It’s ravishing, simply ravishing.
When the bright-yellow flows have ceased, I crack an egg on your head, slapstick if it weren’t so sexy. The contents ooze down over your pretty face, sullying what’s already appealingly imperfect. You’re so fucking happy that you look like an angel. Then you, cheekily, reach for an egg and crack it over my head in turn. It’s cold and gooey. Clearly, you’re not as submissive as all that. I think I’m falling in love.
I grab the container of yogurt and smear a chilly handful over your chest, then another on your belly, and you dip into the dairy and smear me in turn, and that’s when the giggling starts. Instead of two very naughty serious men, we have become two very naughty laughing boys.
Mutual masturbation ensues. And some kissing, fraught with the peril of salmonella.
After an extended cleanup, in which I carefully hose down the tub so neither of us will slip and kill himself—an odd demise to explain to a coroner, even in San Francisco—we chat for a while as you slowly get dressed.
“I don’t think,” you say in that irresistible accent of yours, “we’ll be doing this again. See, I find you fascinating, and I prefer not to have sex with people I actually like. I’m sorry, but…”
My mind glosses over the unearned compliment and goes straight to the “Oh, shit” moment.
After you leave, I jack off; you had come when we were in the tub, but I had never gotten around to it. It feels great, and is a dandy way to put off cleaning up the bathroom.
You’ve left your wringing-wet jockstrap behind, so there is some hope we’ll at least see each other sometime. I let it dry, but it retains a distinct stench—a rotten-egg smell, not the appealing stink of sex—and I end up washing it.
It’s not until the following day that I remember that some years back I published a story, “The Boy Who Read Bataille,” that contained a raw egg scene. I send it to you without rereading it. You write back that you were sad because the guys in the story don’t remain together, perhaps ironic in light of your having already told me that our little fandango, too, was a one-off.
I decide to let you make the next move. You don’t. Then, quite unexpectedly, after weeks of silence, you get in touch, just when I’m partway through writing a story about you and me, tentatively titled “Your Jock.” (I always assure folks that I do not in fact base my short stories on anything that’s really happened to me, but the authorial flesh is weak.)
I tell you that I’ve been wearing your jock, with its woven mantra of Bike Bike Bike, around the house, pissing in it, using it to wipe up my cum, in an attempt to restore its stinky faded glory. I find that very hot, my dick being where yours has been.
This apparently strikes a chord with you, as well. You propose going for a walk in Dolores Park on this warm February day, just for a chat, nothing more.
I meet you there, of course I do, you looking particularly sweet in bicycle shorts that calculatedly show off your hairy legs.
But I don’t even have time to ask you why, though you’ve told me you went to Oxford, your Facebook page says you were educated somewhere considerably less glamorous—hell, you’d lied about your age, too—before you grab my crotch and murmur to me that you want to get fucked.
So we walk back to my place and you, a mere ten minutes later, are sitting on my hard-on while wearing your jock. Your jock. There’s a certain amount of excessive bouncing, but as I look up at your face, it’s heaven, really it is. You come too quickly, but I don’t mind. What I do find disappointing is your telling me once again that you’re feeling weird about the sex because, well, you like me and you figure this will be the last time, no, really….
I do ask for the chance to bury my face in your armpit just once more. You seem never to use deodorant, which makes me very happy, and the smell will linger on my face for hours.
Days after that equivocal fuck, resigned to not having any further sex—much less messily egg-splatted sex—with you, I email you to invite you to go see a movie. Twice. No response.
And then a third email, just to see what’s up. I even tell you that I can take a hint, but I’ll give it one more shot. Again, no response from you. Hey. Maybe you’ve left town or found a monogamous boyfriend. But more probably, I’ve been unceremoniously dropped; I suppose I’m just too fascinating for my own good. It’s a shame you’re neither polite nor courageous enough to drop me a line, but then, I’ve always been a remarkably bad judge of character where crushes are concerned.
In the meantime, I’ve finished writing “Your Jock,” and read it at Perverts Put Out!, a local performance series that I host, dropping my pants at the end to show the audience that I am, yes, still wearing your athletic supporter. The audience loves it. Later, I even offer to email the story to you so you can read it, an offer you pretty fortunately don’t take me up on.
Weeks pass. The memory of you, like the thought of many another glorious trick of the past, fades into present lusts.
In time, I even stop jacking off to your picture.
Then one April day I realize, with a minor start, that the deadline for submitting stories to Best Gay Erotica fast approaches. I decide to revamp “Your Jock” and send it along. Which is when, through sheer serendipity, I run across a quote from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the avatar of—yes!—masochism. Venus in Furs and all that. “The moral of the tale is this,” sayeth he. “Whoever allows himself to be whipped deserves to be whipped.”
Since I’m getting horny rewriting the egg scene, I put an anonymous ad up on Craigslist, an ad almost identical to the one you originally answered. And—just like in one of my creaky stories—the first response that comes in is yours; you apparently didn’t even recognize the picture of my dick.
So you seemingly are still alive and well and at least sporadically horny. And—for whatever reason—now utterly disinterested in me. When I email a “What a coincidence!” response, I don’t expect to hear any more from you. And of course, I don’t. Not a word. Not even a “Give me back my fucking jock!”
And now this tale has reached its little foredoomed end, at least for now.
But I still have it, I do.
I’m wearing it now, while I finish working on the story. It’s pressing up against my cock.
Your jock. Your fucking jock.
Like some perverted piece of the True Cross.
Your jock.
My dick is hard as the proverbial rock.
And maybe I do deserve to be whipped.
BEFORE THE PLANE
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
When this guy asks me why I’m at the Phoenix, I say this may sound strange but I’m here because I know there’s no smoke. He wants to know if I read science books, or science fiction, or this other book that’s not really either one but it’s about the way people with mental illnesses were treated at the turn of the century and it’s very sad. It’s still sad, I say, maybe in a different way but it’s still sad. You’re right, he says.
This is the guy who came up and asked if I wanted to talk to him—I clocked him right away as someone with a speed problem, sitting by the door all jittery he was one of the other lonely characters in the bar and he wasn’t drinking either. Lonely in a different way because maybe it’s more obvious that he doesn’t belong—he’s older, and doesn’t fit any of the fashion types—he’s from Riverdale but he lives far out in New Jersey, he likes it better because of the trees. I know where Riverdale is because Andee worked there as a nanny in this enormous house that a married couple of anesthesiologists were renovating. Andee had a glamorous suite but I’m guessing this guy is from a different part of Riverdale, not the rarefied mansions but the working-class part he wanted to escape. He’s a writer too, he writes contracts for ConEdison. When I tell him why I’m at this bar, he wants to know if I’ve been to Christopher Street; sure it’s right where I’m staying but it seems kind of quiet. I might go to Ty’s later, he says, and I could drive you over there. No thanks, I say—I’m just going to walk around. Then he wants to know if I want to go to 311 Irving Plaza. What’s 311 Irving Plaza? It’s a gay bar, he found it on the Internet and we could walk over there.