Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 04:14:11 -0800
From: B Keeper <silvershimmer@earthlink.net>
Subject: G/M college, relationship "Couplings"

				"Couplings"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


I fancy you," Julian said to me. He smiled down at me, raised in bed,
elbow supporting him, hand cupped to his cheek. I smiled at the long
ladder of him.

"We've fancied each other three times tonight, Jules." I smiled that
devilish grin I am known for so, world wide.

He bent down his long lanky chest and neck and leaned his head down to my
mouth and we kissed passionately for a time.

Then he pulled back.

"None of that malicious stuff, right, Joel?"

"None of that," and I pulled him to me and we hugged naked for a while.
His legs scissored me and we held closely, our cocks hardening again.

""You won't think of him again?" Jules asked, his Brit voice with that
little bubble of mirth in it.

"Which one," I said stroking his dick with mine, our bodies on this too
warm winter night, on this well loved and well made love in bed.

"You know."

"All the boys in the world, and you had to find this ass to slip your
dick into." And I rubbed his creamy butt that jutted out just so
perfectly. I stroked his cleft. He fingered my nipples and sucked them
hard again.

Jules mouth was next to mine. He blew on my check soft and warm whispers.
I think that turned me on the very most.

"Oh," I said. "All the boys. Names forgotten. Lips left kissed with my
memory. Brazen me. Laddering from lad to lad to lad. They crushed and
ruined into runes because they can't cast me up before them yet again.
Not one more time."

Jules and I made love some while now. We loved the taste of all of each
other in the other's mouth. We believed in closeness. We believed in
experimentation. We believed in magic. And we were the top magicians.

He was on top me now. I was in him. And he pushed and pulled himself up
and down and did all the work while we experienced friction. We
experienced the heft and slim weight of the other.

And we came to our own Cordura. And we bucked and he placed his hands
hard on my sternum and he used me and I used him and we were sweating
like wet dishrags. And it was all quite loamy and wondrous and
incandescent and his legs were beside mine and I pushed into the interior
of Jules. And I dwelled therein. And there was nothing more than the
continents of each the other, sliding of the plates of the earth and
falling into sexual nimbus. While the ceiling lowered and lowered and we
were the earth again, gravitated to itself, one more complete explosive
cum time.

We gyrated. We were muscle sore moths. We were the dizziness of sex. We
were pervasive. And we shot almost equally. He came on my stomach. I came
a moment later or two inside him. My cum ran out of him down to my
abdomen. He squirted and squirted. And he rolled off me. The night was
young. So were we. So was a life itself. Cooked up kin the miasmal swamp
that was our secret passion.

And we lay there for a time. Our hearts pounding. Our stomachs breathing
deep. Our sweat a glory of ours.

And after a long deep sleepy time, Julian said, in his bubble giggle
voice with that Brit lilt I loved so much, "Joel."

I nuzzled into his neck with my mouth. I bit the whiteness of him. The
alabaster of him.

"Sleep now." I said to him, our breaths slowing down. Our hearts beating
keener. Tomorrow was ours. And the day after that. What more could anyone
wish, I ask you?

"How did he--" Julian started.

I put a finger to his lips. "Not again. Please. Don't wreck it."

Julian sighed. He *sighed*.

"I can't compete with him, can I?"

Oh Jesus. "You are a nut, Julian."

He laddered his tall body out of the bed. He got himself a cigarette, lit
it, by the small dim lamp on the table beside us. Ours was a rickety
apartment in the darker confines of London. Our love was incandescent. So
the queen could keep her bloody palace. We had our own right here at
home.

He smoked for a time. He flicked the ashes in he ash tray.

"How I love you," I said.


"And I love you too Joel."

I leaned over to him as he sat on the bed with his back to me. I stroked
the shiny velvet of it. Followed the dragons teeth of his back bone step
case.

"I never tire of saying your name," Jules told me. And then he was
weeping. Just a little.. Just a mist of it. He tried to keep it hidden.
Soft and silent. But the softness and the silence of the tears I knew of
him so well.

He stopped weeping. Smoked the last of the cig. Put it out.

Then he said, "You remember the movie `West Side Story'?" he asked for
the millionth time in our endless relationship.

I didn't have to say anything. He knew what he and I meant.

He tried to sing and that was when his bubble voice lost control. " `All
the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word'"--and before he told
me my name said aloud was `like music playing' and said softly `was
almost like praying' I came to him and put my chin on his neck.

"I built you Joel."

"And I built you Julian."

"We made each other at the beginning of time."

"And its been worth the life of rhyme to find you finally..."

Then we both said...."Just as we always knew you would be."

It was an old song between us. Pardon the doggerel. But never pass the
love.

He smiled and then we laughed and he tumbled me into bed again. We held
so tightly I thought we would break each others' rib cages.

He didn't say it as we held each other. He didn't say it as he brushed
my lips with his, the slight stain of nicotine on them inhaled by me,
perfume from my love it was.

"I'm just a mope."

"A dope, " I said.

"He wasn't better than I was he?"
I pushed back from him, untangled myself from his sexy encumbrance. I sat
on the edge of the bed now, my back turned to him.

"It's a game, Jules" I said, somewhat petulant that I had to tell him
that again.

"But it wasn't a game. It isn't. He was, he is real."

I hunched my shoulders. I felt like a box again. I felt the room small
round me. And shabby and Julian was knock kneed if you want the truth of
it. And my right eye was a raw wound out of which I could only see little
white circles like boiling see throughable stew on the kitchen stove .
And he wouldn't let go of the dream. The fancy. He had to know it all
again. I felt his decreased penis against my back.

"Make it hard for me again, would you kind sir" he said. And I could do
nothing but turn round and oblige.

We slept for a time thereafter. The morning light came later and later as
the month came on deeper and deeper. We hated the light. I because it
found me half blind and dull and ugly again. He because he could not be
the sprite he felt himself at night, so he said. Though he was beautiful
in any kind of dark or light.

We woke up with the street cleaners machine noise coming down the road.
The village in our hearts was bound tightly with rings of silver and rims
of mornings.

I had dreamed of Stefan again. I had dreamed he was Julian and I was
Mandy. And I had dreamed other names as well. And contemplated the
chambers in which each of us, Jules and Joel became all the others, real,
fancied, read about, seen in movies, test cases for each other till we
found ourselves.

But it was Stefan Julian wanted to think about.

Because I could never quite forget Stefan. I could never quite forget the
game. Or imagine it real enough at all. No matter the times we made love,
had sex, fucked each other silly, pained each other and gave pleasure as
rich reward in return.

He went away far too quickly, my Stefan.

As did Jules' Mandy.

Jules was locked in lost love of Mandy.

I was not locked in lost love with Stefan.

Jules refused to accept this.

I kept trying over and over. We both did. And failed. And failed..

The winter sun was now casting through the grimed narrow bedroom window a
thin parquet of wavery sunlight.

We lay for a time, our arms round each other. Until we had to admit to
ourselves and the other that we were ostensibly awake.

"I don't miss him, Jules," I said. My voice was reflective. A play back.
If not a throw back. If not a throw rug we constantly tripped on because
Julian would not believe me.

"He went away. But he never left." Julian said plaintive song voice.
Again and again. Like they never stopped making stereo recorders. Like it
was in that crack of groove over and over again until someone would lift
the arm bar and let the music play onward again. Instead of backward, at
the wrong speed.

"Stefan is gone" I said, not unkindly. "As Mandy is gone." Again, not
unkindly.

"What though..."

And it comes again, and I tightened my muscles and clenched my jaws
waiting for those words one more time, rawer and more stew bubbling then
in my deformed disfigured right eye.

"..could we be them? Could we be time machines? And be them and us at the
same time."

I pushed upward from the bed and walked naked to the window. I cranked
open the speckled thing and the wind was nicely cooler this morning. I
knew, I hoped he was looking at my naked back side. I have a fairly good
one if you want the truth of it. Jules never fails to compliment it. He
never mentioned my right eye. Never has. Not one single time. Not even
the first time we met. Never even seemed to notice it. Then god the
horror--maybe he never really did notice it.

"I am NOT MANDY. YOU ARE NOT STEFAN."

I turned to him. I was hoarse from yelling that. I had sworn never to
yell or get mad at him again for that, and of course I had failed, and I
had.

He slunk down into the bed, in the gropy shadows of gloved night boxes
that refused to let go just yet for the morning light was still so weak.

"What do you want, Jules? Do you want me to eat him into me? Is that it?
Do you want me to recast you as him? Do you want to fake our lives like
mechanical, Machiavellian contrivances in some half ass science fiction
story?..."

Jules' voice, stop it please, muffled, almost not said, not even
deserving of quotation marks.

""I don't dream of him. I dream of you. You never see me. You always see
him."

"It's easier." Julian sighed and held his arms out trembly scarred and
battered like the Frankenstein monster just learning how fleeting love is
and how long is memory. And how knife in the wound painful it is.

I scratched my pubes. I would not look at him. I remembered his mouth on
my dick and balls and how he loved my "Little Johnny" as he fancied to
call it.

I mused. I said, "What if you are not Julian? What if I am not Joel? I
mean literally, objectively. What if you are Stefan? And I am Mandy? And
we've cooked up this Joel and Julian disguise because we never knew
anyone by those names, and we were scared we would lose each other
forever if we admitted we really are Stefan and Mandy? So we kept them in
the closet of our hearts. And kept them prisoners. And we developed new
bodies and new faces and new names and new histories? What if we don't
go to Cambridge at all? What if we go to Harvard instead? What if we are
not in London but in New York and what if we are not at Yale at all but
at Notre Dame and what if Paris is in Madrid? And we've taken our real
selves whose love was too fragile to last and put them in our fake
knockabout bodies? And what if we've moved the whole damned world round
just to accommodate those selves we love, each to the other, because we
will risk anything to pull them out of our hearts secretly at night in
the dark when we have sex make love and then put them back in our hearts
after the sun comes up or tries to? And you are Stefan and I am Mandy and
we are so damned fragile so damned scared of losing each other, so we
lather all this phoniness----" I stopped. I had never said it all this
way. Had never said the worlds full form like this before. I was shaking.
My shoulders trembled. I was terrified I was right..

Jules was silent for a long long time, then he started singing in that
bubble voice, that had a sort of torn broken toy voice behind it, a voice
I had not heard before, a back ground sound, that sounded so awfully so
frighteningly familiar, and I knew what he was whisper singing because
Stefan and I often sang it when we had a row, fights we tried not to
have, and kept them muffled and inside till it ate into us--the song I
could not hear Jules singing, I now joined in singing with him and a
rickety much loved shadow of old toys deep in the open me now heart, the
heart that would be opened, the soul that Jules would open in me and I
would open in him, sometimes a little cracking door inch wide of it,
maybe a little more, something we promised to open each to the other some
day full tree summer leaves this or next or the year before or the year
after, again...

As I stood there, stroking my chest, feeling my heart beast so fast, so
hurried. As Jules lay in bed signing by not really sounding the worlds of
words at all....

"It's a Barnum and Bailey world/just as hollow as it can be/but if you
believe in make believe/then please believe in me."

And I turned and went to him, slowly, languidly, and he reached up for
me, equally as slowly and languidly, and he pulled me to the bed and I
put my mouth and face and heart and home to his shriveled penis and I
kissed the tip of it, that had a slight white scar of moon crescent stark
on the pink tip to the left upper quadrant of his piss hole. That scar he
had told me had come when he was ten years old and he was just getting
out of the bath when his bastard mean older brother, rushed in laughter
suddenly into the bathroom and shot a BB gun right at his little
brother's dick causing him an immense amount of pain, and leaving that
crescent reminder. Jules had told me that..

Or was it Ricky? Ricky? Who the hell was Ricky? Our thoughts were sliding
over each other again. I traced the scar and I knew he was as frightened
as I was at that moment.

So I rushed up his ladder tall chest to his mouth and we kissed and felt
and loved and held.

As tightly as we could.

And the world outside us, under us, inside us, wherever it was, whatever
it was, wherever we were, whoever we were, we held onto each other for
dear life.

My eye was a cauldron of stew about to bubble over.


     the end


B Keeper
silvershimmer@earthlink.net