Spirit

by John Inman

  I sprawled out on my back at the edge of the table with Sam standing next to me, stroking my legs, my stomach, bending down now and then to plant another kiss on my mouth. I saw another dribble of come dripping from his cock as he stood there beside me, and I caught it with my thumb, popping it into my mouth before it got away.

  Sam smiled, watching me. Then he stood there at the edge of the table, with me laid out before him like a Christmas ham, and with his hands exploring in every direction, he bent and took my cock into his mouth, doing everything to me that I had done to him.

  Sam knew what he was doing too. In less than five minutes, my ass was off the table, my back arched like a footbridge, and my fingernails were digging trenches in Sam’s shoulder.

  “Come for me,” he mumbled around my dick, and no sooner had he said the words than I moaned, and as I watched him through hooded eyes, damn near blinded by desire, I sprayed my come into that hot, eager mouth. Over and over, my back arched, my come shot out, and Sam steered me flawlessly, never easing up, never letting me get away, never slackening those heavenly urgings with his tongue and lips, pleading for more. Always more. He was as bad as I was. He couldn’t get enough either.

  When I was finally drained, my ass collapsed onto the table, and Sam gently cupped my balls one last time before letting my sated dick slide from his mouth.

  “Delicious,” he cooed, and again his wet mouth buried mine beneath it. I wrapped my arms around him and held him close while my pulse slowed and my heart eased its hammering. When he broke the kiss, he did it gently and lingeringly. It was a lover’s kiss. Hungry, happy, sweet.

  “Thank you,” I sighed, so fulfilled I could barely open my eyes.

  “No, Jason. Thank you,” he said with a dastardly grin. “I think we needed that.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t finished yet. I couldn’t let it end here. I couldn’t.

  “Sleep with me tonight, Sam. Please. I want to feel you next to me. All night.”

  I closed my eyes and trembled yet again when he licked a wayward splash of come from my cheek. I had no idea if it was his or mine, and at this point in the evening’s festivities, I figured it didn’t much matter.

  “Gladly,” he said. “I’ve wanted to be with you ever since I got here. You’re beautiful, you know.”

  I blinked, a little stunned by how romantic he could be. I don’t know why it surprised me so.

  “You’re the beautiful one, Sam. Every inch of you.”

  He took my hand and smiled. “Let’s go to bed.”

  I laughed. “Think maybe I’ll wipe down the table first. We may want to eat here someday.”

  “Hmm,” he said, tapping his chin with a fingertip like Sherlock Holmes while eyeballing the dining room table from one end to the other. “I’m surprised I didn’t think of that. Where’s the cleaner?”

  “Follow me.”

  “You have come remover?”

  I gave him a smirk. “I think we took care of that ourselves.”

  Sam smacked his lips. “I think you’re right. Every last drop, and boy was it good. So it’s just your ass marks we want to get rid of, then.”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  Sam giggled as he grabbed my butt and followed me into the kitchen.

  I LAY with my head on Sam’s chest and one leg draped snugly over his. As I hugged him close, his cock lay sleeping, soft and warm, gently nestled against my elbow. I really loved feeling it there. I could hear the soft snores coming from Timmy’s bedroom through the baby monitor at the side of my bed, but this time that reassuring buzz of static and childish snortings and the occasional rustling of bedclothes was mixed with the comforting sound of Sam’s heartbeat softly thudding in my ear.

  It was still early. Ten o’clock or so. Neither of us was sleepy. Sam had his lips in my hair, and I was twiddling with the trail of fur leading downward from his tight little navel. As he breathed, Sam’s warm stomach rose and fell beneath my hand. My body could barely move I was so relaxed, but my mind was a hurricane of activity, filled to the brim with images of everything that had just happened in the dining room. Some of the images made me blush. Some made me hard again. Some made me smile.

  I could still taste Sam’s come on my lips, and that made me smile for sure.

  I wasn’t entirely certain, but I thought maybe that twenty minutes I had just spent with Sam in my dining room was the hottest sex I had ever experienced in my life. I smiled remembering the way we had laughed in the middle of it. How often does that happen? Especially on a first encounter?

  “What are you thinking about?” Sam asked, his voice little more than a lazy hum. He was obviously as comfortable as I was. Lethargic, that’s what we were. Lethargic.

  Too spent to go to all the trouble of speaking in complete sentences, I simply tossed out a few nouns and called it quits. “Dining room,” I mumbled. “Sex. Remembering.”

  Sam gave an amused huff of air that stirred my hair. “That was something else.”

  “Phenomenal.”

  “I love your body.”

  “Yes.” I kissed his stomach.

  Out of the blue, Sam said, “I played Sting Warrior a couple of months ago. Great game.”

  I lifted my head and looked at him. “You liked it?” A little praise and suddenly I was able to make a sentence. How self-centered is that?

  “Yeah,” he said. While I was gazing at him, he kissed my nose.

  “Last year I played Doomathon,” he added, frowning like his favorite cat had just died. “The controls were sluggish. The graphics only fair.”

  I grinned at the dour expression on his face. “Everybody’s a critic. Get over it.” He laughed.

  I snuggled my head back onto his chest, and he pulled me tighter into his arms.

  As we lay there enjoying the feel of each other, I realized I knew almost nothing about him. Again, I lifted my head, rested my chin on the back of my hand while my fingers caressed that little patch of hair on his chest. I loved the way he gave me his full attention when I spoke. He had a satisfied expression that was so sincere it made my heart give a happy thud just seeing it there on his handsome face.

  “What do you do?” I asked. “Where do you work?”

  “I’m an electrician. That’s the trade I learned in the Navy. I’ve been trying to get on with the Tucson Power Company, but for now I work as a repairman for a private firm. Business, residential work. Whatever they need.”

  “Wow,” I said, impressed. “That’s butch.”

  He laughed. “What did you think I did? Make feather boas for a living? Sew tutus?”

  It was my turn to laugh.

  “Too bad you don’t work for the phone company. You could put my phone back together.”

  He grunted. “It would take more than a phone man to put that phone back together. It would take a magician and an act of God.”

  “No kidding.”

  He smiled at me. “Should I apologize again for stomping it to smithereens?”

  “No,” I said. “Four hundred times is enough.”

  I could see the blood rushing to his ears. He was so cute when he blushed.

  In the middle of admiring his blush, I suddenly grew solemn. There were a couple of things that needed to be said, and there would never be a better opportunity than this for saying them.

  “Sam?”

  He grunted a lazy, “Huh?”

  “I’m sorry about your brother. I’m sorry you don’t have him in your life anymore. And I’m sorry about what Sally has done to your family. I still can’t understand it. I mean, I know she can be a bitch. So can I. But this seems to go beyond the pale of bitchiness into the realm of outright vindictiveness. I guess I never realized how hard it hit her when Paul left. She’s lashing out at you and your family because of what Paul did. It isn’t fair.”

  Sam stared at me, considering my words. He carefully brought his fingers into play and plucked what I presume was a loose eyelash off my cheek. Then he caressed the side of my face,
but only for a heartbeat before he slid his arm around to my back again. A moment later he was idly stroking my shoulder.

  “I do miss Paul,” Sam said, watching me with those incredible brown eyes. “I miss speaking to him on the phone. I miss seeing him. You know, just before he disappeared, we were planning to go on a fishing trip together. Just him and me. Camping in tents, the whole bit.” His voice trailed away. “Now I know we never will.”

  “I’ll go camping with you,” I said. Quite bravely, I thought.

  He grinned. “What you consider camping and what Paul and I considered camping are probably two distinctly different things.”

  I mulled that over. Paul and Sam’s version of camping undoubtedly included bugs, bears, snakes, and chiggers. My idea of camping entailed roughing it in a Motel 8, continental breakfasts, and praying the pool was warm.

  “You may be right,” I admitted.

  There came a rustle of sound through the baby monitor. Bedclothes shifting. The squeak of a bedspring. The tinkle of Timmy’s bell-like laughter. Then silence.

  “He’s dreaming,” Sam said. There was a smile in his voice.

  I listened a moment longer. The flurry of sound seemed to have ended. All I could hear now was the gentle breathing of a child at rest, along with a tiny yip from Thumper.

  “Thumper’s dreaming, too,” I said. God knows I could recognize her dream yip. I had heard it enough times over the past two decades as it dragged me out of sleep. Usually, it was preceded by a toenail scraping my leg or an ice-cold nose poking me in the ribs because inevitably, when she dream-yipped, she also flopped around like a fish out of water. Sleeping alongside Thumper was not conducive to a good night’s rest. I should know. I’d been sleeping alongside her since junior high.

  The excitement concerning whatever was going on in the bedroom down the hall seemed to be over. I once again focused my attention on Sam. It wasn’t much of a hardship either. I studied his face while he studied mine. I slid my fingers across his forehead, sweeping his hair aside. He smiled.

  “Has your house always been haunted?” he asked, taking me by surprise.

  I thought about it. “No. Only since Timmy arrived. Unless I was just too dense to notice it before.”

  Sam tsked. “That’s unlikely.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Don’t you think it’s weird that it never started until the kid got here? Don’t you think there must be some sort of connection between the two?”

  “What? You mean like Timmy being clairvoyant, or psychic? Please.” Too far out. I had a hard time not laughing in poor Sam’s face. I wondered if he was serious.

  “Maybe Timmy’s a conduit,” Sam said, but even he couldn’t say it with a straight face. His lips twisted up in a grin. “Forget I said that.”

  I laughed. Timmy being a conduit to the netherworld seemed a bit far-fetched. The kid could barely walk across a room without falling down. “All too happy to forget it completely.”

  Apparently, Sam still wasn’t finished with the subject. “But really, Jason, don’t you think it’s strange that nothing… odd… happened around the house until Timmy arrived? Don’t you think it means something?”

  “Well, yeah. Maybe. I think I read once that poltergeists are more apt to show up when there are kids around, or teenagers. But even if it is a ghost, or a poltergeist, as long as he isn’t doing anything too mean or frightening, as long as he hasn’t tried to stab us in our sleep or do something equally horrible, I don’t figure there’s much reason for alarm, do you? Timmy doesn’t seem to be afraid at any rate.”

  Sam gave a wary chuckle. “He’s the only one.”

  “No kidding.”

  I made a big show of looking back over my shoulder with frightened eyes. He popped me gently on the chin.

  “Stop it,” he snorted. Soon we were both giggling. Then all of a sudden, I was turned on again. So was he.

  “Kiss me,” Sam whispered, and I did.

  By the mere uttering of those two simple words, and with one delicious taste of Sam’s sweet mouth, I felt that inexorable downward urge that all gay men feel when in the naked presence of another. Just as I had done earlier that evening, I slid my lips from Sam’s mouth and kissed my way down his warm, responsive body until I found his dick again, eager and hard and waiting. Just as it had been before. Just as mine was once again.

  He twisted around on the bed until he faced the other way, and as I slipped my mouth around his cock, he did the same to me. This time we knew what we would find, what to expect. We even knew a bit of the responses we would receive, one to the other. This time we were not traveling blind. We had fed from each other before. And that knowledge, that familiarity, made the coupling more deeply satisfying, and yet, more urgent; more exciting, and yet more trusting. It made it—a comfort.

  And exciting as hell.

  A beautiful eternity later, our juices spilled, our thirsts slaked, we fell asleep.

  The night slipped by us unnoticed, unheard. We lay in each other’s arms, spent and happy.

  It was Timmy’s screaming that finally woke us up.

  STARTLED OUT of our minds by that piercing knife of sound emanating from the baby monitor and stabbing out across the room, we flew from the bed and hastily donned our shorts after scrambling around and bumping heads a couple of times trying to find where we’d tossed them. Once that was sorted out and we were halfway decent, we took off running down the hall to Timmy’s room. Even through a two-inch oak door, we could hear him screaming a high-pitched wail of a screech that made the little hairs on the back of my neck dance around. It was the creepiest sound I had ever heard.

  We barged through Timmy’s door side by side, and once inside, we stopped so quickly that Sam’s feet would have flown out from under him if I hadn’t caught him by the elbow to keep him upright.

  The first thing I saw was Thumper sitting up in the middle of the bed. And when I say sitting up, I mean sitting up. She was perched on her butt, her little front legs held high and waving around. She was panting her laughing pant, pink tongue flopping around all over the place at one end and little brown tail flopping around all over the place at the other end.

  One happy-ass dog.

  I only tore my eyes from Thumper when a hand came up in front of my face with a pointing finger poking out of one end of it. It was Sam’s hand, Sam’s finger. “Look,” he said. “Look at that.”

  I followed the pointing finger and spotted Timmy standing on the stuffed chair in the corner. He had his arms straight out to his sides like Jesus Christ on the cross, only Jesus Christ never wore rocket-ship pj’s, at least not in the paintings I’ve seen.

  Timmy seemed to have landed himself in the middle of a wind tunnel. His pajamas were flapping around his little body like a flag in a typhoon. I could actually hear the fabric whapping against itself. Timmy’s mutilated hair was all over the place, whipping this way and that, slapping him in the face one second and blowing straight up into the air the next. While Timmy’s eyes were bright and fearless as he squinted into the wind, there were tears skittering horizontally across his face, first heading for his hairline, then sliding toward his nose as the gale-force wind kept shifting from one direction to the other.

  Timmy’s cheeks were pruning and undulating like an astronaut’s cheeks when he’s sitting in one of those centrifugal force machines down at NASA. With his cheeks slammed back like that by the force of the wind and his lips pushed back and out of the way, every one of Timmy’s tiny baby teeth were on full display and a pretty good river of spit was sliding across his face mixing with the tears.

  The kid was a mess.

  Oh, and did I mention he was laughing? That was the horrible screeching sound we had heard, the happy wail of a four-year-old screaming in euphoria, just so goddamn happy he couldn’t hold it in. While the gale tossed him back and forth, damned near knocking him out of the chair every now and then, Timmy howled with laughter and wailed and giggled and sputtered, and if he didn’t stop
soon, I was pretty sure he would probably pee in his pants—and in my chair. And all the time he was wailing and laughing, he held his arms straight out to either side as if begging for more.

  The boy was fearless.

  But where was the wind coming from? Nothing else in the room was moving. Even the curtains were hanging limp and still. What the fuck?

  I was so shocked I couldn’t think straight. It took a minute for me to realize Sam was saying something.

  “What?” I yelled over the roar of the wind. “What did you say?”

  When Sam didn’t answer, I tore my eyes from Timmy long enough to see what he was doing.

  And when I did see what he was doing, I couldn’t believe it. There was a grin splitting Sam’s face wide open. He was watching the kid laughing and chortling, and when Sam turned his eyes to me, I guess the shocked expression on my face really cracked him up. Sam bent over and slapped his knee like some old guy who’s just been told a really good Social Security joke.

  “He’s playing with him,” Sam said, pointing at Timmy again, snorting with laughter. “Look. Don’t you see? He’s playing with him.”

  I gawked at Sam like he had just sprouted a pineapple out of his forehead. “What are you talking about? Who? Who’s playing with him?”

  Sam was laughing so hard now he had snot sliding out of his nose. But he wasn’t laughing at me anymore. He was laughing at Timmy. He was laughing with Timmy.

  Jesus, could these two get any happier?

  “The ghost,” Sam gasped, tears squirting from his eyes, giggling like a four-year-old, giggling like Timmy. “The ghost is making him laugh. Don’t you see? The ghost is playing with him!”

  I followed his pointing finger back to Timmy and just stood there watching him.

  In the middle of everything that was happening to him, Timmy managed somehow to spot me across the room. He stood there, buffeted by the wind. And while his pajamas whipped around him and his hair flew every which way, he erupted once again into a merry, tinkling laugh and waved hello with both hands. Just waved and waved and giggled and laughed.