Best Gay Erotica 2009

by Richard Labonté

  Kyle turned, arched his back, and widened his stance slightly. He was shaking with pleasure.

  “They’re way too small, buddy,” Joe said, softly, as he cocked his head to get a better view. “They barely cover you back there. Sorry I got you the smalls.”

  “You are?” Kyle asked.

  A bit of silence.

  “No…no…I’m not sorry,” Joe said deliberately. “You look so hot. Like neutron hot.” There was a long silence. Kyle stood for an eternity while Joe surveyed him from every angle, keeping his distance.

  “Okay,” Kyle said, finally. “Could you get me the mediums?” he asked, not knowing what else to say.

  His trance broken, Joe said, “Yeah, stay right there.” He turned and dashed to the underwear section. His palms broke out in a sweat as he ran back to the changing room. Kyle hadn’t moved an inch. Joe opened the medium package and threw Kyle a red pair. They landed on the floor.

  “Take the ones you have off and put those on,” Joe said, closing the changing room door and locking it. Kyle flinched when he heard the door lock, and he stared at the package on the floor. “Bend over and pick them up,” Joe said softly. Kyle did as he was told, and the top half of his butt popped out of the size small briefs. Joe licked his lips.

  “Look at me,” Joe said. Kyle shifted his gaze from the floor and turned around. Their eyes met. A connection was made, a strong connection, welded willingly by mutual smiles. The smile on Kyle’s face was big and toothy, and it transformed his gawky appearance. All at once, for the first time, Kyle felt sexy, and he looked radioactively sexy to Joe.

  “Take them off,” Joe said softly, not wanting to scare Kyle. After a moment, Kyle stripped and stood naked.

  Without missing a beat, Joe said, “You’re beautiful.”

  Kyle’s smile got wider and he felt blessed. He felt as if he were going to cry, too. He’d been so unhappy for so many years. This first taste of adult happiness was new to him, and it demanded everything he had.

  “Turn around now, kiddo,” Joe said, his lowered voice daring to edge this exchange into something smutty. “I want to look at your tight teenage ass,” he said, fetishizing their age difference.

  Kyle turned and Joe let out an involuntary grunt.

  “Can I see you, too?” Kyle asked, tentatively.

  Joe stepped closer to Kyle and stripped off his shirt, then his shoes, then his pants and underwear.

  They weren’t Joe and Kyle, finally, and they weren’t in a dressing room in Ridge City Mall anymore. They created another location.

  At last, Joe asked, “When are you eighteen?”

  They both laughed, coming down to earth.

  “Next summer,” Kyle said.

  Carefully, Joe asked, “Are you a virgin?”

  “I don’t have any friends,” Kyle said, skipping the smaller point and arriving at the larger issue. Somehow, he felt he had permission to jump to what was important—he felt that this man would understand. “I don’t really have anyone. I’m alone all the time,” Kyle said. Then, he felt he had gone too far.

  There was a pause. Kyle was in agony.

  “You’ll have me,” Joe said.

  All during the fall, winter, and spring of Kyle’s senior year in high school, he walked to Ridge City and tried on clothes in front of Joe. White briefs, black briefs, sleeveless shirts, and jeans, lots of jeans. “You look so great in tight jeans,” Joe said, running his eyes from Kyle’s tiny hips down to his feet. Joe started giving Kyle tips on how to bulk up, and though the young man remained almost painfully skinny, by the spring his body had developed more definition.

  Joe talked lovingly about every little change and improvement he saw in Kyle’s body, and he talked and talked about what they were going to do on Kyle’s eighteenth birthday. Hypnotically, Joe would murmur detailed, fantastically dirty things he was going to do to Kyle, always coming back tenderly to what he was going to do to Kyle’s “tight little teenaged ass.” The repetition of this phrase grew more powerful each time Joe said it.

  Kyle would constantly interrupt and say he wanted to do all that now, but Joe would shake his head and say, “We have to wait until you’re legal, sweetie. You can wait, can’t you? Let’s go over some of the different positions we’re going to use…”

  Kyle would stare at himself in the mirror as Joe stared at him. Most of the time, Joe brought in clothes, leaned against the door, and half whispered instructions to Kyle, spiked with lurid commentary. Kyle was ordered to turn and stretch and bend, to hold strange and difficult poses. “We have to train that cute little body of yours,” Joe said. “It has to be flexible and ready to take cock. That’s all you’re gonna do, is take cock. I’m going to fuck your tight little teenaged ass every single day.”

  “You are?” Kyle would ask.

  “Every single day,” Joe would repeat.

  “Yes, Joe,” Kyle would say.

  “On your eighteenth birthday, you’re going to take my dick.”

  Kyle smiled happily and put his arms around his savior.

  One day, a month before his eagerly awaited eighteenth birthday, Kyle asked, “Would you try on clothes in front of me?”

  Joe smiled. “You want to see me do that?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I want to look at you again,” Kyle said.

  Joe went off and got himself a pair of small-sized blue jeans. He came into the dressing room and slowly started to take his clothes off in front of the mirror. Kyle was dazzled, and Joe was proud of his strapping body.

  “This is yours,” Joe said, running his hands down his body and then grabbing his dick.

  “Mine,” Kyle said.

  It took Joe a while to get into the jeans. When they were on, Kyle went to Joe and kneeled down. Joe took Kyle’s head and rubbed it deep into his crotch, then leaned back into a wall and let out a contented moan. Joe looked at them in the mirror and smiled at Kyle’s fresh young nakedness, crouched over awkwardly, worshipping his maturity and largesse. They stayed in this position for such a long time that it felt to Kyle like he was not quite there anymore, like he was looking at himself in a movie on television.

  Finally, Joe pulled Kyle upright. “You’re so sweet,” he said. “You’d do anything I asked, wouldn’t you?” Kyle nodded eagerly. “You’d even give your tight little teenaged butt to an old, ugly fat guy if I told you to, wouldn’t you?” Joe asked. “I want to see the oldest, nastiest, fattest guy come right in your sweet little face,” he continued. The sound of a customer finally broke up their scene. Kyle left in a hurry.

  On his eighteenth birthday, Kyle walked all the way to Ridge City for the first time in weeks, in the tightest blue jeans he owned; underneath he wore the red bikini underwear he had bought on their first day together in the changing room. When he got to Joe’s store, Kyle stood and blinked, over and over. The store was gone, closed; boarded up and abandoned. Kyle’s hands broke into a sweat. He ran around the mall, the ugly, boring mall, hoping to see Joe. He wondered if he could ask anybody what had happened to the store, but he knew no one there, only Joe.

  For an hour or two, he walked around jerkily, trying not to cry. Finally, he sat down in front of the bus stop, and he did cry. He cried for all the years of waiting. He cried for feeling like the most rejected reject. He cried, at last, for no reason at all. An old lady lumbered up to him and, without saying a word, offered him a Kleenex. He sat next to her on the otherwise empty bus all the way home. As his stop neared, Kyle dried his tears a final time and murmured, “He liked me. At least someone liked me.”

  ABDUCTING FRODO

  Jeff Mann

  For S

  He’s even handsomer than I remember, striding out of Roanoke Airport’s security area with his bags of luggage. Lean, rangy, shorter than me by several inches, younger than me by a decade. Boyish, with big, wide, shy eyes and a head of black curls. “My hobbit,” and “Boy Frodo” I’ve called him for months, because of his amazing resemblance to Elijah Wood in The Lord of the Rings film tr
ilogy. Just the sort to bring out the Top in me something fierce.

  As the distance between us dwindles now to inches and the months apart shrink to seconds, as he moves closer and closer, I’m trying to look calm, in control, trying to hide the welling exhilaration I feel. Tonight his sweet young body has moved hundreds of miles through dark sky to me, from Manhattan, his home, and his husband, high over ocean and Pennsylvania earth, in and out of Dulles, and into these mountains at last. It’s been a good long while since I’ve topped a boy this desirable, this smart and talented, this eager to be tied.

  “Howdy,” I mutter, gripping his shoulder with welcome. “Hey,” he whispers, squeezing my forearm. I’d hug him, but, despite months of email flirtation, up to now we’ve just been writer and reader, men with mutual friends. We’ve never before been together like this—as soon-to-be lovers, as Top and bottom. Things are still careful, tentative. The hard hugs, the deep kisses, they’ll wait till later, after I have him home, stripped, collared, and bound.

  “The beard looks real good,” I say, studying his smile, the angles of his face, the new stubble darkening his cheeks. That little patch of silver on his chin makes me want to kiss him hard right here, in the middle of the airport, under the disapproving, pious eyes of Southwest Virginia, but I don’t have time to share fisticuffs with homophobes. I want us on the road and on the way to Hanging Rock Park and then on down the interstate to Pulaski as soon as possible.

  We’ve been planning this weekend for a long time, plotting the details of his abduction, the way we’ll meet, the ways he’ll be restrained, what I’ll do with him once he’s my prisoner. It’s been like composing literotica together. I’ve ordered him not to shave or use deodorant for days, because I love beard shadow, facial hair, and armpit musk. I’ve told him to wear his scruffiest jeans and, beneath them, a jockstrap. In my truck, as promised, wait the collar, the cuffs, the hunting knife, the tape, the bandana.

  Our time is finally here. He grins up at me, and the difference in our heights maddens me, makes me want to rope and gag and fuck him, hold him and protect him from the world, which is, of course, exactly what he’s come so far for. He studies me for a long moment, assessing the man he will soon submit to. In about fifteen minutes, for the first time he’ll be exactly as he wants to be—completely helpless, a big man’s captive—and I’m sure he’s still a little nervous. I’m a little nervous too. He’s come a long way, and I want to be the perfect Top, the perfect Southern host. I want to insure that all his fantasies, the many scenes we’ve discussed so long on email, come true without a flaw.

  Novelty, anxiety, and anticipation: the combination’s a true aphrodisiac.

  What does he see? A tall, beefy guy with a close-cropped silvering beard, a black biker jacket, a black leather-flag baseball cap, faded jeans, and black cowboy boots. Would have worn the black cowboy hat, but it was too windy today. The mountaineer queer, I call myself. Too much of a country boy to tolerate cities, so I’ve had to make peace with my Appalachian hills, with the way they’ve shaped me. Luckily, I’m fierce enough to defend myself and my kind, if need be, from local fundamentalists and conservatives. Two hundred pounds and regular gym visits help.

  I grab the larger of his two bags and nod toward the exit. “This way.” It’s 11:00 P.M., and I want us home as soon as possible.

  “Good to be here, Strider,” he says, following me toward the escalator. “Let me visit the restroom, and we can be on our way. No other luggage to collect.”

  Strider. I love it when he calls me that. Wish I resembled handsome Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn as much as my boy resembles adorable Elijah Wood’s Frodo, but he calls me by Aragorn’s nickname anyway. He knows that Aragorn is a major role model of mine, that the ring I’m wearing tonight—silver dragons wrapped around a green stone—is a copy of Aragorn’s, that I have replicas of Aragorn’s ranger sword and elven hunting knife hanging on the walls at home. Surely he knows the name makes me feel strong, protective, a warrior of sorts. The kind of man I want to be: ruthless to enemies, tender and caring with friends and kin. Pretty much the kind of man I already am, after years of conflict and self-shaping. Surely he knows that he’s entirely safe here, that a boy who submits to me will be shielded from the hateful orcs of this world, protected from all pain except whatever abuse he begs for.

  On the escalator, a little polite chat. “How was your flight?” “What’s the weather been like down here? Any snow predicted?” In the restroom, urinals side by side. Then we’re out in the darkness together, heading across the huge parking lot toward my pickup truck. The wind gnaws at our necks. A few dead leaves scuttle by. One day I’ll be decrepit, but I’ll have this night to remember. I’ll have written what I could to retain what I can.

  Six months since we met by that pool in New Orleans, introduced by mutual friends at Saints and Sinners, the LGBT literary festival. Five months since our email correspondence began, after he’d read my Masters of Midnight vampire novella Devoured and some of my other BDSMTHEMED work. He was particularly excited by a short story I’d published in the online magazine Velvet Mafia. “Captive” is about a young Southern man who gets picked up, overpowered, bound, gagged, and used by a Yankee biker and loves it so much he eventually decides to become the man’s full-time slave. How much of that story was true? Frodo asked. How often do you live what you write? he wondered. Have you ever been part of a consensual kidnapping? Have you ever kept a guy bound and gagged for hours? After reading “Captive,” I really want to submit to a man that way. Do you know any trustworthy New York City Tops who might introduce me to bondage?

  Perpetual Southern altruist, I offered my kidnapping services, agreeing to play out with him some version of “Captive,” if he could ever get out of that noisy Northern city and down to my mountains for what we soon began dubbing “A Wilderness Bondage Weekend.” His husband gave reluctant permission and took to calling me “Wilderness Daddy.” Mockery, perhaps, but it was a title I gladly embraced. My husband bought me both Aragorn and Frodo bookmarks and plans to return from a business trip tomorrow in time to join us and help create a Hobbit sandwich.

  Months of sweet planning, and now here we are. I shove Frodo’s luggage into the truck’s extended cab, then turn to him in the dim parking-lot light. I have to touch him now—I’m tired of waiting—so, awkwardly, briefly, I stroke his curly head. So soft. I can’t wait to feel his mouth on my cock, taste his nipples between my teeth.

  “Look what I wore for you,” he says abruptly, pulling up his knit sweater long enough to show me his T-shirt. BOY is the slogan printed across his chest. “Very good,” I say, chuck-ling but secretly touched. I open the passenger door, he slips in, I close the door behind him. We both know that this is where it really begins.

  Behind the wheel now, looking around the parking lot to see who’s within eyesight. A fat middle-aged man—well, about my age, I guess—trundles by with his rolling suitcase, so I wait till he moves off before I look Frodo in the eyes and say, “Ready?”

  “Yes,” he whispers, meeting my gaze for a second, then dropping his eyes.

  My beat-up old black-leather backpack is behind the seat. I pull it into my lap, unzip it, and begin sorting through what’s necessary.

  The collar first. A short length of heavy chain to circle his neck and then padlock together just below his clavicles. The metal’s chilly, but soon enough his young heat will lend it warmth. The molecules will speed up the way my heart is speeding now.

  “Looks good,” I say, stroking his hair. “You’re mine now, right?” As we’ve agreed, he’ll remain collared till I return him to this same airport three days from now.

  “Yes,” he says, looking up at me long enough to nod, then lowering his gaze back into submission. How much I love a boy’s submission. Nothing gets me harder.

  Well, I guess one thing gets me harder: restraining and gagging a boy. The gag, unfortunately, has to wait. Right now, we both know, it’s time for the cuffs. Eagerly, without waiting for my o
rder, he holds out his hands before him, and I snap the black metal around his wrists. I’d prefer to cuff his hands behind his back, but he’s a novice at all this, and it’s a good hour to Pulaski. I want him powerless but not hurting. Not yet, anyway.

  That’s all for now, simply because I have to pay for parking first. I toss the extra sweatshirt I’ve brought for this purpose across Frodo’s lap, concealing his cuffed hands. I tuck the slave collar under his sweater. I drop the backpack on the floor between his feet.

  “All right?” I ask. He nods. I start the truck, turn off the blaring country-music radio—107.1 FM, my favorite station for backroads driving—let the engine warm up for about half a minute, then head for the brightly lit booth on the lot’s far edge.

  “How you?” I ask, passing the elderly attendant a dollar.

  “Jus’ fine,” he replies. “Not a bad November we’re havin’.” He and I have to shoot the shit briefly—we mountain folk make a short social chat out of every interaction. His accent is about the same as mine, and I’m guessing he likes the same kind of music and food I do—Toby Keith and Reba McIntire, brown beans and cornbread—but I’m also guessing his values are otherwise pretty different. This is the sort of queer juxtaposition I love, the sort of irony I relish, created as it is by the contrast between appearance and reality. I look and sound and sometimes pretty much act like just another local redneck in a pickup truck, and in many ways I am just that. But of course I have a leather-flag sticker on my rear window and, this blessed night, a handsome young man from New York City collared and cuffed in the passenger seat. I guess I’ve become the kind of wildly contradictory and complex man I’ve always been attracted to and I’ve always wanted to be: good baker of biscuits, collector of cowboy boots and hats, aficionado of four-wheel-drives, adept user of cuffs and ball gags, deft maker of knots. When you’re butch enough to blend in, you can get away with a hell of a lot in this region, despite the stupid fuckers that compose the Religious Right and run most of Virginia.