by Neil Plakcy
“Bureau drawer.” While he grabbed the lube, I opened a package and popped out a neon-green circle. “In high school they used to call me the Jolly Gay Giant,” I said. I slid it over my hard-on and wagged my dick at Julian. “I’d like a couple of those guys who bullied me to see me now.”
“I bet they’d be envious.” Julian squirted some lube in his hand and began massaging my hard-on. The green rubber glowed in the dim light.
When my dick was vibrating with pleasure, Julian stood up and handed me the bottle of lube. He turned and presented his ass. “Do me,” he commanded.
I squirted some lube on my index finger, then began rubbing it around the edge of his asshole, waiting for the sphincter to relax. Then I slid my finger in as far as it would go. “You’re tight,” I said.
He hummed with pleasure.
I got a second finger in; then Julian backed away. He straddled me on the bed, the moonlight illuminating the need. I’d never fucked a guy like that, with that kind of intimacy between us, and my pulse raced and my mouth felt dry.
He guided me into him, easing slowly down over me. He stopped halfway with a grimace on his face. I could see his thigh muscles straining.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded. “Just taking my time. There’s a lot of you to accommodate.”
“I love it when you use big words.”
“Big words for a big dick,” he said and slid a little farther down.
I’d never thought of myself as big; my dick was long and skinny, like a peeled banana, with a slight curve to it. I’d seen a lot of dicks at the Three Lambs—big, meaty ones like Warren Updegrove’s, long ones, short ones, pimply ones, uncircumcised ones. And sure, I’d compared myself to them. But maybe because the rest of me was long, I’d always assumed that my dick length was simply proportional to my height.
Julian slipped down more, and I felt my pubes tickling his ass. He looked me in the eyes and smiled, and my heart beat so fast I was worried I’d have some kind of attack. But what a way to go, I thought.
Julian then began a slow up-and-down rhythm, taking my dick into his ass, then almost releasing it, then sliding back down. I could tell when I hit his prostate by the blissful smile on his face.
I was pretty blissed out too. I’d never been able to fuck someone so deeply before; because my legs were so long, it was hard to find the right position for maximum access, usually involving the other guy on his knees with a stack of pillows beneath him.
Not with Julian, though. He squeezed his ass muscles around my dick and moaned with pleasure, and I loved the glazed look in his eyes, the way drops of sweat pooled under his arms and below his pecs and then dripped down his hairy chest. I’d never felt the sensations I felt with him—was it that he was damn good in bed? Or was I falling in love with him?
I couldn’t help myself; I began raising my ass and slamming into him as he rode down, and we made our own rhythm. Julian’s dick bobbed in front of me, and I reached up to grab it, but he said no. “I want to come just from this,” he panted.
I had a quick, uncomfortable memory of Victor Kunin, the way he had been determined to have me shoot my load without touching myself, but I pushed it away. I was with Julian, and he was all I wanted.
We fucked together until I couldn’t hold back anymore, and I shot off into the condom. Julian bucked me for another moment or two, then shot a long stream of come out of his dick and onto my chest. “Wow,” I said, hoping that word handled my own orgasm and my astonishment at what he’d been able to do.
He stood up, releasing my dick to slap against my belly, and said he’d be right back. I lay there in the pleasant afterglow of sex, the come cooling and sweat dripping from my chin. Julian returned with a wet washcloth and cleaned me up.
“Such service,” I said sleepily.
“All for you, mi hijo.” He crawled into bed next to me, snuggled against my chest, and we drifted off to sleep together.
It was almost eight on Sunday morning when I pulled on a pair of shorts and an FU T-shirt and went out to the kitchen. The living room was littered with sleeping male bodies in various configurations.
Chuck and Fitz were cuddled by the sliding glass doors with a young guy I didn’t recognize. All three of them were naked, as was Warren, who was sleeping on his back with a pair of couch pillows beneath his head, his impressive dick nestled in a thatch of pubic hair. Thom was on his side, also naked, with one hand resting on Warren’s beefy chest.
I sniffed the air. Beneath the sweat and semen I smelled coffee, and I followed the scent to the kitchen, where Gavin was naked too, standing by the espresso machine. For probably the first time since I’d met Gavin at Three Lambs, his naked body didn’t turn me on. I preferred Julian’s hairy tanned chest, and Gavin’s dick, shrunken like a balloon with the air let out, looked small and unimpressive.
“It’s like the aftermath of a porn movie out there,” I said, nodding back toward the living room.
“Some of the guys had too much to drink at the party and didn’t want to drive. I extended our hospitality.”
“I saw. Was the nudity your idea?”
He shook his head. “I went into my room with that guy I was with at Java Joe’s. I found that pajama-less party when I came out this morning.” He had a line of white china mugs half-filled with coffee in front of him, and he poured milk into a metal pitcher and stuck it under the frothing arm of the cappuccino maker.
The sound of bubbling milk filled the kitchen. I wondered what was going to happen when the guys on the floor woke up. Would they move into round two, or perhaps three? Or would there be a lot of sheepish looks and a walk of shame out of the apartment?
Gavin lifted the metal frothing pot high and swirled milk into a white mug of espresso, finishing with a swirl of foam that looked like a musical note. He passed the mug over to me, and I poured some chocolate syrup in and stirred.
“You’re ruining my artwork,” he said as he moved on to the next mug. “Philistine.”
“True artists are never recognized in their lifetimes.” I snatched the next mug for Julian and walked back out to the living room. I couldn’t help myself; I did take some mental snapshots of the nudity on our floor. I noticed that Thom’s hand had strayed down from Warren’s chest to his groin, and that reminded me that I had a hunk of my own waiting for me in my bed.
25 – Misspent Youth
“It’s like the aftermath of an orgy out there,” I said to Julian as I walked back into my bedroom. I described the scene, all the men sprawled on the floor. “I’d hate to see what the floor looks like under a black light.”
He sat up and took the coffee eagerly from me. “And they didn’t invite us?”
“We were too busy in here,” I said. “They could have slipped an engraved invitation under the door, and we wouldn’t have noticed.”
It felt so right sitting there with Julian Indian style on my bed, drinking morning coffee and laughing together. “I don’t know how much work we can get done here,” I said. “With all those naked bodies sprawled around the living room.”
“Naked? Really?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Curious?”
“Anything wrong with that?”
I waved my hand toward the door. “Look, but don’t touch.”
He laughed and got up. “But put some shorts on,” I said. “You’re not part of the show. You’re all mine.”
He blew me a kiss. “You bet.” Then he pulled on a pair of my gym shorts and walked out. I sat back in bed and sipped my coffee, and thought about the day. It was going to be a while before all those sleepy guys got their shit together and vacated our living room. That meant I’d have to work in my bedroom with Julian, which wasn’t the best option.
We could go to Java Joe’s; they had fast, free Wi-Fi and served food. That would require us both getting showered and dressed, though.
Julian returned a couple of minutes later. “I’ve never seen so many naked guys together outside of a locker ro
om.”
“You never belonged to a gay frat, then,” I said. “At the Three Lambs there were always naked guys wandering around. Sometimes brothers, sometimes visitors. I got a real education in male anatomy there.”
“At Stanford I was too busy studying,” he said. “Oh, the woes of a misspent youth.”
“You’re still young,” I said. “Come spend some more of your youth with me.”
“The bathroom’s vacant right now. You want to shower with me?”
I hopped up off the bed. “Don’t have to ask me twice.”
The bathroom was a sloppy mess, smelling of soap and shampoo and littered with piles of wet towels. While Julian peed, I pulled the last clean towels from the closet, shucked my shorts, and stepped into the shower, getting the temperature right. There was a brief shock of cold water when he flushed, but then he was in the shower with me, and everything was great.
We soaped each other up. I arched my head back, and Julian nibbled my neck like a vampire as our dicks rubbed together. We did a slow, sensual dance under the pulsating water, and the frottage was so intense I had to hold on to Julian to keep the pressure going. I worried I might pass out.
We both spurted around the same time, sagging into each other. Then we rinsed off. Julian grabbed the shampoo. “Bend over. I want to wash your hair.”
No one had washed my hair for me since I was a little kid in the tub. My mom used to wash the three of us together until first Lincoln, then Leroy objected. I leaned my head down, and as Julian rubbed the shampoo into my hair my dick began to stiffen again. But the stiffness hurt, and I willed it down by thinking about big-boobed girls.
He rinsed me off, and we toweled ourselves dry. We went back to my room, and Julian borrowed shorts and a T-shirt from me. Then we followed the smell of eggs and bacon to the kitchen, where we found Eric at the stove. “I raided your fridge to make breakfast,” he said. He had one frying pan going with a few strips of bacon remaining in it, and another full of scrambled eggs, onions, and green peppers.
“Didn’t see you on the living room floor,” I said.
“Not my scene. Manny went off with Walter last night. He said I could use his room.” He nodded toward the cabinet. “Get yourselves some plates.”
The three of us divided up the remaining food and walked out to the dining room. Fitz, Chuck, and their new friend had already left. Warren and Thom were dressed and finishing their food. We joined them, but then they left a few minutes later.
“This is some apartment,” Eric said when it was just him, me, and Julian at the table. “How can you three swing the rent? Must be a fortune.”
“Six hundred a month each,” I said. “Gavin got us a deal by sleeping with the guy who owns it.”
I didn’t realize that Gavin had come up behind me. “Now, now,” he said. “You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, he’s charging us half-market rate because you charmed him.”
“Well, there might have been some sex involved,” Gavin said. “Any food left?”
“Eggs in the frying pan on the stove,” Eric said. “But the bacon’s all gone.”
“You are a master chef,” I said to Eric as Gavin went to the kitchen. “Where’d you learn to cook like that?”
“In the army. If you wanted to eat anything besides MREs, you had to make it yourself.”
“Will you marry me?” I asked. “Or at least move in here? Manny is probably going to leave us to live with Walter, so Gavin and I will need a third.”
“I might be interested,” Eric said. “If it isn’t party central twenty-four-seven. I’m looking to get out of Three Lambs—too many distractions there. This is my last semester, and I need to knuckle down and study.”
“Awful far from here to the campus, though,” I said.
“I only have class two days a week; the rest of my credits are independent study. So I don’t have to be on campus. And I’ve got my bike.”
“You’re going to ride a bicycle between here and FU?” Julian asked.
“Motorcycle,” Eric said. “I bought it used, but I’ve been tuning it up and it runs like a beauty.”
Gavin returned with a plate of scrambled eggs and an orange and slid across from us. Julian turned and elbowed me. “Eric’s not the only gay man who can cook, you know.”
I looked at him. “Really? You can cook? I thought all you could do was order out.”
“I’ll make you an amazing dinner when we’re all finished.”
My mouth was already watering, even though I’d scarfed down an excellent breakfast. “We need to get to work soon,” I said in a low voice. “But if we stay here, we’ll get stuck with clean up. Want to go to Java Joe’s?”
“We could go to my place,” Julian said.
“That works for me. As long as we can take some breaks together, if you know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Julian said.
26 – Romantic Heart
Julian lived in a sweet little one-bedroom apartment in a restored art deco building a few blocks from Flamingo Park. I set up my laptop on his coffee table, and the two of us sat across from each other. He e-mailed me the list of new bugs he and his beta testers had found, and I looked them over.
“What’s this one about special characters not displaying properly?” I asked.
Special characters included all the accents used in foreign languages, like the tilde, the curl over the n in Spanish words. It was crucial that we got them right, because a native speaker would immediately recognize any errors.
He scooted beside me and, from the site, pulled up a guide to restaurants in Buenos Aires. “See there?” he said, pointing to place in the document. “That restaurant is called Los Años Locos, but there’s no tilde over the n, so it would actually be pronounced ‘anos,’ not ‘anyos.’ And that changes the meaning in English from Those Crazy Years to Those Crazy Assholes.”
“I could see that would be a problem,” I said. “I’ll look into it.”
He kept testing, and I looked through the code step by step, trying to figure out where the ASCII character map was referenced. Around eleven his phone pinged with a text from Mila. “She has some questions about the translations,” Julian said after he’d read it. “Okay if she comes by and we go over them?”
“No problem,” I said. “I found the problem with the ASCII character map, so maybe the two of you could do some testing.”
Some people look totally different when you see them outside of work. In my first work-study job in college, I answered phones and did filing for the accounting department. One of the professors was a thirty-something woman who wore very professional-looking business suits with long sleeves. One day I happened to run into her at Matheson Hammock Park, and I almost didn’t recognize her—a torn T-shirt from a long-ago Ramones concert, hot pants, and tattoos up and down her arms.
Mila wasn’t like that. When she showed up at Julian’s, she could have stepped out from behind the reception desk at AppWorks. She had the same chic Goth vibe—everything black, but expensive and well-tailored. I introduced her to Julian, and it was funny to watch as he segued from English to Spanish to French, Mila matching him without a hitch.
“I like him,” Mila said to me. “He’s smart.”
They sat down on the sofa to go over translations, and I was jealous. Julian was mine, and Mila had walked right in and co-opted him.
But Julian was gay, I reminded myself. And it was great that the two of them got along. We were both helping Julian put together the best website, right?
Julian gave Mila some instructions and his laptop and went out to get us all sandwiches. Every time I looked over at Mila, she was doing something different—pounding on the keyboard like a maniac, staring at the screen with a strand of her black hair in her mouth, typing slowly, finger by finger.
“What are you doing?” I finally asked her.
“Bug testing,” she said. “Isn’t this what you guys do? Try to break the software? Typing fas
t, typing slow, putting letters in the numbers boxes, and all that kind of thing.”
“I didn’t know you could do all that,” I said.
“I’m not just eye candy, Larry. I have a brain. I pay attention to what’s going on around me.”
“Speaking of which. Kevin and Lilah. How long has that been going on?”
“He pursued her for months, and she kept pushing him away, because of the whole not-soiling-your-nest thing. But he was determined, and eventually she gave in. They were on the down low for a long time.”
“Any other secrets at AppWorks? Boris’s hidden love child? Dylan’s modeling career?”
She laughed. “Everybody has secrets, Larry. And if I was the kind of girl to kiss and tell, nobody would tell me anything.”
I guessed that meant she was willing to keep my work for Julian a secret, which was fine with me. He returned with thick roast-beef sandwiches on challah bread, and we dug in. I went on to other bugs, and early in the afternoon Mila left.
“I like Mila,” Julian said after she left. “She’s cool.”
“Yeah. I got lucky. Everybody at AppWorks is okay.”
“Because it’s small. The bigger the organization, the more chance you have for conflict. That’s why so many people in Silicon Valley go for start-ups. Fewer personalities to deal with.”
“That, and the money,” I said.
“True. But sometimes there’s a lot more upside sticking with Facebook or Apple and collecting your stock options. I know tons of guys whose start-ups crashed and burned.”
I looked up at him. “What will you do if this project flops?”
“I can’t let it. I have too many people depending on me.”
“Come on, Julian. The kind of people who invested with you must have deep pockets. If they lose a few grand, they won’t even notice it.”
“It’s not about the money. It’s about me, my reputation.”
“And what your father thinks of you?”
“That too. My dad started out with nothing. At twelve years old he was on the street selling fruit from his backyard. He hustled everything from cassette tapes to bootleg videos of American movies. In the 1980s he started importing simple cell phones from the United States. He was the first person I knew to have a car phone—it was almost as big as a briefcase.”