[ 9 ]
My time with Charlie is surprisingly nice. We seem to have similar work hours, though I don’t quite know what he does and never bothered to ask. I like everything he orders to eat. He seems to always order delivery and never cooks. “I don’t believe in stoves,” he tells me. “My mother halfway cooked her boobs on one once, like in that scene in Mrs. Doubtfire. I’m literally afraid to bake my boobs. I don’t do toasters either because every time I try to use one, my shit gets burnt.”
Trent calls again Thursday afternoon.
“Aren’t you ever gonna answer it?” asks Charlie after I let the phone go to voicemail. “Your girlfriend Trent is obviously concerned as fuck about you. He’s probably posting missing persons fliers, like they do with lost puppies …”
“He knows where I work,” I say flatly. “If he really cares, he’ll find me at the store.”
“Oh, hey, look what I picked up.” He lifts a case of beer onto the counter with the might of a lumberjack. “Your roommate’s favorite. The brand I guzzled up that night I stayed at your place and almost molested you.”
“I still sorta wish you had.”
“That can be arranged.”
It’s all fun and games between us. I never know what to take seriously and what to laugh off as another of his countless jokes. But a handful of hours later when the sun’s gone down, we’re huddled on his couch watching reruns of Golden Girls and chugging beer after beer after beer. I’m squinting at the TV now and we’re laughing at each other’s slurring.
“You know you’re really not my type at all,” he tells me. “Handsome just doesn’t do it for me. Believe it or not, I did not ogle the football team, nor did I hump to thoughts of the soccer team … or the anything else team. The wrestling team, however …”
“I peeked into one of their afterschool practices once,” I confess, remembering. “The gym where they practiced was right across from my study hall, and they were all in this bent-over-backward bridge sort of position, each of them, their pelvises pointing up to the rafters. Their coach was punishing them, I think, threatening to make them hold that position for another thirty minutes if any of them fell or couldn’t hold it. The dude closest to the door, bent over in a bridge in his tight blue singlet, he was sporting the biggest hard-on I’d ever seen. It was like he was enjoying it, but couldn’t hide his enjoyment, no matter how he shifted his body or … or anything. It was just there, out in the open, his hard-on in plain view.”
“Hot,” grunts Charlie. “What the fuck’s your point?”
Clumsily, I push my face into his and, as if fumbling through dark woods to clasp hands with a friend, my lips latch onto his. Nothing happens, our mouths just touching, frozen together. Then, as if gently waking up, our lips begin to move, kissing one another. With growing anticipation and deepening hunger, I twist my head and bury my mouth into his as deep as I can manage. He grunts, surprised, then slowly slides to his back on the couch. I climb over him, sucking his lips and inhaling his scent.
When our lips finally part, I tell him, “You’re not really my type either. But I’m a bit virge, I’m a bit lonely, and we’re here and alive and all that bullshit so … y’know, figured why the fuck not, right?”
“That’s basically how it always happens,” Charlie explains.
Our faces collide again. This time, Charlie takes the lead and works me onto my back as he climbs atop me. Ungently, he works open my shirt one stubborn button at a time. Then his mouth wanders from mine, kissing down my neck like a naughty boy taking a path in the woods he was warned against. Charlie even sneaks wicked glances up at me as he goes lower and lower, to my pec where his mouth meets a familiar friend. I clench shut my eyes and moan when his playful tongue finds my nipple again. Yes, I cry inside, my inner triumphant shout of victory. A thousand times yes.
Six billion hours of working my nipple later, he resumes his trek of kisses down my body until arriving at my pants. He pulls the belt off and throws it aside, that wicked, evil thing, then claws open my pants like branches of trees in his way.
My cock leaps out, hard as it’s ever been. Kiss it, I beg him silently. Lick it like I licked Trent’s. Bathe it with your tongue. Oh god, I just want to know what I did to him. I want to know how it feels.
He kisses the tip of my dick. “Yes,” I say aloud, my thoughts becoming words. “Kiss it good.”
Charlie follows my command. What a good boy. Those lips touch my cock with such tenderness, I feel my balls pull up tightly, my toes curl within my shoes.
“Lick it,” I whisper.
When his tongue darts out, daring a taste of my cock, I gasp sharply, surprised by the sensation. This is really happening. Finally, really, actually happening.
“Please suck my dick.” My hands grapple. I fumble blindly for his face, then find my greedy purchase in his hair. I pull him down on my dick, his warm mouth enveloping my every inch. This boy is practiced. “Fucking holy hell fuck,” I blurt out.
He lifts off my cock. “You’re sexier when you shut the fuck up.”
I shove him back down, gagging him with my dick as I start to pump my hips. “So are you,” I growl back.
My hands gripping his hair so tightly, directing him up and down my cock, I find myself licking my own lips, breathing heavier and heavier with every tongue-and-lip-assisted stroke of my cock.
I want this feeling to last forever.
“Fuck me,” I say, getting close. “Oh, god, fuck, fuck me, fuck …”
This time, he pulls completely off my cock and brings his face near mine. I almost recoil, surprised by his closeness when suddenly he asks: “Is that an invitation?”
I stammer. “I … I meant … I was just …”
“Yes, right, I’m sure you were. But would you like to, Benny boy?” He grins, bites his lip. He looks halfway cute when he does that, and halfway amateur porn star idiot. “I can transport you to worlds beyond worlds, boy, with just my cock and my hands and a bottle of gooey.” He grips my dick with his hand. “Pitch, or catch? Hocus, or pocus? Lemon, or lime, or take your time?”
“Just fuck me,” I breathe.
A minute later, my face is pressed into a spread of five different feather pillows. My naked body feels smooth as a buttered bird on his silken sheets. I don’t see him get the lube, but suddenly he’s working a finger along my crack and I feel the unmistakable slickness of fuck-goo from a tube. Trent and I use it to jerk off every day.
Mmm. Trent.
“It might hurt at first, sweetie,” he says from behind. “You gotta relax yourself into it. Feel it all. Let yourself off the edge for once. Drift, baby … just drift away.” I feel him put a finger at my hole, gently pushing. I’m so tight that I feel my hands clasp the bed sheets. Shivers run up my back. “Just drift.”
“Just shut up.”
I’m imagining Trent behind me working my hole instead of Charlie. My body relaxes. Charlie is being so—I mean, Trent is being so gentle with me. He doesn’t want to hurt me. “That’s it,” he murmurs, though his voice is someone else’s.
When his cock enters me, I don’t realize it’s gone in until he begins to slide in and out, his hips moving. My mouth is trapped in a perpetual jaw-drop, feeling every bit of his cock moving in and out of me. I bite the pillow and feel the slickness of his member. Is it really Trent? Is it really Charlie?
“Fuck me,” I breathe. “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.”
And he does.
The more he goes, the slicker it becomes, and the more I relax. It’s a contradiction, how I’m tensing up with excitement, how it feels so fucking good, and yet I’m turning to a puddle of helpless horniness on his bed. It’s like the most perfect massage in the world.
“You’re tight,” the person that isn’t Trent says to the back of my head.
“Sorry.” I groan the word, high on sex.
“Don’t be. It’s a fucking pleasure.” He grabs my back like a horse’s reins, his thighs squeezing my ass like a saddle, and he rides me into the whispers of very early morning.
But the very early morning is anything but whispers when he has me flipped over, my legs apart, and he starts to jerk me off while his cock—still hard as steel—pummels into me at full force.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
It’s harder to keep up the illusion that it’s Trent doing all this to me when I’m face-to-face with Charlie. But with all our sex in the air and our scents dancing like horny demons in the heat of this fast-filling room, I realize I’m with exactly the right person I need to be with and that I am not lacking.
I don’t tell him I’m ready. My cock races to the brink without my permission, Charlie’s expert hand making work of it. And in the sweat of his thick, warm room, I cum.
Rope after rope of transparent whiteness dresses my abs. Some of it reaches as high as my neck, a pearl necklace made of liquid fire that, on contact, turns to ice.
“You’re fucking brilliant,” I breathe, my eyes wide, sweat dripping down my nose.
“I fuck brilliantly,” Charlie corrects me, his pumping having slowed after I came. “I am far from brilliant. Now it’s my turn.”
He pulls out, drops my legs, then straddles my stomach, half-sitting on the mess I just made across my body. He rips off the condom, tosses it across the room and, with his cock halfway to my face, he strokes himself fast.
“What’s the hurry?” I ask, every muscle in my body relaxed into a state of nirvana. I reach up and throw his hands to the side. He looks down, startled. “My turn.”
When I clasp his cock, his lips part. His eyes lock onto mine as I start to stroke his cock, gently at first, then quickening by the second.
He breathes heavy, throws his head back. His right hand, as if having a mind of its own, drifts up to his nipple. Then his left hand joins, gripping the other nipple. Squeezing, kneading, massaging them, his cock grows even harder than it was, pulsing and flexing as I jerk him off.
“Keep going, keep going, keep going,” he says over and over, his thighs shaking. “Keep going, keep going.”
I certainly don’t stop. He’s so insanely hard, I wonder if he plans to ride the edge for hours more. Surprisingly, even after cumming, I’m so into this … The look on his face of utter bliss, even as he rocks his head back and goes into another galaxy, working his tits …
The fantasy and the reality never align. What you tell yourself you want, and what you’ll ever get, they’re like strangers that will never meet. It’s the lie that desperately wants to become truth. It’s the straight boy in me and the fag in me. Both are truths. Both are lies. Somewhere in the middle is where I exist—where Benny exists, trying to convince himself who the fuck he is, but ain’t no one buying it. They all see the fear in his pretty eyes. They know he’s hiding something. They watch and they whisper and they wait.
Straight up, Benny. Why can’t you just look them in the eye and be straight up?
“I’m cumming,” Charlie warns the ceiling, squeezing his nipples red and purple.
He warns me ten times for ten minutes—once a damn minute—before finally deciding to let go of the ride, to leap off the horse, to set free the bird. And his birds fly all over my chest, one of them smacking me in the chin, another on my shoulder. Fly, birds, fly.
He falls off me like a desert-bound man off a camel’s back. “Holy mackerel.” The bed springs chuckle as he lands on them, bouncing.
For a good long while, the after-sex peace lays like a blanket over the room. The heat slowly dissipates, replacing itself with the coolness of air conditioning and a breeze snaking in from the cracked-open window by his purple armoire.
“You can stay here forever for all I’m concerned,” says Charlie finally.
I was seconds from drifting to sleep with all this cum drying on me when he speaks, stirring me back to life. “Huh?”
“I know, I know. Trent.” Charlie sighs.
We’re both staring at his ceiling, sprawled out on his bed. Our legs are woven together a bit, tangled like a pile of zombie limbs, and the fingers of one of each of our hands are grazing each other like curious, playful friends. I feel strangely close to Charlie. Part of me might even entertain the idea of exploring something deeper with him, if it weren’t for the apparent commitment my heart and soul has to a certain punky someone else.
“I do need to talk to him,” I admit. “We do, after all, share a place. All my things are there. I’m sure he’s worried about me and all that, but …” A quivery sigh escapes my lips, thinking on that horrible night all over again. The look on his face, both before and after I punched all his blood out of it. I’d never laid a hand on him until that night.
“Sleep here tonight.” He almost sounds like he’s begging. “I can’t be alone tonight. My soul feels all needy and crap and—Ugh, I hate feelings.”
“It’s too fucking late to go anyway.”
“Oh, yeah. Sun’s probably coming up soon, huh.” He turns his head to glance at the window across from me, his eyes sparkling in the glow from the pink clock radio by the bed. “Y’know, Benny, you’re actually a really good person.”
Trent’s bloody face looks at me in the dark, squinting at me, teary-eyed. “I’m not.”
“I don’t know anyone else in this town that would’ve come around the corner of a bar late at night to investigate a sound, happen on an obvious beating-up and bother to intervene. I might be the only proverbial torch-bearing gay in this town, but I’m not the only gay. Neither are you. We’re not alone, fuckface.”
“Call me fuckface again and I’ll fuck your face.”
He looks at me, squinting. I twist my head and shoot him a smirky smile, inspiring his face to light up. “Promise?”
Our eyes connect longer than they should, and a million unspoken thoughts seem to pass between them, like our eyes have some secret language that our mouths desperately envy. Somewhere in the space between us, yet another truth is realized.
This was just an island of relief for the two of us. It was a moment, come and gone. I’m not his type of heaven, and he’s not mine. We’re just two lost, lonely birds who landed on the same branch, and it’s time now to flutter home.