A Mutual Friend

by Layla Wolfe

  It sounds corny, and I’ve definitely experienced weirder things, but it was like the street stood still around me. The other shoppers ceased to exist. No car drove down Surprise Street. If they did, they had frozen in time. The only things moving were my lover’s electric grin and the breeze rustling his ginger cloud of hair.

  “Well?” said Flannery, completely proud of how he’d arranged the moment.

  I bolted. I flung my arms wide and, in a flash I was skin-to-skin with King in that sort of bear hug where you rock back and forth in bliss. I’m sure I was squeezing the breath out of him, but it had been a month since I’d seen him. First, I’d had to go to Colorado Springs, knowing at any moment he’d be called to his dad’s deathbed. He left the day after I did.

  “King, King, King, mi amor. Te amo más que la vida misma.” I love you more than life itself.

  “Mi amor,” King muttered back against my neck.

  I finally broke away to breathe, but my nose was practically touching his. “Let’s go in the back, and finish what we started.”

  His eyes glittered. “You’re on.” I didn’t ask where he’d gotten the fancy bike that no self-respecting Zealot would ride. He gave the keys to Flannery to let him park it and spent a minute nuzzling with Todd when Kenna came up to greet us. He did that thing where you lift the dog up and make lip farts against its stomach. I wasn’t sure Todd liked it, but the dog looked like he laughed as he squirmed. King handed the pup back to Kenna and we went through the “broken” door, then the swinging double doors, of The Happy Hour.

  Chapel was still in progress, but Merwin Bigwater and Mayo Snodgrass, on his way to the can, interrupted us with their greetings. I didn’t like the way Mayo thumped King on the back and kissed his cheek. What a slobbery, kissy kind of guy. He had a bad aura. Surrounding every living creature is a bioluminescent aura due to a natural discharge of energy. King’s glowed rainbow-like and surreal. Mayo’s was dark and joyless. That guy would be alone forever.

  “Glad to have you back, King,” said Mayo.

  I grabbed King’s arm. “We’ve got business to attend to,” I said, unkindly.

  Mayo tipped an imaginary cap at us as we headed for a back room used as a bedroom for visiting or drunk members. The first thing we did was strip each other’s cuts off, as if they didn’t define our true identities. Or, maybe we wanted to feel each other’s naked chest. The next to go were the T-shirts.

  “Oh, wow,” I breathed, taking in the bars that pierced King’s nips. Not knowing when he’d had them pierced, I experimentally tweaked one, gently. He hissed in air, but relaxed when I moved my thumb across his nipple, leaving the bar alone.

  “I did this for you,” he said. “You always loved my nipples, put clamps on them, try to lengthen them.”

  He swallowed his own words when I bent to slather my tongue over an areola. I nibbled on the metal bar, ran the flat of my tongue over the nubbins of his ducts. I made him jump like a Maasai and hold my head between his palms, but he did nothing to stop me. I’d often clamped his nipples so the pain took his outside of himself and allowed him to see the demon—or our love—more clearly.

  I understood. King was allowing me to be the Dom in this scene. My penis twitched and elongated just thinking about it.

  But first, I wanted to suck. Sucking a little didn’t mean you weren’t dominant, did it? Of course not. The cocksucker often really had the true control, because the guy being pleasured would never stop him and was basically at his mercy.

  Licking my way down his muscular abdomen, my fingers made short work of his belt. He was really getting into this biker business. His buckle depicted a skull and crossbones. It turned me on. It had been hot when he was a sweaty, muscular truck driver, going long distance. Now he “drove truck” while wearing a leather cut.

  His long, thick cock popped out of his jeans, veined and juicy. He wasn’t wearing any drawers. I liked that, but wondered what had happened in LA. No underwear? Nipples pierced? I tried not to think about it as I swallowed the dick like a sword. I let my throat muscles massage his tool for awhile, just gulping, hungry as always for his penis.

  Before long, it turned me on too much. I was clutching my own crotch, massaging my own penis through my jeans. Shoving him away almost violently, I pushed him back onto the thin mattress on the floor. I tried to think who had slept there last. I thought it was another friend of Lily’s from the Rez, trying to make something of himself instead of drinking Montana Gin, a fluorescent blue drink made from hairspray they favored on the Rez.

  King lay casually, hands behind his head, his erection pulsating against his hip. I whipped his pants off and stripped completely naked because I wanted him to see me. I’d been working out like hell with Anson and Bond during the past month, hoping it showed. I tried to take my time stepping out of my jeans, knowing King was admiring me. But I was too eager to be the “top.” I wanted to top my man.

  A month ago, we’d been about to perform this when King had gotten an emergency call from his sister Eliza. His father had taken a turn for the worst and she’d been forced to call 911. I was literally just about to sink down on his big prick and ride him like a bull when Eliza called. I mean, we knew Duane needed to move into a memory care facility. We did. But I guess we’d been shoving those thoughts aside in favor of living in the moment.

  I had no motion lotion, so I spit into my palm and greased up my dick.

  I was going to fuck my man, missionary style, like a woman.

  “Oh, yeah,” I snarled. “You want this, don’t you, boy?”

  King clutched the sheet that covered the mattress. “You fucking know it, you big, bad Dom.”

  I had to enter him then, holding one of his knees up like a woman, or I would’ve shot on his stomach.

  I was that hopelessly in love.

  d

  It had been a long, sad trip to LA. Words can’t describe how happy I was to be back in the place I’d been realizing was my true, new home. After helping Eliza empty out the family house and put it on the market for sale, I’d had a few pieces of furniture shipped to Twinkletoes and grabbed my Ducati bike and hit the road.

  And now my cock was being sucked by a demonologist.

  My demonologist.

  I was so flooded with lust I nearly came instantly in his hot, muscular mouth. I gasped with relief when he stopped and shoved me back on the mattress.

  “You want this, don’t you, boy?”

  When Anton entered me with his slippery dick, I cringed and grabbed the sheets in my claws. He was hung like a soup can and had only fucked me a couple of times before. But he went slow—at first. Though he leaned on one of my uplifted knees, trying to pin it to the mattress at my shoulder, he moved like a slow-motion wrestler, and I relaxed into it.

  It dawned on me. I’m being fucked by a Catholic demonologist. Anton wanted me. He craved me. And he was going to shoot his load inside me.

  Rocking back and forth, Anton massaged my gland with his dickhead.

  And he talked.

  He talked like a nasty demonologist.

  “You want this, don’t you, boy? You want my fat penis inside of you. That’s all you’ve been thinking of this past month, isn’t it? Being fucked by a big, dominant man like me?”

  “Not just any big, dominant man,” I panted. “You. I want to be fucked by you.”

  “Say it. Say ‘fuck me.’”

  “Oh, Good God,” I said, tweaking his nipple. “Fuck me, you stud, you fucking ripped Daddy Dom.”

  I thought he came then. He choked and tossed his head back, frozen. But I think he was only trying to hold it back. Maybe hearing me call him a Daddy Dom, which he was sometimes, sent him over the edge. I clutched his cock with my asshole, and he really sounded like he was dying. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he tried to swallow.

  He completely threw me for a loop with what he did next.

  Collapsing onto his back, he flipped me over so that I was sitting on top of him. My knees straddled his hips,
and never once did he slide out of me. In fact, as I allowed my weight to settle onto him, he penetrated me even further, deeper than I’d ever been drilled.

  Instantly I loved this new position. I rotated my hips in a clockwise, then counterclockwise direction, feeling his cockhead at every gyration in a different part of my hole. I rode his cock to my heart’s content.

  And I was the one talking nasty. “How do you like that, Mr. Daddy? Being plunged deep in your boy’s hole? Being ridden like the giant stud horse you are?”

  Gripping me by the hips, Anton growled, “I love it, son. Keep doing your daddy like the sweet little boy you are.”

  Spitting in my palm, I rubbed it on my glans. “Here, dad. Jack your little boy. Don’t you want to see me splatter your chest? I know you want it. That’s all you think about all day.”

  And, because it was probably true, Anton choked out, “You know it, mi chico blanco.” He grabbed almost blindly for my dong. “Tu padre ama a su chico.”

  I have to admit, I was the one who came first.

  With his eyes flashing and his pecs churning, Anton jacked me mercilessly. He looked from my cock to my face, then back to my cock. He wanted a reaction, and he got one. Bam. I shot him in the chin at first. The second stream covered the valley between his pecs. A few drops even splashed his nipple. The third stream hit the lovely, velvety arrow of hair that directed one’s eyes to his pubic bone. I filled his navel with my jizz. It jiggled there like jelly as he watched my cock, fascinated.

  The moment I was drained, I went to work on his cock. Clutching at it with my inner muscles, I rode his prick like a regular gaucho, my penis at half-mast bouncing up and down on his abdomen. I might as well have had a cowboy hat in my hand, and I didn’t even have reins to grip. I was riding bareback.

  “Do it,” he urged. “Do me, King. Do me like el hombre grande. Do me like you love me.”

  “I do love you,” I gasped, and he came.

  I felt his seed filling me up. He tensed every muscle in his body, only his cock spurting inside me. I massaged him with my inner muscles, coaxing the semen from him. I milked him dry, every twitch of his hips another ecstatic spurt.

  At last, he relaxed with a deep sigh. We just looked into each other’s eyes for the longest damned time, panting. We’d almost caught our breath by the time I got off him, his jizz rolling down my inner thigh. I even staggered a bit as I walked down the hall, holding up my jeans with my hands, my deflated cock swaying from side to side.

  In the past six months, my life had been altered one hundred percent. I’d been a company man spending agonizing days and nights driving big rigs long distances, addicted to opiates. Now I was just a guy who smoked weed and took shipments of lettuce and canned tomatoes to and from the border.

  I’d also clarified I preferred men. One man in particular had stolen my heart, and I dedicated myself to him. I’d told Eliza in LA that I was having a serious fling with a former priest. I hadn’t even told her the demonologist part yet, because she was already swooning with shock and had to sit down. This was after Dad passed away. I would not have liked to have told a former cop in Watts that I preferred sucking dick. No, everything worked out perfectly in the end. Eliza recovered from her swoon without the use of smelling salts and went back to nursing school with the money we got for the house, and Duane mercifully passed away. He was not living his best life. That was not how he’d want to be remembered.

  No one asked me to clean the bathroom, and going back down the hall I staggered past Lily, who grabbed me in a bear hug.

  “I’m so glad you’re back, brother,” she whispered.

  I muttered some loving shit and continued to the guest room, where it looked like Anton was already sleeping, an arm above his head. I fell in next to him and cuddled in the crook of his arm, my face dusting his pit hair. Almost immediately I had a very clear and lucid dream.

  It was the most beautiful dream of my life.

  I was up in the red and white granite of the Chemehuevi Mountains to the west of Lake Havasu. It seemed to be early spring, since a desert spiny lizard hugged the rocky ground for warmth. Oddly, in the midst of this rugged, treeless landscape, I stood at the bottom of a house’s steps. Four people I didn’t know stood on the porch. And covering the steps were thousands of golden and emerald-green gems.

  That was when I realized I was dreaming. I thought about Harte and Dust Bunny, geologists who could identify the gems. They owned a rock shop. Looking up, I realized one of the people on the porch was my dad. I knew it was my chance to delve into dream symbolism, so I picked up a giant rock that looked like a shiny hunk of amber, glinting in the sun.

  “Dad! What does this symbolize?”

  He had his serious face on, a face I remembered with fondness. He looked at the gem, then back to me. “Hope and consciousness.”

  I noticed another person on the porch was Barclay Samples, and I wondered if he was dead too, since he was standing with my dad.

  I was so thrilled with my lucid dreaming success, I tried to wake up and write it down, but I just wound up drifting into a boatload of regular, symbol-filled dreams.

  A few weeks later, we were in our new house in Rough and Ready. I was receiving my shipment of furniture. Anton was glad because we shared a bedroom and he had nothing to his name other than some religious items and a matted teddy bear. Boy, I could never be a priest. They had to give up everything.

  “Hey,” said Twinkletoes, at our bedroom door. We were putting the mattress on top of the box spring. I had sort of Arts and Crafts style furniture—probably that old, too—and it went well with the Midcentury Modern architecture of the house. “Turk and Moog just rode up.”

  Anton and I looked at each other. That was weird. Those two guys together meant it was club and medical business. Was someone sick? Did it have to do with my dad? Was Anton’s ex-boyfriend sick? Noel Moloney was a patch holder in the Bent Zealots. I’d had to meet him at a crab feed before I left for LA. Anton didn’t talk to him once, that I could see.

  Tossing the mattress into a vaguely approximate position, we went out to the living room just in time to meet the two bikers coming in.

  Turk said, “Father, King, Twinkletoes, sit down.”

  Uh-oh. This doesn’t bode well. But I’d had the dream about the gems, about hope and consciousness, and nothing had ever come of it.

  Turk tented his fingers between his legs. I was right. This was real serious.

  “It’s about Barclay Samples. The jury came in early this morning. Guilty on all six charges of murder in the first. Court sentenced him to death by lethal injection.”

  The three of us looked at each other and let out long breaths. As though we’d been holding them in for months.

  “I mean,” Turk continued, “it was pretty obvious, even without your testimony. A couple guys from Mencken testified about biting the heads off birds and eating the innards of domestic pets. Vera, Chuck, and Dave testified that he needed fresh blood constantly to replace his own pulverized blood. Vera said he told her all about it after he shot that guy with the groceries. He said he was practicing.”

  “That’s exactly what he said,” said Twinkletoes. “Practicing.”

  “Right,” said Anton. “He said he’d walk up and down the street, and if a door was open, that meant ‘welcome.’ Locked doors meant he wasn’t supposed to go in and kill.”

  The two men rolled their eyes cynically. Turk said, “Well, they plan to demo that whole building. Nobody wants to rent any offices in there now. They thought they cleaned it, but a realtor went in and found an eyeball in a kitchen cabinet.”

  The three of us stared at each other. I said, “I thought he wasn’t able to get Jessica’s eyeball out?”

  “Someone else,” surmised Anton.

  We all looked to Moog now. “I just wanted to add that Barclay is dead. He overdosed in his cell on hoarded antidepressants before the verdict even came in. I wanted to let you guys know, to take some of the weight off your minds
that you must have.”

  Did it take weight off my mind? I was so shocked, I didn’t know the answer to that question.

  “Joder,” said Anton under his breath in his beautiful Catalan accent.

  He seemed genuinely surprised and so was I. We hadn’t realized that Barclay bore any responsibility for his crimes. He seemed so carefree and even giddy about his ne’er-do-well activities. He was frantic and afraid even when it came to the demon, but his genuine wickedness didn’t seem to bother him at all.

  Had Beelzebub had anything to do with Barclay’s suicide?

  Anton thought it did. We had one of those dinners where nobody pays attention to the food, so I don’t even know what we ate.

  Anton said, “A demon cannot own anyone’s soul, but it can encourage them to do things they ordinarily wouldn’t.”

  That made me afraid that Beelzebub had somehow imbued my own soul. I mean, hadn’t he come to my locked room and thrown law books on the floor, scratched Anton’s arm? Hadn’t he protected me by tossing a horizontal bowling ball at that birdwatcher?

  Twinkletoes said, “I saw that thing with my own eyes, blacker than black, the embodiment of pure evil. If anything could kill Barclay, that thing was it.”

  That night I had another flying dream. I was swooping up and down those Chemehuevi granite canyons and gullies. I focused on a song I heard far away, flying toward it. It actually had sort of a disco beat, and as I got closer, I heard someone singing “burn, baby, burn.” Another refrain went, “Burn that mother down.”

  Whoa! The singer talked about people out of control getting loose on a roof, and I did see the house from the earlier dream. This time I merely flew above it, so I couldn’t identify Duane, or see if the gems were still on the steps. Later on, I was glad he wasn’t there, because these were the people being sent to hell, I realized. Sure, they were getting down. It was their last chance before they were sent into the flames.