them for something that wasn’t their fault. He got so pissed he stopped thinking about it.
Even walking as slowly as possible, Griff finaly made it home. The windows were dark and his father’s car was stil gone.
Shit
. He was walking into an
empty house.
He thought of heading to the station and sleeping in his crappy little bunk just to be surrounded by normal life and no privacy. He thought of caling someone
to come over, but the only person he could think of was exactly the person he didn’t need to be sitting with. Hel, Dante would probably sign on to the HotHead site and
make
him watch his porn debut. He almost considered going back to chat with Sticky in Manhattan, just to kil another couple beers and hours so he’d be tired enough to sleep.
Griff’s key turned in the lock with a thunk of finality.
“Dad?” Hoping against hope, Griff caled out into the dim rooms, praying that his father had passed out somewhere or that he’d had car trouble and been
dropped home. The parlor was stil. The kitchen. Just the ticking of his mother’s clock from the hal as he climbed the stairs, the ghost of a bel as the gears shifted and shook the chimes without sounding them. Tick-tick-tick as he creaked up the stairs to the dark above. “Hey. I’m home.”
No answer. His dad’s door stood open, the spartan bed made. A suit hung on the closet door like a man without a head or hands.
Griff clumped back downstairs in the dark to the kitchen. Without turning on the light, he opened the fridge, which held only half a lemon in wax paper, a