Winter Ball

by Amy Lane

  “Nungh!” Oh God, that felt good too! But Richie was playing with his muscle ridges and his nipples and the cuts of abdomen underneath his hip bones.

  “It’s a four-pack and not a twelve-pack, man, but not fat!”

  Skip wiggled in sheer arousal. “I… you know. Fat kid… doesn’t go away.”

  Richie cocked his head again, like a spaniel listening for unheard signals. “You weren’t fat,” he said, voice quiet. “You showed me pictures once.”

  The one picture of his family happy. The other picture of him in his senior year of high school, paid for with his after-school job so he wouldn’t be completely invisible in the yearbook. The first picture full of fake smiles and carefully ironed collars, and the second replete with baby fat and acne.

  “You know, ‘Mama’s own little fat boy.’” He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice when he did an imitation of his mother.

  Richie stopped playing with his stomach, which was too bad because he’d just gotten to the part where Skip’s cock lay, dripping, begging for attention.

  “You’re….” Richie ran his hands down Skip’s thighs, up his torso, and stopped, framing his face with those work-roughened, bony hands. “Just like you said to me last night, Christopher. You’re beautiful. You are… I could touch you all night, but it makes me want.”

  Skip fumbled for words and Richie took pity on him, moving down and engulfing his cock in one fast suck. For a few wonderful, oblivious moments, there was only that edgy heat, the pressure of Richie’s lips, Skip’s moans echoing in the dark behind his eyes.

  “Look at me.” Richie’s breath teased his cockhead, and Skip had no choice.

  “You’re so fuckin’… fuckin’ hot right now.” Richie scrambled to his knees and grabbed the lube from under the pillow.

  Richie bent over on all fours and squirted some lube on his fingers and fumbled for his hole.

  “Wait!” Skip sat up and stopped him, not wanting the touching to be over. “Just… slower, Richie.” He bent over Richie’s backside and placed little fluttering kisses down his freckled spine. Richie gasped, and Skip went firmer against his ribs. The taut, stringy muscles of Richie’s stomach contracted under Skip’s hands as he ran them up and down Richie’s front and his chest. By the time he got to Richie’s bottom—avoiding the patches of lube as he went—Richie was emitting a steady keening moan.

  Skip parted his cheeks and looked. The pink little pucker squeezed and released as he watched, and he thought, My dick is not going to fit there.

  He’d had a girlfriend who liked this, though, and she’d been shameless, showing him how to stretch her, how to make sure he didn’t hurt when he went in. He’d liked her—he’d liked her a lot—but with every burning frisson of Richie’s skin against his own, he was starting to suspect why they were never able to pass “like” into “love.”

  He spread Richie’s ass a little wider and licked.

  Clean—it tasted a lot like Skip’s soap, actually, and Skip spat three or four times so he wouldn’t get sick on amber bodywash. Then he licked again, like he meant it, and Richie moaned deeper and buried his head in the pillow in front of him. Skip licked more, and harder, his interest in the sounds Richie made, the way his thigh muscles trembled, the incoherent little pleas he was screaming into the pillow, far outweighing any discomfort because of taste. Oh wow—look at what he was doing to Richie!

  Richie started to rock back and forth, begging him, not for anything specific, just “Please… oh God, Skip, please!”

  Skip pulled back enough to test the rim with his finger, and Richie gasped and thrust against him, taking Skip to the second knuckle. Skip added another finger and twisted, stretching, not just to hear Richie gibber (although that was fun too) but to make sure.

  He didn’t want to hurt his friend.

  “Here, Richie—gimme the lube.”

  He oiled himself up generously, making sure the lube was skin temperature before he placed his cock where he needed to go.

  Richie groaned and pushed back, taking him in one solid gulp, and Skipper’s vision went dark.

  Oh my God. Oh my God. I’m assfucking Richie Scoggins and I want him… I want him… oh fuck I want him so fucking baaaaaad….

  Richie was rocking back and forth, keening, and Skip suddenly took over. He placed his hand firmly on Richie’s lower back and started his own rhythm, feeling the drag of Richie’s sphincter as he pulled out almost to the crown and the push of it as he thrust back in. Thrust and pull, thrust and pull, every stroke along his nerve endings like fireworks.

  “Oh God…. Skip, it’s like… like fuckin’… so….”

  “Magic,” Skip whispered hoarsely, and then he slammed his hips forward hard, because if Richie had words, he was doing better than Skip.

  “Yes!” Richie howled, and Skip did it again, and again, hard and staccato, every smack like a scream of pleasure from his crown to his balls to his own asshole.

  “Fucking you!” he gasped.

  “Yeah! Fucking me!”

  “So hard!”

  “Fucking hard!”

  “So good….” Skip’s voice caught, and something in him broke. “So fucking good, Richie!” Why weren’t we doing this six years ago?

  “Don’t stop!” Richie howled, and Skip kept on going. Again, and again, faster, until the drag of Richie’s skin was almost numbing, until….

  “Augh! Yes! There!”

  Skip pulled out slowly and tried to hit that spot again.

  And one more time.

  And….

  Richie buried his face in the pillow and screamed, his entire body convulsing around Skip’s cock, clasping him in the slick-fisted vise of his body.

  In the sudden silence, Skip could hear Richie’s breathless moan, and then that sound again, of a spoonful of tapioca flung at a canvas sail.

  Skip’s vision darkened and he came, huge, dumping what felt to be a lifetime of spend into Richie, marking him from the inside out as irrevocably Skip’s now, nobody else’s. Skip was this kind of friend, and nobody else could be.

  Richie collapsed under him and Skip fell over his back, both of them flat in the yellow light from the bed stand, trying to see again, trying to catch up to the now.

  Richie groaned and Skip tried to remember how to move. “’M I crushing you?”

  “No. Don’t want you to leave me.”

  “Not gonna leave,” Skip mumbled. “May have to pull out, but I’ll be right here.”

  “That feel as good for you as it did for me?”

  “God, yeah. You, uh… wanna try it on me someday?”

  Richie went still. “Not soon,” he said, voice shaky. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me, Skip. Not so sure about me not hurting you.”

  Skip grunted and lazily licked the sweat off the back of Richie’s neck. He slid sideways, feeling the come that dribbled when he pulled out. He pulled the comforter over their cooling bodies and ignored the fact that they were both naked. They’d wake up and pee, and probably put on their shorts then.

  Right now he turned off the bed stand light and snuggled down, Richie replete and exhausted in his arms. A furry body thumped on the bed, and he felt the familiar weight of Hazel picking her spot down by his toes.

  Oh Lord. It was fall back. His phone was set on the bed stand, and it would ring a whole hour later than it had rung this morning.

  And he’d wake up again with Richie snug and sexy in his bed.

  SKIP HAD never given himself credit for any sort of imagination. He could get soccer plays from books, but he didn’t make up any of his own. He could fix computers, but he had no urge to write his own code or design his own hardware or software. But he did read—mostly thrillers and espionage, because he liked to see if they got the tech things right.

  He read enough, watched enough movies, to be able to envision a perfect day.

  That Halloween Sunday was a perfect day.

  He woke up with Richie in his arms, and that was a start. They didn’t
have enough time to fool around, but they did kiss, long and slow, like they’d always wake up in the same bed, like they’d always have time for sex, like they’d always be in each other’s arms.

  They took turns in the shower, and this time, when he got out, Richie had made coffee. They ate cold pizza for breakfast (because cold pizza!) and were out to the field half an hour early for warm-up. The smell of cold, of wood smoke, and the midautumn haze—all of it sang in Skipper’s bones. It wouldn’t matter if they won or lost—he was playing soccer with his friends, with someone who cared about him, and yes, damn, he finally knew what sex was about.

  And then they won the game.

  This time he was the one who lifted Scoggins on his shoulders and ran with him down the field. In six years of that soccer club, three seasons a year, they hadn’t taken the championship once.

  Running down that field, Scoggins whooping with his arms out under the heartbreak blue of the Halloween sun, felt like flying.

  That night Richie hid behind the tree and waited for the older kids to walk up to the front porch. As soon as the motion sensor kicked on for the ghost, Richie popped out from behind the tree wearing the Frankenstein mask, roaring, and the brave kids who got past that got the candy bars.

  One tiny little girl slipped by Richie’s radar, but when he jumped out and hollered, she squealed, “Do it again! Do it again!” so it wasn’t too bad after all. (Skipper liked that kid—he gave her extra chocolate, and she gave it to her little brother, who was sitting down at the sidewalk in a stroller.)

  When Richie got tired of that, he answered the door and roared, and Skipper handed out the candy bars anyway, but that didn’t last long. Richie needed to be active, and apparently chasing kids was its own awesome sport.

  One mom with zombie makeup and a blood-soaked pink bathrobe laughed appreciatively as she balanced a squirming little zombie on her hip.

  “Your boyfriend’s really good with kids,” she said, laughing, and she turned away with her wiggling kid before Skipper could reply.

  What would he say? That Richie wasn’t his boyfriend? That they weren’t “that” way? Because they were that way, and Skipper wouldn’t mind if they were boyfriends.

  But what? He was just going to bring that up? Stop Richie as he chased some high school kids through Skipper’s yard and tell him, “Hey, I think you and me, it’s more than a weekend thing or some fucking when you’re staying over for video games. It’s real. We’re boyfriends. Is that okay?”

  Richie trotted back up to the porch, still laughing as he tore the mask off his face. “I think I put the fear of God in those little bastards!” he crowed. “They’re not coming back for a triple helping of candy—not on my watch!”

  Skip wanted to laugh with him—he did! But all he could think was I want to kiss him! I want to throw my arm over his shoulder and ask him if he wants a triple helping of candy, and hear him laugh dirty! I want—

  “Skip, anything wrong?” Richie asked. Skipper fumbled for words and Richie started going through the candy bowl in his arms. “Oh, hey! You still got massive quantities of Almond Joy—excellent! Those are my favorites!”

  Skip said, “Yeah, I got lots left over. It’s nine o’clock—you think anyone else is coming by?”

  Richie looked out into the gentle little neighborhood. Most of the porch lights were still on, and they could see flocks of children moving like starlings from porch to porch. “I’d say wait until ten.” He yawned. “I’ll be ready to go to bed by then anyway.” He leered up at Skip. “Gotta get my fun in before the weekend’s over, you know?”

  Skip nodded unhappily. He thought about saying it, then decided against it and was completely horrified when it came out of his mouth anyway:

  “I wish you didn’t have to go home.”

  Richie didn’t look horrified—he looked sad.

  “Yeah, me too.” They’d locked Hazel in the bathroom, so they were standing in a lighted doorway. The whole world could see them. And Richie grinned up at him and tapped his cheek gently with a knuckle. “You think I want to leave a place that serves cold pizza for breakfast and has Almond Joys?”

  Skip rolled his eyes and grinned, and they went back inside to watch Insidious: Chapter 3 before the next round of kids came by.

  Naked Limbs and Fallen Leaves

  THAT NIGHT they did the thing again, but something was different. It was like they’d gotten some of the “Right the fuck now!” out of the way and they could go slower. Skipper was gentle with Richie when he knew Richie was about to come, pulling back and letting Richie’s cock flop out of his mouth and cool in the air. Richie drew Skipper’s blow job out a little, slowing down when Skipper warned him, and moved so Skip could stroke him off while Richie was deepthroating Skip.

  They turned off the lights this time, because both of them were tired, and Richie said he’d eaten too much chocolate to do the butt thing. It didn’t matter. The sexual contact, the explosion of orgasm behind Skip’s eyes, Richie’s little whimper as he buried his face in Skip’s thigh—all of it made for the perfect day.

  But the next day they had to get up early. Their morning was a flurried game of “I got next!” in Skip’s tiny bathroom. One of them shaved while the other one shit, and one of them showered while the other one shaved. They ended up dressing at the same time, Skip in his polo shirt and tan pants, Richie in his mechanic’s blues and jeans.

  Skip shoved toast in Richie’s hand before they both ran out the door. Richie paused, one hand on the doorknob, his duffel bag over the other shoulder, and Skip grabbed his lapels suddenly and hauled him in for a thorough, lip-pulping, cock-hardening, nipple-tightening mauling. When Skip released him, Richie let go of the doorknob to rub his lips.

  “What was that for?” he asked in wonder.

  Skip was already hot from the kiss, but he knew his face got even redder. “Just… don’t forget this weekend, ’kay? Was… you know. Like the best weekend in my life. Want another one.”

  Richie’s smile was almost shy. “You want another one?”

  Skipper bit his lip. “That okay?”

  “Yeah. I mean….” A smile of wonder split Richie’s face. “Yeah!” He reached behind Skip’s neck and hauled him down for another kiss, and this time Skipper found himself smiling when it was done. “We’re gonna do it again, right?” Richie asked, their faces so close Skip could feel little puffs of Richie’s breath across his lips.

  “Next weekend,” Skip promised rashly. “We’ll go out to a movie Friday, play Saturday—can’t promise we’ll win—”

  “Who cares!” Richie said, clearly enchanted. “Friday! I’ve got a reason to survive the fucking week now! That’s awesome!”

  He was out the door before Skip could tell him that he could come by any day. Any day was a day Richie could hang out on his couch, play his video games, strip naked, and molest Skip’s unprotesting body.

  But it didn’t matter, because they were going to do something on Friday. Richie would find his way to Skip’s door when he needed to, right?

  BY LUNCHTIME, Skip was staring at his phone like it had the secret of the universe.

  “Skip,” Carpenter muttered, “you’re up!”

  Skip looked at the phone bank, swore, ignored his cell phone, picked up his work line, and squeezed his squishy brain-shaped toy. “Tesko Tech Business Services! This is Skipper, how can I help you?”

  “Oh, hey! Skipper! My boy! Lucky me, I got you again!”

  Oh Lord. Skipper rolled his eyes at Carpenter and mouthed, “Mr. Gay Porn.” Carpenter made an obscene gesture using his fist and his closed mouth and his tongue in his cheek.

  Skipper grinned and walked Mr. Gay Porn through his paces. When he was done, the guy laughed and said, “We’re going to have to stop meeting like this, Skipper. Any chance we can meet any other way?”

  Oh boy. Skipper sighed grimly. “Actually, I’m seeing someone right now, sir. And this is highly inappropriate.”

  “Oh….” That sound was not pro
mising, in that it didn’t sound like Mr. Gay Porn would go away. In fact, that sound was highly unpromising. “You are seeing someone. You didn’t say a girl. You said you are seeing someone. I find that interesting. Don’t you find that interesting?”

  Skipper pasted a smile on his face. “Thank you, sir, for using the tech services at Tesko. If you have any questions or any complaints about the service you’ve just received, feel free to dial the number provided by your employee manual. Thank you again, and have a nice day!” He hung up. “Without me,” he finished with passion.

  “What’s the matter, Skipper? He having trouble realizing that no means no?”

  Skipper turned to his friend and shook his head. “Man, you’d think the guy would… I don’t know. Take the hint. I told him I was seeing someone—”

  “You are?” Carpenter took a deep drag from his flavored water and looked eager. “Tell me more!”

  Skipper blinked. “You act like I haven’t ever dated before!”

  Carpenter rolled his eyes and took another drag. “Skipper, my last girlfriend was a year ago. She was sweet, didn’t mind that I was fat, and left me because her old boyfriend came back and she loved him more. It was very sad. Your last girlfriend was Amber. You broke up for unspecified reasons, about five months before Trisha and I broke up. The fact that you’ve been seeing someone is a big deal. C’mon, man—you’re my only friend who doesn’t practically live online—hook me up with some real-life details!”

  For a moment Skipper wanted more than anything to tell him about Richie. Carpenter loved liberal political causes. If Skipper was a betting man, he’d put down actual money that the fact that his love life had magically changed from an “Amber” to a “Richie” wouldn’t do more than surprise him.

  But… but Richie hadn’t said it was okay, and that held him back. Richie had said they’d see each other over the weekend, but that wasn’t a confession of… of commitment or anything.

  It was just “Hey, man, what’re you doing next weekend?” “Well, I thought we’d try that fucking thing again, what do you think?” “Fucking sounds great, Skip—how about fuck my ass again!”