Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:08:47 +0100
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: Nectar in a Sieve

Nectar in a Sieve

      I was exhausted. I had stayed up till four last night and gotten
up again at six in the morning, two hours later, so I could open up
the restaurant at six thirty. Now it was one in the afternoon. I was
near my stop on the bus and yawning ferociously while still feeling
the urge to remain in the waking world. I was full of longing. The air
around me crackled with unsatisfied desire.

     I pulled the cord and walked to the exit door.

     "You're not getting off," a man said. He was not much older than
me, and you could tell by his looks and the way he dressed that he was
hot for guys.

     "I'm not?" I said smiling.

     "No," he said. "Sit down." I did. "That's better," he said, took
my hand as if to shake it but held it as he smiled into my eyes.

     "Where are we going?" I asked.

     "Wherever we want to," he said, and kissed me before I could
resist even though we were on a public bus.

     "But we get off soon," he said breaking the kiss, and this time,
he pulled the cord.

     We got off the bus at Seventy-second Street and Broadway.

     "This way," he said, took me by the arm, and headed us towards
the river. His building stood just off West End Avenue.

      "Get undressed," he said, once we had come into the bedroom.

      I took off all my clothes, feeling my perfection as I exposed
myself. It felt like a dream.  I twisted, slithered, elongated myself.

     "Lie down," he said, and began stroking me until I fell asleep
with a sweet hard-on.

     Looking into his eyes as I opened mine made me feel so far away.

    He held me in his arms and moved inside me with infinite slowness.
I felt his warm breath on my neck and with every bit of myself I
yielded to him.

     "Yes," he whispered, aroused by my surrender.

     I felt his arousal and it thrilled me. I melted into him.

     "You belong to me," he said. "I own you."

     "You possess me," I said. "I want to be yours. I need to be."

     He kissed me, grinding his open mouth into mine and filling me.

     Slowly he undulated in and out of me touching my lightning rod
every time, making me glow and then fragment into the thousand lights
that fall from a luminous arc in my mind. It flared and then dissolved
as the next chromatic wave covered the shore I had become.

     Each time he inched back into me, he touched my tongue with his,
embraced mine with his, and then pulled away as he arched himself out
of me, each time renewing my desire to feel him come into me.

     I moaned and sighed and groaned and stared into his eyes so
intensely it could only be I was giving my eyes to him. I felt his
take their place in the sockets that had held mine and that yearned
for him to fill them.

     I smiled from the center of my body. He wrapped his hand around
my branch and then played a light tattoo on it with his fingertips. I
writhed as we came and fell exhausted into joyful embraces.



     All the next day, at work, I felt him like a happy shadow inside me.



     She would not have understood even if she had given me the time
to explain. But it was not like her to do that. Instead of reaching
for understanding, she preferred picking a fight. There is a certain
satisfaction in feeling betrayed, a sense of righteousness. She
cultivated it. But I had enough. I knew her moods and the violence she
was capable of.

I took my leather windbreaker from the couch and zipped it up over my
naked chest, forgetting my shirt, and bolted out the door before she
even knew what had happened.

     Outside the air was cold and the cold leather rubbed against my
bare chest, sensitive because clean-shaven, one of her fetishes. I was
through with it. The cold leather against my bare skin chaffed my cold
nipples. I was punishing myself for wanting her. I was punishing
myself for deserting her.

     The vibrations of the phone stashed in the pocket of my jeans
sent a current along my thigh. I saw it was her. I didn't answer. The
wind was strong. The air was dense with the possibility of snow.

     My room looked out over the river. I sat by the window and smoked
a joint and watched as the storm took charge of the world. She called
several times again. But I didn't answer and she stopped.

     In the morning thick snow blankets transformed the streets. I
would not be going to work today.

     It was the first time in a long time that I awoke in my own bed.
She was not next to me, and I did not have to bring her her coffee.
If I wanted coffee, I had to go to the cafe on the corner. I showered
and shaved and dressed. Despite the weather, I dressed lightly: jeans,
moccasins, the same leather windbreaker. I wore a black t-shirt  under
it. No hat, no gloves. The cold is a discipline I submit to.

     I sat at the counter, hunched over a black coffee wondering what
I would do now. I am young. I am good-looking. I am not vain or
boastful. It is a fact everyone confirms. I'm not sure how I feel
about it. I have always been able to trade on my looks. I have never
been without a job or a place to stay or something to eat or people
who want to hang out with me or make out with me or even support me
because of my looks. When I say I trade on my looks, I mean it
literally, and I'm not sure what exactly I trade away. I fear it is
something important, because I feel empty. I am skin-deep.

     What did I trade? Something real for an idea, for a stance, for a
distorted shadow of myself.

     "Where are you?"

      "What?"

      "Where are you?"

     He was smiling a friendly smile, concerned. He was not the kind
of man, I felt, just by looking at him and hearing his voice, that you
could brush off.

     I smiled deprecatingly.

     "Nowhere," I said.

     "Come with me," he said. "I'll take you somewhere."

     "A motorcycle," I said, once we were outside. "In this weather?"

     "You have nothing to worry about. I know how to handle it."

     He did.

     He lived over the park. I stood by the window and looked out over
the fields of snow and the boughs of the trees, brightened by the
traces of snow they supported.

     He took me near and kissed me. I responded giving myself in a long kiss.

     "I want to watch you dance," he said.

     At that moment it did not feel like it was a strange thing to
say, and I danced like Salome before Herod.

     "Strip as you dance. Tease me."

     It was what I wanted to do.

     He gazed in awe at me. I felt his gaze uncover me. It was what
she withheld from me, her gaze. Who was she looking at when she was
looking at me? How I had been inverted, converted into coveted images
– reflections that obliterated the thing itself!

     I removed my t-shirt, my boots, my jeans. I showed myself to him
in black briefs, a thin bikini that clung to my hips as if from inside
my skin.

     He took me by the hips and drew me to him and pressed me to him
as I rubbed my veiled cock against his tough jeans.

     I looked up at him and groaned. He turned me round and I felt my
back cupped in him. He slipped his hand under the band of my briefs
from behind. I shivered. He took my balls in the palm of his hand and
played the stops of my cock with his fingers. He took me to the edge
but did not let me fall. I walked back into the meadow with him and
lay down beside him on a bed of summer grass and slowly undressed him
and caressed each newly revealed naked part of him. I breathed kisses
into his mouth and stroked his chest and legs. I took him in my mouth
and felt the electricity of his strength enter me and become my
strength, too.


     I thought of him with longing the next days when he did not call.
I felt how different the place he lived in was from my shabby room by
the river. We might become equals for an erotic night's pick-up, but
in the world of daylight and power, I could not approach him on his
terms.

     I could not be anybody worth being if I could not be some sort of
independent force myself. I was looking for myself. I had to find
myself. I had gotten lost. Or what is worse, I had thrown myself away.

     I walked up town. The night was clear; the moon, bright. I had
wasted it in a movie house. Now my head was weighed down with misery.
I felt the emptiness with an empty apprehension that I had fallen into
a niche and would be guided by it forever. I needed rescue and
despaired of it.


     I'd worked in the bookstore a week, and from the beginning, the
manager made me uncomfortable. He was young and slender. He wore silk
ties and double-breasted suits, and he carried them gracefully. He was
not conventionally handsome, but his features were compelling, and his
bearing was easy but never at ease. He was reserved and showed no lack
of self-esteem. It was the middle of the afternoon. He motioned me
into a vestibule between the selling floor and the stockroom.

     "You're fired," is all he said.

     "I don't understand," I said.

     "You don't need to understand."

     "I'm new and I'm slow," I said, "but I'll get better once I know
where everything is."

     "This is not a discussion. You can pick up your check at the main
office where you were hired."

     He signaled with his thumb and first finger, turning his palm
upwards, that I should go. I left, aching from the dismissal as if I
had been slapped around.

     I went home and slept. I slept for a day. I was exhausted from
trying to hold two jobs. I still worked as a waiter on the Sunday
breakfast shift and Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.


      Sunday afternoon, after work, I walked through the park and took
the bus home the rest of the way. As the force of the motor rumbled in
the seat beneath me, I daydreamed of life-changing encounters.