The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (13 page)

“A
boyfr
—? No. I mean—
No. I guess I didn’t know you knew I was the type to have one.”

“I’m the RA, I know everything about all my residents.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

He laughed. “Plus, that sign on your door.”

“Sign? Oh. Yeah.” The rainbow sticker; but of course it
had
been a sign, too. A sign implied an
advertisement, and that’s just what it was.

“That’s too bad, no boyfriend,” Travis said, casually but
with a growing coyness when he added, “Or who knows—maybe it could be
lucky, right? For both of us?”

In my surprise, in my unwillingness to believe, I tried
imagining what else he could possibly mean by that, and I really had to scrape.
Lucky for both of us
because he didn’t
want me to bring a boyfriend here, or something? No—I knew what he meant.
I knew where this was suddenly and unexpectedly going. I knew what was probably
about to happen. By the tone of his voice, by the way he was looking at my
shoulders. It made me excited, but sad too. It was a sad discovery to realize
that when it’s going to happen it’ll be this obvious and happen this easily.
How many nighttime drives had I taken with Boyd Wren where I had wallowed in
the purgatory of
maybe
, analyzing
little comments and gestures when, if it’s going to happen, you can know from a
look?

The look Travis was giving me.

“So I—,” I began. “So do you— Do you think you’ll
be able to find a room for those guys? Wayne and—”

“Probably, Oliver,” Travis said, “but to be honest, right
now I’m more interested in you.” It was flirty but a weird type of flirty. Not
a cutesy kind; it was authoritative, almost stern, almost dismissive, like a
boss, like a principal. Like I was in trouble. “Should I come over there?”

I didn’t reply but felt half aware that I was licking my
lips, which on some level I must’ve meant to be an invitation. Regardless, he
took it as one. He got up. What I had taken for aggressive straightness must
simply have been aggressiveness. His skin and body and maleness came over to my
bed like a conquering armada and I was shivering, wanting it, afraid of it. He
sat down on my bed. His mouth tasted like toothpaste and his stubble was sharp.
Whatever he was, I was kissing a boy.

We only kissed for a minute before his hands found my
erection and pulled my underwear down. They felt hot and smooth on it. He
leaned down and bounced it against his face, and sighed. I tensed when the head
grazed his stubble. I watched as if it were happening to someone else, as if
this were a porno, but when he took my penis into his mouth I came back to
myself and it felt as though all of me was in his mouth, rolling back and forth
across his tongue. It was exciting and scary and I felt— I didn’t know
what I felt.

He only had me in his mouth a few seconds before I said, “Travis,
I’m gonna come.” I was afraid of shooting in his mouth; I didn’t know the
etiquette, I didn’t know if that’s what real people did or if only pornstars
did that. He didn’t acknowledge me, though he had to have heard me—his
ears were only inches from my mouth. “Travis, I’m getting close—” But
rather than stopping he sped up. I didn’t want to come in his mouth; it was
about more than etiquette, I just didn’t want to. I put my hand against his
head. “Travis—” He didn’t stop. “
Trav
—”
And then I came. It was fast, like a lightning strike, not the rumbling,
almost-itchy things I had mastered the art of giving to myself. It seemed to
slip out of me, out of the hotness of me into the hotness of him, moving from
one to another as if we were all one thing. I had never come into anything my
own temperature before. I gasped. I could feel him swallowing around me, his
tongue and throat working. His eyes were closed. I felt embarrassed. I didn’t
know what to say. He took my penis out of his mouth and licked up the strings
of spit and sperm that had dribbled into the hair. Then he smiled and pulled up
my underwear and patted my softening dick through it, the way you pat the head
of a good dog.

“I needed that,” he said. Then he slid back on my bed and
pulled out his own erection, the first I’d ever seen in person. His penis was
bigger than mine, and veiny, and the head was shining. I didn’t know what he
wanted me to do for him now—he seemed to not really know I was still
here. He was stroking himself and licking his lips and I, because I had to do
something, reached out and rubbed his chest.

“You came so hard,” he said. And for some reason I wanted to
say I had barely come at all, that I’d hardly felt anything. I wanted it to be
over. I wanted him to come and go back to his side of the room.

But while I watched him jerk himself I started to feel
turned on again. I moved my hand lower on his belly and laced my fingers
through the hair around his dick. It was stiffer than mine, and that surprised
me—I must’ve thought, stupidly, that boys were boys, that I could know
about them by exploring myself. Travis felt different from me. Even his come,
when it landed on the back of my hand, was different—thinner and more
watery than mine. It ran across my knuckles and dripped on the bed.

He lay there breathing heavy for a minute. Then he lifted
his head and looked around.

“Hand me a Kleenex?” he said, pointing to my desk with a
glistening finger. I got up and got the box, pulling out a few for myself
before handing it to him. He yanked out three or four and held them to his
belly and said, “
Wooo
.”

He stood up and hiked up his plaid boxers, then dropped the
tissues into my wastebasket on his way back to bed.

“Thanks, that was really cool,” he said as he clicked off
his lamp.

In the darkness I touched myself through my underwear, felt
the wetness that was proof of—what? I wondered if I was still a virgin.
If that had counted as sex. If I wanted it to count.

Soon I heard him get up and eat a cookie.

“There’s the RA’s pet,” Bruno said to me the next morning
as I was heading to class. He clapped me on the shoulder.

In the gym that day I lifted for twice as long as usual,
until I was out of breath and my muscles ached. Two days in a row of pushing
hard. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw I was not someone to be trifled
with. But I met Harriet and Shelley in the dining hall for dinner and didn’t
hear much of what they were saying. My mind was stuck on yesterday.

That night I lay awake wondering if Travis would come to my
bed again, but he didn’t, he kept to his normal greetings and homework and
reading. Same on the second and third nights. It was like the sex hadn’t
happened, which made me worry that I’d been bad at it, that I’d tasted bad or
smelled funny, that I hadn’t said the right things afterward or been too
awkward or not helped enough to get him off. I wanted to ask Harriet or Shelley
what they thought but I didn’t want either of them to know, or anyone to know,
and risk getting Travis in trouble. He was, after all, our RA. The rules were
clear.

By the fourth night, when we shut off the lights, I was
confident in the routine. Small-talk, then quiet, sleep, no chit-chat. The
pre-sleep quiet was a starker contrast from Wesley than the shirtlessness had
been, than even the blowjob had been, but I was getting used to it.

I was in the first stage of sleep when Travis’s voice
snapped me awake. He’d said my name. It sounded loud and he added, “Did you
like it when I sucked you off the other night? That was pretty hot, right?”

My own voice, fumbling to find itself, sounded loud too. “It
was pretty hot, yeah.”

“Only
pretty hot?
I bet you’re probably getting hard thinking of it.”

My mouth was dry. I shifted under the blankets. “I’m—getting
a little—a little hard.” And I cursed myself for stammering.

I heard him chuckle, then he went quiet. I started to think
he was just ramping me up for fun. Then he added, “Maybe I should come over
there and help you out again.”

I swallowed and took a breath but didn’t say anything.

He turned on his reading lamp, aimed it at the wall so it
lit the room in a diffuse yellow glow, a little more atmospheric than the first
time when it’d been shining right at my bed like a spotlight. He swung his legs
out of bed and stood up. His plaid boxers preceded him by the six or seven
inches of his erection as he came toward my bed.

I felt clumsy kissing him and I wondered if I was doing it
right. Most other people had had practice by this age. I guess maybe I was
doing it wrong because this time too he only kissed me for a few seconds. His
mouth had other places to be.

He sloppily kissed my shoulders and biceps, leaving cool
spots on them with his tongue. Pushing me against the pillow he kissed down my
stomach. He reached up into my underwear through the leg holes and hooked his
fingers over the waistband, and pulled my underwear down over my thighs and
over my knees, past my ankles and off. I had been basically naked with him the
first time but this time I felt even more naked. I looked up at him, feeling a
little silly, not sure what to say. He told me to roll onto my stomach, so I
did. The bed creaked with our weight. My face lay on the pillow and my legs
were stretched to the end of the mattress. After kicking off his own underwear
he sat with my legs between his thighs; I could feel his balls on the backs of
my knees. He kissed down my spine, down and down, and I thought surely he’d
stop before my bum, but he didn’t. With his palms he spread my cheeks and made
a little noise, a small coo, the way someone might at the sight of a puppy. I
was pretty sure I knew what he was going to do—I’d looked at enough porn—but
I had no expectation of what it would feel like. My body went rigid with the
anticipation, and I squeezed my eyes shut. The warmth was surprising, the
softness, the slickness of his tongue. It felt good but not a sexy good; it
felt like a private good and I didn’t like feeling it with him here.

“Travis, I might not be clean—”

“You’re clean,” he said, stopping just long enough to say
it. “You taste amazing.”

Which confused me, because if I was clean, what was there to
taste? Did I have a natural taste there? How could it be amazing? He continued
for a minute or two while I stared into the pillowcase, my mind racing and my
heart thumping to keep up. He kissed up around my butt cheek and bared his
teeth against my skin.

“Have you ever gotten fucked, Oliver?” he whispered.

“Yes,” I lied quickly.

“Did you like it? Of course you did. It feels amazing,
right?”

“Yeah,” I lied. What could I do after lying once, except
double down?

“How much do you want me to fuck you right now, Oliver?”

How much? What kind of question was that? There was no answer
for it, or there were many. The truth is I did want him to fuck me, a lot, now
that I’d been awakened by his tongue. I wanted him to fuck me the way fucking
worked in my imagination, though—with the sweetness and the effortless
glide it had in my imagination. I had no idea how that would translate into
real life, into real feeling or real pain. I was afraid. And so the second,
equal truth is that I didn’t want him to fuck me, not at all. But the third
truth: I knew he was going to.

What’s strange is that I also knew that, if I wanted to, I
could push him off me and throw him across the room, back to his own bed. So
why did I feel like he was holding me down with the weight of his tongue?

Before I told him anything he got off my bed and hopped
naked to his side of the room, where he rummaged in a duffel bag he had not
unpacked. I heard the rip of foil and when he turned around again he was
putting on a condom.

I was excited. I was terrified. Would it hurt? Would I be
able to do it? Would he know from my body language that I had lied?

I rolled onto my back, because I liked it best in porn when
the guys looked into each other’s eyes.

“Oh, lube,” he whispered, returning to the duffel and
pulling out a bottle. “Lube
lube
lube
.
We’ll use a lot.”

As he approached my bed I spread my legs. My penis was
barely erect, flopped against my belly.

“This body, Oliver,” Travis murmured, running his fingers
across my abs.

“Go slow, OK?” I think I heard my voice crack, or maybe it
was just that my throat was so dry.

“Don’t worry, we’ll take our time.” He kneeled on the bed
beside me. “Here,” he said, tapping my hip with the back of his hand, “roll
over back onto your belly again. It’s better that way.”

I did what he said because although I had wanted to face
him, being on my belly hid my softness.

He kneeled in the space between my spread thighs, which he
spread wider with his knees, and repeated what he’d done earlier—kissed
my neck, my traps, my spine, worked his way down to my butt. Again he held my
cheeks open and swirled his tongue. I liked it better this time because I knew
what to expect. I was getting hard against the mattress and I thought that this
could be good, this would be all we needed to do. If I let him know I was
enjoying this maybe he wouldn’t stop, maybe he could make me come this way,
maybe if I came I could roll over and show him the dark spot on the sheet and
say, “Sorry, maybe next time?” And maybe his ceiling would be fixed before
there was a next time.

I sighed into the pillow and moaned pornographically, “That
feels really good. Please don’t stop.” I started rubbing my pelvis against the
mattress to make myself come. An orgasm could be my escape hatch.

After a moment he did stop, though. I heard him sniffle a
laugh as he wiped his forearm across his mouth. “I don’t want to accidentally
finish you off before we get to the fun part.”

And again, because it had been feeling good, I was excited,
but I also didn’t stop rubbing against the mattress, and I didn’t stop trying
to come. I was stuck bewilderingly between wanting and not wanting.