“Dirk,” I asked softly, “what’s wrong?”
“Scott left me,” he said in a tortured voice. “Or I left him. He’s been seeing this other guy, a basketball player. The bastard.”
“Which one’s the bastard,” I asked, “Scott or the basketball player?”
“Both, I guess,” he said with a little laugh. I thought maybe he’d calmed down, but then he started crying again. Ever since my mother left my dad, I’ve been uncomfortable around crying men. But I got up from the futon, walked over to his bed, and laid a hand on his shaking shoulder. He reached around and put his hand on mine. I’d just wanted to act emotionally supportive in a brotherly sort of way, but, inconveniently, my dick was getting hard. I was surprised. And confused. And hard. Really, really hard.
Dirk said something, softly.
“What?” I said, not sure if I heard right.
“Hold me,” he repeated.
I got into bed with him and awkwardly laid my arm around his shoulder, far enough away from him so he couldn’t tell what was up with my crotch.
“Closer,” he said. “Please.”
I took him in my arms and pressed my chest against his back. My throbbing dick was just inches from his butt. He snuggled back up against me, and I didn’t resist. I figured he had to notice the state of my cock. We both lay there for a minute, unmoving, barely breathing. Then he reached his long arm back around and pressed my body tightly against his. The fleecy fabric of my sweatpants felt great against my hard shaft. I started gently dry-humping against him.
“Uh, Dirk, I’m not taking advantage of you in your hour of need?”
“Not at all. In Holland, we have a saying…”
But I never did find out what that saying was, because Dirk gasped as I slipped my hand inside his shirt. I knew from what Sarah had done to me that it feels great to have your nipples played with. So I slid my hand along the soft hair on his chest, found his left nipple, and gently squeezed.
“Wait,” Dirk said. He pried himself loose from my arms, stood up, and lit a candle on the bedside table. I could see that his eyes were a bleary red. There were tear tracks on his cheeks. I hate to admit it, but that turned me on.
I lay there, hardly daring to think, as he, looking me in the eyes, began to unbutton his shirt. I’d seen plenty of guys’ chests before, of course, at the beach, at the gym, just hanging around. But no one’s chest had ever looked like Dirk’s did in that candlelight. It was beautiful.
He unbuckled his belt and unzipped the fly of his khakis, letting them slip to midthigh. He was wearing white boxer shorts. I’d seen his cock before, a number of times, but never hard. It was big, much bigger than mine. Its glossy, swollen head, still half-hidden by foreskin, was poking out of one of the legs of the boxers. I knew it would be a bad idea to touch it, but I wanted to touch it, bad.
“You gonna keep those sweatpants on?” Dirk asked. I nodded stupidly.
“Then I’ll keep my underwear on, too.” He looked down at his semi-revealed cock and smiled. “Not that it’ll do a lot of good.” He took a step toward the bed, and stood there, towering above me, nearly naked in the candlelight. “You ever touched another guy before?”
I shook my head. “Not since sixth grade,” I said. “You know, just messing around.”
“Why do I find that so easy to believe?” he said, smiling an unreadable grin. He reached down for my hand, grabbing it by the wrist and guiding it straight to his cock. At first I just touched the base of his hard-on through his shorts, the flesh hot and stiff beneath the thin white cotton. Then I moved my fingers down to his naked flesh, his hand still tightly grabbing onto my wrist. I squeezed the swollen head of his prick, rubbing my thumb over his moist slit.
“You like the way it feels?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Good. So do I,” Dirk said in that deep Dutch voice of his. “Now just lie back.”
I did as I was told. He kicked off his shoes, tugged his boxers down, let his pants fall to his ankles, and stepped out of them. His swollen cock stood straight out, pointing in front of him, pointing in my direction. I wondered what that big hard thing would feel like in my mouth. And I wondered what Dirk’s mouth would feel like on me. That, I was about to find out.
Dirk sank to his knees and pulled the waistband of my sweatpants down, just enough for my dick and my swollen balls to spring free; my cockhead was wet, and there was a sticky stain inside the pants. He licked the underside of my shaft hungrily, then slid his wet mouth down the length of my dick, till I could feel the back of his throat working my dickhead. I knew that gay men liked to suck cock, more than most women did. He did it a lot better than Sarah ever had, and unlike her, he didn’t smell of patchouli.
I grabbed the back of his blond head and gently guided it as he moved up and down on my dick. Nobody had ever seemed to want my cock so much. I felt like I was going to explode. I could see now why guys wanted to be gay.
I hated it when he let my hard-on slide out of his mouth, but it turned out he had something else in mind. He went into the drawer of his bedside table and pulled out a condom and a little bottle of lube. He tore open the foil package with his teeth and expertly rolled the rubber down over my shaft, then lubed it up and stroked it till I was once again rock hard, almost ready to shoot. He clambered over me until he was squatting on the bed, straddling me, my dick rubbing right against the crack of his ass. Even through the rubber, the friction of his butt against me felt intense.
I’d always figured that getting fucked up the ass would hurt, but when Dirk raised himself up on his knees, reached back and guided my dick to his hole, and then sat back, my cock slipped right into him and he looked like it didn’t hurt at all. Being inside him felt incredible, like a cunt but tighter. He rocked himself on my dick, sliding up and down on my hard-on while I thrust up into him. I looked at him, at his shining blond hair, his handsome face, his lean body shiny with sweat. And at his cock, hard and throbbing, precum drooling from his big slit.
I reached down and grabbed his hot dick and started jacking him off, his flesh lubed by his own juice. It was incredible, knowing that his cock was feeling what mine was feeling too, a cycle of energy unlike anything I’d ever felt during sex. I looked up at his face. There was a smile, but his blue eyes were wild. He moaned. He gasped. And then suddenly he was coming, spraying hot gobs all over my chest and his ass muscles clenched and my cum was rising and I couldn’t hold back anymore and I shot off in his ass. Again and again and again. It was amazing. Just fucking amazing.
And in a few minutes, after we’d stopped shaking and caught our breaths, he raised himself up from me, peeled the rubber off my half-hard cock, and lay down beside me. He reached for me, then hesitated. I reached for his hand and guided it to my chest.
“Feeling better?” I asked.
“Yep,” said Dirk. “I guess Scott’s not the only fish in the ocean.”
“In the sea,” I corrected him. “And neither is Sarah.”
He put his mouth to mine and hesitated. I parted my lips. Our tongues met. I wrapped my arms around him.
I was already drifting off to sleep when I heard him ask the question. “Okay, genius,” Dirk said, “
now
are you going to explain goddamn
War and Peace
?”
COMING OF AGE
William T. Hathaway
S
an Francisco! Want to go?” Don stood in the door of our dorm room, curly blond hair bobbing with enthusiasm.
“Sure,” I answered. This was 1968, and the news had been full of all the wild times in San Francisco: love-ins with hordes of people gathering in the parks to dance, get high, and protest the war we were waging on Vietnam. The hippies were putting their bare bodies on the barricades for peace.
Life
magazine had full-page photos of kids wearing only hair—long and sprouting everywhere, heads, faces, underarms, crotches, letting it all hang out, impudent asses and joyous bouncing tits.
I was a freshman at Kansas University and had grown up a few miles away in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. I’d never been east of the Mississippi River or west of Wichita. Hell yes, I wanted to go to San Francisco!
Then I saw our drab dorm room again. The offer was probably too good to be true. “What’s the deal?” I asked Don cautiously. He and I were best friends from high school, now college roommates.
Blue eyes glinting, Don straddled his desk chair. “I just got off with phone with Lee, my cousin. Remember, you met him once. Now he goes to Berkeley, lives with his folks, but they’re cool…right near San Francisco. They invited me for Christmas vacation, and when I told them about you, they said you could come too.”
“Sounds great,” I said.
As soon as classes broke, we left our college town of Lawrence, paid an obligatory visit back home, then headed west on Highway 40 in Don’s red ’55 Chevy. The wooded hills of eastern Kansas yielded to a broad plain, its harrowed soil newly planted with winter wheat, awaiting the first snow.
“The land’s not really flat, you know,” said Don. “It’s tilted. We’re climbing all the time, but so slow you can’t tell. It’s building up toward the Rockies.”
I squinted at the horizon, anxious for a first glimpse of the mountains. The highway widened to four lanes and the speed picked up. Oncoming semis roared by, buffeting us with wind. “Kick it in the ass,” Don said and tromped the gas.
We tried to find a good rock station on the radio, but now we were too far out of Topeka and too far away from Denver. It was either country-western or gospel. “Shut that crap off,” said Don. “Heard enough of it…that’s what we’re getting away from.”
“Brain rot,” I agreed.
“In San Francisco we’ll go to the Fillmore,” Don said. “Blast all this hokey shit out of our brains.”
The Fillmore—I’d read about it, seen pictures of Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar on stage, Janis Joplin screaming her joy at being long gone from Port Arthur, Texas, which was probably worse than Kansas City.
This was the pre-Interstate era, so the highway plowed through the center of each town on the route, often narrowing to two lanes. We crept past the stores: hardware, feed and grain, auto parts; the restaurants: Vera’s and A&W Root Beer; the motels: Dew Drop Inn and Bide-a-Wee on opposite ends of town; the Alibi Bar with a neon cocktail glass; the John Deere dealership, most prosperous place in town, its display windows and lot filled with glistening new tractors.
We cheered as we crossed into Colorado. “Now we’re running on Mountain Time,” Don said. “Doesn’t that sound better than Central? Keep time with the mountains!” Don’s hands left the steering wheel to beat a drum riff on the dashboard. “Plus we get a whole extra hour to live. By the time we get to California, two extra hours.”
Too road weary to be enthused, I reset my watch and the clock on the dashboard. “When we come back, we’ll lose it again.”
Don jutted out his elbow to prod me out of my torpor. “Maybe we won’t come back. We’ll just keep going west, keep gaining time…never die. Maybe that’s the secret. If you can keep up with the sun, you go on forever.”
I slugged down cold coffee. “The only hitch is, then you’d have to live in a space satellite, wear one of those suits all the time. You never get to screw, and you have to shit into a plastic bag. You think that’s worth it?”
Don shook his head. “Nope. For that we could’ve stayed in Kansas.”
“This looks like Kansas,” said I. “Where’re the mountains?” I strained my eyes again toward the horizon. “I want to see Pike’s Peak.”
Two hours later the land still looked like Kansas, but up ahead ragged blue silhouettes were emerging on the horizon. The sight snapped me out of the caffeinated drowse I’d been driving in. I looked over to Don, slumped against the door, and decided not to wake him. I enjoyed the sunset in solitude, driving with the visor down, squinting at the sinking orange ball, its golden light shooting rays through the haze, shining the mist into glowing velvet clouds, then throbbing them pink and violet, flaring them iridescent. Right before it dropped out of sight, the sun fired the peaks, and I could almost see crags and cliffs locked in ice. With a last gleam it was gone. I glanced back at the eastern sky, already a starry plum.