Joe College, Part 24
There was that odd detail with my e-mail. When I signed into my .edu account, the last login time frequently didn't match reality.
Let's say I'd been in a lecture and a discussion section, off e-mail for two or three hours. I'd sign in, and notice that the last login was 45 minutes ago.
If this happened today, I'd immediately worry that I'd been hacked. I'd change passwords and cancel credit cards. But back then, when I first noticed it, my response was to think, "Huh, this is weird," and forget about it. We'd just gotten WiFi at the house. I'm not technologically stupid, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I left my laptop open in my room; I'd never had WiFi. Maybe my e-mail automatically reloaded at home.
So while I didn't think that I'd been hacked, it was odd enough that I continued to make note. At first it was happening less than once a week.
And then it happened in a flurry. Once or twice a day. It said that I'd logged in two minutes ago, even though I'd been away for hours.
This freaked me out. I asked around. When I suggested that it had something to do with our new WiFi, I was politely called an idiot.
I changed my .edu password, and then my gmail for good measure. I concluded that this was the price of my new celebrity as a college newspaper columnist -- a stalker at the Computing Center had figured out my password when I left a computer unattended.
The next day, it happened again.
After five minutes of panic, I realized that Chris was on my laptop, reading my e-mails.
And I was furious.
I prepared myself to tear into him when I went home. I couldn't concentrate on my work, so I walked out to a liquor store, bought a pack of cigarettes, and smoked while I paced the block, angrily envisioning him sitting at my computer, peering at my messages. Was he fucking jealous?
Following my e-mails with Andy? Was he searching my accounts for mentions of his name?
That soft, wormy, adolescent fucker had done the one thing that could seriously pissed me off.
I very nearly called to confront him, so shaky I was with anger, but I knew not to trust myself in a rage. He could be so panicky that, no matter how correct I was, the consequence of aggressively accusing him would make it worse.
Yes, there was a principle. I let him use my space like his private rec room. I was away from the house so often that it didn't matter. The whole time, I never worried about him going through my shit. Jesus, we wore each others' clothes sometimes; I'd never had less privacy with anyone. I didn't want to demand limits.
After a couple of hours, I knew that I needed to resolve this without fussing or accusation. I didn't want to alienate him, just to stop this new hobby. I sent myself a message with the subject line, DUDE, ARE YOU READING MY E-MAIL?, and left it unopened. Chris would see the subject line, freak for a few days, and it would stop, without us having to discuss it.
But even then, by the time I left the newspaper to go home, I was softening. This goddamned guy liked me so much that he was combing through my e-mails, which were not remotely scandalous. He wouldn't come across anything that shamed me: boring e-mails from my parents, Andy's ruminations from Italy, Matt feeling bored and combative in D.C.
My all-caps, subject-line question went unacknowledged. He didn't behave differently that night. I saw him for about ten minutes when I got home.
That guilty-Chris countenance -- averted eye contact, half-mumbled recognition -- that I'd pictured so vividly was absent.
To be on the safe side, I changed my passwords yet again, and waited for some kind of acknowledgment. I e-mailed with my mom about a great-uncle's gall bladder; I ignored messages about mandatory editors' meetings; Matt sent me a 2,000-word jeremiad about Wolfowitz and Cheney.
I sent myself another content-free subject line: "Chris, seriously, are you reading my e-mails?"
But he wasn't.
I'm pretty sure that he wasn't. I never figured out what he was doing with complete certainty, but I've got a solid guess.
I'm pretty sure that during the day, when he was alone in the house, Chris would go up to my room, get on my laptop, set the browser to private mode, and surf gay porn. And I'm pretty sure that he did this while wearing my dirty clothes and cumming in my boxers.
When days passed and Chris didn't react to my self-addressed e-mail subject lines, I conducted an investigation.
I'd gotten a digital camera for Christmas, but rarely put it to use.
Before I went out in the morning, I took a photo of where I'd left my laptop. It was usually on the floor next to my bed, in a stray position that even a careful schemer (which Chris was not) would have trouble replicating.
So immediately my suspicion was confirmed. On the first day of my sleuthing, when I compared the morning's photo to the position of my computer at midnight, I saw that it had been moved.
But what really caught my eye was that my bedding had been repositioned.
The pillows had been rearranged; my comforter wasn't bunched up like it had been in the morning. At the least, he was lying in my bed during the day.
When I saw that, I got a boner.
Was he thinking about me with his face at my pillow? Did he want to lie in my under-washed sheets, which, for most of college, were specked with traces of our cum?
I badly wanted him to come to my room and get off with me, but he'd been downstairs in the living room, hanging with Trevor and Sam. I had no discreet way to summon him. Instead, I leaned back in my bed, took out my dick, and jizzed within a couple of minutes. I hugged the pillow that night, thinking of Chris.
But I wasn't done trying to reconstruct his habits. I continued to take photos before I left in the morning, taking wider frames, shooting from different angles, no longer minding that he might have been snooping through my e-mails.
My clothes piles shifted, too.
We had laundry in the basement, but I sucked at laundry. At least once a month, I'd buy a pack of boxers or white tees to delay it another 96 hours.
I regularly recycled jeans, hoodies and button-downs.
The photos didn't show minor, incidental changes in the pile, like he had stepped on something or kicked it out of the way. It was rearranged.
Chris was picking through my dirty clothes.
An admission: from about ages 12 to 22, I was a sloppy masturbator. This was especially true in college. I might start jerking it with my boxers on, and before I knew it, I was cumming inside of them without bothering with the labor of yanking them down. This only happened before bed, mind you, but it conserved the physical energy of getting up to grab a kleenex or dirty sock, and I'd be washing them myself anyway, and no one else was wearing them, so it was just an efficient measure that periodically happened, and I thank you for not judging me, because it was extremely sanitary and helpful, I'm super-proud of myself, I don't even understand why I don't still do that because it was such a fantastic and sophisticated practice.
So if you were Chris, and you were discerning, it wouldn't be challenging to pluck a pair or two of my jizz-christened boxers in the pile and have your way with them. And then, if he were to do the same thing with them, I wouldn't notice it come laundry day.
A blue flannel shirt that I hadn't worn for two weeks showed up on top of my clothes pile. Orange boxers that I hadn't worn in days seemed to have a fresh dampness to the typical semen smear. When I sniffed, I was convinced that it smelled more like Chris's cum than mine. Not that I had a classification system for the way our semen smelled, just that something in the scent didn't seem like me.
So he wasn't going through my e-mails -- or if he was, it was only incidental, but I don't think he was, since he wouldn't have been capable of maintaining his nonchalance after being confronted in those subject lines. He was getting into my laptop during the day, putting the browser into privacy mode, and looking at gay porn. The e-mail in my browser would simply re-load when the computer went out of sleep mode.
He'd strip down and put on my clothes, or at least my boxers, or, if he wasn't wearing them, he was shooting his load into them.
He wasn't really being an intrusive snooper. He was fixated.
I e-mailed him that day: Hey, come up and hang with me tonight. Should be home by 11.
Sounds good, he replied.
I spent the whole day horned up -- the tremors of a boner in line at a coffee house, in Arabic class. When I tried to drive it away, the feel of Chris still lurked on the periphery.
It was so much that when I got home that night, I was almost nervous. I wanted Chris so badly that it felt like we'd just met. He was in his room with his door open, lying on his bed, reading The Age of Innocence for a class.
I leaned in his doorframe, my backpack still over my shoulder.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," I said. "Come up in a minute if you want."
"Sure thing," he said, putting down the paperback.
He was in my room about five minutes later.
"Hey," I said, touching the back of his head. "Your hair's damp."
"Yeah," he said. "Just got home. I swam laps at the gym."
I didn't even want to wait for him to finish the sentence before I kissed him. I pulled his head in. I could smell shower soap and the pool's chlorine. He hooked me toward him from my lower back. I pulled his tongue into my mouth. We were both already hard. We were hard before we even touched each other.
"Is Michelle here?"
"No," he said. "Michelle has a boyfriend now."
"Seriously?" I said. I didn't want to think about Michelle or her boyfriend, but this was the first I'd heard.
"Yeah. Brian. You and Michelle are never around anymore."
"I'm around," I said, snatching off my T-shirt, running my hands up under his, up the skin of his stomach to his chest. He pulled his shirt up from the back. It found itself inside-out in my hands.
His body had changed drastically since we first started running together.
Nearly every day, he was jogging or in the gym. He'd developed proper pecs, the kind you can lift your palms against. His shoulders were sinewed and defined. He had real biceps. His stomach was lean and flat -- not that gay-peacock sixpack, but trim. Our lifestyles had flipped since freshman year. I still managed to work out three times a week and maintained adequately, but I could feel that a lifestyle of beer and pizza was starting to present its bill. My body was slacking while his was getting tighter.
"You're so hot," I said, putting my hands down his jeans, my fingers sliding down his silky pubes and his warm, smooth, dry dick. "You don't know how hot you are."
"That's what my girlfriends tell me," he said, smirking because I was in on the joke.
"Those poor girls," I said, undoing the top of his jeans with my free hand.
"They don't know that I only like you," he said.
Fuck.
When my jeans came off, it felt like my dick had been released from solitary confinement. It had been a couple of weeks since we'd gotten off together. In seconds we were naked on my bed. He held me down at the wrists, breathing out of my mouth, our dicks kissing. His balls slid against the hair on my inner thigh. I pushed my back upward from my legs, feeling the weight of his body press at our thigh bones.
He released my wrists, kissing down the length of my neck. He flicked at my nipple with his tongue and drew swirls at it with his finger. Chris had gotten better at knowing what I liked. His motions used to feel frenzied and reflexive, a crash of impulses carried out all at once. He'd slowed himself down, grown more attentive, like it wasn't a race against himself, where he had to feel everything at once.
If this was a byproduct of surfing gay porn on my computer, then I was happy to let him read my e-mails all day.
Not long ago it would have seemed crazy that he'd start to suck my dick unprompted, without me reassuring him or going down on him first, but there he was, lifting the shaft of my dick, tonguing out the thin pool of precum in its slit, taking the head of my cock into his mouth without any hesitation. He had one hand at the base of my shaft and the other at my cheek. I held that hand against my face, kissing and licking the heel of it, sniffing in the soap and pool chlorine.
"Chris," I half-gasped, feeling the exhale of his nostrils at my treasure trail, thrilling at the sound of speaking his name in a deep quiet voice.
I said his name again. He took my shining dick from his mouth and looked up at me, thinking that I was speaking his name to give direction. When he looked up to me, his eye contact made me quiver.
"Put your legs by my head," I said.
"Like-"
"Just stay there but put your legs by your head, so your dick's by my face."
"Like, uh, 69?"
"Or whatever," I said.
He kind of smirked and complied. The positioning felt awkward at first.
He lay on his side, sucking my dick, while I was on my back, craning my neck to pull in his cock. The thing with his dick being as long as it was, I could guide the end of it toward me without having to contort myself too radically.
The only important thing, for my purposes, was to have his cock.
I sucked it sideways, then had my nose at his balls, first-wave sweat and musk coming from him, carefully trying to take one of them into my mouth, until I felt him tense at the chest and realized that he didn't like that.
"Chris," I half-gasped, feeling my cock at the roof of his throat, nearly talking into his like a microphone, thrilling at the sound of speaking his name in a deep quiet voice.
He quietly hummed his assent into my dick. My spine vibrated.
It's not something that I'd thought about or gotten off to. I'd only seen it in pornos, and thought that it seemed disgusting. But then it didn't, and he'd just been swimming and showered, and everything about him felt clean and fresh and alive.
I didn't say anything, just pulled firmly on his leg and repositioned him, so that he was now straddled over my chest, the back of his balls dangling at my face, the cheeks of his ass open, his asshole exposed to the light and air, inches away from me. It was pink and small and vulnerable, circled with a thin thatch of short blond hair. I thought to myself: Holy shit, I'm so gay. The fact that I was so aroused by seeing a dude's asshole that way -- I mean, that has to be objectively one of the least attractive perspectives to see a human body, because unless a guy can squat 200-plus, his ass is always going to look bony and lost from that angle, and the human asshole is not self-evidently appealing. But there it was, presenting itself, circled with the same golden springs of hair that dusted other parts of his beautiful body, and it was all so human and real and wonderful-seeming because it was his, part of the guy who would rest in my bed during afternoons because he missed me, who ejaculated into my dried semen because I turned him on so much.
I tilted my head forward until the pucker was at my mouth, tentatively putting my tongue at the hairs, expecting some unpleasant taste or texture, finding instead that it was completely neutral and unobjectionable.
Chris's joints and muscles tensed. I pressed my tongue against his asshole, which felt smooth and leathery. I looked directly at it, pressed my finger at it, then my tongue into it, feeling it turn smooth and slick and moist. Whenever I saw this in pornos, it struck me as so nasty, but now that I was doing it, it didn't feel gross as much as novel and intense and intimate.
"Joe," he half-gasped, feeling my tongue flick in and out of his asshole, raising my heartbeat at the sound of hearing my name in his deep quiet voice.
"Is this okay?"
"It tickles but it's nice," he said. "You're so dirty."
"You just went swimming," I said, half-evading his comment. "It smells like the pool."
It conjured the image of him standing naked in those gang showers off of the pool, showering across from some other built naked dude, suds running down their bodies and dripping off their cocks, Chris facing outward and scrubbing at the asshole that was now at my lips, the other dudes in the shower -- even if straight -- surreptitiously glancing Chris's long heavy cock swinging while he rinsed off.
I held his ass with both hands and pressed my tongue inside of him. He inhaled sharply. He wasn't working on my twitching, iron dick, which was alert to every touch of air on its skin, moist from the spit of his mouth.
I pushed my tongue into him as far as I could, which couldn't have been more than a couple of millimeters. He leaned back slightly toward my face.
"I'm not sure if it's safe to kiss you," he said, half-kidding, when our faces were at each other, his cheeks red, our foreheads sweating.
"You'll take the risk," I said, pushing my mouth at his. We hugged each others heads, armpits at each other's shoulders. Just the friction of my dick at his hip, I could have jizzed. I had to distract myself to keep from cumming at the taste of his mouth and the warmth of the air coming from his nose, the feel of his hands clutching at my head.
This was different from before. We were no longer scared of each other.
All of this time, we'd feared one another. I worried that Chris would abruptly crack, either from something that I did or from some unknowable self-sabotage; he feared losing control, or that I would judge him, or that there was a certain self-drawn boundary that he couldn't overstep. There was no hesitation now, no verbal or physical hedging. His body wasn't fighting with itself. It was no longer a project or a test. We were overwhelmingly attracted to each other, and we both knew it.
I've probably said this before, but the downside to going down on him was that I had to stop kissing him. I wanted his face to cum; I wished that it were a sexual orifice.
"I want you to cum," I said, taking his dick out of my mouth, jerking it slowly, nuzzling my face against it like I was a cat. "Cum in my mouth, dude. I'm going to swallow it."
"God," he laughed, "you are so raunchy tonight."
"It's you," I said, my heart beating. "It's not raunchy because it's you.
I only want it because it's you. I've never done shit like this before."
"That makes two of us."
"I know," I said, kissing and licking the underside of his cock. "You're so amazing."
"You're amazing."
"Yeah, well, we're both fucking amazing," I said, going down on him again, hearing my throat click and grind as his cock slid in the back. I left it there motionless for a second, taking a mental engraving of how it felt to have it there, his face looking down to me, happy and vaguely mystified.
He told me before he came, and it felt and tasted like I thought it would -- hot, viscous, salty, vaguely sour, not something that I'd order off a dim sum menu, but something that I wanted because it was his. I classically half-gagged when I swallowed, not because it was disgusting, but because the mechanics of swallowing hard with a cock in your mouth and not simultaneously closing your jaw felt unnatural. The warmth of his jizz settled down my throat. He kept cumming, his typical, whimpering, muffled gasps, his hips shifting upward while he shot. When I pulled it from his mouth, his cock was coated with a film of my spit and his jizz.
He was still hard.
"That seemed difficult for you," he said, as I straddled myself over him.
He slid his hands to my ass, and for a flash, I thought, Holy shit, I'm about to let him fuck me.
But I wasn't, and he didn't even hint at it. I stared down at his face, into his blue eyes. His hair was an adorable mess. He was caressing my ass with both hands.
Jesus Christ, did I cum. I don't think I've ever shot like that before or since. My first salvo was massive and weirdly watery. I thought that I'd cum on his chest, but it went everywhere, hitting his face and my pillows.
The second was also strangely watery and thin, slightly less propulsive, and then the next several shots were more the texture of normal, everyday jizz -- denser, pearlish white, slightly gelatinous. They came out in slow, long successions, gradually diminishing until my ninth shot, which was nearly as forceful as my first two. My dick still had four more releases before it exhausted itself.
"Holy porn star, Batman," he said.
"Jesus," I said.
I mean, his chest was defaced, from collarbone to navel, running in thin streams and ponds, with the remnants of that first water ejection on his cheek and forehead.
"Don't move," I said, not wanting him to shift positions and spill a cascade of semen on my sheets. I grabbed my towel off the floor and mopped off his chest. He didn't move to wipe the small smears from his face.
He didn't look disgusted or overwhelmed. He was still smirking: amused and surprised. When we kissed -- sticky and sweating -- he replied, "I think your breath tastes like my load," but he kept kissing me. We were both still hard.
And I thought, Whoah, I just swallowed a couple tablespoons of Chris's jizz, and briefly reflected on how swept away people get when they're in a moment of sexual mania.
"What time is your first class tomorrow?" I said to his mouth.
"Noon," he said to mine.
"You should sleep up here tonight," I said. "You feel so good." I sniffed at his shoulders. He felt so solid and warm. I shifted myself, rubbing my dick against his hip, starting to skin-fuck him, reaching down to jerk slowly on his cock.
"Maybe," he said, squeezing my shoulders. "We'll see."
"Just stay," I said. "We can get off again in the morning. It'll be great."
He kissed me and our mouths just stayed there. I felt the comfortable exhaustion that I'd only known from a ten-mile run. We were about to get each other off again.
That night, he passed out under my sheets with his nose at my ear. Even if he'd wanted to crawl out of my bed, I don't think he had the energy.