by Words (lit)
“Ooh, I like the sound of that.” Aoi scooted closer, rubbing their cocks together. “My big, strong fox.”
Itsuki lifted Aoi easily and set him gently on the couch. Despite all the growling, Itsuki was a big softy, especially when it came to Aoi. Not that his foxy man would ever admit it.
“Can you lube yourself up, love?” Itsuki dropped a quick kiss on Aoi’s shoulder and kicked off his jeans. “I don’t know if I have the patience right now.”
“Sure thing.” Aoi rolled onto his hands and knees and reached between the cushions of the couch. There was a tube in there somewhere, at least there had been the last time. His fingers closed around cool plastic. Bingo! Aoi squirted some lube onto his fingers and slid two of them into his ass. He shifted, spreading his knees and lifting his ass. His foxy man deserved a little show, didn’t he?
Aoi curled his fingers and pushed them deeper, nudging his gland. He glanced hungrily over his shoulder. “Itsuki...”
“Not yet, I want to see you take another finger first.”
A nod was all that Aoi could manage. He added a third digit to the mix, stretching his hole a little more. Aoi moaned, and rocked back, fucking himself on his own fingers.
“Oh, you are a sexy thing,” Itsuki purred and trailed wet, nipping kisses along Aoi’s spine. “I’m going to fuck you hard and deep, just how you like it.”
“Please.” Aoi pulled his fingers out and held himself open. If Itsuki didn’t do something soon, Aoi was going to explode, he was sure of it.
“Maybe next time, I’ll dress up as a pirate.” Itsuki rubbed his cock teasingly against Aoi’s hole. “You can be my cabin boy.”
“Damn fo-- ooh!” Aoi was going to give Itsuki an earful, but before he could say anything else that sweet cock pushed into his ass. Aoi’s fingers clenched against the arm of the couch as Itsuki’s cock slid deep. No one stretched him like Itsuki did.
“Better?” Itsuki pulled back and slammed his hips forward, dragging another groan out of Aoi.
“Mmn, definitely.”
One big hand slid over Aoi’s chest and tugged at his nipple rings while the other wrapped around his cock. Those fingers stroked Aoi, keeping pace with the heavy cock sliding in and out of his ass. Itsuki knew exactly where to touch him, how to fuck him. No matter how many times they slept together, his fox always blew his mind.
Aoi moaned again and pushed back, taking his fox to the hilt. He was close. He could feel the tension building in his gut. Itsuki must have felt it, too, because he picked up his pace, fucking Aoi with quick, hard strokes.
Itsuki purred in Aoi’s ear. Aoi’s brain was too scattered to catch all of it but he did hear the bit about a pirate doing something naughty with a kumquat.
That pushed Aoi over the edge. He tossed his head back against Itsuki’s shoulder as he came. His entire body tensed and clenched around Itsuki’s cock. Aoi slumped against the arm of the couch panting breathlessly. Oh, that was good.
“Wow.” Itsuki leaned against Aoi’s back and kissed his shoulder. “That was intense.”
Aoi rolled over so he could pet Itsuki’s ears. “Did you come hard?”
The kitsune grinned back at him. “How could I not with you squeezing me like that?”
“See, I told you strip Scrabble was a good idea.”
“Yes, you were right, love... for once.” Itsuki whapped Aoi with his tail teasingly. “So, what do you want to do now?”
Aoi tried not to yawn, but it was hard. Sex took a lot of energy. “I’d say a nap, but we really should clean up before Aya gets home.”
“True.” Itsuki shifted to one side and snuggled against Aoi. “There are Scrabble tiles everywhere.”
“Oops.” Aoi trailed his fingers through the soft fur of his lover’s tail. “That settles it then, we’ll clean up and, when Aya gets home, play another game of strip Scrabble, just so he doesn’t feel left out.”
“Mmn, sounds like a plan to me.”
***
Aoi sat on the couch dozing against his kitsune’s shoulder as something random flashed on the TV. He loved lazy days. He loved them even more when both his lovers were home.
“So what are you two up to?” Aya settled on the couch next to Aoi.
“Relaxing, that’s all.” Aoi shifted so he could snuggle with both men. Aya was warm and still damp from his shower. Perfect cuddling material. Well, if you asked Aoi, anyway.
“Sounds like a good way to spend th-- what the?” Aya shifted, with a puzzled look on his face, and pulled two Scrabble tiles from under his thigh. “How’d these get here?”
“Oh, that’s where those went.” Aoi plucked the wooden tiles from Aya’s hand and set them on the coffee table. “I was wondering.”
“They probably stuck to you last night.” Itsuki nibbled on Aoi’s shoulder and reached over to pet Aya’s thigh.
“What did you two do last night?”
“You wouldn’t know it, but Itsuki plays a mean game of Scrabble.” Aoi winked at his foxy man.
Aya raised a slender, cinnamon-colored eyebrow at the two of them. “When did you two start playing Scrabble?”
“Well, yesterday, and we ended up making like bunnies on the couch afterwards.”
“Of course, that was after I had to jack him off on the kitchen table.” Itsuki added with a wiggle of his ears.
Aya still looked a little confused. “And how exactly does Scrabble get you so hot and bothered that you do all that?”
“Well, it was strip Scrabble.” Aoi grinned.
“Ah, that would explain things.”
“Oh, and it would be even more fun with the three of us.” Itsuki perked up, his tail wagging happily. “What do you think, Aya-love?”
“Sure.” Aya stood and stretched, giving Aoi a good long look at that lithe body of his. “I’m game.”
Aoi sighed. Good lord, his bo-ya was sexy.
“Good!” Itsuki slipped his arm around Aya’s waist and pulled him close. “Go for ‘kumquat’ if you can. ‘Pirate’ is a good Scrabble word, too.”
“Kumquat?” Aya still looked a little confused. “Okay...”
“Itsuki.” Aoi wasn’t sure if he wanted to kill his foxy man or kiss him. ‘Kumquat’ sounded just as good rolling off of Aya’s tongue as Itsuki’s, but he wanted to tell Aya himself, damn it.
“I’m just helping Aya out. He is at a bit of a disadvantage after all.” Itsuki was trying to look innocent, not that it was working. Aoi had known the kitsune for way too long to fall for that.
“Jerk.” Aoi stuck his tongue out at his foxy man, not that he meant it, well, not really.
Oh, that gave Aoi an idea. He glanced over at Aya hopefully. “Bo-ya, say ‘onomatopoeia’ for me.”
“Um...‘onomatopoeia’?”
Well, that settled that. Aoi grabbed the Scrabble box off the kitchen table and started to shoo his lovers toward the bedroom. “Come on, you two.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to play on the kitchen table?”
“Not the way we play.” Itsuki scooped Aya up and followed Aoi.
“Trust us, bo-ya.” Aoi nodded in agreement. “This will be way more fun.”
Shattering Silence
By CB Potts
In the spring of ’06, I stopped speaking entirely. Not a sound, not a word, not the merest breath of a thought could make it past my lips. Silence was my refuge.
It was months before anyone noticed. Even then, the change went unremarked -- one more strange attribute of a decidedly odd man, the absence of vocal communication was hardly worth mentioning.
And honestly? As long as the world got to enjoy my creations, new novels appearing on a semi-regular basis, they really didn’t give a rat’s ass about the creator.
That was fine with me.
It wasn’t, however, fine with my assistant Marco. At least, not at first.
A small man, he’d been with me a while by then, doing all those things that needed doing to make the work possible.
When I’d decided t
hat the Internet was too distracting and kept me from writing, it was Marco who made the web go away, replacing it with an electric typewriter.
When that proved to be too smooth, too seductive -- for one could compose nearly as fast on the Selectric as on the computer, allowing no time for careful thought to insinuate itself into the process -- it was Marco who almost magically produced an antique Underwood from somewhere, allowing me to revisit the most mechanical pleasure of capturing dreams.
When that failed me -- as we both, at that point, had known it would -- Marco was ready with pencil and paper. A sharpened cupful of potential was proffered every hour on the hour.
We never talked about this. It just happened -- happened in the same seamless way that pages disappeared from my desk at the end of the day, only to appear later, neatly bound in hardback editions that Marco insisted I sign.
“For your fans, Gregory. For your fans.”
It did no good to dissuade him of the existence of these fans. While I doubted them, Marco believed. It was a simple enough thing to indulge his fancy and sign, so I signed.
That made Marco happy. My silence, however, did not.
***
“Why won’t you speak to me?” he asked, after bringing the breakfast tray to my office. It was nearly a work of art in itself: obsidian black coffee, paired with butter soft croissants. A small dish of marmalade, bejeweled with the thin skins of Seville oranges hanging in citrus-tinged suspension, was presented in the shadow of the season’s first daffodils, impossibly creamy and pure. “Have I displeased you?”
That was a ridiculous question, for how could I be upset with Marco? Marco simply was. One might as well be displeased with the sun for rising, or with the fog for draping itself round the green fir covered mountainside.
I could not tell him this, so I went to the window to show him. French windows, they swung outward -- an unusual affectation in this part of the world, but one I could not live without. The need to push open the glass and insert my presence into the uncaring wilderness came far too frequently and insistently to be ignored.
He stepped beside me, going up on tiptoe a bit to peer into the gray-tinged verdant landscape that was my answer.
A long moment we stood there, his brown eyes flickering from the unkempt expanse to the almost equally disheveled surface of my face, searching for the relationship between them.
At last he spoke.
“I see,” he said, although his tone belied him.
Perhaps he did not need understanding to be content. I do not know. But Marco never raised the question of my silence again, and for that, I was grateful.
You see, if Marco had continued pressing, I would have at some point broken -- and in breaking, revealed a truth so terrible my heart ached near to bursting, every time I thought about it.
***
I was running out of words.
It might not seem like such a thing was even possible, especially for someone renowned as one of the world’s most prolific authors.
After all, hadn’t I penned (or, more correctly, upon recall, composed on the Selectric) the wildly popular Sin Sisters mystery series? Seventeen books right there: over a million words, easily, when you stopped to count them all. Add to that the Harker books -- better written, certainly, if not as popular -- and you’ve another million. A handful of stand alone titles, just to round out the corners.
One would imagine that a shortage of words was not my problem.
That’s the rub, though. Twenty six letters, in almost infinite permutations, had served me well for decades. Now they’d had enough.
I thought at first they were abandoning me, fleeing out of sheer exhaustion. That my talent felt itself wasted on what the critics termed ‘enjoyable if predictable’ mysteries and decided to take up with someone who would write about the magnificence of the human spirit or the cold, dark forgotten corners of our collective soul.
But then I read -- and one sure sign of the writer who feels the muse faltering is to check his consumption of other people’s work, there’s a clear and direct relationship -- about the hummingbird’s heartbeat.
That’s when it all became clear to me.
***
You see, we all come into existence with a pre-determined, finite number of heartbeats. I won’t bore you with the science here. The hows and whys of theory seldom matter. It’s the application that proves the relevance.
In this case, we all have roughly the same number of heartbeats allotted to us -- man and beast, fish and fowl -- a few hundred thousand iterations of that familiar rub-dub, rub-dub rhythm, and then it’s time to go. The heart simply stops, and failing heroic measures and mechanical interventions of the kind my poor Underwood could only mutely envy, it’s game over.
Smaller creatures -- the hummingbird in question, for example -- beat through their allotment of heartbeats at a tremendous rate, departing this mortal coil mere moments after arriving on it. Larger, slower creatures linger longer, their cardiac metronome ticking away at a more sedate pace.
A simple enough theory, really. Easy to grasp. The type of idea I almost intuitively understood.
All quite lovely, really, until you take the concept to the next logical step.
If we are born with a finite number of heartbeats programmed into us, might not the same be true for other things? If we had preset limits on our physical existence, would there not also inevitably be limits on our intellectual selves? Might there not be a point where we’d exhausted all of our ideas, used up all of our words?
Forgive me a little egotism for a moment when I say this is clearly not a problem for most people. While everyone’s hearts beat away a fairly consistent pace, we don’t all spend the same proportion of our time thinking.
I have a brother, Paul, and I can tell you with absolute confidence that he has not had an original thought since the spring of ’78. If conservation of mental energy was the sole determining factor in longevity, my brother would stand a very good chance of claiming Methuselah’s fame for his own.
I have no such comforting claims to make regarding my own existence. Having established long ago an almost total lack of ability for most physical endeavors, I’ve based my life entire on mental agility. My sole profit center -- the source of my value to the world -- lay squarely between my ears.
And now, I realized, I’d come perilously close to using it up.
***
There were consolations, of course, and the finest of these was Marco.
I couldn’t tell you exactly when he’d moved into the house. I worked odd hours, always, and it was a comfort to have him there.
Marco had an uncanny way of knowing when I’d need him -- appearing, almost magically, with the ream of paper or perfectly timed sandwich. Anything, everything was possible, as long as it kept the work going.
And at those times -- once rare, now damnably frequent -- when I couldn’t work, Marco’s presence was more than a comfort.
It was a delight.
***
He liked to sing, Marco did, while he showered. A rich, booming baritone, he would stand under the water and make the most incredible music. Songs that would put one in mind of the tiny island cluster that must have been his ancestral homeland, all toppled white columns and dark-eyed smiling lovers, gay with white-bright smiles.
He didn’t miss a note the first time I stepped into the bathroom to watch him shower. Only the merest flicker of his eyelids indicated any surprise that I would be there at all.
Marco’s voice was magnificent, but it paled in comparison with his body. Compact and well-muscled, he had the shoulders of a young bull -- bulging like the full end of an onion near a thickly-corded neck, tapering only slightly before reconnecting at the elbow.
His stomach was hard, rather than taut -- the type of musculature that gave voice to Marco’s life outside of my presence, for no one maintains a physique like that by hauling paper a few hundred sheets at a time. Crystal rivers of water spilled over his body,
seeking out the subtle valleys defined by abdominal muscle, sluicing over the angled pelvic bones, the softened steel curvature of hips at ease, framing a thick, proud, black-furred cock.
Perhaps my eyes lingered overlong, for when at last they traveled away, Marco had stopped singing. Instead, he stared, his own brown eyes filled with some unshared knowledge.
My decision to stay silent in no way involved Marco, but he kept his peace just the same. A fresh cloud of steam rose round him in the shower, convenient cover for both the center and possessor of attention.