It was tough to appraise a situation where, thanks to pot, my senses lagged behind my observations. I was in deep trouble, its depth revealing itself slowly, like layers of a dream. While most of me could do nothing, my pot-sensitized feet perked up like a retriever’s ears, registering everything—air currents, particles of dust, sound waves from Granger’s squeaking chair. Idiot feet, bragging about how sensitive they were, as if to reassure me. “Hey, Granger?” I said. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call this off. “Granger.” I was growing warm in my plastic cocoon, my sweat seeming to tighten the sheath even more. “Granger,” I said, twisting my head toward his bare feet on the kitchen floor, all I could see of him. Unlike mine, his feet were confident, in control. Feet that would always land a man on his legs. What, what was I going to do? What could I do? The unacceptable nothing echoed through my mind in a voice very much like Granger’s. I shook my head vigorously, like a child throwing a tantrum, until I heard Granger’s voice again, for real this time.
“Here you go,” he said. As if he were handing me a glass of water, instead of fitting a blindfold over my eyes. “Here you go,” and there I went, into total darkness.
What he did to my feet over the next hour should not have been done to anyone, ever. I would never know what he used on them, for he refused to tell me, even after he finally stopped. I assumed it was something from his kitchen, something that was never meant to be used on human flesh. It burrowed into the core of my ticklishness and multiplied like a corrosive virus, flaying my feet down to raw nerves. At each touch I howled a desperate laugh and the touching never stopped; he kept me on the brink of passing out but I never quite crossed over. When he finally stopped tickling me I kept howling, stuck in my hysteria till he grabbed my chin with one hand, turned my head back and forth. It was then I knew it was over, also realizing that my midsection had become unbearably warm and moist: I had pissed myself.
Something was different in me after that. For a long time I sat across the living room from Granger and looked at him looking at me. He sat with one bare leg hiked up, a forearm resting on his knee, a vaguely satisfied expression on his face, the look of a champion trying to appear humble. Even his dick, which I had rubbed and sucked raw over the past twenty-four hours, looked satisfied, lying on his belly as if it were taking a well-deserved nap. Still half-stoned and hardly sane, I began listening, almost against my will, to the tiny voice in that part of my brain that could still organize thought. The voice was telling me that somehow I was going to have to pull myself together. Somewhere the world kept turning, and I would have to join it again.
“You want anything to eat?” Granger asked.
I shook my head.
“Anything to drink? Water?”
I just looked at him. “How am I going to do this?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just take it slow. Do you want to make a phone call?”
Yes, that was another thing that just came back to me: I wasn’t going to be able to make it all the way across the state tonight as I had originally planned. I needed at least another couple of hours before I would be in any shape to drive. I looked at my watch and figured out, with the time-consuming, roundabout logic of someone under the influence of too much stimulation, that David would not be home from his law office yet, even though it was Saturday. That meant I would get his answering machine. That was okay, I could handle being coherent enough to leave a message.
By my watch it was 8:15 when I left. Granger, still naked, saw me to the door. Even in the hallway the air reeked of sweat and cum and piss, and I felt I had his scent on me too—hard to describe, a clean but strong smell, like a no-nonsense soap. In spite of what they had done to me I was going to miss his enormous hands. And his dick, which I stooped down and took in my mouth one last time, clutching it with my tongue. He cuffed me on the shoulder as I picked up my bag and stepped outside. The late evening sun was surprisingly strong.
I was still feeling a little stoned, and drove with the kind of overcompensation that can be so amusing in someone who’s high—keeping twenty miles under the speed limit, braking far in advance of a red light. There wasn’t much traffic, though, on the quiet streets leading to the highway.
The interstate was a different matter, especially at the point where it merged with another major highway. Suddenly I found myself in the midst of eight lanes of stalled traffic—a thousand taillights flaring at random as brakes were lightly touched, no car moving more than a few inches at a time. Whatever caused the jam lay far ahead, unseen; I couldn’t spot even the flashing lights of a police car or ambulance. It seemed like a long time before traffic moved freely again.
The ugly, over-familiar highway offered little to see but gently rolling countryside, flat and featureless. I kept to the speed limit, letting tractor-trailers and anxious SUVs rush by on my left. Alert now, I could see each step of the journey ahead: stopping at a cheap but adequate motel, catching seven or eight hours’ sleep and taking off again with a thermos full of coffee, finally reaching home around noon. Calling David, who would surely be at home then, reading the Sunday paper. I’d told him that I was visiting an “old friend.” He’d have no inkling of what I’d been through; if I tried to explain that I had been tied up and tickled to within an inch of my life he would only stare at me, wide-eyed and openmouthed, letting his Parade magazine fall to the floor.
Traffic grew sparse as I approached the center of the state. With no oncoming headlights or a clear radio station to keep me company, I reached into my bag on the passenger’s seat and found the cassette tape player. Granger had turned it on and kept it near me during our most intense sessions. As soon as I pressed the PLAY button my own raucous laughter, so sharp and clear in the dark of night, took my breath away. I was neither seeing him nor feeling him, but at that moment Granger seemed more alive than anyone I had ever known.
All at Sea with Master E
James Williams
Scuba diving near a dying coral reef in the warm Caribbean waters, we gradually lose our colors as we descend: First the reds go, then the yellows, then nothing but fathomless blue remains as we sail out over a steeply sloping wall. The endless depths there call to me as you once called to me, and I feel myself begin to slip below the dive-master’s sixty-foot limit as at first I slipped below my own thresholds of sense wherever you were concerned. Afternoon dives are always to forty-five or fifty feet, but morning dives are deeper. Yesterday we dived to one hundred feet in the morning, why not now? Because yesterday there was no wall nearby sliding out of sight, sinking deeper than light, that’s why: Among the sandworms and eels and butterfly fish there was no temptation to disappear.
Not quite weightless in the salty sea, I settle like a falling leaf to land. Hands across my chest, I listen to my measured breathing: one, two, one. My depth gauge reads sixty-six, sixty-seven. Preserving oxygen I drift, I do not swim, and drifting with the current I’ve left the reef behind. Over the wall the blue below me does not seem to end although I know that color too would soon be taken away. Sixty-nine, seventy. This is how I fell in love with you, inching out on another sort of ledge to see how far I might go before I lost my balance, seeking you through a studied darkness much like this watery one, stalking you until you saw me, circling closer for your eyes on every pass, entering your smoky nimbus, rippling the emanations that surrounded you always in those days, making myself more daring so I might fall into the aura of your waves, might disappear into your famous murky depths.
I was new to the netherworld where you had long been famous: the great, the grand, the notorious Master E whose expertise with whips and ropes and straps and pain was all seductive legend. Oh, yes: I saw you demonstrate your prowess for the masses in your wide community at conferences and classes, on videotapes turned into DVDs; I read about your exploits in the panting words of women who longed to be your china dolls, your macramés, your footstools, your mattresses, your holes; I watched you play at parties, turning women into slaves and virgi
ns into whores and making other masters play your sycophants: you who anyway did not deign to play with men yourself, directly.
I watched you work the tools of your deliberate trade with narcissistic certainty. You never moved as fast as your women wanted you to move, were never as rough as they begged you to be, never called and never explained, never flourished your blades as loosely as your legends claimed except every now and then, without notice, when the eyes were right that might report what they had witnessed in hushed murmurs to others who had been less fortunate; when rumor and report could mingle in the echoing chambers of your underground; especially on the public street when nothing was expected, in shadows against dark walls at dusk when colors lost their luster in the gloaming red to yellow to blue and left you to shape the delicate awe that was the brick and mortar of your current biography.
But though I was a novice, soaking wet behind the ears and wearing my keys on the left in homage to an old, long-lost tradition, I knew what I wanted and that was you. I wanted you quietly, privately, out of your public’s eye. I did not need the world to know you played with men—one man—after all, and I did not want your notoriety: just you, naked and bound at my feet and at my mercy. I wanted to beat you in a measured way: one, two, one, the way I’d seen you beat the women you wanted to make fall in love with you; I wanted to make you crawl when you could hardly even move; I wanted to watch you watch in fascinated, helpless horror while I wrapped your balls in my tight fist and brought them slowly all the way up to what would have become your screaming, open, and very dry lips. And one more thing: I wanted you to want to be there. I wanted to see your pleading eyes all doglike in their helpless, begging, desperate, lunging bid for surrender to my absolutely unknown will. All I wanted was to be lost in the disappearing blue below the disappearing surface of the blue Caribbean sea. That was all.
The dive-master bangs his knife on his tank: the dive is nearly over. Maybe five minutes’ air remains for most of the divers. Some are up already, rising like bubbles in the water cooler at your club’s meeting house, breaking the surface and bobbing like corks on the pretty waves beneath the pretty, cumulous island sky. I can imagine them at sea level, one eye above and one below the water’s edge, removing their masks and mouthpieces, shouting excitedly about what they saw, breathing real air instead of the pure canned stuff we carry on our backs. The first burst of fresh salt spray is always so lively, an inspiration, a breath of life for the mammals we are.
I searched the best outlets for tools and toys and accoutrements, courted famous artisans, then learned to make even better gear myself. I visited the best Masters and Mistresses I could find, as well as the ones with odd skills that set them apart, and what they could teach I dutifully absorbed, making every special technique my own. I was flogged and strapped and paddled and punched, tied and chained and hoisted and caged, cut and pierced and bitten and bludgeoned, used for sex and used for labor, used as a table and used as a toilet, used as a pony and used as a slave, bought and sold like trash for a cigarette, slept with the dogs and woke with a senator—happily: happily. I wanted to know about everything, and I practiced what I learned on any unsuspecting piece of party flesh, all against the someday coming when I would have a chance to use it with you. But what I learned from you, oh, that was different: That was something no one else could teach, and it had nothing at all to do with all that made you famous: From you I learned patience; I learned to simply wait.
Ninety feet down I hover, immobile as an object in the deep, rocking waves. Three barracuda thirty feet away hover like this also, like readied torpedoes, aware and wary of me as if I were a bigger fish. Everything is wary here, everything is prey. Above me I see our group of divers all buddied up, the last ones rising behind their bubbles. The tropical colors of their bright dive suits, red, yellow, and blue as reef fish, fade in the greenish distance of water, dim brightly, as it were, against the thinned, milky light of the filtered sky. Up there I see you as you look around and look around again, and spin, and spin until your movements seem frantic and antic and then when you see me so far away, so far below the surface, you motion and move at once: Come, your arm calls, and I’m coming. You swim, you do not drift, down and out across those dozens of watery feet, reaching out your hands to come mask to mask with me. You arrive out of breath, out of air. I see your chest heave, see your grasping hands as you stare wondering into my eyes. I could let you buddy-breathe from my tank. Below me the wall disappears in blue. I wait.
Doll Boy
Jonathan Asche
Jed Bolshear got home after midnight. Mama and his cousin Doyle were already asleep. He tried to move through the dark house silently, wincing every time the stairs creaked under his feet, even though he knew Mama wasn’t likely to hear him over her snoring.
He went straight to the bathroom, stripping off his clothes as soon as he shut the door. They stunk of smoke and oil. Shoulda’ thrown those in the fire as well, Jed thought. He’d have to get rid of them in the morning.
Jed started the water running for a bath—he reeked of smoke and oil, too. The rust-stained tub filled slowly; there was barely enough pressure for the water to win its fight against gravity as it ran through the pipes to the second floor. After ten minutes there were only three inches of water. Impatient, Jed turned off the tap and eased his thick, muscular body into the tub anyway.
With cupped hands, he scooped warm water, splashing it onto his face. It turned gray as the soot rinsed off his body. The guilt did not wash away so easily.
“I shouldn’t a done it,” he whispered, his face buried in his hands. In the same breath he reminded himself it was only right. He was just taking back what had been his family’s livelihood.
“Oh, sorry, cuz’n Jed. Jus’ needed to pee.”
Jed looked up. His cousin Doyle stood in the doorway, his boyish face—so pretty he’d been nicknamed Doll Boy—peeking inside.
“Well, c’mon,” Jed said impatiently, motioning for Doll Boy to step inside. “No need to be shy. Ain’t got nothin’ I don’t.”
Giggling, Doll Boy padded into the bathroom, wearing nothing but a pair of dingy, threadbare boxer shorts. Jed followed his cousin with his eyes. The two men may have had the same parts, but to Jed’s eyes, those parts—sinewy arms; bulging pecs; smooth, flat torso—fit together real nice on Doll Boy’s compact frame. He was built like a brick shithouse; hard to believe he was but eighteen years old.
Doll Boy stood at the commode and yanked down his drawers. From his position in the bathtub, Jed only got a rear view of his cousin while he pissed, but Doll Boy looked just as fine from this angle as he did head on. Jed’s gaze glided down the spine of Doll Boy’s muscled back, down to the curve of his full, round butt, where just enough crack was showing to spark Jed’s imagination and awaken his cock.
“What’cha doin’ takin’ a bath so late, Jed?” Doll Boy asked as he shook the last drops from his dick.
“Was up at Joe Willard’s, helpin’ him fix that dang truck of his. Leaked oil all over me.”
“Guess that’s why it smells like gas in here,” Doll Boy observed, pulling the chain on the toilet. He started for the door.
“Since yer here, you mind scrubbin’ my back?”
Obediently, Doll Boy moved to the tub instead, his eyes widening at the sight of his cousin’s naked body. Jed was only five years older than Doll Boy, yet, with his face and chest covered with coarse, rust-colored hair, he seemed so much more grown up.
Jed handed Doll Boy a grimy bar. “Soap up my shoulders and back, would ya’?”
As Doll Boy lathered up his broad back, Jed closed his eyes, his mind drifting from tonight’s crime to more pleasant plans of mischief. He hadn’t been too thrilled about his cousin’s coming here to live when Doll Boy’s mother, Aunt Tizzy, finally drank herself to death two months ago. It was just one more mouth they couldn’t afford to feed. But after they picked him up from the bus station, Jed warmed up to the idea of another man around the house.
“Gosh, Jed, you sure got a big one!”
Jed opened his eyes. He didn’t have to ask what Doll Boy meant. His cock stood at full attention, quivering with anticipation. “You like lookin’ at my pecker?” Jed asked.
Doll Boy’s face reddened, and he looked away. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
“Naw, that’s okay. You can touch it if you like.”
Though a flash of interest crossed Doll Boy’s face, Jed’s young cousin made no move to reach for the swollen rod. Jed cuffed Doll Boy’s wrist, making him drop the soap into the tub. He guided Doll Boy’s hand down to his boner.
“It feels warm,” Doll Boy burbled as he wrapped his fingers around Jed’s cock.
“Wanna suck it?”
Doll Boy recoiled, wrenching his hand away. “I don’t know, cuz’n Jed. I’m pretty sure that’s a sin.”
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