Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2014 15:03:07 -0400 (EDT) From: DJAkeeba@aol.com Subject: Tragedy on the Potomac, Chapter 8 This story is about male/male relationships and contains graphic descriptions of sex. You should not read this story if it is in any way illegal due to your age or residence. This is a work of pure fiction. This story is the sole property of its author and may not be copied in whole or in part or posted on any website without the permission of the author. Questions and commentary can be sent to djakeeba@aol.com Please consider donating to keep Nifty going. Details at http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html --------------------------- TRAGEDY ON THE POTOMAC by Steven H. Davis Chapter 8 I tried to avoid Donny for a few days after that, which wasn't easy considering that I found myself spending a lot of time in the office right next door to the Gay Alliance, which housed the university's alternative newspaper, *Current.* I had always enjoyed creative writing, and at the time my writing was centered on shock-humor, which I wouldn't have had any outlet for at the school's "official" paper, the *Hatchet.* That's where the student government, the serious types, and the future leaders worked, and they concerned themselves with what I then felt to be the boring minutiae of student life and university policy. *Current,* on the other hand, was staffed by radical young rabble-rousers, anxious to use their newfound social and political consciousness to challenge the prevailing mainstream attitudes of the time. That meant that editor Greg Staley would tackle issues like the university's heavy investments in apartheid-era South Africa, fiery Lucy Walters would write about feminist issues, and the cynical Shyam would dig into the country's involvement in the ongoing battles between the Nicaraguan Contras and the Sandanista regime. That left me and Doug Snyder -- an obese, vulgar but extremely intelligent party animal who reminded me of John Belushi crossed with Paul Krassner -- to be creatively provocative with our humorous essays, poetry and cultural pieces. I wrote a series of bizarre poems telling of the adventures of a heroic character called Rasta God, inspired by the Tongue-Fu series in my mother's old *Whole Earth Catalog,* and took over reviewing edgy movies like *Caligula* and *Liquid Sky.* For his part, Doug nearly lost us our funding with a piece on religion headed with a two-word lede in huge black letters. The second word of the lede was "God." The first was Doug's favorite verb. I was selected, along with Lucy Walters, to attend our hearing in front of the student activities committee. I knew that the reason for my selection was because I was well-spoken and looked more cleancut than the rest of the staff, but I also suspected that Greg Staley was afraid that if he sent Doug to defend his piece in person, the irascible rebel would end up telling the committee exactly where they could shove their funding. As we sat in the empty hearing-room preparing our remarks, Lucy gave me a nervous glance, wary of my participation. "I know you've only been at this school a few weeks," she said. "But I've been on this paper for four years, and it means a lot to me. Don't fuck this up, little one." Then she leaned over and kissed my cheek. My eyes widened. It had been four years since Kathy Witcher, then a senior at Polk High, had christened me with that name, and here I was a freshman again, and a sophisticated, worldly senior girl -- just as short as Kathy, it should be noted -- had once again decided that I was her "little one." There were some differences. Lucy had blond, straight hair bleached platinum-blonde, and while Kathy had dressed like a young lawyer, Lucy favored black tights, white ankle-boots and bulky black sweaters. She also wore heavy black eyeliner and rode a Vespa scooter, leading Shyam to dismiss her as a "wannabe Mod," whatever that meant. She also cursed like a sailor, smoked heavily, and always seemed to be reading Baudelaire or De Sade, while Kathy had favored Plato and arcane foreign-policy journals. After the hearing, where both of us were eloquent and persuasive concerning the place of provocation in challenging dogma (Lucy) and the importance of free speech (me), we found ourselves at my small, tacky apartment. It was Friday, and my grandmother Vedzma was in Maryland for the weekend, so we had the place to ourselves. Lucy took one look at the mess in the apartment, the pink-painted kitchen, and my "bed" -- the mattress balanced between two facing couches -- and laughed out loud. "You live worse than I do," she rasped, her voice husky from the unfiltered French cigarettes which she chain-smoked. "I know," I said, "but at least I don't have to share a dorm room with some moron." "True," she conceded. "And we get to be alone." Lucy was sitting in one of the chairs at the table in the small dining nook, and I was perched on the edge of another, wondering where this was going. She turned her eyes back toward my mattress. There was an empty area between my bed and Vedzma's couch on the far wall, and Lucy pointed to it. "You should move the mattress to the floor, right there," she said. "Then I'd be right up against my grandmother," I replied, clueless as ever. Lucy rolled her eyes, exhaled a thick plume of smoke, then crushed out her cigarette in the tacky ceramic alligator ashtray which Vedzma had brought home from a conference in Miami. "Not forever, dumbass," she said. "Just for now." The light dawned, and I hurried to move the mattress onto the floor as Lucy stood and began stripping off her clothes. She was a take-charge kind of girl, I decided, and after scaring myself by being so aggressive with Donny, I really didn't want to be in charge for a while. As I hustled the mattress gratefully into place, my eyes fell on Lucy's creamy-white nakedness. She had beautiful, full breasts with large, pale pink nipples and curves in all the right places. I had been curious as to whether her carpet matched her drapes, imagining how difficult and painful it would be to strip-bleach the hair down there, but noticed that there was no carpet at all. Her pubic area was shaved smooth, which seemed an elegant solution to the problem. "Well," she rasped, "are you going to take off your clothes or stand there staring all day?" "Yes, ma'am," I grinned, and shed my clothes in record time. There wasn't any romance in our coupling, but neither was there the borderline S&M of my encounter with Donny. Despite her hard exterior demeanor, Lucy was a gentle, soft and extremely tactile sexual partner. She was like a soft, comforting cloud that I could sink into and experience pure physical pleasure without the constant psychological war and internal chatter which messed with my head in every other sexual experience I had entered into at that point. We spent a good hour on that mattress, and I was having a really great time. As I approached my climax, I started to pull out, but she held me inside with her arms and legs. "I'm on the pill," she whispered. "Stay in." I did, and came hard, Lucy's husky, lusty moaning spurring me to an intense, ecstatic orgasm. When my shivering had subsided, Lucy gave a lazy grin and reached for her pack of Gitanes, which she had brought over to the mattress with her lighter and the ceramic alligator. To this point in my life, my experience with women had been limited to Kathy Witcher. I was still unsure of how to recognize the female orgasm, and although Lucy had been moaning and cooing throughout, I didn't know whether the final spate of moaning had been an orgasm or simple encouragement. I decided that I had to find out. "Did you, uhm..." I asked nervously. She looked at me very seriously as she lit her cigarette. "We need to have a talk before you ever ask me that again," she said. "I don't come when I'm fucking for fun. It feels great, and I really enjoyed it, but that's just not a part of myself I'm willing to share until it matters." She stroked my hair as I laid against her breast, squeezing me close with her arm. I felt like she was mothering a kid who had just learned to ride a bicycle. "You did great," she said. "That felt really good." With that, she stood and went to the bathroom, grabbing up her clothes along the way. I laid on the mattress feeling a bit confused, but decided that this must be how grown-up, sophisticated college students had recreational sex. I slipped on my underwear, then fished a cigarette from Lucy's pack and lit it with her lighter, a Bic encased in a black metal casing which read "Dead Kennedys." Holy shit! The smoke from the imported Gitanes cigarette hit the bottom of my lungs as if they were being punched. I had been smoking regularly for over four years, but I had never felt anything like this. I began to cough loudly, knocking an ash onto my underwear and burning a small hole in them. "Those aren't for amateurs," Lucy grinned from the front door. She was fully dressed, looking impeccably Mod in her tights and white boots, makeup and hair perfect and fierce. It was as if she had put her shield back on, I thought with a bit of remorse -- although, with her no-orgasm policy, it wasn't as if she had ever *really* let it down in the first place. I got up, still naked, and went over to her for a goodbye kiss. She anticipated and dodged it, giving me a hug instead. "I have to get to class," she said. "This was fun. We should do it again." She nodded to me, opened the door, and was gone. I went back to the mattress and got dressed, pondering the meaning of what had just happened. I was gay, right? I mean, I had been in love with Taine, I'd had sex with Jeff Salzburg and Jason and Donny, I'd been reading gay books and got turned on by men, for Heaven's sake. Also, I had been a Drama kid, an actor. That meant I had to be gay. All guys who "dance around the maypole" with the arts were, right? That was what my adoptive father Rex had always said, and by the time I left his house, I had come to believe it. I believed it even with the stark evidence of all the notorious womanizers in the arts, rough and tumble straight guys like Rex's hero, Rock Hudson, whose exploits with the fairer sex were legendary. Rex's sarcastic dismissal of my theater work had almost fully pushed me away from acting by then, and it's the one thing that I resented Rex for doing. I didn't know that Rock Hudson had been diagnosed with what was then called HTLV-III a few months previously, although I wonder how much it would have changed my perspective if I had been aware of that fact. But I had certainly had a good time with Lucy, and was sad to see her go. Sure, the fucking had been kind of emotionless, but it felt great, and didn't make my head and heart do all the crazy cartwheels of confusion, doubt, and need that they did when I was guys. Maybe I was bisexual, I thought. Maybe I liked sex better with women, even though I really wanted to be with a man emotionally. No, it's not that I liked it *better* with women, it's just that it was more about sensation and less about emotion. It was just about the sexual pleasure, and didn't tie me up in knots. It was simple. Yeah, that was it. It was simple. I would later learn just how wrong I was, and that nothing in the sexual life of Rick Spivey was ever destined to be simple, but I concluded my internal debate that day satisfied that I understood the feelings which my explorations had produced. A few weeks later, I sat in the offices of *Current* with the male staff members, who were talking about the relative attractiveness of the female writers. Lucy's name came up, and most of us agreed that she was the hottest despite her Mod style and apparent arrogance. That was when Mark O'Malley, a tall, cute Irish kid who was the only fraternity member on staff other than Doug, asked the fateful question to the eight other guys in the room. "Okay, guys," Mark said in a deep, ominous tone. "Raise your hands if you have *not* had sex with Lucy." Shyam raised his hand quickly, as if he would have been ashamed at the association. No one else in the room did. There was general laughter, some good-hearted comparing of notes, and -- something which surprised me, being just off the plane from a Texas high school -- not one bit of slut-shaming except from Shyam, who couldn't stop grinning and shaking his head. The conversation was otherwise surprisingly respectful, which not only made me happy because I liked Lucy, but made me feel better about my own explorations as well. Later, Shyam and I went down to the bowling alley on the third floor and chatted as we bowled a few frames. He was quickly becoming my best college friend, and I asked him how he felt being the only one to raise his hand. "Proud," he said, and promptly threw a strike. "But I gotta say, man, the one who surprised me was you. I thought you were gay. Did you really bang Lucy, or were you just going along?" "Variety is the spice of life," I smiled cryptically. "I just like sex." Shyam gave a slow nod, and an evil grin spread across his face. "Then you're the one," he said. "The one what?" Shyam marked his scorecard and set it down on the lighted scoring table. "How would you like a challenge?" "What kind of challenge," I asked warily. "I have a bet to make with you," he replied. Uh-oh. --------------------- Thank you for reading Chapter 8. To be continued... I'm always happy to hear from readers at DJAkeeba@aol.com. 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