When Sam starts to make little sobbing sounds, I finally desist. I take a long pull of beer, give the same to him, and drop to my knees for the next course. I’ve been wanting to suck his cock for years now. Last fall, standing in that crowded civic center as Sam sang, I watched him lift his shirt every now and then to give us teasing flashes of bare belly, and I knew that his chest, his cock, his ass were the ones, of all men’s on earth, that I most wanted to devour.
I tease us both by chewing and licking the swell in his boxer briefs for a minute or two before peeling them down and letting the heft of his cock pop free. His dick’s long and thick, the kind that lean, rangy men like him tend to have. I drip honey on the rosy tip, delicately lap it off, then slide the whole length in—sword sliding into the scabbard meant for it—till I choke. I back off a bit, chew on the head a little, then start a regular rhythm along the shaft, with occasional tongue-swirls over the head and into the piss-slit. A man like me’s well-practiced, and in no time at all Sam’s getting close, fucking the back of my throat hard and fast. He’s making a lot of moaning music, good excuse for me to grab bondage tape and a bandana off the sideboard.
“About time,” he growls. He puts up a few sweet seconds of mock-resistance, just the way I like it, before I force the bandana between his teeth and knot it tightly behind his head. One, two, three, four layers of tape over his mouth, around his head, the end cut off with a kitchen knife. “Mmmm mmm,” he says, nodding, blinking at me as I smooth the shiny blackness over his lips.
The dishes go flying beneath my forearm. They hit the floor and shatter. Licked and gnawed rib-bones scatter over linoleum. But—the convenience of fiction again—no one needs to clean up. The fragments disappear with the sound of their shattering.
Table’s cleared now. I spin Sam around, bend him over the table, and spread his ass cheeks. They’re softly hairy, and the cleft is a puff of black smoke. I knead his buttocks, brush one fingertip between them. When I reach his hole, he tenses beneath my touch. I drop to my knees, bite one cheek, then the other. He grunts, clenches and unclenches his bound hands. The height of fantasy, a universe in which we both want me inside him.
His ass tastes as good as it smells—black walnuts, buckwheat honey, orchard grass, granite. I tease his hole only briefly, then push my tongue in as far as it will go. Beneath the muffling layers of tape, he’s shouting. He pushes his ass back against me, his hole spreads open a bit more, my tongue moves further inside.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God.” I think that’s what he’s saying. It’s hard to tell.
“Time for bed, Sam,” I say, abruptly rising to my feet. Obedient, the candles snuff out one by one. Crooking one finger under the chain of his slave collar, I grip his arm and pull him off the table and to his feet, then help him step out of the ankle-manacles of his peeled-down jeans and briefs.
He stands quietly before me, entirely naked now. Lean, muscular, furry—I can’t imagine a man being more desirable. Sometimes God does such fine work. Damnation, how long have I wanted him like this? Stripped, roped and taped, waiting for me to touch him again. I take his nipples between my fingers—gently now, because I know they’re raw. Our eyes meet. What other reward could the afterlife offer? How can there be a paradise without the flesh, its ardors and appetites? Sam hangs his head and presses it to mine. For a long time I simply stand there, soothing his nipples and kissing the top of his head.
In reality, despite my regular weight-lifting, I doubt that this next move would be possible, certainly not for very long—plus, at age forty-five, I have to watch my back, and lately a tendon in my left forearm is screwed, despite the glucosamine I pop like candy. But none of those quotidian concerns matters here. Loving Sam makes me feel manly and strong, young, dominant, protective. Wrapping one arm around his back, another under his knees, I lift him into my arms.
“I’ll take care of you,” I whisper into his ear. Sam nods. “Mmmm mmm,” he murmurs. I can feel the tension leaving his muscles. His head nestles in the space between my shoulder and my jaw.
I stand there in the dark for a full minute, feeling his breath against my neck. There’s a pattering against the window-glass. Sounds like the snow is shifting to ice. With any luck we’ll be snuggled in here together for days.
I carry Sam into the bedroom and lower him gently into flannel sheets. Blinds pulled down on the soft tick of ice, candles lit around the room. Sam’s eyes look moist in the candlelight, glistening like volcanic glass.
Off come my lumberjack boots, my jeans and briefs, and now I’m stretched out in bed beside him. Sam shivers—suddenly the room’s chilly—so I pull the sheets over us. We lie there together, listening to the ice, to the snowplow’s distant scrape returning. “You all right?” I ask, kissing the tape over his mouth, once, then twice. Sam rubs his face against my chin, against my lips. He nods. He’s still shivering, though, so I pull him close, our bodies stretched out together, chest to chest, belly to belly. He closes his eyes, then I close mine.
We’ve been dozing, I realize. The ice is still clicking, only yards away in the darkness. I reach for Sam, and he’s there, back to me now, rubbing his ass against my cock, his roped hands tugging on my belly hair. I wrap one arm around his chest, cup a pec, squeeze. With my other hand, I work his hard cock for a while, till he’s groaning and squirming in my embrace.
One fingertip up his ass. “Yeah? You want this, right?” Sam nods and keeps nodding, pushes back until my finger slides entirely in. A second, then, very carefully, a third. He’s still wet from the efforts of my tongue, so only a little spit’s needed. I work his hole gently—he’s very tight, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s never been fucked before, he’s been saving himself for a man who loves him as much as I do.
“Slow, slow, please Sir, slow?” I’m sure that’s what those tape-trammeled noises mean.
He’s ready now. “Slow, you bet, sweet boy,” I whisper. I grip his furry pec hard. It’s wet with sweat, forest moss after a rain. The smell of him washes over me—his pits, his crotch, the musk of his slowly opening ass. Freeze us here, in eternity, like the lovers on the Grecian urn, like the golden birds of Byzantium.
I pinch his nipple hard. Sam grunts. I slide my bunched fingers out of his ass, then push them in again. I slide them out a final time, bite his earlobe, whisper, “You ready to be fucked?”
More nods. “Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir. Please, Sir.”
My cockhead, all of its existence up till now far from him, beyond him, outside him, exiled. Pressed now against his hole. And now…and now…just the head inside him. Inside his tightness, his volcanic flesh. Home.
Very slowly I slide farther inside. Sam’s groan is continuous now. “All right?” I ask, shifting one hand to his hard-on, clamping the other over his tightly taped mouth. “Yes, Sir.” I can hear him inside my head, hear him begging for all of it. Sam rotates his hips, bucks back, and his ass swallows my cock whole.
He’s whimpering a little, hurting a little. “Easy, Sam, easy. Relax,” I soothe, licking the back of his neck. I hold him hard in my arms, keeping very still till he grows accustomed to being filled with me. We’ve waited all our lives for this, one man’s body inside the body of the other. This is the rightness of rain reaching the dark thirst of root hairs deep in the earth, the inevitability of sunflower fields shifting hour after hour toward the sun.
When Sam nods, I begin a slow fucking, pushing as deeply into him as our bodies’ laws will allow. I work his cock, I torture his tits, I grip his taped mouth and pull his head against my lips. I lick the sweat on his scalp, bite his neck and shoulders till they bruise—I want him marked tomorrow. I roll him onto his belly, spread his thighs, and mount him that way, my heavy ardor stretched out along his naked length. Then Sam’s on his back with his legs over my shoulders, our eyes interlocked as I shove inside him again and again, bending down to nip at his chest and lap the tape across his face. Then, finally, back onto our sides, jerking his cock with my spit-wet fist, his tightness maddening me. Before I know it, I’ve lost all control, I’m growling, he’s roaring, I’m pounding his ass as hard and as fast as I can.
Far too soon, my hand’s dripping with his semen and my semen’s filled his ass. We lie there, sides heaving, sweat-slippery, catching our breath. For a long time I stay inside him, letting my cock slowly soften. Meanwhile, I lift my hand to my mouth and lick off every pearl. The furnace hums on again. I pull the sex-rumbled blankets over us, pull Sam against me.
“You comfortable like this?”
“Mmmm mmm.”
Of course he is. Fiction—hands tied tight behind him, but no numbness, no aching shoulders. He’ll be fine roped and taped all night.
“Lots of ice out there. You’re gonna have to stay awhile. How about buckwheat cakes, maple syrup, and bacon for breakfast?”
“Mmmm!” Sam snuggles even closer. For the time we have left, we want no space between us.
I hold Sam till his breathing slows with sleep. Again I cup his hairy breast in my palm and feel his heart beat. I kiss his hair and whisper many things to him in the fitful candlelight. How much I wish him and his family well outside this room, how much pleasure it’s given me to listen to his music, admire images of him, love him from afar. How welcome the longing that star-worship allows such ciphers as I, what a surprise it’s been to find another Muse this late in life, albeit far-distant and likely never to be met. He sleeps peacefully on, while outside the snowplow scrapes by again, and the silence left in its wake says that the ice has stopped, our isolated idyll is ending, and the roads will be open soon.
Snowbound silence is more eloquent than most speech. Tonight it tells me that I am aging, that some lovers are lost before they are ever found, that some things—the things wanted most—are irremediably unreal, never to be possessed. The silence tells me that no one can escape the mundane, that tomorrow I will wake sober and alone, back to an existence where the greatest beauties remain intolerably far from me.
I slip from bed, careful not to wake Sam. I snuff the candles, then stand by the window and stare out over the fallen snow. The blue shadows thrown by the limbs of oaks are splayed fingers, arms thrown wide for an embrace. I sit on the bed-edge and savor Sam’s sleep, his dark eyebrows, his beard-stubbly face, the sound of his slow breath. The same world that almost always denies us what we most desire gives us this consolation, to imagine down to the tiniest detail what raptures our realities will never allow. Gently I touch his goateed chin and the black tape over his mouth. What I tell the silence is that these words are bonds, knots. To hold us together—two men who will never meet, whose passions are irreconcilable—to hold us here. What I tell the silence is that I will make my own miracles, make the moments that Fate will not.
The winter night does not reply. And so I sit here, studying my beloved in his sleep. Outside the snow stretches on, without mark or flaw this late at night, blank as what is left of a page after the story ends, after the mediation of syllables stops and there are no words left to stand between the writer and the world.
RUSHING TIDE OF SANITY
Charlie Vazquez
Manhattan: Winter, 2007
I lip-locked with a British punk stud in an East Village dive while Kirsty MacColl warned of chasing bad boys over the shitty speakers—she and I, apparently, both helpless in our ways. Shane’s sweat was a magnetic force that drew my lips to his neck, mouth and the bristle around his ears. His heaving core (like an alien about to burst out of his chest) and my long lapses between inhalations of dank air fused together like a courtship ritual dance of manic flightless birds. We left and resumed our noisy
pas de deux
in the cab’s backseat.
At his hotel, I initiated the first of many prickly kisses to follow; he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. He let me lead the dance, which I was used to doing anyway. I opened the two buttons holding his shirt up and it fell to the floor like a lopsided theater curtain; a crimson screen of animated tattoos came to life on the stage of his torso when the flickering red lights of the hotel across the street splashed their net of light across us. He kicked his shirt out of the way with his dirty boot and surprised me when he pulled me to him by my wrists, chest to chest.
Our mouths wrestled for dominion, neither of us willing to back down. I rested my hands on the top of his head when I gave in—melting had never felt better. That’s how I remember surrendering—I melted into him. It’s what I needed and I knew it—I was usually the boss. But not this time. No way. The sweaty bristle on his head was all the aphrodisiac I needed. This was the kind of man I idealized: a cocksucking warrior, a man-fucking descendant of Northern European barbarians who had his image burned into my crosshairs.
Shane shoved me against the wall and tore off my grimy T-shirt, the loud ripping signaling a bone-deep sense of awe and danger. He threw the useless cloth behind him, pulled me away from the wall, and pushed me backward onto the couch. Metal jangled. Magician’s hands. He handcuffed my wrists over my head, the cold metal stinging. It was done before I realized it, and the unexpected switch was an extraordinary delight: every aggressor has a unique style, and I would soon catch a fantastic glimpse of his. Little did I know I would stew in it.
As he bit me—
¡Maldita sea la madre!—
I was instructed to address my “boss” as Master Hawk. His advance was swift. The torture of his rough sucking and the scraping of his teeth on my skin sent me into soul-stirring distress. I writhed in equal parts misery and euphoria. The process of surrender began. Wave after wave of ancient music emanated from our cores and through our mouths: the tones of his slick and deep sucking—the ebbing. My guttural heaving for relief—the flowing. In tandem, we were in complete and complex bliss.