Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 11:06:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jerome Higgins <mmmbreather@yahoo.com>
Subject: Rebound

	Rebound boy, I thought. My fingers curled into a fist and knocked
on the front door of the gray ranch with the white Cherokee in the
driveway. That's all this is. Rebound. I shivered on the porch, waiting for
him, the coming storm stirring my hair.
	He was even smaller than I expected. When he opened the door,
stepping backward and pulling it toward him, I had to look down at him.
Five foot eight, he said on the phone, one fifty-five, but I hadn't
expected five foot eight to be so small. I could pick him up and cradle
him. Narrow shoulders, narrow hips, a button-down shirt tucked into tight
jeans...I avoided looking at his face as I entered the house, but accepted
the sweeping hug he pushed on me. "Mark, hi," he says. "It's so good to
finally meet you."
	"You too, Tyler," I said, unsure of how to answer that. We'd been
emailing for a week, had spoken on the phone twice. He instigated it,
mailing me after seeing my profile picture on a messenger program. I wasn't
looking for this. Or at least I kept telling myself that. I removed my
backpack and took out the two six-packs I'd stuffed in it, handing one to
him and following him with the other to the kitchen. The fridge was empty.
	"Sorry I don't have any food in the house," he said. "I'd offer you
something but those storms the other night took out the power to the whole
neighborhood for eighteen hours and all my food went bad. I had to pitch it
all."
	"Oh," I said. "It's no problem. I'm not hungry." Which was a lie.
I'd been hungry for two weeks, hungry and unable to do anything about it.
When Jim had handed me my heart on a platter, he seemed to have handed me
my ability to eat along with it. I'd lost ten pounds in the past fourteen
days, ten pounds I didn't need to lose. I even had to tighten my watchband.
Beer I could still do though, as I'd proved to myself, spending at least
half my evenings since Jim had left me in a state of morose inebriation.
	Tyler pulled me by the hand through the house, showing me all the
rooms, the plants, picking up a small framed photo on the computer desk in
one of the bedrooms and handing it to me. It was dark, and I couldn't see
it well-a man and a blonde child, sitting at a table with fake wood
paneling on the wall behind them. "My dad," he says, "and that's me when I
was four. I was blonde."
	"Mm," I say, handing the picture back to him. "Cute." He'd
mentioned on the phone that his father had died in front of him when Tyler
was fifteen. A massive coronary: God had posed his fingers as if in
preparation to flick a speck of dust away, reached down, and flicked out
the life of a man instead. Just like that. Tyler looked at the picture for
a split second before putting it back on the desk.
	I could feel his nervousness, but stayed distant from it, not
extending any extra effort to put him at ease. I laughed when he brought me
down to the basement; he'd hesitated at the top of the stairs, unsure of
whether to end the house tour with the ground floor or bring me down, and
then decided to show me the basement. I could almost smell it coming from
him, the lust mixed with the nervous perspiration. The basement was filled
with dirty laundry and workout equipment.  "Nice," I said. "You brought me
down here to show me your dirty laundry." I laughed again, genuinely, and
he laughed in response, relieved.
	We walked back up the stairs and settled on the couch in the living
room. The blankness of the forty-five inch television stared at us and
Tyler abruptly stood again. "Beer?"
	"Please," I answered, but not too quickly. I watched his back as he
walked into the kitchen, my eyes narrowed cattily. In the picture he'd
emailed me when I asked, shallowly, what he looked like, he was shirtless,
posed in the bedroom he'd taken me through a few moments before. The camera
had sat on the adjoining bathroom's sink, lower than his waist, so that he
looked down into it, and thus my surprise to find that he was so small;
he'd looked larger. And those muscles, my god: scanning my memory quickly,
I couldn't find any man I'd slept with whose body was so perfectly,
symmetrically built and sculpted. Clearly, he had good genes, and clearly,
he'd worked hard to take advantage of them.
	He returned to the couch with a couple beers and handed me one.
"Thanks," I answered, our fingers grazing together against the coldness of
the bottle. He sat against the pillows at the other end of the couch, and
watched me take a long drink from the beer.
	"Your picture doesn't do you justice," he said. "You're beautiful."
	"Oh," I said, and waved my hand dismissively. "Thanks." I took
another long swallow of beer and lowered the bottle. I've never been good
at accepting compliments. "You're cute too." Or giving them.
	"Am I what you expected?" he asked.
	I looked at him full in the face for the first time. I wasn't sure
why I hadn't been able to look at him until just then; I never looked at
people directly upon first meeting them on their turf, instead looking at
my surroundings and trying to understand the person through the way they
kept their environment. So far, Tyler's house had said about him that he
was fastidious, neat, and stuck somewhere in the business-professional look
of the late eighties. There was a hint of sterility about everything, the
solid oak bed frame, the maroon towels and gold fixtures in the bathroom,
the gray carpet, gray couch, empty bottles of Bailey's Irish Creme on
the top of the refrigerator.
	His face, when I looked at him, looked different from the picture
he'd sent. Not remarkably different, but-tanner, for one thing, and
thinner. His eyes were dark, and I liked that. They regarded me with a
seriousness I hadn't seen anyone look at me with in a long time, and I
liked that too. I smiled at him, answered his question: "I didn't expect
anything," I said.
	"Why's that?" he asked. "Don't expect anything good and you won't
be let down?" He smiled and looked down into his beer bottle.
	"No, no," I said. "Not at all. I just-I'm not-" I stopped, unsure
how to word what I was thinking without offending him. This was a man
looking for love. I could tell by the hunger in his eyes, by the fact that
he'd emailed me out of nowhere, by the willingness he had to ask me
questions about myself and listen to me talk on the phone about Jim, which
I hadn't meant to do. But the pain was so recent and so real that I'd
opened too easily to Tyler's gentle questions, failing at the attempt to
cut myself off from thinking out loud about where I went wrong with
Jim. Love was one thing I was not looking for. Tyler had told me he'd been
alone for nine months, recovering from a three-year relationship. He was
ready for another one. Ripe for the picking. I wasn't. But I didn't want
him to know my assumptions about him, because if they turned out to be
false, he might have been offended.
	Instead of trying to explain myself, I finished the beer and stood,
noticing that he'd finished his already too. "Want another?" I asked, and
walked to the kitchen without waiting for an answer. I didn't feel bad
helping myself from the fridge; it was my beer anyway.
	"Yeah," he answered, and I could hear a note of sadness in his
voice that I was immediately both uncomfortable with and moved by; it was
something I felt myself and couldn't put into words either, could only
inflect what I said with the tone of it. Outside, through the open kitchen
window, I could hear the storm coming closer, could hear the wind rustling
the spring-new leaves of the small ash and maple trees in the subdivision.
	I returned with two beers, sat down and looked at him again. He
really was cute. Handsome, rather, actually. Though with a touch of
little-boy cute. The Italian genes he claimed to have were more evident in
person than in the picture. There was definitely a vulnerability about him,
although I wasn't interested in putting my finger on it. Not yet. All I was
interested in tonight, I told myself over and over, was getting laid. The
easiest way to get over somebody is to get under somebody. Right?
	But he had turned out to be such a damned nice guy. My bullshit
detector, usually alarmingly accurate (and alarmingly inaccurate when it
had come to Jim), had not gone off once in the time we'd been talking, both
online and on the phone, and now in person. I felt kind of bad,
actually-even though I hadn't done anything yet. I hated when someone used
me, and here I was about to use this guy to get myself over someone
else. But not bad enough to stop myself from doing it. I'd warned him. He
knew the wound was fresh.
	"So how about those video games?" I asked, and lowered myself to
the floor with the backpack. The premise for our getting together tonight,
so necessary and yet so dispensable, was that we'd toss back a few beers
and play some video games. He was thinking about getting a game system, but
didn't know which platform to go with; I'd offered to bring over my old
Playstation and a bunch of games so he could check it out. I unpacked it
and set it up on the floor, leaning around the back of the monstrous
television to find the red, yellow, and white inputs. I hooked everything
up and turned it on. When I turned back around, he was squatting down right
next to me on the floor, and our eyes were suddenly level, his burning with
some intensity I didn't want to see. I felt a flush of heat from his
presence, turned away quickly. I could not afford to get emotionally
involved with this guy; I wanted the body, not the soul. Not now.
	I drained my beer, helped myself to another. Not having eaten all
day was taking its effect already; I felt mildly buzzed. Tyler turned on
the television and the Playstation and put a game in; I stood in the
doorway between the kitchen and the living room drinking the beer and
watching him plug the controllers in. "How about this Tekken game?" he
said. "You gonna show me how to play it?"
	"All right." I sat down next to him again, keeping some distance
between us. What the fuck was I doing here? I thought suddenly, and pressed
my palm into my forehead for just a moment, closing my eyes. Only the third
beer, and already I felt a little crazy, a little driven, ready to strip
Tyler and suck his cock all night, substituting the reality of his flesh
against mine for the memory of Jim's.
	"Are you okay?" he asked, concern in his voice.
	I lowered my hand and smiled. "Yeah, sorry," I said. "I get these
sort of miniature migraines sometimes, like this flash of intense headache,
and then it goes away right away." It wasn't a lie; I'd been getting
cluster migraines since I was in the seventh grade. I just didn't happen to
have had one right then.
	"Oh," he said. "Can I get you anything?"
	"No, thanks, I'm fine," I said. I drank more beer. Already, the
room was hazy at the edges. I was going to have to start forcing myself to
eat more; this beer on an empty stomach, while it was fun at the time, was
just unhealthy.
	Once the game had loaded, I took the first-person control and gave
Tyler the second one. "Okay," I said, looking down at the gray hunk of
plastic in my hands. It struck me that I hadn't looked at his hands yet,
and that until I did so, I wouldn't let him touch me. I swallowed, ready to
make the first move. I put down my control and scooted closer to him, put
my hands over his. "Here's what you want to do," I said, looking down at
his hands. "If you want to punch, press these two buttons." I put my thumb
over his and depressed the square and triangle buttons. "If you want to
kick, it's these two." I moved our thumbs over to the X and circle
buttons. "Combinations are this..." and I finished walking him through the
controls, never looking at his face, examining through my instructions the
skin of his hands, the shape of his fingers, the muscles in his palms. I
could feel him breathing on me, and his presence combined with his
beautiful hands was making me hard. Hands. So important to me, and for
reasons I could only vaguely understand, reasons I didn't want to shine a
light on, their association with the darkness inside me too close for
comfort.
	"I'll be back," I said, and stood unsteadily. I took a moment to
settle into myself, lose the dizziness, and then walked to the bathroom,
leaving Tyler sitting tensely and almost breathlessly on the living room
floor.
	There were five bottles of cologne lined up at the edge of the
sink. I glanced at them, saw the bottle second closest to the edge, and
immediately looked away from it. Acqua Di Gio. Armani. Jim's scent. I
immediately stopped breathing, afraid for a moment even to deal with the
possibility of inhaling the slightest whiff of it. I emptied my bladder,
washed my hands. I could hear through the door that Tyler had started a
game, the bass of his surround-sound system thumping under my feet with
each blow to his or his computer opponent's character.  I looked at myself
in the mirror, for a frozen instant hating my reflection. The dark hair,
flopping over my forehead in a way my lovers thought sexy-I impulsively
wanted to shave it off, to make myself ugly, because gorgeous, as I'd said
to Jim when he'd called me that, got me nowhere I wanted to be. I turned
away from my visage in the mirror, rashly picking up the Armani and
uncapping it. I closed my eyes, inhaled the scent of it like a drug, held
my breath. Yes, those were tears swelling my eyes from inside. And I hated
them too. Hated the Armani, hated myself, hated Jim and Tyler and sex and
all of life. To smash the smooth glass of this bottle into the mirror, to
shatter my reflection, replace the spring scent with the iron tang of
blood-but it passed, and left me with an emptiness surrounded by a lungful
of the light, spring-rain scent I associated so strongly with Jim and with
the love I'd felt for him, the love he wouldn't let himself want.
	I capped the bottle and replaced it on the counter. I glanced at
myself again. My eyes were red. I put my fingers to my lips, realizing I
was drunker than I'd thought. I switched off the light and left the
bathroom.
	Tyler sat cross-legged on the carpet, entranced by the fight
onscreen. I picked up the other control and hit a button, which now gave me
control over the computer opponent he'd been battling. "Hey," he
said. "Missed you."
	"I'll bet," I said, and promptly kicked his character's ass.
	"Christ," he said. "You've played this a lot."
	"Sorry," I answered. "I'll go easy on ya." I smiled at his profile
and he turned to look at me again. His face, hard for a moment after I'd
beaten him, softened, and he smiled in return.  We played the game for a
while, battling one another onscreen as lust and revulsion battled inside
me. I hated being used, unless I was in just the right mood for it-the
right blend of masochistic desire and willingness to suck another human's
pain, if only for a few moments, right into my very flesh. I didn't think
Tyler was quite up for that, and that was all I had for him. I needed so
badly to let it go, and clearly this gorgeous body sitting next to me would
be willing to share itself with mine...but at what price? And why was I so
callous as to think of him as a gorgeous body, rather than a human being,
possessed of his own passions and pain and love and joy?
	I'd finished off one of the six-packs by the time we finished
playing Tekken, and Tyler was on the fifth beer of the other. He offered me
the last bottle, and I hesitated before taking it, knowing already that I
was stuck here for the night even if we didn't get naked and hedonistic. I
was too far gone to get behind the wheel of a car; while I wouldn't have
minded the obliteration of my own body, I wasn't willing to risk hurting
anyone else. Except Tyler. Why?  I blurrily turned off the Playstation
after kicking his ass for about the twentieth time, put in South Park. He
watched me, and his eyes on me felt both good and bad: good in that they
looked at me with desire, which I needed, and bad in that they looked at me
with real hunger, which I also needed-but from someone else. From the one
person who would not look at me that way. Who hadn't, not once in all the
time I'd been with him. God, what had I been thinking? Mentally, I pounded
my head against a wall, knowing that the imaginary wall was Jim, all of
him, his heart, his soul, even his body. I squeezed my eyes shut again, and
felt Tyler's hand on my arm. I opened them quickly, exhaled.
	"What's wrong?" he asked, leaning in to me.
	"Nothing," I said, turning my face away.
	"What were you thinking about?"
	"Jim." The word escaped my lips before I could stop it. "He-" I
stopped, too drunk to articulate what I wanted to say to Tyler, that I had
finally realized over the past two weeks that I was in love with Jim, that
I had been in love with him from the moment I saw him at the Comet, that I
knew he would never love me and that without that, my flesh felt cold and
sterile with fear.
	"Hey," Tyler said. "It's okay." He put his hand on the side of my
face and I looked at him. Sympathy. Light. Compassion.
	"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm getting over it. It just takes time."
	"It's all right. I know. Don't worry about it."
	I swallowed the lump in my throat. "Thanks." Ugh, I thought,
wishing I wasn't drunk, knowing that though the pain was slower, duller
through the alcohol, it was still there. Still there. And Tyler was being
so good to me. So patient. I could hardly stand it. I knew why he was
willing to do this, willing to put up with this. He didn't just want
sex. He wanted more. He wanted more. Who was doing who the favor here?
	South Park had loaded, and the silly music filled the room. I
smiled, felt the pain at my center turn slightly, go deeper so that later,
it would be that much harder to work out. But for now, for now, I felt
better.
	We played the game and I thought about Jim, about his
animal-in-pain blue eyes, the irises so large and perfect in his face, the
gentleness with which he'd told me that he wasn't ready for any kind of
commitment, the tone of his voice-soothing, beautiful, the kind of sound
one could fall asleep in, offering a security that felt as real as the
sensation of warmth that emanated from his flesh-but it wasn't real. I was
foolish. He didn't want what I wanted.  I launched a cow onto Tyler's
character, and as the top half of the screen slowly turned red and the
character spewed a string of childish obscenities, Tyler gave my arm a
shove, sufficient enough in my inebriated state to knock me over onto the
floor, where I lay laughing. South Park was so ridiculous, it really
was. And I needed that. I'd spent almost the entire past two weeks, in my
sleep, at work, while I struggled in vain to get down any food, in my free
time-thinking about Jim, and all I really needed was somebody to shove me
over onto the floor. I lay there staring up at the ceiling, laughing
helplessly, knowing that if I didn't stop soon, the laughter was going to
turn into its opposite. Tyler hovered over me and tickled me, and I curled
on my side, struggling to get away from his prying fingers, losing,
laughing, gasping, finally escaping.
	"God," I panted, "my bladder is going to explode!" I stood, still
laughing, and stumbled toward the bathroom.
	Once there, I stood swaying over the toilet, the piss pouring out
of me and the bottle of Acqua Di Gio on the counter daring me to pick it up
again, to inhale and to let the power of scent on memory to force me back
into Jim's bed. I flushed, washed my hands, left the bathroom without
touching the bottle. My shoulder slammed into the doorframe on the way out
of the bathroom. I was drunker than I thought. Seven beers, and here my ass
was just about on the floor.  Tyler had a mixed drink of some sort when I
went back out to the living room. I picked it up and sniffed. Orange juice
and something...definitely not gin. Vodka maybe? No. I took a sip. Sake.
	"Lord, boy," I said to him. "Don't you know the rule?"
	"What rule?"
	"Beer then liquor, never sicker?"
	"Yeah," he said. "But I've got a fast metabolism. I've already
burned up the first couple beers."
	"Oh," I said. Of course. With a body like his, all muscle, no fat,
of course he burned alcohol faster. And of course I was drunk, and he
wasn't. Embarrassing. I hated that. "Well," I said, seeing that he was
getting his butt kicked by gobbling turkeys on the screen, "you want to
listen to some music or something while we play?" This kid needed some
guidance in the realm of video games, but I didn't feel like it just
then. Kid. What was I thinking? He had five years on me. He was thirty.
Thirty and with the most perfect body I was likely to ever sleep with. If I
slept with him. Which I wanted to do, even more now that I was drunk. Why
kid? The vulnerability, likely. Hunger does that. Reduces us to our base
instincts.
	I flipped through the CD booklet I had in my bag, found a Madonna
mix I'd burned a while ago. It was full of remixed tracks of her more
recent work, none of the old stuff except for the beautiful first notes of
"Like a Prayer" warped into a dance track at the end of the CD. Tyler took
the CD from me and put it into the player. We played a few more rounds of
South Park through the revamped version of American Pie, and then I dropped
the controller and sat behind him. I raised my hands up to his shoulders as
if in a trance when the first sounds of "Frozen" filled the room, rubbed
them gently. He moaned softly and the controller fell from his hands. His
head tilted forward.
	He murmured something, and I leaned my face in close to his to hear
it. "That feels so nice," he said.
	"Good," I answered. God, his muscles were incredible. I probed all
over his back with my fingertips, feeling where the muscles connected, the
heaviness and resistant springiness of them. I pressed my palms flat into
the center of his back, felt radiating heat surging through my palms. He
murmured again as I worked my hands further down, pressed the heels of my
palms against the hardness of his lower back...I worked the shirt out of
the jeans, lifted it up, put my hands on his bare skin. Warm.
	He reached up to unbutton the shirt; I followed his flesh with my
hands, around his ribs, up his sides, to his nipples. Both were hard; I
squeezed gently and then rubbed at the muscles of his chest, ran my hands
down. Perfect abs. I could feel all of them. Even his obliques were defined
under my fingertips. He came to the last button and I helped him shrug the
shirt off, and once it was off, I planted my lips on his neck. Madonna's
crystalline voice poured out of the surround-sound, filling my head: "If I
could melt your heart..." I licked up the side of Tyler's neck, sucked
gently on the cord of muscle leading from behind his ear down the side of
the neck to attach at the sternum and clavicle, following its progress with
my palms. His eyes were closed, his head tilted. He moaned.
	"Frozen" morphed into "The Power of Goodbye" as I worked my magic
on Tyler. I knew that even though he was cute and had a phenomenal body
that I had something different, something he wanted, something many, many
men wanted. I couldn't say exactly what it was, and neither could they-it
was buried too deeply inside me. It had to do with art, and pain, and the
way suffering makes your eyes look in certain lights. And it wasn't like I
didn't have a good body and face myself, especially now that I'd lost ten
pounds and the definition of my muscles was that much clearer. I was no
Tyler in the muscle department, but I had a good frame, linebacker
shoulders my brothers used to say, and I lifted occasionally. But there was
something else, something that I rarely saw in other people but when I did
I wanted them so badly it ached, like a cavity. And the fact that I
possessed this thing as well made no difference. Seeing it in others-seeing
that they had some center that no one else would ever touch, no matter how
deeply or persistently a pair of reaching hands was willing to dig-made me
recognize it in myself, but if anything, I felt more ambivalent about it
seeing it elsewhere. Yes, I wanted to dig for the center of someone like
me, but as for reaching my own, I could not care less. I wasn't willing to
go there. Which is what made it that much more appealing for others. Except
Jim. Jim, who caught glimpses now and again, saw more of that center than
anyone had in ages, and who changed his mind at the last minute and told me
he didn't want it after all. I choked down a half-sob as I worked on
Tyler's shoulders, the pain of the moment Jim had said he didn't want to be
together suddenly as fresh as it had been the second it happened.
	The extremity of emotion passed; I pushed Tyler down onto the floor
so that I could really dig into the muscles of his entire back, could press
my palms into his lats, could even get a few cracks and pops out of his
spine. I had studied massage technique, had idly dreamed of getting
licensed for several years, but more school was the last thing I wanted.
Maybe sometime. Right now, though, what I could do was something my friends
begged for, a free alignment, a sucking out of the tightness and tension.
My hands often burned and tingled for hours after shoving all that energy
around, especially in someone who I had never worked on or hadn't worked on
in some time. It was so worth it to me to see how they carried themselves
after I'd finished with them, as opposed to the way they walked beforehand:
the shoulders not so drawn up, the neck not so stiff with tension. That
some of the negative energy moved from their bodies into mine was only
mildly concerning. What I wanted was to be a sponge for someone else's
sensation; always, always, I was starved to feel what sensation was like
for someone else. And that quality made me a phenomenal lover, and I knew
it. Not one single man I'd slept with had failed to tell me that I was the
best lay he'd ever had. And they couldn't have all been lying or feeding my
ego.  Tyler, now, was practically drooling on the carpet. I'd worked out
the major knots in his back, an easier task on him than on most since the
muscles were so perfectly defined and I could tell exactly what I was
doing. I pressed my palms into his lower back on either side of his spine
and worked my way up in pulses, pressing and releasing, spreading out the
pressure so that it never concentrated too heavily in one spot. I found the
nexus of tension, carefully placed my hands, and instructed that he breathe
out as I press down. Straddling him, I gently began to put my weight onto
my palms, slow at first, and then faster. Soon I had reached the spot
where, intuitively, I knew to crush the muscles together and upward, the
perfect release of stress always accompanied by the crackling sound of the
fluid around the spine being released. I cracked his back in four places,
and he moaned every time, gasped, breathed: "God, that's so good, oh my
God, where did you learn that, fuck, oh God..." until my ego was thoroughly
placated, until the energy I'd expended to turn him into a limp noodle was
well worth it. That was my pleasure: making someone else feel differently
than they had before I came into contact with them. Preferably better. I
loved to suck it up.
	And, thinking of sucking, now that Tyler was putty in my hands, I
wanted to do more, to take him to another level of pleasure, to get him to
the point where he'd be begging for me, for my flesh, incapable of stopping
the compulsive need. I gently rolled him over and straddled him. A Kruder
and Dorfmeister mix of Madonna spilled out of the speakers and around us,
and I ran my hands over his naked chest, my fingertips lingering on his
nipples. I leaned down to his face, his eyes looking up into mine with
complete trust, and I kissed his mouth. I ran my fingers over his eyebrows,
over his cheeks, put both hands on the sides of his face, angled him so
that I could kiss him with maximum lip and tongue contact. I ran my hand
around to the back of his head, pulled his mouth harder into mine, and he
responded by raising his hips beneath me. My jeans were uncomfortable now,
my erection pounding inside them. I ended the kiss slowly, working my mouth
down to Tyler's neck. He pulled at my shirt as I kissed his chest, sucked
on his nipples. I let him take my shirt off, and then leaned into him and
pressed our naked chests together.
	"I want you," he whispered, and I could hardly hear it over the
music. "God, Mark, you are so beautiful. Just don't stop, baby."
	I had no intention of stopping. I worked my way down his chest,
down to his navel, used my hands to spread his legs apart and knead his
inner thighs. I moved them inward to his crotch as I moved my mouth down,
and then rubbed his erection with my fingertips. I placed my mouth over
where I could feel the head of his cock under the jeans, and I breathed
slowly outward there, warming the fabric and what was underneath with the
heat and humidity of my breath. Tyler sighed the word "oh" slowly, and I
undid the snap at the top of his jeans. I kissed his perfectly muscled
stomach while I undid his fly, moved my hands until I had his cock
free. Immediately, and unwillingly, I compared it with Jim's: longer but
thinner. Tyler was almost a good eight inches. He'd be as difficult to
deep-throat as Jim had, but for another reason. Jim's cock had been so
thick it was hard not to hurt him with my teeth, but after a little
practice, I had mastered it. This cock, this cock of Tyler's, this cock was
beautiful in its own right. I licked the length of it, put my lips over the
head and teased him with my tongue. He was groaning now, moving his hips. I
tugged gently at his jeans and he took the hint, raising his hips so that I
could pull the pants down and out of my way.
	After his pants were off, I moved up to his mouth again, kissed
him. His fingers worked frantically at my jeans, and I helped him, undoing
the button and the zipper and freeing my cock from its restriction by the
fabric. Tyler reached down to touch me, but i wasn't ready yet and I cut
myself off from moaning with lust even though the pleasure I felt from his
touch on my stomach tingled through my whole body. I left my jeans on,
licked my way back down his stomach to that glorious eight inches.
	If I tried to explain what it is about sucking cock that is so
fulfilling, I have the feeling that the very fulfillment I get from it
might disappear, but I always try to figure it out anyway as I'm doing
it. To feel it pulse between my lips, to move my tongue all around the
head, to feel the body behind it pushing itself into my mouth: heaven. I
always wait for the first few pushes, let him think that's all the further
I can take it into my mouth, and then with a gentle sucking, I swallow the
whole thing, no matter the size, no matter the width. I learned long ago
how to suppress the gag reflex, and now having an entire cock inside my
mouth and throat, my nose buried in the flesh of the abdomen, my chin
hitting balls, is one of life's greatest pleasures: the gasp of shock and
intense pleasure that comes from the mouth of my lover is bliss.
Ecstasy. This is where I find myself in sex: a beautiful cock as far in my
mouth as it will go, my tongue rubbing it, my hands kneading the inner
thighs, the sounds a man makes when he discovers just how far I can go.
	Tyler, I could tell, was going to come in my mouth if one of us
didn't stop, and soon. Which would have been very unfulfilling. His
movements of thrusting into my mouth became more intense, and I felt with
my tongue the cum starting to move up to fill his cock. Instantly, he
pulled away from me and shuddered softly, pulled his shoulders back. He
hadn't had an orgasm yet. He leaned down to kiss me and immediately
straddled me, his hands pressing my shoulders into the floor. I struggled
out of my pants and he kissed me even more passionately, reached down while
keeping his mouth on mine and wrapped his hand around my cock. Rather than
the soft moan I had expected to escape my throat, a cry came forth instead,
and I bit it back just a bit too late. "Baby, are you all right?" Tyler
asked, immediately letting go of my cock and wrapping his arms around my
body, cradling my head. I shook once, twice, fought as hard as I could to
keep myself from falling apart in his arms, and I won, even as the sound of
pain I'd made echoed in both our ears.
	"I'm fine," I said, pretending I had been suppressing a cough,
which I now let go. "Just let me suck your cock." It was all I wanted. All
I'd ever want. All I could think about while I was doing it was what I was
doing. Nothing else. Everything went away but the flesh in my mouth.  I
rolled us over and started to lick my way down his chest, but he pulled me
back up to look at his face. "What is it?" he asked.
	I shook my head, again pressed my lips to his chest. He let me this
time, but unwillingly, lying there as if someone were forcing him to stay
down, as if he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to be there. I ignored this,
attacked his cock again, swallowing it almost entirely, pressing my lips
hard around it as I drew my mouth up and down the length of it. It wasn't
as hard as it had been before. Had he come without my knowing it somehow,
discreetly palmed the coursing liquid? I didn't think I was that drunk,
that I wouldn't have noticed such a thing. No. That must not be it. I
redoubled my efforts, and slowly, Tyler started to get into it again. His
hips moved beneath me, and small gasps and moans of pleasure began to issue
from his lips. I hummed soflty, letting him feel the vibrations in my
throat with his cock. "Oh, God," he said, and the sound of his lust made me
even harder. Tentatively, I reached down, ran my hand over my flat, bare
stomach, wrapped my thumb and forefinger around the base of my cock. I
couldn't help but let a small gasp out at the pleasure I felt, both from my
hand and from having Tyler's cock down my throat. I'd hardly even been able
to touch myself after Jim had left me, proof again of how deep my feelings
had gone. All I had to do now was to not think of him, and getting through
this, being with someone else successfully, would prove to me that I was
really starting to get over it. Selfish, yes. But it wasn't like Tyler
didn't know. It wasn't like he wasn't enjoying this too.
	He pulled me off him, nudged my chin. I raised my mouth to his,
kissed him with all the pent-up passion of the past two weeks. Again, he
reached for my cock. This time the only sound that came from me when he
wrapped his fingers around me was a gasp of pleasure, and I tilted my head
back, let his lips run all over my neck. I lay back onto the floor and he
shifted so that he was over me. A breeze came in the half-open window and
washed over us, a reminder that we were both completely naked. His turn
now, his turn to go down my stomach, to lick my cock, to put his mouth
around me. I tried hard to keep the moans from escaping, but that another
person was in such close proximity to me, had his mouth around my cock in
fact, forced them out. Tyler sucked me, licked his fingers, sucked me
more. His fingertips found my ass, prodded gently, and soon he had one
finger inside me. I spread my legs further, let him get another finger
inside me. "Fuck me, baby," I moaned, and he took his mouth away from my
cock, raised up to my lips, kissed me again. The head of his cock pressed
against me, wanting in.
	"Wait here," he said. I answered with a murmur, wrapped my hand
around my cock and stroked myself while I waited for him to come back. I
was thankful for the alcohol coursing through my veins; I couldn't have let
my guard down this far without it, wouldn't be lying here with my hand
around my cock without something to get me over the initial lump of fear
that when someone else touched me, I'd shatter.
	Tyler returned with a condom and a bottle of lubricant. For a
brief, panicked second, I remembered Jim digging around in a drawer while I
lay naked on his bed, turning back to me with the same things in his hand
andlook on his face that Tyler had now, the look that said, "I'm going to
fuck you so hard..." and I froze. But it passed as quickly as it had come
over me, and Tyler knelt beside me, kissed me as he uncapped the
bottle. Then the cold sensation of it against me, and the feeling of his
cock rubbing up and down, and he stopped again to put the condom on.
Quickly, he hovered over me again, took hold of both my legs, moved them so
that I was completely open and exposed to him. Panic, again: was I ready
for this? I held my breath as he pushed into me, forcing myself to relax,
to let him in. Familiar pain for just a moment, and then the waves of
pleasure began to wash through me as Tyler pumped his cock in and out of my
ass, slowly, gently. I pressed my head back into the floor, closed my eyes,
moved my legs as far apart as they'd go. He couldn't get in very far at
this angle, but this was all I wanted right now. I rubbed my hands over my
stomach and chest, down to my cock, wrapped my hand around it. Tyler let go
of one of my ankles and reached down to stroke me as he fucked me. "God," I
moaned, "fuck me. Fuck me, Tyler. Push your cock into me." I stretched my
arms up over my head, my body as prone and vulnerable as it would ever
be. "Do anything you want to me, baby, anything at all..."
	"Can I tie you up?" he whispered.
	My eyes opened instantly, and my knees pressed into his chest,
pushed him out of me. I curled around myself, defensive, protecting-"No," I
said. "No."
	"Okay, baby, it's okay," he said. "I'm sorry."
	"God," I said. "No, don't be sorry. I'm sorry. Please, let's
just-let's just go in the bedroom." Fuck, I thought, fuck fuck fuck. I
screamed at myself in my head, furious that I'd been unable to overcome the
memory of Jim binding my hands and legs, smacking me, then actually hitting
me, hard. I'd broken down then, using the safe word, and he'd untied me as
I shuddered, let me bolt from the room as soon as I was unrestrained. In
his bathroom I had curled up on the floor, my hands on the back of my head,
making myself as small as possible, trying to forget everything that had
ever happened to me, wishing I could die and that this pain would go away.
He'd come into the bathroom, unfolded me, led me back to the bedroom, and
I'd told him more than I'd meant to about how sometimes, suddenly, a sexual
act that seemed to be going fine would suddenly not be fine, that I'd be a
child again, that what had happened to me then against my will would impose
itself on the present and I'd be completely unable to cope with the
victimization, with the pain, with the self-hate. Sympathy and light. And
that was the last time I'd been with Jim.  I left for a business trip to
Oregon the next day, and when I came back, his mind was made up.
	Now, the heat inside my eyes that had been threatening to spill
over at points throughout the course of the night finally won a small
victory, and a tear fell down my face. I wiped it away quickly, so that
Tyler wouldn't see, stood and led him to the bedroom. We laid together on
the bed, our limbs and bodies and faces tangled up together, each clinging
as if to a life raft for our own separate reasons.
	We kissed for a long time then, and through the half-open window,
we could hear the storm getting closer and closer. Lightning flashed
through the room occasionally, and through my half-open eyes I saw his
face, his eyes closed, his brows furrowed together in passion and
intensity. He ran his fingers over my face, and again, tears welled up, but
I forced them away. Thunder shook the earth around us as he entered me,
pressing my legs up so that my thighs touched my chest. I cried, but not
hard-the tears leaking out of my eyes and running down the sides of my face
without shudders, the darkness and the sound of the storm outside the cover
I needed. Tyler wrapped his hand around my cock again and pumped me as he
fucked me, and soon, the tears stopped and I lost myself in sensation, in
submission to him, in hunger and gratefulness and exhaustion all wrapped up
in my body, right in the pit of my stomach, flowing down and out into my
cock, and Tyler touched all those feelings as he touched my body. Over and
over, his movements made me shake with pleasure, and soon I was on the
brink of orgasm, my eyes closed, my head pressed back into the pillows, my
breath hard and fast. I felt it build up in me, and Tyler let go my other
leg and cupped my balls, tugged gently downward, but it was too late, the
hot liquid was already coursing up through my cock, and I came, hard,
crying out with the overwhelming sensations. Tyler stilled himself as I
pulsed beneath him, and as the orgasm subsided, I felt his stillness and
how intently he was looking at me, feeling me, sucking me in with every
sense he had.
	I gasped as the last wave of pleasure washed through me, and he
withdrew, laying next to me on the bed, our sweat mingling, the scent of
sex slowly being overwhelmed by the tang of a spring rainstorm. Lightning
flashed again and again, and the rain spattered on the windowsill, but he
clearly didn't care enough to get up and close the window. He peeled his
condom off and tossed it on the floor, turned back to me and held
me. "Baby," I said, tired now, so tired, "thank you." Why was I calling him
baby? Somewhere, deep inside me, I knew Tyler was utterly trustworthy, that
he'd never hurt me...
	I ran my fingers through the sweat on his chest and stomach,
marveled again at how beautiful, how absolutely exquisite his body was. I
found his cock with my hand, moved my palm slowly up and down the length of
it. Despite my orgasm, my hunger for it was not satisfied. But I was so
tired, so very tired...to combat it, I sat up in the bed, looked down at
this naked god lying next to me. Tyler sat up as well, kissed me, wiped the
sweat off my face, and I did the same for him. "Let's lie down," he said,
and pulled me back into the comfort of the pillows.
	"What can I do for you?" I asked him, wanting to make him come so
that we could lie here in the still darkness together, this bed like a
stranded boat in the vastness of the ocean, the storm outside buffeting the
house but unable to reach us.
	"Just hold me," he said. "Kiss me and hold me."
	Well, I thought, this was something different. I came over here
looking for a rebound fuck and what do I get? A sensitive man, one who
wanted to pleasure me and put his own needs on hold that I might be
satisfied. "Mmm," I said, "that sounds good."
	Jim was gone from my head. I smiled.
	"Tell me a memory," I said to Tyler as he rested his head on my
shoulder, draped his arm over my bare chest. "Tell me a memory from when
you were little."
	Tyler started speaking in a soft voice about riding in the kiddie
seat on the back of his dad's ten-speed, and every time he smiled, I could
feel it, because his face was resting against me. The crease of his smile
made me feel warm. I played my fingers over his hair as he spoke, fighting
sleep but not too hard. My arm eventually dropped, my mind where Tyler's
words had taken me, to an Illinois suburb in the middle of summer, a view
of his father's back as Tyler rode in the bike seat and they hurried home
to beat a storm.
	I must have drifted off, because I snapped back to consciousness
with a start when a sudden peal of thunder rang through the house. Tyler
was talking about his father still, and I could hear the pain in his voice,
could hear his throat tightening. I raised my hands, traced them along the
sides of his face, felt tears there. I leaned in and kissed them away,
their salt on my tongue and lips making me want more of them. "I remember
the last thing he said to me," Tyler said around the tightness in his
throat. "I was fifteen, you know, curled up on the couch watching something
on television, and I asked him what he wanted to watch, and he said-the
last thing he ever said-'Doesn't matter to me, bud, I'm working out.' And
then I heard the thump and turned and he was on the floor-" Tyler stopped,
swallowed, and a fresh stream of hot tears poured down the side of his
face. "I don't know why I'm telling you all this," he said. "I screamed for
my sister and then I tried to do CPR on him, but it's not like it is in the
movies, or like it is when they train you, you know, he was drooling, and I
couldn't-I couldn't do it right, I don't know, my sister realized what was
up and ran back upstairs to call the paramedics and it was just me and
him-" Again, he stopped. I wiped the tears away, pulled him closer to me,
wrapped my body around his instinctively, even though I knew I couldn't
protect him from this pain.
	"They said I was doing everything right when they got there, and
they used the electric paddles-so I can't stand those jokes now, you know,
the ones about jump-starting someone-whatever-because that was my dad, and
they did that to him right in front of me and it didn't work. My mom rode
in the ambulance with him to the hospital and my sister drove me and her
down there, and when we got there the doctor was coming out and getting
ready to tell her, and you could see on his face-it was-he was gone. Just
like that. My dad." He swallowed again, repeatedly. "I'm sorry," he
said. "I know you didn't ask for this."
	"No, baby," I said, my palms soaked with his tears. "Don't be
sorry, I'm glad you're telling me, it's okay."
	"It's just-like I've suppressed it so much, I've pushed the
memories down so far, and sometimes they come back, so strong, and it's
like I'm there in that hospital all over again, listening to the doctor
tell us that he's gone." One more wave of tears, and he was silent, having
won his own battle against the pain for the time being.
	"Tyler," I said, kissing his face. "Sweetheart." I held onto him in
the lightning, the thunder, what was inside him and what was inside me, the
similarities too parallel to be ignored. He turned to me, and we lay
tangled together on top of the blankets, having connected on a level
infinitely deeper than the one I had expected when I knocked on his door
two hours ago.
	Well, so much for expectation.