Black John

by Amy Lane

  “God, John—imagine that on camera! That’d be hot.”

  “Yeah,” John mumbled. “Hot.” He pulled out then and rolled to the side, watching with detached interest as a rivulet of come ran from Tory’s opening down the back of his thigh.

  Tory sighed luxuriously and parted his legs, wriggling against the cheap sheets and probably getting hard already, just feeling the dripping come. “Lick that up,” he commanded roughly—and John, he’d do anything for Tory.

  Again and again and again.

  After they graduated to fucking, graduating to taking pictures of it was the next step.

  John’s first pornographic picture of Tory was much like that first pic in his head: Tory used and sweaty, lying on his stomach, legs splayed, his thighs and bottom dripping with John’s spend. He’d turned his head to the side and was looking down his arm as John took the picture while crouched at the side of the bed. John wanted all of it: the proof of their sex, and Tory’s sated sensuality. He even wanted the Star Wars sheets, because they seemed appropriate somehow. They pointed to the fact that Tory might have been young, but he was burgeoning with sex and the promise of pleasure.

  John had been unstoppable since—Tory in every position, Tory clothed, Tory naked, Tory before sex, after sex, beating off, and in the middle of sex. Tory wanted pictures with his mouth wrapped around John’s cock, but John shied away. Sure, he’d grown some since their adventure in the porn store, but still. No amount of working out was putting bulk on his thighs or his ribs, and he couldn’t hide his pale, skinny body behind Tory’s head as Tory went down on him.

  And in spite of Tory’s excitement about finding someone else to film, John didn’t want to. He wasn’t ready yet. He’d had Tory all to himself since grade school—sharing wasn’t on the roster. Not yet. Please.

  But Tory was caught by the camera, thrilled by exhibition, so John proposed the outdoor shoot.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking longingly at Tory’s body stretched out in the shade, gleaming faintly with sweat. “You want me to do something to make that hard again?”

  Tory laughed throatily. “God, yeah.”

  So John was fully clothed, on his hands and knees, mouth on Tory’s prick, when he heard noises in the brush behind him. He and Tory scrambled, getting Tory’s shorts and shoes on, then his shirt while John folded up the blanket and pocketed the lube. They were standing, waiting to see which direction the sounds were coming from, when suddenly they identified what they were hearing.

  “Oh my God,” Tory mouthed, muffling his laughter against John’s shoulder.

  John’s mouth fell open in shocked disbelief, and then they both got a glimpse of what was going on behind the stand of kudzu that marked the boundary of parkland and swamp wilderness. (The hopeful assumption was that the swamp wilderness held all of the snakes, gators, and spiders, and that the parkland maintenance was enough to keep those dangers from biting your dick off when you were on the cleared part of the land. Thinking back on it as an adult, John had to concede that he and Tory were particularly lucky to still have their dicks, because if all that was keeping the gators out was a stand of kudzu, you were pretty much fucked.)

  On the other side of the kudzu, someone was getting lucky.

  Two someones.

  One of the boys was African American, which of itself was not a surprise—Florida had a diverse population, even if the schools sometimes ended up with harsh dividing lines either within or between campuses. But he wasn’t just African American—no. This boy had skin blacker than ebony, blacker than pitch, and hair grown out in flamboyant dreadlocks. His red-and-white-striped shirt glared even brighter against that amazing skin, and even from behind the kudzu, John caught glimpses of an outstanding grill of gold teeth. He was standing behind a white kid who bent over clutching a tree, spreading his asscheeks for what John had to admit was an impressive cock. John and Tory had to work hard then not to make a sound—they knew that white kid. If John’s home life was difficult because he was a policeman’s kid, Brant Jordan’s life was doubly difficult as a preacher’s kid. And there he was, son of a preacher in an all-white church, taking it from a fabulous all-out black kid, one who looked like he didn’t belong in the state, much less their neighborhood.

  And brother, did that kid talk dirty.

  “You just spread that sweet ass, boyfriend, yes, you do that. Oh, yeah, don’t worry none about striking oil, that sort of brown washes off.”

  Brant moaned, partly in pleasure, yes, but there was also some pain. Brant was obviously getting his ass stretched wide.

  John itched for his camera, but suddenly pictures were the least of their worries.

  “Oh fuck!” Tory muttered. “John, is that your dad?”

  John looked up at the cherry lights and swore. “Fuck. Tory, get out of here. I’ll warn them, but you can’t be found here.”

  This past summer, everybody’s parents had grown just a little more suspicious. Don’t you have other friends, Tory? You know we love John, but it would be nice if you brought a girl along.

  John, one of those kids from the country club called. He’d like you to go swimming with his friends, okay? Just this once, you can leave Tory behind. It’s not like he understands that sort of place anyway.

  Frank Carey had married above himself and resented John’s intelligence and quick wit. Jennifer Carey married beneath herself and yearned to change it through her awkward, ugly son. John told Tory repeatedly that he was over them and over it, but that didn’t mean he didn’t trip over it on occasion.

  Or sometimes it just slapped him across the face or punched him in the stomach because it managed to piss off the wrong parent. John would just as soon that Tory, middle kid in six of a raucous, seemingly happy family, didn’t get involved.

  “We’re just eating here as far as they know!” Tory said, looking at John like he was stupid, but John knew better.

  “Dude, go. Go now. I’ll call you later.” He shoved at Tory, who grabbed the blanket and all their shit and took off for his bike, which was chained next to John’s on the other side of the park.

  John looked up at the cop car where, sure enough, his father’s big, bulky body could be seen behind the wheel, and did his good deed for the day. “Brant, pull up your pants and take off, my dad’s here!”

  “Fu-fu-fu… ck….” The word was more sexual than panicked.

  John grimaced. Fucking amateur.

  “Brant, you asshole! Get the fuck out of here before my dad tells your dad you’re getting ass-fucked in the middle of the woods!” He did not add by a black man, because it sounded racist as shit and nobody wanted to sound racist, but everybody knew which lines were drawn in which part of town. Besides, if Brant got his sorry pimply ass in gear, it wouldn’t matter who was ass-fucking him. John would get busted for a walk in the woods, he’d take the belt on his ass, and the world would turn apace!

  “Oh my God!”

  Oh good—there was the self-awareness John needed. Unfortunately the other guy followed by saying, “Sugar, where do you think you are going?”

  Jesus! Infants! “Man, if he gets busted out here, he’s going to call rape,” John said, casting a furtive look up on the hill. Yup, slow and steady, with that threatening strut, his dad was getting out of the car and scanning the park. Someone else must have seen either John and Tory or Brant and his unexpected friend, because Frank was giving them time to get their shit together before he got down. Threats were so much easier to deal with than realities—it was Frank Carey’s credo. “He’s a fucking spineless weasel who throws freshmen in the trash can and calls them faggot to watch them get beat up. Buddy, you are going under the fucking bus, so zip up and go!”

  At that, Brant’s well-hung friend grunted and pulled out. John figured good deed done and he wasn’t going to be caught anywhere near this scene—although he was most certainly going to be caught.

  With a sigh, he started a vague saunter up the hill toward the park’s entrance where his father was
parked, prepared to take the hit. What was one more, really?

  “So it’s a crime to be taking a nature walk?” he asked, smiling ingenuously into his father’s glare.

  Frank was the one who had given him the red hair and green eyes and need to wear SPF Flannel Shirt, and his face was perpetually sunburnt to leather, with creases at the corners of his eyes from squinting into the Florida sun and glaring at people he didn’t approve of. “What in the hell are you doing here? I’ve got word of faggots screwing around in the back of the park—where the fuck is your little butt-buddy?”

  John kept his expression bland. Hey, there’d been more than one set of faggots out there, and who knew who saw who fucking around? “Tory had family stuff,” John lied. Frank and Jennifer didn’t like Tory’s parents, Vincent and Vanessa, and Vincent and Vanessa didn’t like Frank and Jennifer. Over the past ten years, they’d established a careful pattern of being civil to the boys but ignoring the parents whenever interaction was necessary—and the boys capitalized on that more than either set of parents suspected. “I’m just out here taking pictures.”

  He held up his camera, which had remained looped around his neck during the melee to get up and dressed, and watched with satisfaction as his father glared at the really expensive gift. Parents—if you couldn’t get along with them, piss them off.

  “Fucking brilliant. You could be at church, you could be doing your goddamned homework, but no. You’re out here at the park where the faggots hang out. I’m so goddamned proud I could vom—fuck!”

  John heard a sudden break in the brush behind him, and he didn’t even have to turn his head to know Brant’s courage had failed him and he’d bolted. Well, why not? If Frank could be a bastard to John, his own son, what was to stop him from turning his acid tongue and brutal fist on Brant?

  John turned and saw the pale form rush the narrow path behind the kudzu, and stepped aside as his father began the classic cop’s sprint after it.

  When the more distinct form of Brant’s delicious trip to the dark side stepped out of the brush with his hands up, Frank wasn’t the only one to go “Whoa!” Really? The guy stepped up for Brant? John felt a grudging respect for him—it was pretty much what John had done for Tory, and this guy didn’t seem to have nearly the same history with the guy he’d saved.

  “What seems to be the problem, Officer?” the guy asked, flashing his grill ingratiatingly. “Just wandering the unbeaten paths, if you know what I—oolf!”

  Officer Frank Carey, true to form, whirled him around and shoved him against the same palm John and Tory had been under.

  “Oh my, isn’t this intimate. I don’t even hardly know you,” the guy said, smirking, and John was once again taken in by his chutzpah. God, he was so… so out, with the swing in his voice and the shirt with the red-and-white vertical stripes cut to leave his stomach bare, and his chest and clavicles too. Every word, every smirk, every shimmy of his hips announced that he was flamingly queer and he didn’t give a fuck who knew it.

  “Shut up, faggot. What were you doing in those trees?”

  The guy laughed low and deep and dirty. “Just taking advantage of the privacy, Officer. What else to do on a day like this?”

  Frank frisked the boy for no other reason than hanging out in the trees as far as he knew, and John grimaced. God, his father was a prick—a racist, sexist, bigoted prick. Who wanted to be related to that?

  “Zion?” Frank muttered, looking at his ID. “Zion Diogenes. Is that your real name?”

  “On my birth certificate, my driver’s license, and my report card.” Zion smirked.

  “Where do you go to school?” John asked politely. He certainly hadn’t seen Zion in the halls of Florentine Grandy High School.

  “Daytona State,” Zion said, and for the first time, a little bit of irritation slipped underneath the flamingly gay. “I was on my way back there after visiting my folks in Pensacola. I’ve got a summer internship waiting for me once I get free of this bullshit.”

  John grunted. Well, it would have been better if he’d scratched his itch in Daytona Beach, but John wasn’t going to say that here, with his dad frisking Zion and grunting like it was a total impossibility that a kid who looked like this would be anything but a criminal.

  “Sure you fucking were,” Frank muttered. “Where’s your goddamned vehicle, Zion?”

  “Up there,” Zion muttered, jerking his chin. Sure enough, John could see a little black Toyota up in the parking lot near the empty playground equipment—and John’s forlorn bike.

  “Yeah? Well, you and my son are going to sit down and have a long goddamned chat while I check that out, how’s that sit with you, Zion? I think you should get cozy with him since you’re both about the most faggoty things I’ve ever set eyes on.”

  Zion parted his lips in unmistakable scorn, and he cruised John up and down with a knowing glance. “You’re wrong,” he said, one corner of his full brown-and-pink lips quirking as he met John’s eyes over the rims of his sunglasses. “That boy ain’t my type at all.”

  It was about one of the nicest things a stranger could have done for him, but John didn’t have the heart to say it was wasted on his father.

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’ll change,” Frank muttered, flipping Zion around and cuffing him from the front. He gave the guy’s shoulder a jerk and a shove and sneered at John. “Both of you, up the hill. I’m gonna call this asshole in.”

  The car was, of course, sweltering.

  “God,” Zion groaned from the pit of his stomach. “The least that asshole could have done was get us some fucking water.”

  John reached under the front seat and grunted in satisfaction. The car had the barrier up toward the top, but the backseat was so limited, some kind soul had allowed that little cubby under the front seats to exist, apparently for the hell of it. John had been here before—he knew where his dad kept the bottled water in case he got stuck somewhere for a long time. Frank was mean, but no one said he was stupid.

  John bent down and cracked open the bottle, took a swig, and then held it for Zion. Carefully, he tilted it up while the guy drank, only a little water escaping to drip in silver lines down the side of his jaw.

  “Thank you,” Zion said when he’d taken about half the bottle. “You can have the rest. You earned it dealing with that fucker. Is he your father?”

  “Unfortunately,” John muttered, then finished off the water. “Sorry about that.”

  “No worries.” Zion tilted his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

  John looked out the front window and watched his dad leaning against the front of the car to do paperwork. In a minute, if he remained true to form, his buddies would pull up, Frank would walk over there to where they parked and have himself a little pow-wow, and then he’d come back and let Zion go, because really? He didn’t have a damned thing on the guy. But in the meantime, John and Zion were stuck together in the unmerciful heat.

  “You were right about your friend,” Zion said into the silence, and John startled.

  For a minute he thought his new friend was talking about Tory, and he was going to go in for the defense.

  “Brant?” John asked after he’d gotten a fingertip hold on his defensive retort.

  “Yeah. I mean, he was scared—you say he’s the preacher’s kid?”

  “Yup,” John confirmed. “Had no idea he was queer.”

  “Yeah, well.” Zion chuckled. “Neither did he until I wandered into the gas station where he was getting a soda.” He bucked his hips. His erection had apparently not suffered the little details of being frisked and cuffed and shoved into a police car. “I’ve got a real nice package to convince a boy otherwise, you hear me?”

  “Didn’t need to hear,” John said dryly. “I saw. But next time you might want to pass up Florentine altogether and do your pickups in Daytona.”

  “You think they got any more black people in Daytona than they got in Florentine?” Zion asked scornfully.

  John si
ghed. “Probably about the same,” he said, thinking about it. “But they sure as shit don’t hang their gay people out on a cross, that’s for damned sure.”

  Zion chuckled. “Don’t be so positive,” he muttered. Then he bucked again and groaned. “Jesus fuck! I have got the worst case of blue balls, like you wouldn’t believe!”

  “Sorry about that,” John said genuinely. His own boner had gone down pretty much when Tory had spotted his father’s car, but Zion apparently didn’t have the same fear response.

  “If you were sorry, you’d give a brother a hand,” Zion said, daring John with his eyes.

  He had full lips and a strong jaw, and John had seen firsthand how well he was hung. Suddenly John had a terrible yearning: he wanted to hold that outsized cock in his pale hand.

  “I, uhm….” Oh God. His throat had gone dry, and he’d finished off the last of the water. “I….” He cleared his throat, preparing to say he didn’t have any condoms and didn’t suck off anyone but Tory, when the boy unbuttoned his fly and wiggled his dick out, his cuffs rattling furtively as he did so.

  John gasped as it flopped, only a little flaccid, against the black denim of Zion’s jeans. Zion grinned seductively at him and took his left hand—probably the one he wrote with—to grasp that monster tightly and stroke.

  Frantically, John looked around. Sure enough, Hank and Jimmy had driven up toward the mouth of the park, and Frank was wandering up to meet them.

  “No one is looking, white boy,” Zion breathed, flashing his grill against those chocolate-cherry lips. “C’mon, now—you’re too smart to suck it, but don’t tell me you don’t want to touch it.”

  Oh God. Here in the car, where the world could see. John reached for his camera, but Zion turned his head lazily, even as he lolled back against seat.

  “Do you really want a picture?” he asked, voice dropping. “Tell me you don’t want to touch it. I mean, you may get some action around these parts, but this? This is something you can’t get….” He sucked in air through his teeth and then let it out on a small groan. “At home,” he finished, and John turned his head from his dad and his equally stupid, mean friends and looked down at Zion pleasuring himself, unashamed and dripping with sex in the same way they were both dripping sweat.