Larry Boots, Exterminator

by John Inman

  So turned-on by now that I could barely think straight, I suddenly convulsed beneath him. My cock hardened even more, the head of it swelling so much that Kenny gasped above me. When I spilled, I clutched his hips and drove him down over me, burying myself as deep inside him as I had ever done before.

  He uttered a sound that registered somewhere between a laugh and a sob. His trembling hands, still smeared with his own juices, danced over my face, reading me like braille once more, gauging my shifting expressions, mapping my excitement. I closed my eyes and let his touch wander wherever it would, relishing the tent of shadow his fingers created over my eyes, loving the scent of his come in my nostrils, the viscous feel of it transferring from his hands to my lips, where I eagerly licked it away.

  At the moment when I collapsed beneath him, breathless and totally spent, he bent down to claim my mouth in a kiss. His tongue eased deep and lay warm across my own. In the middle of the kiss, I could hear his heartbeat hammering in the darkness. Or did the hammering come from mine?

  Slowly, as we relaxed against each other and my cock began to wilt, I scraped him into an embrace and eased him down onto the bed beside me. He pressed his face to my throat, and I could feel his smile on my skin. His breath still came in tiny gasps, but when my cock at last slid free from his gentle grasp, he gave a mournful groan as if his greatest pleasure had been stolen away.

  We lay in each other’s arms for maybe three minutes, allowing our bodies time to relax, enjoying the sensation of simply holding on after all our exertions. He still trembled from time to time, and I always pressed a kiss to the side of his neck when he did. I could feel his eyelashes fluttering against my ear. His breath lay hot and sweet against my cheek.

  Finally he whispered, “Wait,” and slipped from my arms. He padded into the bathroom and returned with a damp cloth. I felt like a pampered baby as he gently wiped me clean. When he was finished, he returned to the bathroom, and I heard the water running. Moments later, he returned, drying himself off. Satisfied, he used the same towel to dry me, and then, after tossing the towel on the floor, he crawled back onto the bed and snuggled into my arms.

  We were at my home. The veranda door was ajar. The night air drifted through, rustling around us, cooling our heated bodies. The dogs were outside, resting motionless on the deck with their noses through the railing wire. Watching for coyotes in the canyon below, maybe. Or keeping an eye out for the little alligator lizards that forever crawled up and down the sides of the house in their never-ending quest for bugs.

  I could tell by the smell of the air it was late. The night was almost over. Too contented to twist around to actually read the clock on the nightstand, I simply rolled deeper into Kenny’s arms and closed my eyes, content to have it be whatever time it chose.

  “Where were you today?” he quietly asked. “I know you were working. Where did you go?”

  I dipped the heel of my hand in the crevice of his ass in a proprietary sort of way, and he opened his legs to accept me there. Just as he always did.

  He murmured against my chest while wiggling his ass against my hand. “You’re trying to change the subject, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “You drained me. I’m too worn out to change the subject.”

  He laughed at that, but there wasn’t a lot of gusto in it. I could tell he wasn’t finished grilling me.

  “Tell me,” he said again. “I want to know what you do.”

  I cradled his face in my hands and lifted his head so I could see him more clearly in the moonlight. I tapped a kiss to his nose and cupped his chin between my thumb and index finger, giving it a little shake.

  “It’s nothing you need to know about,” I said. “It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

  That didn’t seem to satisfy him at all. I don’t suppose I really expected it to. He scraped his hairy leg along mine as if he loved the way it felt. But his thoughts, I knew, were centered far from the sense of touch. It was my inner workings that concerned him now. What I did, how I spent my time, where I went when I was not with him. And it wasn’t jealousy, I knew, that motivated his questions. It was fear. Fear that I might be falling afoul of the law. And dammit, the worst part was, he was right. I was falling afoul of the law. I had to. It’s what I did for a living.

  He clearly wasn’t finished with me yet.

  “I want to know that you’re safe when I’m not with you, Larry. It’s not a lot to ask. Will you at least tell me that you keep yourself safe.”

  I extended my tongue and ran it lightly across his eyelashes. “Don’t worry. I keep myself safe.”

  “But what is it that you do?”

  I sighed. Pulling him back down to my chest, I buried my lips in his hair and cradled his small, lithe body in my arms. His narrow back barely spanned my forearm from elbow to hand. His toes, when we lay side by side, only reached to my ankles. It was a funny thing, but I never realized how much shorter he was than me until times like this when we were wrapped in each other’s arms. He seemed content to be there for now, and for that small miracle, I thanked whatever celestial being was in charge of such wonders.

  “Tell me,” he urged again. “Tell me what you do.” His breath stirred the hair on my chest. I could feel his soft cock pressed tight against my thigh. We lay as close as two people could, and somehow it still wasn’t close enough. So I dragged him closer.

  “I make things right,” I said. “That’s what I do. When people do bad things, I make them right.”

  “Like a cop?”

  I faltered at that. “No,” I said. “More like… karma.”

  “No one can be karma.”

  “That’s not entirely true.”

  He considered my words for a full minute or more. Finally, he asked, “These things the people did, were they terrible? Did they hurt people?”

  “Yes,” I said. “They hurt people.”

  “Were they innocent people they hurt?”

  I thought of nine-year-old Tommy, posing proudly with his baseball team buddies, his lips stretched wide in a happy grin, not caring two cents about his missing tooth or that his mother would have to scrub and soak his uniform pants for two hours to get the grass stains out, and even then they would never look new again. “Yes,” I said, “they were innocent people.”

  “Why don’t the police handle it?”

  “The police are restricted by laws.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  “Why does your mother think you design software?”

  “Because that’s what I told her.”

  “So she doesn’t know the truth either.”

  “No.”

  One of the alligator lizards must have made the mistake of venturing up onto the deck. I heard the sudden tippy-tap of doggy toenails clattering around outside. François whimpered in play, and Chuck gave a merry yip. God, they loved those damned lizards.

  “Do you really break the law when you do what you do?” Kenny asked. His hands were at my sides, his fingertips following the wales of my ribs, lightly exploring the furrow between each one. His touch was a toss-up between erotic and ticklish. I squirmed a little, and he stopped, although his hands never left my skin.

  “I correct the things the law can’t do, Kenny. I punish the unpunishable. That’s all you need to know.”

  “So you really are karma.”

  “Yes. At least, I work on its behalf.”

  “Do you hurt people?” he asked. “When you punish? When you do whatever it is you won’t tell me you do, do you ever hurt anybody?”

  So there it was, then. The moment of truth. The question I had known was on the horizon all along. I had already decided what I would say if he asked, so by this point in the conversation I just went ahead and said it.

  “No,” I lied without missing a beat. “I never hurt anyone.”

  A short stretch of silence followed my denial. It took me a minute to realize his silence was a
little more cynical than relieved. A blind person, it seems, is not so easily bamboozled. With visual signals withheld, perhaps they measure truth and falsehood in the very timbre of a person’s voice. Or maybe the fact that we were wrapped so closely together, Kenny and I, with our beating hearts mere inches apart, the lie simply didn’t have time to survive the journey from me to him.

  “I think you do,” he said softly. There was a sadness in his voice I had never heard before. “I think you need to hurt people.”

  I slipped a fingertip along the tiny valleys and ridges of his spine. “Please don’t ask me any more. Someday I’ll tell you everything.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes, Kenny. I promise.”

  But still he was not appeased. “If I asked you to stop, would you do it?”

  I let my silence follow his question until once again the sounds of life intruded. More tapping of toenails on the deck. A night bird keening in the trees outside. Closer in, I heard the rhythmic squish of my pulse surging through my temples. I separated the gentle thudding of Kenny’s heart from the pounding of my own, then listened, fascinated, as their two rhythms beat in counterpoint to each other.

  He wiggled down in the bed and pressed a kiss to my belly. “I love the way you feel,” he said, his lips against my skin. He tilted his chin up to face me, but his eyes were closed. “I love the way you fuck me too.”

  I smiled. “I’m glad.”

  “Those are just a couple of the reasons why I don’t want to see you get in trouble.”

  I laid my hand to his cheek. “You don’t want to see me get in trouble?”

  “You know I don’t.” He twisted his head and laid a kiss on my palm. Gently, I closed my long fingers around his face. He burrowed in, as if he liked the sensation of being trapped in my grasp.

  “I hope you know I enjoy being with you, Kenny.”

  “Well, you haven’t barfed when I walk into the room yet.”

  “I wasn’t joking, Kenny. I enjoy being with you.”

  In the moonlight, his face sobered. “When I get nervous, I make jokes.”

  “Are you nervous?” I asked.

  He extracted his face from beneath my hand, and folding my fingers into a fist, he rested his chin on it instead. His eyes were open now. I could feel them on me. It was almost as if he could see me. As if his sight had been miraculously restored.

  The tip of his tongue came out and moistened his lips. I could feel him inhaling a truckload of air, as if he needed a massive infusion of oxygen to keep going. Or maybe to calm his nerves.

  “Our conversation took a turn I didn’t expect,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m always more comfortable fretting about what you do for a living than actually talking about it. I’m a little lost when we talk about us. I never know what I should say, how I should respond.”

  “Does it scare you when I talk about us?”

  “A little,” he said. “Sometimes I think you still don’t quite get the fact that I’m handicapped. You don’t seem to understand all the things you’ll miss out on if you stay saddled with me. When I’m with you, there are a lot of things we can’t do together. Things you could do with someone else.”

  “Like what?” I asked, inordinately happy to be off the subject of my job, but a little wary to be on the subject he’d introduced. “Name one of the things we can’t do together, Kenny.”

  “Jog,” he said. “We can’t jog together.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure about that. “Actually, we might find a way,” I said, “but just so you know, I hate jogging anyway.”

  He plucked gently at the fold of flesh between my thumb and forefinger. I felt his tongue brush across my skin, as if he was testing the flavor. “Okay,” he said. “We can never watch a sunset together.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But I can tell you how it looks. I can be with you, sitting on the beach, when it warms our faces. I can explain to you when it dips beneath the horizon and blinks out like a candle.”

  He lowered his forehead to my hand, where his lips once again came to rest on my stomach. He nibbled at the hair there as if enjoying the texture. “When you say it like that, it doesn’t seem so bad.”

  I agreed. “No, it doesn’t. Tell me another thing we can’t do together because you’re blind.”

  “I can’t tell you how you look,” he said. “I can’t point to the city skyline at night and share the beauty of it with you. I can’t gaze deep into your eyes, like sometimes I sense you doing to mine.”

  “You can feel that?”

  “I think I can.”

  “It’s true, you know. I do gaze into your eyes. You have no idea how beautiful they are. How green. How open and innocent and kind and sexy.”

  “How worthless.”

  I cupped his face in my hands and lifted his mouth from my belly. “Don’t say that. Nothing about you is worthless.”

  “We’ve only been seeing each other for three weeks or so.”

  “I know.”

  “Does it seem longer to you?”

  “Yes. And no.”

  He hesitated, then asked, “Haven’t you had enough of the stuff I just warned you about by now?”

  “I haven’t experienced any of the stuff you just warned me about.”

  “That can’t be true,” he said.

  I stroked his forehead with my thumbs, smoothing out the worry lines. “I’m sorry, but it is. It’s one of the truest things I’ve ever said.”

  His voice was frailer now. As if emotions had stripped away its strength. “Do you want our time together to end soon?”

  “I’m beginning to think I never want it to end,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if I wanted to break things off?”

  My heart gave a lurch inside my chest. “Why?” I asked, forcing myself to remain calm. “Do you?”

  He dropped his face back to my stomach. I caressed his hair, waiting for him to speak. Finally, when his words came, they were soft and sad, and I could tell he had been thinking about them for a long time.

  “I don’t want you to miss out on things, Larry. I don’t want to be the person who holds you back. I know what it’s like, you know. I’ve been dumped more times than you can imagine.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s because you’re blind. Maybe it’s because you were being an asshole.”

  He smiled at that. “Maybe it was. Am I being an asshole now?

  “If you tell me one more time how wrong you are for me, you’ll be walking a pretty fine line.”

  His smile was still there. “So I shouldn’t do it, then?”

  “No. You shouldn’t do it.”

  His hand slid upward along the rise of my chest, stroking through the hair until it came to rest at the side of my face. His fingertip probed my ear. His thumb brushed the corner of my mouth, so I kissed it.

  “If it gets too difficult, will you tell me?” he quietly asked.

  I eased my head to the side and sucked his thumb into my mouth, talking around it like I was chewing on a cigar. “Yes. If being with you becomes too difficult, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Carefully, he crawled up the length of me and buried his face into the side of my neck. I clasped him tight against me and smiled into his hair.

  “So,” I crooned, breathing him in, “between your physical shortcomings and my moral turpitude, maybe we deserve each other, huh?”

  Giggling, he wiggled closer. “Maybe we do.”

  He let out a sigh then, which might have signified anything or nothing. Then he reached up and stroked his fingers over the bristle of new growth on the top of my head. Was it my imagination, or did he look relieved?

  “At least your hair’s growing back,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “At least there’s that.”

  “Oh, and I forgot to mention. I’m having lunch with your mother tomorrow.”

  The old ticker gave another lurch. “You’re doing what?”

  K
enny rooted sideways to bury his face in my furry armpit. For some reason, he always liked going there.

  “Relax,” he mumbled inside my echoing axilla. “We’ll have fun.”

  “But you’ll talk about me!”

  “I know. I promise I still won’t tell her you come like a fire hose. That’s our little secret.”

  “Oh, I feel so much better.”

  Kenny’s breath evened out, he stilled, his limbs went limp, and he gradually settled against me like a horse leaning on the poor blacksmith changing his shoes. Soon, Kenny was snoring, his nose still buried deep in my armpit.

  “Christ,” I breathed into the darkness above. And the next thing I knew, I was asleep too.

  Chapter Twelve

  TWO DAYS later, my mother called. No hello. No how you doin’? All she said, right out of the box, was “If you hurt that boy I’ll disinherit you. I’ll leave my one point three million dollar house to the Humane Society and tell them to rescue chipmunks in it.”

  I decided I could be aggravating too, although I might not be as polished at it. “The Humane Society doesn’t deal with chipmunks. And what boy are you referring to, Mother?”

  “You know perfectly well what boy. How did you meet him?”

  “Oh, you mean Kenny.”

  “Of course, I mean Kenny! How did you meet him?”

  “I picked him up in the park.”

  “You did not.”

  “Okay,” I relented. “I picked him up on a park bench.”

  “He likes you, you know.”

  Now I was listening. “Did he tell you that?”

  My mother made some noises on the other end of the line. Familiar noises. Crinkling cellophane. Flicking a lighter. Puffing sounds that conjured images of exhaust smoke rolling out of a bulldozer. She had lit a cigarette. I wondered if it was one of the funny kind.

  “It wasn’t his words so much as the expression he used when he spoke them.”

  “What expression was that?” I asked, cramming the phone closer to my ear, not wanting to miss one little itty-bitty nuance of what she was about to say.

  “Probably the same expression he gives you when you first walk into a room. Do you know the expression I mean?”