THE LITTLE SAINT
His name meant light, or that was the root of it, the root too of the word for holy, for any number of words associated with sanctity and the church; and this was why later, when I grew fond of him, I called him Svetcheto, the little saint. It made him laugh, both because it was bad Bulgarian, he told me, no one who actually spoke the language would say it, and also because he liked it, I thought, not the name but that I had made it up for him. I liked it too, not least because it was so at odds with the things we did together, with how I used him or how we used each other. And maybe there actually was something saintly about him, his slightness and quiet in the hoodie that framed his face like a monk’s cowl when I saw him that first time, or in the bathrobe he wrapped around himself later, when I came to his door; and maybe there was something saintly in his endurance, too, I guess I think there was, in his desire for pain.
But that first day I didn’t know his name, I thought probably I would never see him again. We had chatted online for the first time just an hour or so earlier, though I had looked at his profile often; he was always online, for months I had been fascinated by him. It was a kind of profile common enough in the States or Western Europe but I had never seen one like it here; it claimed that anyone who wanted to could fuck him, that he wanted it rough, that his only demand was to be fucked bare, he wanted as many loads as he could get. No limits whore, it said, in good pornographic English, with a Bulgarian translation beneath. I was curious to know what that meant here, no limits, and where he had learned it. Many of the things he listed were things I wanted, too, what I liked to be done to me, which is why I took so long to write him; we wanted the same things and so were incompatible, as people say. Maybe I came to be excited by the thought of doing to him what others had done to me, what in those weeks or months I had wanted done more often and to greater extremes. Maybe it happened slowly but it seemed sudden, the desire I felt for the boy whose photos appeared in little boxes that accompanied his profile, in one his face twisted in an erotic grimace, in another three fingers, his own, inserted in his ass.
The photos didn’t give any real sense of him, I was surprised by how beautiful he was when he pushed back the hood he had raised against the rain, which was just a light rain, a relief from the early summer warmth. He was short and dark-skinned, with close-cropped black hair, and as he looked up at me I realized it was his eyes that made him beautiful; they were large and almond-shaped, a shade of grayish green. I was sheltering beneath the awning of the café where he had told me to wait for him, in a part of Mladost where it was impossible to find your way, he said; you had to have lived there a long time to make sense of the jungle of buildings, the warren of unnamed streets. It wasn’t far from the apartment on campus where I lived, but it was on the other side of Malinov Boulevard, and there was little reason to explore beyond the supermarket where the whole neighborhood did its shopping. It was a Saturday, the café was full of couples and children. We acknowledged each other with a nod, and then I reached out to shake his hand as he looked away shyly, making me feel I had embarrassed him, that I had acted in some way I shouldn’t. We murmured a greeting but didn’t otherwise speak, he just turned and began to walk, leaving me to follow.
His building wasn’t far, but he was right, it would have been difficult to find. There had been a plan here once, in Communist times, the huge blokove erected at intervals to leave green spaces between, parks and playgrounds, the remnants of which we passed through now. But any sense of order had been lost, the parks had been paved over, new buildings had sprung up in every empty space. Cars were parked on sidewalks, in the little alleys between buildings, on both sides of the road; drivers had to thread their way through the streets single file, cells in a clogged artery. He walked ahead, not speaking or looking back, moving quickly because of the rain, though maybe it was eagerness too, I thought, maybe he felt the excitement I felt, the blood rushing to my groin. I’ll use you hard, I had written, after he told me what he wanted, get ready, I’ll make you take it. It isn’t easy to find men who will say that, the idea of it frightens them or turns them off; when finally I found someone to say it to me there was excitement but also gratitude and relief, maybe he was feeling that. Even in his hoodie it was clear how slim he was, he kept his hands in the pockets at the front and pulled the fabric tight around him, showing off his frame, and he wore tight jeans that advertised his legs and ass, which I found myself watching as we walked. It was the only condition I had set, that I didn’t want to come in his ass; I want to shoot in your mouth, I had said, in your mouth and on your face. Really I wasn’t sure I wanted to fuck him at all, I worried about disease, and the longer I fucked him the more danger there would be. Danger for him, too; I got tested every six months but I wasn’t always careful, I wasn’t fanatically safe. On his profile he had chosen the third option, not negative or positive but don’t know, and in the text he had said he didn’t care about status, anyone was welcome, he didn’t want to know. People always lie, he would say to me later, why bother to ask, why should I believe them, why should I care.
His apartment was on the ground floor of a poorly maintained building, ten or twelve stories of discolored concrete, the façade run through with cracks. The door was a thick metal slab, meant for security, though it wasn’t locked, wasn’t even latched; he opened it by gripping it with both hands and pulling hard as it dragged. He left it open behind us; he would tell me later that the old women in the building couldn’t open it on their own, if it was closed they would call out or rap on windows for someone to let them in. On my window, he complained, since his was the second apartment in the long hallway on the ground floor I followed him into, it’s fucking annoying. His own space was more effectively guarded by the series of locks he undid, and by the bars that latticed the narrow window, which I glimpsed before he drew a curtain across it. We stood in the larger of two rooms, which had a TV and, facing it, a couch, between them a low table with an open laptop, an overflowing ashtray; the second room was to the right, with a narrow bed visible through the open door. There was another bed, or kind of bed, behind me, against the wall by the front door, a thin pallet laid over a long wooden chest or cupboard of some kind, an improvised frame. It was unmade, the sheets balled up at one end. This was where he slept; the apartment was his sister’s, he didn’t really live there. He was just visiting Sofia, though he had stayed for a long time, he said, and had no plans to leave.
I didn’t know whether I should sit or lie on this bed, I stood waiting for a signal. He looked at me, hesitating, and then stepped forward. Neither of us spoke. I watched him, unsure how to begin, though I knew I should be the first to act. He smiled a little, as if he saw my uncertainty and forgave it, forgave it or mocked it, I’m not sure which. I knew the kind of disdain I had felt for men who weren’t sure what they wanted, you could sense it from the first moment, the first tepid move; I had despised them sometimes for offering less than they had promised. He raised his hand and placed it on my chest, a tender gesture, and then he leaned toward me to kiss me. But I didn’t let him kiss me, I would kiss him later but it wasn’t the right way to begin, I grabbed his throat to stop him. He had closed his eyes but they opened now in surprise, and I held his gaze as I tightened my grip, not much, not to hurt him or frighten him but to assert something, to chastise him a little for having made the first move, though he had had to, we both knew, it had given me permission to begin. There was a kind of negotiation as we looked at each other, a question, and then he moaned low in his throat and closed his eyes again, and I knew that it would work between us. I turned his head a little, tilting it first to the left and then the right, as if I were examining him, but really I was examining myself, my willingness to master him as much as his willingness to be mastered. And then I pushed him away and dropped my hand and told him brusquely to get undressed.
He took another step back and lifted his hand to the zipper of his hoodie, which he drew down slowly, glancing at me and then lo
oking away, seductive or shy. His chest was boyish, slender and almost hairless, his nipples small and dark and already tight with excitement. He was slow with his belt, too, and with the zipper of his jeans, not quite performing for me as he undid them and pushed his jeans and his briefs down to reveal his cock, which was already hard and sprang out, eager and comic. He posed for a moment, showing it off. It was thickish and hooded, the long foreskin even though he was hard drawn over the head. He pulled it back now, stroking himself two or three times before I told him to stop and he dropped his hand. I had spoken sternly, but I was glad to see it, that he was so eager, that he was enjoying himself. I wouldn’t touch it, it was part of my role almost to pretend it wasn’t there; I want to be a hole, he had typed in our chat, I want to be nothing but a hole. It was important to seem like I didn’t care about his pleasure but I did care about it, very much, I wanted him to be hard. I took a step toward him, claiming ground and coming too close; I could feel his heat through the fabric of my shirt. We looked at each other, and before he dropped his eyes I felt an upwelling of tenderness for him. I wanted to kiss him, to be in a different kind of scene with him, but of course I couldn’t change the scene, it would have been a breach of our contract. If it had been my usual role to dominate, to be cruel, to be cruel in that way, my role or my nature, I would have simply acted on my inclination, I think; at least that’s what I imagine it must be to act as the men I long for act, to want something and not question it. But I didn’t kiss him, instead I ran my hands across his torso, the back of my hands, stopping when I reached his nipples, which I brushed across lightly several times, feeling them tighten further. Then I took them between my thumb and forefinger, gently at first, rubbing the tip in little circles, like a bullet, not twisting but massaging, so that he hummed slightly to show me that he liked it, and slowly I began to grip him harder, listening as his humming became more glottal and higher in pitch, became a whine. And then I grabbed him very hard, pinching and twisting in a way meant to hurt. He opened his mouth, not whining but gasping a single syllable, Ah, his eyes clenched shut. But he didn’t move his hands, which was the test, he didn’t lift them to shield himself or loosen my grip, when I looked they were pressed against his thighs, fingers extended, the tips digging into his flesh. Good boy, I thought, though I didn’t say it out loud. It became a kind of contest then, I wanted to make him ask me to stop. But he took what I gave him, when I pulled on them hard he even leaned back to stay upright, though that could only have increased his pain. I wouldn’t find his limit, then, or not that way, and I acknowledged this by changing the direction of my pulling, tugging him by his nipples not toward me but down. He resisted this at first, too, straining against me to maintain his position, not realizing until I yanked harder what I wanted him to do. And then he dropped to his knees.
I let go of him once I felt him begin to fall, I stayed upright, my hands at my sides. He had fallen hard, even with the rug we stood on it must have hurt. He leaned forward slightly, he bowed until his forehead almost touched me, he kept just the slightest space between us. I looked down at the crown of his head, the neatly cut hair spiraling out counterclockwise from the center, and I saw that without being told he had clasped his hands behind his back. Again I wondered where he had learned it, whether someone had taught him these gestures and codes, whether he had learned them himself online. I wondered if they made a coherent pattern, a kind of life, consistent, something like virtue, really, or were just a sort of ornament, a dream to be dipped into from time to time. But I didn’t wonder this long; I was hard, I wanted more, and so I leaned forward just slightly, little more than a breath, letting my crotch brush his forehead. Immediately he lifted his face, he pressed his nose into me, breathing in hard, smelling me, and then he started rubbing his face against me, against my balls and then along the shaft of my cock where it was trapped by my jeans, rubbing first his forehead and then the side of his face and then his mouth and nose, up again to his eyes and forehead, making a circular movement that brought his whole face in contact with me. I had done this too, many times, it was a kind of animal instinct, the pleasure not of marking one’s territory but of being marked; it was the pleasure of belonging to someone, I suppose, the pleasure of knowing one’s place. On his face was a look of need and provocation, begging me for something or daring me, both, I think, he was leading me where he wanted.
I stood and watched him, enjoying not giving him what he wanted, though that isn’t quite true, the not-giving was part of what he wanted; and part of what I wanted was this, to see him desire or perform desire, more intensely now as he started rooting into me, almost making me flinch. At first I couldn’t understand what he was doing, he was moving his head back and forth just slightly, and then I realized he was trying to flip back the flap covering the zipper of my jeans. Once he had managed this, folding the fabric back with his nose, he rubbed his face against the metal, up and down, as if he were trying to undo it that way, all the while with his hands clasped behind his back. He wasn’t trying to undo it, of course, this was part of his performance, but he was rubbing hard and fast enough that I thought it must be something else, too, a desire for pain, or if not pain then sensation of a particular sort, a kind of intensity. Take it out, I said finally. He looked up at me, smiling, and then brought his hands to my belt, slowly now, the urgency gone, and pulled the leather strap free of its buckle. He surprised me by removing the belt altogether, taking a moment to coil it around his hand before setting it ceremoniously beside him. There was something ceremonious about all of his movements, if they had been animal before they were exaggeratedly refined now, careful and precise. He pulled my jeans down, waiting for me to step out of them before he folded them and placed them beside the belt and the shoes I had kicked off. Only then did he bring his hands back to my waist and pull my underwear down, stretching the elastic to let my cock spring out, bobbing in the air as I lifted first one foot and then the other to let him pull the fabric free. He took my underwear in both his hands, spreading it across his open palms, and then buried his face in it, taking famished breaths, wanting whatever chemical traces I had left there, some mix of sweat and urine, of detergent and soap. His hands were covering his eyes but I almost rolled my own back in sympathy, I had felt the rush of it many times, that scent, but I had never watched someone else be overcome by it, I had never before been the cause of it. He folded them carefully and settled back on his knees before me.
He linked his hands behind his back again but almost immediately reached up to cup my balls in one hand, the first time he had actually touched me, my bare skin; I drew my breath in through my teeth at the shock, which was neither pleasure nor pain, but sensation, pure and unmarked. With his other hand he gripped the shaft and moved it to the right and left, up and down, not erotically, but as if examining it, I thought, like a physician; and maybe he was examining it, in part, looking for signs of disease though he claimed not to care about disease, I don’t know. My first American cock, he said then, looking up at me and smiling, my first cut cock; his English was remarkable, he spoke flawlessly the language of hook-up sites and porn. He gripped more tightly as he pulled up the shaft, milking me, and at the tip there appeared a small drop, opalescent, almost clear. I should have stopped him as he leaned forward, I was giving him too free a rein, but I let him touch the tip of his tongue to the drop, not gathering it up but tasting it, and then he pulled back, so that it stretched out gossamer between us. He closed his eyes, his tongue still extended, and I felt again that he was acting something out, that he had slipped into a fantasy that had very little, had possibly nothing, to do with me. He was posing, inhabiting a scene, something out of porn, some image in which he was a star. He made these images, he would tell me later, they were his main source of income, he performed on webcam sites for men who paid him to do whatever they wanted. I love it, he said, all those guys watching me and jerking off, I love it. There were dozens of guys sometimes, once nearly a hundred, a little counter on the
screen told him how many, they would urge him on as he brought out his toys, ever larger dildos and plugs. It was never much money, he said, unless a guy wanted a private show, and then they could leave the site and go to Skype, and he might earn thirty or forty euro. But I don’t really do it for the money, he said. Once he had auditioned to do porn, or not auditioned exactly, there had been a call on one of the websites he used and he had sent his photos to a company in Germany, but they didn’t want me, he said, they didn’t even send me a response. Can you believe it, I would have been amazing, they wouldn’t even have to pay me, I would have been a star. Maybe it was to shock him out of his fantasy that when he moved forward to take me in his mouth I stopped him, catching his forehead in my palm. He objected, he made a little grunt, half protest and half question, bending his head back to look up at me. I grabbed his chin in my other hand and spread the hinge of his jaw wide. He let me do this, he looked up at me until, realizing what I intended, he shut his eyes and I spat hard into his mouth. He made another noise, this time of pleasure, and when I let him go he dove onto me, in a single movement taking my whole cock in his mouth, almost to the base, and again I nearly flinched, I bent myself just slightly around him and grabbed his head, not to force him down but just to hold him still, the sensation was too much. But the sensation didn’t stop, I held his head in place but his tongue kept moving, he swallowed repeatedly so that it moved up and down, muscular and snakelike, and I found myself making a noise I hadn’t intended to make, not just a noise but a word, I don’t remember what it was, some expletive, shit or fuck, low and drawn out, a word that can mean anything and that meant here that it was wonderful, what he was doing, and it became more wonderful when I let his head go.
Cleanness Page 15