Best Gay Erotica 2008

by Richard Labonté

  I was on my back, my legs over his shoulders. Sweat was sprinkling down on me, dripping off the tip of Jimmy’s nose, off his chin, falling to my lips, where I licked some of it up. Jimmy’s humping made the rest of the sweat roll down the sides of my neck, tickling into my ears. Both of us were breathing heavy, gulping the apartment’s stale air. Jimmy rose up on his haunches, shook his crew cut so that more droplets of sweat rained down on me. He let go of my wrists.

  He grunted and said three or four words, what sounded like something-something-blood, and I was thinking, Oh shit. But I couldn’t be sure if he was really saying what I thought he was saying.

  Suddenly he stopped humping and, like a little monkey, flipped himself around so his ass was in my face. He grinned back at me with bared teeth. “You can’t hit me, then at least get your fist in there. Right? You can do that, can’t ya?”

  I could. I could do anything for him except hurt him. I’ve always had a thing for him, always figured I’d do anything he asked. Something about his size, I think, not dick size because he’s only pinky-finger big, but his body, I mean, him being so little you could carry him around in a backpack or a suitcase if you wanted. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you get the idea. Back in high school he was just Jimmy Delano, one of those quiet kids sitting by himself in the back of the class, or in the corner of the cafeteria, not enough of a pain in the ass to make himself known, or to call down some bully’s attention, just the quiet sort, reading Star Trek anthologies or the latest Frank Herbert, going unnoticed through his high school years. Maybe I was reading things into him that weren’t there, but I always suspected there was more to the little guy than met the eye. And later, whenever he showed up at my apartment, whenever he said he wanted to fuck me, I told myself it was that sweet quiet old-time Jimmy I turned over for. I was fooling myself, but at least I knew it.

  “That’s it, big guy, keep going, keep going. Ah. Yeah. That’s it.”

  I had about four fingers in there, working around. He’d never let me so much as touch his hole before, but I didn’t ask questions. I tried never to ask any questions that Jimmy didn’t want me to ask.

  He leaned forward, knees and elbows on the mattress. He squirmed his ass at me, pushing against my hand, trying to get the whole thing in there. I finally got my thumb into the act, squeezing it in between my fingers, but then everything seemed to stop.

  “Jimmy,” I said, “I don’t think—”

  “It’ll go, goddammit. It’s going. It’s going.”

  And suddenly I was inside him, up to the wrist, my arm poking out of his asshole like he’d just given birth to a twenty-year-old, six-foot-tall man, and the hand was the last to come out. Like I’d just been born, and Jimmy Delano was my creator.

  “Holy shit,” one of us said, but I couldn’t tell you which one.

  Our senior year, Jimmy had gone away for a while, disappeared, not noticed by anybody but me, probably. There was just a silent place, something empty, me wondering where he’d gone, wishing I’d had the chance to talk to him, get to know him.

  When he came back two years later he’d already had the dragon tattooed across his back. I heard rumors about him before I saw him, that he was crazy now, that he’d walk up to anybody, peel his shirt off, and make sure they got a good look at the tattoo. Suddenly he was all about being around people, couldn’t get enough of people, telling everybody, like some maniac carnival guy, “Step right up, take a look, take a look at this.” He’d take off his shirt, turn around, and start talking.

  The story changed every time he told it. He’d been in the Navy, he said, and got the tattoo in a shop in Bangkok. Or Fiji. Or he’d hiked across Europe and then Asia, ending up in Ti-bet, where he got the dragon during some kind of secret Buddhist ritual. Jimmy was smart, he’d read a lot, that much was obvious. But he couldn’t keep his stories straight.

  Fucking liar, everybody said, but not to his face. Most of the local guys, the few remainders of the old gang who were still in the neighborhood, turned and ran when they saw Jimmy coming their way. Couldn’t take it, they said, telling me about it when they stopped at Koessler’s, where I’d be sweeping up, cleaning the bathrooms, wiping down the tables. They’d shake their heads and laugh, “That Little Jimmy Dragon, what a fucking nutcase.”

  At first I couldn’t figure out why he came to see me. I’d kept in touch with one or two people from school, but didn’t hang out with them. I knew that Jimmy was back, but didn’t have any reason to think he’d try to contact me. I was just biding my time, keeping to myself, telling myself I was trying to make the Big Decisions about my life. I did my bit at Koessler’s, and jacked off when I got home every morning, pretending I’d get off my ass someday, apply to the local college, Be Somebody.

  Then Jimmy showed up, out of the blue, knocked on my door like some fucked-in-the-head Cupid had shot an arrow into his ass, and he just somehow knew I had its twin sticking out of mine. When I opened up, he came in, looked around a little, sat down on my filthy old couch like he owned the place. His foot jounced on the floor like he had something to say, but couldn’t decide whether or not to say it, so he didn’t say much of anything. Finally he said Hey, and then he looked around some more. When I asked, he said Nah, he didn’t want anything to drink, just wanted to see where I lived. A few minutes later, he stood up like he was ready to leave, but then he came over to me, pulled his T-shirt off over his head, turned around so that I could see the dragon on his back. I’d heard about it before, of course, but it was the first time I’d seen it.

  “Go on,” Jimmy said, quiet, his voice an octave too low. “Touch it.”

  I touched it.

  “You’ll never guess how I got this motherfucker.”

  I don’t think it was really the sex he was after. Some people say sex is the answer to everything, but it seems to me like that’s too simple an answer. Sex is never just sex. Mostly Jimmy came to my place to try out the new stories, I think, since I never questioned him, never let on that he’d told the story before, or that he’d said something completely different last time. And I was horny and I guess lonely, and wanted a little human contact, and my crush on Jimmy hadn’t gone away, never did go away, even after I found out about the lies. I think Jimmy fed on that need, my need, satisfying needs of his own that weren’t just about getting his rocks off.

  He’d put on some weight while he’d been gone, muscle weight, not much but just enough to show the veins in his biceps and the ones running down by his hip bones, blue-green veins worming up over the washboards, held down tight by his light brown skin. He liked it when I traced them, my fingers running along his arms, his shoulders; down his belly to the insides of his thighs. He wouldn’t put it into words, or ask me outright to do it, but Jimmy liked it when I touched him slowly. He liked to be…adored.

  He came around more and more, started telling me about his family. From Puerto Rico, he said. Or Cuba. Or Venezuela. He told me his sister had had her head cut off by a sugar cane harvesting machine. He told me his little brother died from asthma in the Andes. His parents had been killed by rebels, or had died of diphtheria in some jungle.

  Whenever Jimmy climaxed, it was like an explosion going off somewhere inside his brain. You could see it on his face, a thousand different expressions fighting for a place there. The first time I saw it, I thought he might be having an attack of some kind. I didn’t know him very well then—not that I ever got to know him very well—and I thought maybe he had epilepsy, or maybe he was having a stroke or a heart attack. He seemed to pull away from me completely, going somewhere all his own. His eyes shut tight, his mouth gaped open, looking like it wanted to yell something, but I guess I blinked and then he seemed to be smiling, peaceful, and I blinked again and then his thin eyebrows lifted up, questioning something, his eyes still closed. All this happened in the space of a few seconds, the time it took him to pump out a few squirts of cum. There’s more that happened, too, that face, but it’s not like I can put it into words. It
just seemed like Jimmy took a trip when he came, maybe his life flashed before his eyes, or maybe he was on a planet somewhere where time happened a lot faster than it happened here. Maybe he was living a whole lifetime on that planet, just in the space of a few seconds, or maybe he was making a list, just that quick, of all his hopes and dreams and regrets and joys or whatever of his real life here on earth, adding them up, trying to figure it all out.

  I couldn’t say for sure. I just know it scared me a little, every time.

  Jimmy’d flipped around again, facing me, was bouncing up and down on my cock, but then suddenly he stopped moving. I could feel him loosening up. Not his ass I mean, which was about as loose as it could get, but just his body in general, his tight little muscles going slack. He leaned down close to me, close enough I thought he might kiss me, but at the last minute his body twisted and he rolled off, climbed off the bed, and marched across the bare concrete floor of my bedroom.

  He’d done this before, climbed off in the middle of the ride, leaving me feeling empty, cold, sticky; now he had left me feeling suddenly alone, lonely, while he went to fetch his bag. He carried an old army surplus knapsack with him everywhere, not something you’d see the troops carrying these days, but an older thing, Vietnam or Korea era, a thin canvas thing, olive drab, worn and frayed by years of use. I don’t think Jimmy really thought people would believe he’d carried it in combat but it did give him a slightly military look, gave the impression that he’d been through something, been through a lot of something. At least to me it did. Like I said, I was pretty young back then.

  But the bag he went to get wasn’t the knapsack. It was a bag within the knapsack, a small leather pouch, black and shiny, newish, hand wide, the top zippered and sloping, making the whole thing almost triangular. It never occurred to me what the bag was actually made to hold. I knew that Jimmy kept his stash in there, sometimes prerolled, sometimes loose but with a pipe. Sometimes it was a toy or two, something he wanted to try. It’d been seven months since we first started fucking, and I could tell that Jimmy was bored after the first couple of times. After that, one by one, came dildos, poppers, handcuffs. Once he had a thong in there, leopard-spotted, that he asked me to wear around the apartment, “just walk around, regular-like, like I’m not even here,” while he drank a sixpack of Old Milwaukee on the couch. Afterward he didn’t even touch me, just grunted and nodded and walked out the door. A few days later he was back, without the thong but with the pot, and he fucked me even if he didn’t want me, him blissed out, counting the tiles in the ceiling, with me doing all the work; fucked me because I was available, because I was willing.

  A few days later he asked me to tie him up, burn him with a cigarette. Just around the nipples, he said, maybe a couple on the inner thigh. It was early enough in our relationship that the fire or whatever between us was hot enough, I was feeling I guess vulnerable enough, that I couldn’t say no.

  When he came back from the living room, he didn’t even try to hide the gun. I didn’t know anything about guns back then, but now I’d guess it was a .38 police special Smith & Wesson, silver, shiny. It dangled at his side, carried casually in a limp arm. I noticed his dick, too, limp, withered up like it wanted to crawl back inside him.

  I sat up on the bed. “What the fuck, Jimmy!”

  “It’s okay,” he said. He sat down beside me, set the gun on his naked brown lap. A bruise on his left thigh was purple, turning black. He had another bruise on the back of his right hand, the same hand that was spread out gently over the gun. “I was just wondering if you’d do me a favor, that’s all.”

  My mind ran through about a million different scenarios. The only one that made sense was that Jimmy had found the gun, or stolen it, and he wanted me to keep it for him. I don’t think I really knew my limits back then, not so that I could rationalize them, think them through to myself and know for sure what I’d do or wouldn’t do, but I knew without having to think about it that I wasn’t keeping a gun in my apartment. I shook my head, started to say as much, but Jimmy stopped me.

  “Just a quick shot through the shoulder,” he said. “I heard that’s the best way. Might mess up my arm for a while, but it heals quickest and won’t hit anything too vital. You know?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake—”

  “No, really,” he said. “It’s not a big deal. I read up on it. Through the shoulder. Minimum damage, minimum pain. Afterward I head down the street, call an ambulance from some pay phone.” He looked me in the eye, something he didn’t often do. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anybody how it happened.”

  “People will hear it, Jimmy. The neighbors.”

  He laughed. “In this building? In this neighborhood? Nobody’d even call the cops.”

  I sank a little, defeated. Jimmy was probably right. There were two crack houses on the block, and right in my own building there were three rooms on the top floor reserved by a pimp I never saw but whose girls sashayed up and down the stairwell all night long. One of the girls had overdosed the previous month, leaving a vomit stain on the hallway carpet, probably the only mark she’d made in life. A few weeks before that, one of the johns had been beaten to death with a tire iron. In a strange way, I’d started to consider it all normal, take it in stride. I’d stopped calling 9-1-1 after the first couple of times I heard gunshots because, the times I’d called, the cops hadn’t shown up for hours. Sure, Jimmy was right. Nobody would care, nobody would call.

  But in the time it took to understand this, I understood a lot more, too. I could figure out Jimmy’s motivation easily enough—to him, the gunshot was just another version of the dragon tattoo—and I knew he was smart enough that he’d probably been using me for a long time, building up trust, trying to get to this very point. I was thinking, that’s what the handcuffs were about, the fisting, the cigarette burns. And, no, it wasn’t about the sex, at least not entirely. In the space of about a minute, I had a hundred sudden revelations like that, and one of those was the fact that I couldn’t see Jimmy anymore. This was the end of it, one way or the other. I knew I couldn’t do what he’d asked.

  He saw it in my face, I think. His body made a move like he wanted to argue his point some more, but he didn’t say anything. He stood up from the bed, went to the living room. Shadows on the bedroom wall told me he was getting dressed, packing the gun away. He opened the door and left.

  This is the part where I’m supposed to tell how I saw Jimmy sometime later, showing off his gunshot wound to all the boys at Koessler’s. How he’d gained their respect because he’d finally proved that he was a real man. He’d be telling a story about how he got it. Maybe he’d finally get the story straight this time. Moral: Jimmy Dragon had learned his lesson. Or maybe the guys would laugh at him because he’d given three different versions. Moral: people never change.

  Or then there’s the tender ending: I tell how he came back to me after he’d found somebody to give him that shoulder wound, and how he couldn’t make it to the hospital, and he was full of regrets about trying to be a show-off, and he died right there in my apartment, in my arms, with me giving him whatever absolution I could. And then I cried or whatever, washing away his sins with my tears. Moral: everybody needs forgiveness, redemption, love.

  But that’s not what happened.

  Long story short, I never heard from Jimmy again. He left like he had in high school. I never heard his name mentioned. The guys at Koessler’s forgot him right away. I thought about him sometimes, mostly at the beginning, right after he’d gone. I wondered if he’d accomplished whatever it was he wanted to accomplish. I doubted it. From time to time, after that, something would remind me, and I’d stop and think about him. I’d be reading in the paper that some Tibetan monk was making a once-in-a-lifetime visit to our city, and I’d think, Where’s Jimmy? Or I’d hear about a farming accident, where somebody got an arm cut off by a threshing machine, and there it would be, the thought: Whatever happened to that guy I used to know? Right, that one with the tatt
oo?

  But every now and then, late at night, when I’m alone and lonely, it all comes back. Every bit of it. And sometimes I feel like writing it all down, trying to dredge up every detail before this memory blurs into something else.

  RELEASE

  Alana Noël Voth

  I met Asa at a volleyball game on a beach in Newport, Oregon. The rain was crazy that day and the players were up against the rain as well as each other. I didn’t like volleyball; I liked to look at the guys. Four on each side of the net, cords of muscle in their arms and legs, clenched buttcheeks, and wet hair.

  One guy served the ball and sent it into flight; for a second the ball dangled like a moon on a mobile, and then it struck the ground, and a second guy grabbed the ball, cradling it to his chest. The guy who’d served hit the ground on his stomach. When he stood, wet sand stuck to him like bruises, which he brushed off, smiling.

  I’d had a few beers before hitting the beach. The cigarette I tried to light was a limp dick, so I returned the pack to my jeans pocket. Camel Lights, same as Dad. I started smoking when I was ten. I hadn’t worn a shirt to the beach; I was pretty skinny.

  “You’re cold,” a voice said behind me.

  “I’m fine,” I answered without looking over my shoulder.

  “But you’re shaking,” the voice spoke again.

  “It’s nothing.” This time I looked. If he hadn’t been cute I would have blown the guy off. He looked my age, twenty-seven, medium tall and slim but not bone-skinny. A hooded jacket framed his face. Green eyes. Lashes so thick you would have thought he wore mascara. Bangs stuck from under his hood, hair the color of raisins. I ate raisins as a kid. Sometimes they were all I ate.