“Your keys, you cocksucker.”
Confused, I fumbled around in my pockets and brought out the ring with the keys to the apartment and mailbox. “These?”
Greg snatched them out of my hand. “Faggot,” he said, then grimaced at the keys and rubbed them on his pants as if he’d just picked them off the men’s room floor. “You fucking faggot.”
“Let me explain,” I said, wondering what there could possibly be to explain, as Greg had seen everything.
“Shut up,” Greg said. “If you want your shit, it’ll be in the hall. You’re out of the apartment.”
“What?”
“You heard me, faggot.”
“But Greg…”
He walked away. There was nothing I could say. I’d just lost my best friend, my ride, and my apartment, all at the same time. And I’d abandoned Zen to go after Greg.
Stunned and numb, I took a deep breath and walked back outside to the darkness of the alley, but it was empty. Zen was nowhere.
I sat down on the asphalt and brushed my hands together. They were stinging from my fall. My right kneecap throbbed with a knot the size of a golf ball. My crotch was clammy. And I could still smell him on me, his breath, his sweat, our sex. Then all my feelings came back and I drew up my knees, hugging them to my chest, and started to cry.
“I’m sorry about your boyfriend.” The voice was warm and sweet. I raised my head to see Zen looking down at me.
“He wasn’t my boyfriend,” I said and wiped at my face.
“Oh. I thought, by the way you always hung on him, that you and he were a couple.”
Always hung on him? Zen had seen us together.
“You need a place for the night?” he said.
My gaze lingered on his eyes, dark chocolate, before traveling down his neck, to his shoulder, and his outstretched arm.
He had knowingly come between Greg and me. Never mind that there was nothing to come between. It seemed a little malicious when I thought about it.
But that didn’t make the slightest difference.
Those magic fingers. I remembered the rush, the release, the exhilaration; could see Zen naked above me, all my fantasies rolled into one.
I took his hand and accepted the invitation.
THE DOLPHIN TEMPLE
David Holly
C
onstructed of pinkish-gray sea stone, the Dolphin Temple stood upon a low hill overlooking the fish-filled sea. Oleander and pomegranate bushes dotted the hillside leading up to an entrance flanked by phallic porpoises. Behind the temple, the high timber blued the horizon. Against the primeval forest’s oaks, firs, and cypresses, the Dolphin Temple glistened like a rich pearl.
Following a farm lad herding his pigs along the pebbled path, I saw two boys approaching along the shore. The boy wearing the yellow loincloth was my boon companion Phaeax, and the other was Dreros, an
Eteocretan
(of the racially pure Minoan bloodlines—as Dreros regularly informed us). I was glad to see Phaeax, who was gorgeous in body but dim in mind; however, I groaned to see Dreros.
“Hail, Androgeus,” Phaeax called. Dreros sniffed condescendingly. The boys’ purple-stained mouths gave clear evidence that they’d been raiding a mulberry tree.
“Phaeax, are you going to the Dolphin Temple?” I asked.
“Is that where you’re going? I hadn’t thought of it, but sure. How about it, Dreros?”
Dreros lifted his nose another inch. “I worship the Snake Goddess,” he boasted. “We
pure
families are children of the serpent, the Great Mother. We never sacrifice to heretical gods; not the Dolphin God, or the God of Flora, or Bechanos, the God of Beasts, or Yakinthos, the Child God, or Stafylos, the Grape Man.”
“But it’s fun, Dreros,” Phaeax protested, while I shook my head at Dreros’s impregnable foolishness.
“Come on, Phaeax,” I urged. “You and I will make the sacrifice to the porpoise. Leave Dreros to get hoity-toity with the snake woman.”
Dreros sniffed. I sniffed back. The warm air was scented with iodine from the sea and wild anise, mingled with the more heady scent of the goats grazing upon the hill. Leaving Dreros, Phaeax and I hurried to the temple and begged admittance from Nausitheus, the priest.
“We’ve come to tender the semen sacrifice,” I offered.
Nausitheus smiled upon us. “Two of your friends arrived just a few minutes ago,” he said, pointing toward the small room behind the altar. We hurried through the nave, where lamps made the blue plaster walls shine eerily. Worshippers felt like they were standing on the floor of the sea. In the curtained changing room, we found Lyktos and Asterius, who had just finished stripping off their sandals and loincloths. After greeting our friends, Phaeax and I quickly bared our bodies.
“We asked Dreros if he wanted to come, but he didn’t,” Phaeax said.
“That smug boor,” Asterius said. “I’m glad he didn’t come. Can you imagine masturbating with him? He would brag about how much better they do it for the Snake Goddess.”
“I don’t think they masturbate to the Snake Goddess,” Phaeax said. “Worshipping the God of the Playing Porpoises is more fun.” That was the most intelligent thing Phaeax said all day.
“Dreros thinks his semen is pudding,” Lyktos commented.
“Besides, he’s not an initiate,” Asterius said.
“Oh, Nausitheus would allow him into the masturbation sacrifice—if Dreros asked with all of his heart,” Lyktos corrected. “Not being initiated would only prevent him from understanding the significance of the ritual or being permitted into the inner circle of the great rite.”
“Come on, let’s quit talking about that wet blanket,” I urged. “Into the shaft and down to the Masturbaria.”
Dropping to our hands and knees, we parted the curtain and crawled down the shaft. Lyktos crawled in front of me. I could feel the closeness of his bare ass and hanging ball sac. Behind me, Phaeax kept tickling my buttocks with his hair.
We emerged into the Masturbaria, a magical room where blazing torches provided light and heat. Balancing the torches were the shafts to the surface that brought cool, fresh air. Frescoed scenes of human boys and men handling their own cocks, humans fondling the cocks of various deities, and ejaculating porpoise phalluses covered the circular wall.
That afternoon, my three friends and I were the only occupants. We sat in a square on the smooth stone floor. The sacred amphora of lubricating oil sat in the center. I poured a generous dollop into my palm and slicked my hardening penis. Sitting directly across from me, Asterius grinned at my growing erection. His own cock was already hard. With his gaze still locked on my cock, he touched the tip of his own and toyed with it dry before he lubricated it.
“It’s been two whole days since I’ve sacrificed,” Lyktos moaned. “I’d have died if we hadn’t met today.”
“You can do it by yourself,” Phaeax said.
“That would be a sacrilege, Phaeax,” Lyktos reproved. “We do this not so much for our own pleasure as we do to worship the god.”
Asterius smirked at me, and I winked back. Lyktos may have been trying to please the god, but Asterius and I both knew that we were pleasing ourselves. Lyktos’s mother was priestess of the women’s rites, and she took her duties seriously. So did her son. Lyktos was a true believer.
Sitting to my left, Lyktos gripped my cock with his right hand. Following the formula, I squeezed Phaeax’s penis, Phaeax grabbed Asterius’s cock, and Asterius latched on to Lyktos. As we gently stroked, Lyktos raised his voice: “Oh, Divinity of the Playing Porpoises,” he prayed according to the Dolphin Heresy. “We assemble to masturbate for you. We stroke our cocks with holy purpose. We stroke the cocks of our companions that the act be pleasing unto you. We will not cease until we let fly the sacred seed even as the gods of old spurted the starry sky. So I, Lyktos, dedicate my semen to the Everlasting Powers.”
“So I, Androgeus, dedicate my seed,” I offered while Asterius and Phaeax followed with their own dedications.
Though Phaeax was intellectually slower than the rest of us, there was nothing wrong with his dick. It filled my hand. I stroked up and down his shaft, taking care to tease his big foreskin with my thumb and forefinger. Phaeax’s face assumed a dreamy expression as I fondled his cock, but that did not stop him from giving his best attention to Asterius. I could see that he was pounding Asterius’s cock hard and fast.
Using one hand, Lyktos grasped my shaft steadfastly and evenly stroked my cock’s hood with his thumb. He didn’t move his hand; only his thumb circled my dickhead, and his speed did not fluctuate. The sensation was agonizingly pleasurable. I feared the manipulation would bring me to orgasm too quickly, but it only kept me hovering near the edge, with tiny tingles rippling though the tip of my cock that defied expansion into a soul-shuddering discharge. My heart rumbled as if it might burst. The blood sang in my head, and Lyktos’s hand evoked a pleasure so powerful that I could scarcely tolerate it. Yet utter satisfaction held in abeyance: I did not cross the threshold of discharge.
Learning quickly, I duplicated the action on Phaeax’s dick. His face soon lost the dreamy expression. His tongue began to protrude until he resembled an animal in extremis. Soon we four were performing the same hand movements on each other, each hovering near ejaculation, but unable to rise to the supreme height. In this state of acute arousal, my memory rippled back, washing through the months to the first time we had sacrificed in the Masturbaria.
Lyktos’s father was important to my father’s business interests, and my mother had always been a mite jealous of Lyktos’s mother. Thus, it came to pass that one night Lyktos’s family dined with ours at my father’s villa. We sat in chairs under the moonlight, with braziers and lamps providing additional light. We did not toss food into our mouths with our fingers or segregate by gender in the perverse manner of the Dorians. We ate with utensils as civilized people do, and the women dined with the men, as equals.
Lyktos’s father had brought a barrel of beer, which everyone enjoyed, even the slaves. I laughed to see one slave child guzzling down the rich thick beer in her bottle. The little one had a real taste for the heady beverage. The dark, pungent beer made my head swim, but it was pleasant, nonetheless. My mother had added a little opium to the barrel, which made it even more enjoyable.
My father was an exporter. He traded with Rhodes, Naxos, Athens, Tyre, Sparta, Corinth, Lesbos, Babylon, Joppa, Sidon, Thebes, Cairo, and Troy. He primarily dealt in timber, though at times he exported cloth and purple dye, currants, herbs, olive oil, medicines, wine, wheat, and wool. He also schemed to corner the beer market, and Lyktos’s father was the principal brewer of the Minoans.
Both fathers were dressed elegantly in elaborate red kilts, with much jewelry on display. They had colored their eyelids, darkened their lashes, painted their lips, rouged their cheeks, and colored their nails. They wore their hair long, but shaved their faces, as is our custom. Lyktos and I did not need lipstick, but we had colored our fingernails and toenails (we ate barefoot, as is polite). We were also clean shaven. In Lyktos’s case, the razor was barely necessary, but I had become embarrassingly hairy at the age of thirteen, and I fear I grow worse every year. My mother claims that she once mistook me for Thoth, our pet monkey, whom an Egyptian merchant had given to my father.
Though my father was intent on seducing Lyktos’s father (in the business sense), it was Lyktos’s mother who dominated the conversation, causing my father to gnash his teeth. Like my mother, she was dressed to highlight her femininity. She wore an elegant dress draped to accent the curves of her buttocks and a wide belt that pushed up her bare breasts. The women also wore elaborate cosmetics and jewelry. They had hennaed elaborate designs on their breasts and rouged their pointed nipples.
Lyktos’s mother started in with the octopus salad. “The priest has frequently used me to select boys for the Dolphin sacrifice.”
“What’s that?”
“Men and boys sacrifice to the Divinity of the Playing Porpoises,” she said. “I cannot say more of the ritual.”