Rebound boy, I thought. My fingers curled into a fist and knocked on the front door of the gray ranch with the white Cherokee in the driveway. That's all this is. Rebound. I shivered on the porch, waiting for him, the coming storm stirring my hair.
He was even smaller than I expected. When he opened the door, stepping backward and pulling it toward him, I had to look down at him. Five foot eight, he said on the phone, one fifty-five, but I hadn't expected five foot eight to be so small. I could pick him up and cradle him. Narrow shoulders, narrow hips, a button-down shirt tucked into tight jeans...I avoided looking at his face as I entered the house, but accepted the sweeping hug he pushed on me. "Mark, hi," he says. "It's so good to finally meet you."
"You too, Tyler," I said, unsure of how to answer that. We'd been emailing for a week, had spoken on the phone twice. He instigated it, mailing me after seeing my profile picture on a messenger program. I wasn't looking for this. Or at least I kept telling myself that. I removed my backpack and took out the two six-packs I'd stuffed in it, handing one to him and following him with the other to the kitchen. The fridge was empty.
"Sorry I don't have any food in the house," he said. "I'd offer you something but those storms the other night took out the power to the whole neighborhood for eighteen hours and all my food went bad. I had to pitch it all."
"Oh," I said. "It's no problem. I'm not hungry." Which was a lie. I'd been hungry for two weeks, hungry and unable to do anything about it. When Jim had handed me my heart on a platter, he seemed to have handed me my ability to eat along with it. I'd lost ten pounds in the past fourteen days, ten pounds I didn't need to lose. I even had to tighten my watchband. Beer I could still do though, as I'd proved to myself, spending at least half my evenings since Jim had left me in a state of morose inebriation.
Tyler pulled me by the hand through the house, showing me all the rooms, the plants, picking up a small framed photo on the computer desk in one of the bedrooms and handing it to me. It was dark, and I couldn't see it well-a man and a blonde child, sitting at a table with fake wood paneling on the wall behind them. "My dad," he says, "and that's me when I was four. I was blonde."
"Mm," I say, handing the picture back to him. "Cute." He'd mentioned on the phone that his father had died in front of him when Tyler was fifteen. A massive coronary: God had posed his fingers as if in preparation to flick a speck of dust away, reached down, and flicked out the life of a man instead. Just like that. Tyler looked at the picture for a split second before putting it back on the desk.
I could feel his nervousness, but stayed distant from it, not extending any extra effort to put him at ease. I laughed when he brought me down to the basement; he'd hesitated at the top of the stairs, unsure of whether to end the house tour with the ground floor or bring me down, and then decided to show me the basement. I could almost smell it coming from him, the lust mixed with the nervous perspiration. The basement was filled with dirty laundry and workout equipment. "Nice," I said. "You brought me down here to show me your dirty laundry." I laughed again, genuinely, and he laughed in response, relieved.
We walked back up the stairs and settled on the couch in the living room. The blankness of the forty-five inch television stared at us and Tyler abruptly stood again. "Beer?"
"Please," I answered, but not too quickly. I watched his back as he walked into the kitchen, my eyes narrowed cattily. In the picture he'd emailed me when I asked, shallowly, what he looked like, he was shirtless, posed in the bedroom he'd taken me through a few moments before. The camera had sat on the adjoining bathroom's sink, lower than his waist, so that he looked down into it, and thus my surprise to find that he was so small; he'd looked larger. And those muscles, my god: scanning my memory quickly, I couldn't find any man I'd slept with whose body was so perfectly, symmetrically built and sculpted. Clearly, he had good genes, and clearly, he'd worked hard to take advantage of them.
He returned to the couch with a couple beers and handed me one. "Thanks," I answered, our fingers grazing together against the coldness of the bottle. He sat against the pillows at the other end of the couch, and watched me take a long drink from the beer.
"Your picture doesn't do you justice," he said. "You're beautiful."
"Oh," I said, and waved my hand dismissively. "Thanks." I took another long swallow of beer and lowered the bottle. I've never been good at accepting compliments. "You're cute too." Or giving them.
"Am I what you expected?" he asked.
I looked at him full in the face for the first time. I wasn't sure why I hadn't been able to look at him until just then; I never looked at people directly upon first meeting them on their turf, instead looking at my surroundings and trying to understand the person through the way they kept their environment. So far, Tyler's house had said about him that he was fastidious, neat, and stuck somewhere in the business-professional look of the late eighties. There was a hint of sterility about everything, the solid oak bed frame, the maroon towels and gold fixtures in the bathroom, the gray carpet, gray couch, empty bottles of Bailey's Irish Creme on the top of the refrigerator.
His face, when I looked at him, looked different from the picture he'd sent. Not remarkably different, but-tanner, for one thing, and thinner. His eyes were dark, and I liked that. They regarded me with a seriousness I hadn't seen anyone look at me with in a long time, and I liked that too. I smiled at him, answered his question: "I didn't expect anything," I said.
"Why's that?" he asked. "Don't expect anything good and you won't be let down?" He smiled and looked down into his beer bottle.
"No, no," I said. "Not at all. I just-I'm not-" I stopped, unsure how to word what I was thinking without offending him. This was a man looking for love. I could tell by the hunger in his eyes, by the fact that he'd emailed me out of nowhere, by the willingness he had to ask me questions about myself and listen to me talk on the phone about Jim, which I hadn't meant to do. But the pain was so recent and so real that I'd opened too easily to Tyler's gentle questions, failing at the attempt to cut myself off from thinking out loud about where I went wrong with Jim. Love was one thing I was not looking for. Tyler had told me he'd been alone for nine months, recovering from a three-year relationship. He was ready for another one. Ripe for the picking. I wasn't. But I didn't want him to know my assumptions about him, because if they turned out to be false, he might have been offended.
Instead of trying to explain myself, I finished the beer and stood, noticing that he'd finished his already too. "Want another?" I asked, and walked to the kitchen without waiting for an answer. I didn't feel bad helping myself from the fridge; it was my beer anyway.
"Yeah," he answered, and I could hear a note of sadness in his voice that I was immediately both uncomfortable with and moved by; it was something I felt myself and couldn't put into words either, could only inflect what I said with the tone of it. Outside, through the open kitchen window, I could hear the storm coming closer, could hear the wind rustling the spring-new leaves of the small ash and maple trees in the subdivision.
I returned with two beers, sat down and looked at him again. He really was cute. Handsome, rather, actually. Though with a touch of little-boy cute. The Italian genes he claimed to have were more evident in person than in the picture. There was definitely a vulnerability about him, although I wasn't interested in putting my finger on it. Not yet. All I was interested in tonight, I told myself over and over, was getting laid. The easiest way to get over somebody is to get under somebody. Right?
But he had turned out to be such a damned nice guy. My bullshit detector, usually alarmingly accurate (and alarmingly inaccurate when it had come to Jim), had not gone off once in the time we'd been talking, both online and on the phone, and now in person. I felt kind of bad, actually-even though I hadn't done anything yet. I hated when someone used me, and here I was about to use this guy to get myself over someone else. But not bad enough to stop myself from doing it. I'd warned him. He knew the wound was fresh.
"So how about those video games?" I asked, and lowered myself to the floor with the backpack. The premise for our getting together tonight, so necessary and yet so dispensable, was that we'd toss back a few beers and play some video games. He was thinking about getting a game system, but didn't know which platform to go with; I'd offered to bring over my old Playstation and a bunch of games so he could check it out. I unpacked it and set it up on the floor, leaning around the back of the monstrous television to find the red, yellow, and white inputs. I hooked everything up and turned it on. When I turned back around, he was squatting down right next to me on the floor, and our eyes were suddenly level, his burning with some intensity I didn't want to see. I felt a flush of heat from his presence, turned away quickly. I could not afford to get emotionally involved with this guy; I wanted the body, not the soul. Not now.
I drained my beer, helped myself to another. Not having eaten all day was taking its effect already; I felt mildly buzzed. Tyler turned on the television and the Playstation and put a game in; I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room drinking the beer and watching him plug the controllers in. "How about this Tekken game?" he said. "You gonna show me how to play it?"
"All right." I sat down next to him again, keeping some distance between us. What the fuck was I doing here? I thought suddenly, and pressed my palm into my forehead for just a moment, closing my eyes. Only the third beer, and already I felt a little crazy, a little driven, ready to strip Tyler and suck his cock all night, substituting the reality of his flesh against mine for the memory of Jim's.
"Are you okay?" he asked, concern in his voice.
I lowered my hand and smiled. "Yeah, sorry," I said. "I get these sort of miniature migraines sometimes, like this flash of intense headache, and then it goes away right away." It wasn't a lie; I'd been getting cluster migraines since I was in the seventh grade. I just didn't happen to have had one right then.
"Oh," he said. "Can I get you anything?"
"No, thanks, I'm fine," I said. I drank more beer. Already, the room was hazy at the edges. I was going to have to start forcing myself to eat more; this beer on an empty stomach, while it was fun at the time, was just unhealthy.
Once the game had loaded, I took the first-person control and gave Tyler the second one. "Okay," I said, looking down at the gray hunk of plastic in my hands. It struck me that I hadn't looked at his hands yet, and that until I did so, I wouldn't let him touch me. I swallowed, ready to make the first move. I put down my control and scooted closer to him, put my hands over his. "Here's what you want to do," I said, looking down at his hands. "If you want to punch, press these two buttons." I put my thumb over his and depressed the square and triangle buttons. "If you want to kick, it's these two." I moved our thumbs over to the X and circle buttons. "Combinations are this..." and I finished walking him through the controls, never looking at his face, examining through my instructions the skin of his hands, the shape of his fingers, the muscles in his palms. I could feel him breathing on me, and his presence combined with his beautiful hands was making me hard. Hands. So important to me, and for reasons I could only vaguely understand, reasons I didn't want to shine a light on, their association with the darkness inside me too close for comfort.
"I'll be back," I said, and stood unsteadily. I took a moment to settle into myself, lose the dizziness, and then walked to the bathroom, leaving Tyler sitting tensely and almost breathlessly on the living room floor.
There were five bottles of cologne lined up at the edge of the sink. I glanced at them, saw the bottle second closest to the edge, and immediately looked away from it. Acqua Di Gio. Armani. Jim's scent. I immediately stopped breathing, afraid for a moment even to deal with the possibility of inhaling the slightest whiff of it. I emptied my bladder, washed my hands. I could hear through the door that Tyler had started a game, the bass of his surround-sound system thumping under my feet with each blow to his or his computer opponent's character. I looked at myself in the mirror, for a frozen instant hating my reflection. The dark hair, flopping over my forehead in a way my lovers thought sexy-I impulsively wanted to shave it off, to make myself ugly, because gorgeous, as I'd said to Jim when he'd called me that, got me nowhere I wanted to be. I turned away from my visage in the mirror, rashly picking up the Armani and uncapping it. I closed my eyes, inhaled the scent of it like a drug, held my breath. Yes, those were tears swelling my eyes from inside. And I hated them too. Hated the Armani, hated myself, hated Jim and Tyler and sex and all of life. To smash the smooth glass of this bottle into the mirror, to shatter my reflection, replace the spring scent with the iron tang of blood-but it passed, and left me with an emptiness surrounded by a lungful of the light, spring-rain scent I associated so strongly with Jim and with the love I'd felt for him, the love he wouldn't let himself want.
I capped the bottle and replaced it on the counter. I glanced at myself again. My eyes were red. I put my fingers to my lips, realizing I was drunker than I'd thought. I switched off the light and left the bathroom.
Tyler sat cross-legged on the carpet, entranced by the fight onscreen. I picked up the other control and hit a button, which now gave me control over the computer opponent he'd been battling. "Hey," he said. "Missed you."
"I'll bet," I said, and promptly kicked his character's ass.
"Christ," he said. "You've played this a lot."
"Sorry," I answered. "I'll go easy on ya." I smiled at his profile and he turned to look at me again. His face, hard for a moment after I'd beaten him, softened, and he smiled in return. We played the game for a while, battling one another onscreen as lust and revulsion battled inside me. I hated being used, unless I was in just the right mood for it-the right blend of masochistic desire and willingness to suck another human's pain, if only for a few moments, right into my very flesh. I didn't think Tyler was quite up for that, and that was all I had for him. I needed so badly to let it go, and clearly this gorgeous body sitting next to me would be willing to share itself with mine...but at what price? And why was I so callous as to think of him as a gorgeous body, rather than a human being, possessed of his own passions and pain and love and joy?
I'd finished off one of the six-packs by the time we finished playing Tekken, and Tyler was on the fifth beer of the other. He offered me the last bottle, and I hesitated before taking it, knowing already that I was stuck here for the night even if we didn't get naked and hedonistic. I was too far gone to get behind the wheel of a car; while I wouldn't have minded the obliteration of my own body, I wasn't willing to risk hurting anyone else. Except Tyler. Why? I blurrily turned off the Playstation after kicking his ass for about the twentieth time, put in South Park. He watched me, and his eyes on me felt both good and bad: good in that they looked at me with desire, which I needed, and bad in that they looked at me with real hunger, which I also needed-but from someone else. From the one person who would not look at me that way. Who hadn't, not once in all the time I'd been with him. God, what had I been thinking? Mentally, I pounded my head against a wall, knowing that the imaginary wall was Jim, all of him, his heart, his soul, even his body. I squeezed my eyes shut again, and felt Tyler's hand on my arm. I opened them quickly, exhaled.
"What's wrong?" he asked, leaning in to me.
"Nothing," I said, turning my face away.
"What were you thinking about?"
"Jim." The word escaped my lips before I could stop it. "He-" I stopped, too drunk to articulate what I wanted to say to Tyler, that I had finally realized over the past two weeks that I was in love with Jim, that I had been in love with him from the moment I saw him at the Comet, that I knew he would never love me and that without that, my flesh felt cold and sterile with fear.
"Hey," Tyler said. "It's okay." He put his hand on the side of my face and I looked at him. Sympathy. Light. Compassion.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm getting over it. It just takes time."
"It's all right. I know. Don't worry about it."
I swallowed the lump in my throat. "Thanks." Ugh, I thought, wishing I wasn't drunk, knowing that though the pain was slower, duller through the alcohol, it was still there. Still there. And Tyler was being so good to me. So patient. I could hardly stand it. I knew why he was willing to do this, willing to put up with this. He didn't just want sex. He wanted more. He wanted more. Who was doing who the favor here?
South Park had loaded, and the silly music filled the room. I smiled, felt the pain at my center turn slightly, go deeper so that later, it would be that much harder to work out. But for now, for now, I felt better.
We played the game and I thought about Jim, about his animal-in-pain blue eyes, the irises so large and perfect in his face, the gentleness with which he'd told me that he wasn't ready for any kind of commitment, the tone of his voice-soothing, beautiful, the kind of sound one could fall asleep in, offering a security that felt as real as the sensation of warmth that emanated from his flesh-but it wasn't real. I was foolish. He didn't want what I wanted. I launched a cow onto Tyler's character, and as the top half of the screen slowly turned red and the character spewed a string of childish obscenities, Tyler gave my arm a shove, sufficient enough in my inebriated state to knock me over onto the floor, where I lay laughing. South Park was so ridiculous, it really was. And I needed that. I'd spent almost the entire past two weeks, in my sleep, at work, while I struggled in vain to get down any food, in my free time-thinking about Jim, and all I really needed was somebody to shove me over onto the floor. I lay there staring up at the ceiling, laughing helplessly, knowing that if I didn't stop soon, the laughter was going to turn into its opposite. Tyler hovered over me and tickled me, and I curled on my side, struggling to get away from his prying fingers, losing, laughing, gasping, finally escaping.
"God," I panted, "my bladder is going to explode!" I stood, still laughing, and stumbled toward the bathroom.
Once there, I stood swaying over the toilet, the piss pouring out of me and the bottle of Acqua Di Gio on the counter daring me to pick it up again, to inhale and to let the power of scent on memory to force me back into Jim's bed. I flushed, washed my hands, left the bathroom without touching the bottle. My shoulder slammed into the doorframe on the way out of the bathroom. I was drunker than I thought. Seven beers, and here my ass was just about on the floor. Tyler had a mixed drink of some sort when I went back out to the living room. I picked it up and sniffed. Orange juice and something...definitely not gin. Vodka maybe? No. I took a sip. Sake.
"Lord, boy," I said to him. "Don't you know the rule?"
"What rule?"
"Beer then liquor, never sicker?"
"Yeah," he said. "But I've got a fast metabolism. I've already burned up the first couple beers."
"Oh," I said. Of course. With a body like his, all muscle, no fat, of course he burned alcohol faster. And of course I was drunk, and he wasn't. Embarrassing. I hated that. "Well," I said, seeing that he was getting his butt kicked by gobbling turkeys on the screen, "you want to listen to some music or something while we play?" This kid needed some guidance in the realm of video games, but I didn't feel like it just then. Kid. What was I thinking? He had five years on me. He was thirty. Thirty and with the most perfect body I was likely to ever sleep with. If I slept with him. Which I wanted to do, even more now that I was drunk. Why kid? The vulnerability, likely. Hunger does that. Reduces us to our base instincts.
I flipped through the CD booklet I had in my bag, found a Madonna mix I'd burned a while ago. It was full of remixed tracks of her more recent work, none of the old stuff except for the beautiful first notes of "Like a Prayer" warped into a dance track at the end of the CD. Tyler took the CD from me and put it into the player. We played a few more rounds of South Park through the revamped version of American Pie, and then I dropped the controller and sat behind him. I raised my hands up to his shoulders as if in a trance when the first sounds of "Frozen" filled the room, rubbed them gently. He moaned softly and the controller fell from his hands. His head tilted forward.
He murmured something, and I leaned my face in close to his to hear it. "That feels so nice," he said.
"Good," I answered. God, his muscles were incredible. I probed all over his back with my fingertips, feeling where the muscles connected, the heaviness and resistant springiness of them. I pressed my palms flat into the center of his back, felt radiating heat surging through my palms. He murmured again as I worked my hands further down, pressed the heels of my palms against the hardness of his lower back...I worked the shirt out of the jeans, lifted it up, put my hands on his bare skin. Warm.
He reached up to unbutton the shirt; I followed his flesh with my hands, around his ribs, up his sides, to his nipples. Both were hard; I squeezed gently and then rubbed at the muscles of his chest, ran my hands down. Perfect abs. I could feel all of them. Even his obliques were defined under my fingertips. He came to the last button and I helped him shrug the shirt off, and once it was off, I planted my lips on his neck. Madonna's crystalline voice poured out of the surround-sound, filling my head: "If I could melt your heart..." I licked up the side of Tyler's neck, sucked gently on the cord of muscle leading from behind his ear down the side of the neck to attach at the sternum and clavicle, following its progress with my palms. His eyes were closed, his head tilted. He moaned.
"Frozen" morphed into "The Power of Goodbye" as I worked my magic on Tyler. I knew that even though he was cute and had a phenomenal body that I had something different, something he wanted, something many, many men wanted. I couldn't say exactly what it was, and neither could they-it was buried too deeply inside me. It had to do with art, and pain, and the way suffering makes your eyes look in certain lights. And it wasn't like I didn't have a good body and face myself, especially now that I'd lost ten pounds and the definition of my muscles was that much clearer. I was no Tyler in the muscle department, but I had a good frame, linebacker shoulders my brothers used to say, and I lifted occasionally. But there was something else, something that I rarely saw in other people but when I did I wanted them so badly it ached, like a cavity. And the fact that I possessed this thing as well made no difference. Seeing it in others-seeing that they had some center that no one else would ever touch, no matter how deeply or persistently a pair of reaching hands was willing to dig-made me recognize it in myself, but if anything, I felt more ambivalent about it seeing it elsewhere. Yes, I wanted to dig for the center of someone like me, but as for reaching my own, I could not care less. I wasn't willing to go there. Which is what made it that much more appealing for others. Except Jim. Jim, who caught glimpses now and again, saw more of that center than anyone had in ages, and who changed his mind at the last minute and told me he didn't want it after all. I choked down a half-sob as I worked on Tyler's shoulders, the pain of the moment Jim had said he didn't want to be together suddenly as fresh as it had been the second it happened.
The extremity of emotion passed; I pushed Tyler down onto the floor so that I could really dig into the muscles of his entire back, could press my palms into his lats, could even get a few cracks and pops out of his spine. I had studied massage technique, had idly dreamed of getting licensed for several years, but more school was the last thing I wanted. Maybe sometime. Right now, though, what I could do was something my friends begged for, a free alignment, a sucking out of the tightness and tension. My hands often burned and tingled for hours after shoving all that energy around, especially in someone who I had never worked on or hadn't worked on in some time. It was so worth it to me to see how they carried themselves after I'd finished with them, as opposed to the way they walked beforehand: the shoulders not so drawn up, the neck not so stiff with tension. That some of the negative energy moved from their bodies into mine was only mildly concerning. What I wanted was to be a sponge for someone else's sensation; always, always, I was starved to feel what sensation was like for someone else. And that quality made me a phenomenal lover, and I knew it. Not one single man I'd slept with had failed to tell me that I was the best lay he'd ever had. And they couldn't have all been lying or feeding my ego. Tyler, now, was practically drooling on the carpet. I'd worked out the major knots in his back, an easier task on him than on most since the muscles were so perfectly defined and I could tell exactly what I was doing. I pressed my palms into his lower back on either side of his spine and worked my way up in pulses, pressing and releasing, spreading out the pressure so that it never concentrated too heavily in one spot. I found the nexus of tension, carefully placed my hands, and instructed that he breathe out as I press down. Straddling him, I gently began to put my weight onto my palms, slow at first, and then faster. Soon I had reached the spot where, intuitively, I knew to crush the muscles together and upward, the perfect release of stress always accompanied by the crackling sound of the fluid around the spine being released. I cracked his back in four places, and he moaned every time, gasped, breathed: "God, that's so good, oh my God, where did you learn that, fuck, oh God..." until my ego was thoroughly placated, until the energy I'd expended to turn him into a limp noodle was well worth it. That was my pleasure: making someone else feel differently than they had before I came into contact with them. Preferably better. I loved to suck it up.
And, thinking of sucking, now that Tyler was putty in my hands, I wanted to do more, to take him to another level of pleasure, to get him to the point where he'd be begging for me, for my flesh, incapable of stopping the compulsive need. I gently rolled him over and straddled him. A Kruder and Dorfmeister mix of Madonna spilled out of the speakers and around us, and I ran my hands over his naked chest, my fingertips lingering on his nipples. I leaned down to his face, his eyes looking up into mine with complete trust, and I kissed his mouth. I ran my fingers over his eyebrows, over his cheeks, put both hands on the sides of his face, angled him so that I could kiss him with maximum lip and tongue contact. I ran my hand around to the back of his head, pulled his mouth harder into mine, and he responded by raising his hips beneath me. My jeans were uncomfortable now, my erection pounding inside them. I ended the kiss slowly, working my mouth down to Tyler's neck. He pulled at my shirt as I kissed his chest, sucked on his nipples. I let him take my shirt off, and then leaned into him and pressed our naked chests together.
"I want you," he whispered, and I could hardly hear it over the music. "God, Mark, you are so beautiful. Just don't stop, baby."
I had no intention of stopping. I worked my way down his chest, down to his navel, used my hands to spread his legs apart and knead his inner thighs. I moved them inward to his crotch as I moved my mouth down, and then rubbed his erection with my fingertips. I placed my mouth over where I could feel the head of his cock under the jeans, and I breathed slowly outward there, warming the fabric and what was underneath with the heat and humidity of my breath. Tyler sighed the word "oh" slowly, and I undid the snap at the top of his jeans. I kissed his perfectly muscled stomach while I undid his fly, moved my hands until I had his cock free. Immediately, and unwillingly, I compared it with Jim's: longer but thinner. Tyler was almost a good eight inches. He'd be as difficult to deep-throat as Jim had, but for another reason. Jim's cock had been so thick it was hard not to hurt him with my teeth, but after a little practice, I had mastered it. This cock, this cock of Tyler's, this cock was beautiful in its own right. I licked the length of it, put my lips over the head and teased him with my tongue. He was groaning now, moving his hips. I tugged gently at his jeans and he took the hint, raising his hips so that I could pull the pants down and out of my way.
After his pants were off, I moved up to his mouth again, kissed him. His fingers worked frantically at my jeans, and I helped him, undoing the button and the zipper and freeing my cock from its restriction by the fabric. Tyler reached down to touch me, but i wasn't ready yet and I cut myself off from moaning with lust even though the pleasure I felt from his touch on my stomach tingled through my whole body. I left my jeans on, licked my way back down his stomach to that glorious eight inches.
If I tried to explain what it is about sucking cock that is so fulfilling, I have the feeling that the very fulfillment I get from it might disappear, but I always try to figure it out anyway as I'm doing it. To feel it pulse between my lips, to move my tongue all around the head, to feel the body behind it pushing itself into my mouth: heaven. I always wait for the first few pushes, let him think that's all the further I can take it into my mouth, and then with a gentle sucking, I swallow the whole thing, no matter the size, no matter the width. I learned long ago how to suppress the gag reflex, and now having an entire cock inside my mouth and throat, my nose buried in the flesh of the abdomen, my chin hitting balls, is one of life's greatest pleasures: the gasp of shock and intense pleasure that comes from the mouth of my lover is bliss. Ecstasy. This is where I find myself in sex: a beautiful cock as far in my mouth as it will go, my tongue rubbing it, my hands kneading the inner thighs, the sounds a man makes when he discovers just how far I can go.
Tyler, I could tell, was going to come in my mouth if one of us didn't stop, and soon. Which would have been very unfulfilling. His movements of thrusting into my mouth became more intense, and I felt with my tongue the cum starting to move up to fill his cock. Instantly, he pulled away from me and shuddered softly, pulled his shoulders back. He hadn't had an orgasm yet. He leaned down to kiss me and immediately straddled me, his hands pressing my shoulders into the floor. I struggled out of my pants and he kissed me even more passionately, reached down while keeping his mouth on mine and wrapped his hand around my cock. Rather than the soft moan I had expected to escape my throat, a cry came forth instead, and I bit it back just a bit too late. "Baby, are you all right?" Tyler asked, immediately letting go of my cock and wrapping his arms around my body, cradling my head. I shook once, twice, fought as hard as I could to keep myself from falling apart in his arms, and I won, even as the sound of pain I'd made echoed in both our ears.
"I'm fine," I said, pretending I had been suppressing a cough, which I now let go. "Just let me suck your cock." It was all I wanted. All I'd ever want. All I could think about while I was doing it was what I was doing. Nothing else. Everything went away but the flesh in my mouth. I rolled us over and started to lick my way down his chest, but he pulled me back up to look at his face. "What is it?" he asked.
I shook my head, again pressed my lips to his chest. He let me this time, but unwillingly, lying there as if someone were forcing him to stay down, as if he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to be there. I ignored this, attacked his cock again, swallowing it almost entirely, pressing my lips hard around it as I drew my mouth up and down the length of it. It wasn't as hard as it had been before. Had he come without my knowing it somehow, discreetly palmed the coursing liquid? I didn't think I was that drunk, that I wouldn't have noticed such a thing. No. That must not be it. I redoubled my efforts, and slowly, Tyler started to get into it again. His hips moved beneath me, and small gasps and moans of pleasure began to issue from his lips. I hummed soflty, letting him feel the vibrations in my throat with his cock. "Oh, God," he said, and the sound of his lust made me even harder. Tentatively, I reached down, ran my hand over my flat, bare stomach, wrapped my thumb and forefinger around the base of my cock. I couldn't help but let a small gasp out at the pleasure I felt, both from my hand and from having Tyler's cock down my throat. I'd hardly even been able to touch myself after Jim had left me, proof again of how deep my feelings had gone. All I had to do now was to not think of him, and getting through this, being with someone else successfully, would prove to me that I was really starting to get over it. Selfish, yes. But it wasn't like Tyler didn't know. It wasn't like he wasn't enjoying this too.
He pulled me off him, nudged my chin. I raised my mouth to his, kissed him with all the pent-up passion of the past two weeks. Again, he reached for my cock. This time the only sound that came from me when he wrapped his fingers around me was a gasp of pleasure, and I tilted my head back, let his lips run all over my neck. I lay back onto the floor and he shifted so that he was over me. A breeze came in the half-open window and washed over us, a reminder that we were both completely naked. His turn now, his turn to go down my stomach, to lick my cock, to put his mouth around me. I tried hard to keep the moans from escaping, but that another person was in such close proximity to me, had his mouth around my cock in fact, forced them out. Tyler sucked me, licked his fingers, sucked me more. His fingertips found my ass, prodded gently, and soon he had one finger inside me. I spread my legs further, let him get another finger inside me. "Fuck me, baby," I moaned, and he took his mouth away from my cock, raised up to my lips, kissed me again. The head of his cock pressed against me, wanting in.
"Wait here," he said. I answered with a murmur, wrapped my hand around my cock and stroked myself while I waited for him to come back. I was thankful for the alcohol coursing through my veins; I couldn't have let my guard down this far without it, wouldn't be lying here with my hand around my cock without something to get me over the initial lump of fear that when someone else touched me, I'd shatter.
Tyler returned with a condom and a bottle of lubricant. For a brief, panicked second, I remembered Jim digging around in a drawer while I lay naked on his bed, turning back to me with the same things in his hand andlook on his face that Tyler had now, the look that said, "I'm going to fuck you so hard..." and I froze. But it passed as quickly as it had come over me, and Tyler knelt beside me, kissed me as he uncapped the bottle. Then the cold sensation of it against me, and the feeling of his cock rubbing up and down, and he stopped again to put the condom on. Quickly, he hovered over me again, took hold of both my legs, moved them so that I was completely open and exposed to him. Panic, again: was I ready for this? I held my breath as he pushed into me, forcing myself to relax, to let him in. Familiar pain for just a moment, and then the waves of pleasure began to wash through me as Tyler pumped his cock in and out of my ass, slowly, gently. I pressed my head back into the floor, closed my eyes, moved my legs as far apart as they'd go. He couldn't get in very far at this angle, but this was all I wanted right now. I rubbed my hands over my stomach and chest, down to my cock, wrapped my hand around it. Tyler let go of one of my ankles and reached down to stroke me as he fucked me. "God," I moaned, "fuck me. Fuck me, Tyler. Push your cock into me." I stretched my arms up over my head, my body as prone and vulnerable as it would ever be. "Do anything you want to me, baby, anything at all..."
"Can I tie you up?" he whispered.
My eyes opened instantly, and my knees pressed into his chest, pushed him out of me. I curled around myself, defensive, protecting-"No," I said. "No."
"Okay, baby, it's okay," he said. "I'm sorry."
"God," I said. "No, don't be sorry. I'm sorry. Please, let's just-let's just go in the bedroom." Fuck, I thought, fuck fuck fuck. I screamed at myself in my head, furious that I'd been unable to overcome the memory of Jim binding my hands and legs, smacking me, then actually hitting me, hard. I'd broken down then, using the safe word, and he'd untied me as I shuddered, let me bolt from the room as soon as I was unrestrained. In his bathroom I had curled up on the floor, my hands on the back of my head, making myself as small as possible, trying to forget everything that had ever happened to me, wishing I could die and that this pain would go away. He'd come into the bathroom, unfolded me, led me back to the bedroom, and I'd told him more than I'd meant to about how sometimes, suddenly, a sexual act that seemed to be going fine would suddenly not be fine, that I'd be a child again, that what had happened to me then against my will would impose itself on the present and I'd be completely unable to cope with the victimization, with the pain, with the self-hate. Sympathy and light. And that was the last time I'd been with Jim. I left for a business trip to Oregon the next day, and when I came back, his mind was made up.
Now, the heat inside my eyes that had been threatening to spill over at points throughout the course of the night finally won a small victory, and a tear fell down my face. I wiped it away quickly, so that Tyler wouldn't see, stood and led him to the bedroom. We laid together on the bed, our limbs and bodies and faces tangled up together, each clinging as if to a life raft for our own separate reasons.
We kissed for a long time then, and through the half-open window, we could hear the storm getting closer and closer. Lightning flashed through the room occasionally, and through my half-open eyes I saw his face, his eyes closed, his brows furrowed together in passion and intensity. He ran his fingers over my face, and again, tears welled up, but I forced them away. Thunder shook the earth around us as he entered me, pressing my legs up so that my thighs touched my chest. I cried, but not hard-the tears leaking out of my eyes and running down the sides of my face without shudders, the darkness and the sound of the storm outside the cover I needed. Tyler wrapped his hand around my cock again and pumped me as he fucked me, and soon, the tears stopped and I lost myself in sensation, in submission to him, in hunger and gratefulness and exhaustion all wrapped up in my body, right in the pit of my stomach, flowing down and out into my cock, and Tyler touched all those feelings as he touched my body. Over and over, his movements made me shake with pleasure, and soon I was on the brink of orgasm, my eyes closed, my head pressed back into the pillows, my breath hard and fast. I felt it build up in me, and Tyler let go my other leg and cupped my balls, tugged gently downward, but it was too late, the hot liquid was already coursing up through my cock, and I came, hard, crying out with the overwhelming sensations. Tyler stilled himself as I pulsed beneath him, and as the orgasm subsided, I felt his stillness and how intently he was looking at me, feeling me, sucking me in with every sense he had.
I gasped as the last wave of pleasure washed through me, and he withdrew, laying next to me on the bed, our sweat mingling, the scent of sex slowly being overwhelmed by the tang of a spring rainstorm. Lightning flashed again and again, and the rain spattered on the windowsill, but he clearly didn't care enough to get up and close the window. He peeled his condom off and tossed it on the floor, turned back to me and held me. "Baby," I said, tired now, so tired, "thank you." Why was I calling him baby? Somewhere, deep inside me, I knew Tyler was utterly trustworthy, that he'd never hurt me...
I ran my fingers through the sweat on his chest and stomach, marveled again at how beautiful, how absolutely exquisite his body was. I found his cock with my hand, moved my palm slowly up and down the length of it. Despite my orgasm, my hunger for it was not satisfied. But I was so tired, so very tired...to combat it, I sat up in the bed, looked down at this naked god lying next to me. Tyler sat up as well, kissed me, wiped the sweat off my face, and I did the same for him. "Let's lie down," he said, and pulled me back into the comfort of the pillows.
"What can I do for you?" I asked him, wanting to make him come so that we could lie here in the still darkness together, this bed like a stranded boat in the vastness of the ocean, the storm outside buffeting the house but unable to reach us.
"Just hold me," he said. "Kiss me and hold me."
Well, I thought, this was something different. I came over here looking for a rebound fuck and what do I get? A sensitive man, one who wanted to pleasure me and put his own needs on hold that I might be satisfied. "Mmm," I said, "that sounds good."
Jim was gone from my head. I smiled.
"Tell me a memory," I said to Tyler as he rested his head on my shoulder, draped his arm over my bare chest. "Tell me a memory from when you were little."
Tyler started speaking in a soft voice about riding in the kiddie seat on the back of his dad's ten-speed, and every time he smiled, I could feel it, because his face was resting against me. The crease of his smile made me feel warm. I played my fingers over his hair as he spoke, fighting sleep but not too hard. My arm eventually dropped, my mind where Tyler's words had taken me, to an Illinois suburb in the middle of summer, a view of his father's back as Tyler rode in the bike seat and they hurried home to beat a storm.
I must have drifted off, because I snapped back to consciousness with a start when a sudden peal of thunder rang through the house. Tyler was talking about his father still, and I could hear the pain in his voice, could hear his throat tightening. I raised my hands, traced them along the sides of his face, felt tears there. I leaned in and kissed them away, their salt on my tongue and lips making me want more of them. "I remember the last thing he said to me," Tyler said around the tightness in his throat. "I was fifteen, you know, curled up on the couch watching something on television, and I asked him what he wanted to watch, and he said-the last thing he ever said-'Doesn't matter to me, bud, I'm working out.' And then I heard the thump and turned and he was on the floor-" Tyler stopped, swallowed, and a fresh stream of hot tears poured down the side of his face. "I don't know why I'm telling you all this," he said. "I screamed for my sister and then I tried to do CPR on him, but it's not like it is in the movies, or like it is when they train you, you know, he was drooling, and I couldn't-I couldn't do it right, I don't know, my sister realized what was up and ran back upstairs to call the paramedics and it was just me and him-" Again, he stopped. I wiped the tears away, pulled him closer to me, wrapped my body around his instinctively, even though I knew I couldn't protect him from this pain.
"They said I was doing everything right when they got there, and they used the electric paddles-so I can't stand those jokes now, you know, the ones about jump-starting someone-whatever-because that was my dad, and they did that to him right in front of me and it didn't work. My mom rode in the ambulance with him to the hospital and my sister drove me and her down there, and when we got there the doctor was coming out and getting ready to tell her, and you could see on his face-it was-he was gone. Just like that. My dad." He swallowed again, repeatedly. "I'm sorry," he said. "I know you didn't ask for this."
"No, baby," I said, my palms soaked with his tears. "Don't be sorry, I'm glad you're telling me, it's okay."
"It's just-like I've suppressed it so much, I've pushed the memories down so far, and sometimes they come back, so strong, and it's like I'm there in that hospital all over again, listening to the doctor tell us that he's gone." One more wave of tears, and he was silent, having won his own battle against the pain for the time being.
"Tyler," I said, kissing his face. "Sweetheart." I held onto him in the lightning, the thunder, what was inside him and what was inside me, the similarities too parallel to be ignored. He turned to me, and we lay tangled together on top of the blankets, having connected on a level infinitely deeper than the one I had expected when I knocked on his door two hours ago.
Well, so much for expectation.