Tangled Sheets

by Michael Thomas Ford

  “That’s really too bad,” said my friend Mark helpfully that afternoon when I called him to bemoan my fate. After a dozen moves, Mark still has every receipt for everything he’s ever bought in his entire life, alphabetized in labeled storage boxes in his closet. If he needed to, he could produce an item-by-item list documenting everything from the first bicycle he bought when he was twelve to the dildo he picked up on a trip to Amsterdam. He, of course, has never been audited.

  “Let me borrow your receipts for the day,” I suggested hopefully. “I promise I’ll bring them back safe and sound.”

  “Not on your life,” he said. “You’re a writer. Why don’t you just make them up? I think Ellen did that once. You could ask her how she did it.”

  In my moment of need, this actually sounded like a very good idea. I hung up and went right to work. Racing to the office supply store, I snatched up an adding machine that printed receipts. Then I found ink cartridges in assorted colors, thinking that I could cleverly use them to make it look like the receipts all came from different places. At the checkout counter, I carefully pocketed the receipt so that I could write everything off next year as a business expense. I returned to my apartment triumphant.

  Four and a half hours later, I called Mark back. “You are an evil bitch,” I said venomously, trying to wipe four different colors of ink from my hands and in the process sending all of the thousands of bits of paper on my desk fluttering onto the floor. “Have you ever tried making up receipts for your entire life? Not only do you have to go by the assumption that you actually do something that would warrant deductions, but you have to make all of the pieces of paper match the totals you put on your forms. Do you have any idea just how many reams of paper you have to buy to equal nine hundred and fifty-two dollars?”

  “It’s not your entire life,” he said defensively. “It’s just a year. Besides, I told you Ellen did it.”

  “I called Ellen,” I said evenly, smudging my face with green ink as I yanked a cartridge out of the adding machine. “She said that not only did they grill her for six hours about her deductions until she started to cry, she ended up paying two thousand dollars in fines on a six-hundred-dollar bill. She said it was only last week that she could ask for a receipt from a cab driver without bursting into tears, and that’s after eight months of nondeductible therapy.”

  “You’re hysterical,” said Mark. “I think you need to lie down.”

  “I think you need to bite me really hard,” I shrieked. “You’d better give me those receipts of yours, you little creep. Besides, you owe me. Remember when you gave Jim crabs and you told him you got them at the gym? And I told him I had them, too, just so he wouldn’t know about your little fling with that delivery boy from the bodega. Pablo, or Paco, or whatever it was.”

  “It was Pedro, and Jim and I broke up weeks ago,” said Mark sullenly. “If you called more, you’d know that.”

  “When I get a hold of you,” I started, but Mark hung up, making weird humming noises and saying that someone was buzzing his apartment. “Maybe you’ll meet someone nice in jail,” he said right before the line clicked off.

  That night I lay in my bed staring at the ceiling and thought about the worst that could happen to me. Would I actually have to go to prison? I had no idea. In my mind I conjured up a vision of a cell, small and airless with bunk beds and a single dirty sink. I created a cellmate named Hank. A big brute of a man, he was in for armed robbery and shooting a cop. I gave him a thick cock and fat, hairy balls that he liked to play with while he jerked off in the bunk above me, the springs creaking rhythmically.

  Surprisingly, my prick responded to my little fantasy and stiffened almost immediately. As I stroked it I let the scenario become even more wild. I pictured Hank ripping my orange prison uniform off me and fucking me senseless on the stained floor of the cell while I begged him for mercy. His prick slid in and out of my burning ass as he plowed me in full view of the other inmates. They in turn all jerked off watching us, their hands pumping fat rods until they gushed thick loads all over the concrete floors of the jail.

  By the time I came I couldn’t care less about my audit. As I shot my load all over my stomach I was ready and willing for them to take me away to Hank and his big cock. I could almost feel him emptying a gusher deep in my shitter. In my delirium I actually believed that everything would work out all right. But then the moment was over and I came to my senses. As cold cum slid down my sides onto the sheets I realized I was screwed but good, and it was the IRS and not Hank who would do the screwing.

  For the next three weeks, I had a recurring dream where I was tied to a chair while a group of faceless men in badly fitting suits and wide ties shone bright lights in my face and tried to get me to tell the truth about my finances. “Where are all of your receipts?” they screamed in unison. I’d try to give them an explanation, but every time I said anything, a big red light over my head flashed and a robotic voice cried out, “Lying. Lying. Lying.” I woke up every morning drenched in sweat with my pillow over my face.

  The morning of my audit, I scraped together my meager pile of tattered receipts and put them into my briefcase. I was still clinging desperately to the vain hope that maybe all of this was a big mistake and they would just let me go home. I thought about wearing a suit, then remembered that I didn’t own one. I decided jeans and a T-shirt would make me look more at ease anyway. I did, however, decide to walk to the IRS office. I didn’t want to look too wealthy by showing up in a cab. I told myself I wasn’t being paranoid. Somehow, I just knew they would know all of these things.

  The building itself was rather unimpressive. I had been expecting big marble halls and long corridors lined with doors and stony-faced guards in black uniforms. Instead, it was a fairly ordinary-looking office building, with windows that didn’t open and blue carpeting the color of antifreeze. The receptionist was a large, middle-aged woman with too much make-up and a bad dye job that made her hair an odd shade of purple. It took me a minute to realize that she looked faintly like Barney. As I checked in, I hummed the purple dinosaur’s moronic “I love you, you love me” song and wondered how years of watching people come to their executions had affected her mentally.

  “Just wait over there,” she said flatly after looking long and hard at my signature and then staring at me with her eyes all squinted up. “Someone will be out to get you shortly.”

  “Aren’t they already out to get me?” I said jokingly. She didn’t smile, and I retreated quickly.

  I sat down and looked at the other people waiting. Most of them had thick files of papers, nicely ordered records of their expenses. Unlike me, they all looked calm and collected, as though they would be perfectly able to explain their four-hundred-dollar deductions for office supplies without breaking down and confessing that it was actually a trip to Provincetown with a hunky construction worker they’d picked up outside their apartment building. I remembered my handful of receipts and wanted to die. I thought about running out or faking a cardiac event, but a voice interrupted my daydreams.

  “Mr. Caffrey?”

  I looked up. Standing in the hall was a man holding a file. He was looking around expectantly, like a lion searching for the one antelope in the herd with a gimp leg.

  “Here,” I said, feeling like I was once more in Mrs. McGuffey’s second-grade class.

  “Come with me, please,” the man said. He held out his hand as I stood up. “I’m Mr. Mitchell. I’ll be performing your audit today.”

  I tried to detect any trace of glee in his speech, but he gave no indications of his attitude toward my impending torture as he shook my hand. His grip was firm, and I hoped my palm wasn’t too sweaty. As we walked down the hall to his office, I tried to get a sense of what Mitchell was like. He seemed to be in his late thirties. Several inches shorter than my six feet, he was built compactly. His face was handsome, kind of like the models you see in department-store circulars every year around Father’s Day posing in knit polo shirts
and khaki shorts. He was wearing suit pants, but the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled back, revealing forearms covered in thick dark hair. At least I’d have something good to look at while I died a slow, agonizing death.

  When we reached his office, Mitchell ushered me in and closed the door behind him. The office was small and a little airless, but there was a window that let in some sun. Mitchell’s large wooden desk was covered in papers and stacks of files in precipitous piles that seemed on the verge of collapsing. He gestured to a chair across from his paper-cluttered desk and I sat down, gripping my briefcase tightly. He settled into his chair and opened my file.

  “Well then,” he said, “I guess we should get started. The sooner we begin, the sooner you can get out of here. As the letter you received states, we have some questions about your 1991 return.”

  I tried to smile, managing what could only have looked like a death grimace. “Ask away.”

  Mitchell pulled something from my file and looked it over. “It says here that you’re a writer.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “What do you write?”

  I hesitated. Lately I’d been making most of my money writing porn. I wasn’t sure telling Mitchell that was going to help me out any. “I write a lot of different things,” I said vaguely. “Books. Magazine pieces. Whatever comes along.” I smiled reassuringly. “Church bulletins,” I added impulsively.

  He looked at me strangely and nodded. “Well, you know, the deductions professional writers can take can be kind of tricky. I’d like to go over some of your deductions and just make sure everything is okay. As long as you have receipts for everything, though, there shouldn’t be a problem.”

  For the next hour and a half, Mitchell went over every deduction I’d claimed. One by one, he asked to see receipts for my taxi fares, business dinners, postage costs, and miscellaneous items. When he found out time and again that I didn’t have any receipts, he just shook his head. By the time we’d reached my six-hundred-dollar deduction for computer equipment, I was about to cry.

  Mitchell put down my file and looked at me. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t have receipts for any of these things, Mr. Caffrey?”

  “Well, you know, my apartment isn’t very large,” I started. “And there isn’t much closet space.”

  Mitchell’s face was blank. “All right,” I said. “I give up. Why don’t you just figure out how much I owe and we can call it a day.”

  “Well, there are a few other things I think we need to clear up, Mr. Caffrey. For instance, this $79.97 for magazine subscriptions in May. What exactly is that?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell Mitchell that those were for my subscriptions to Advocate Men and Freshmen. He already had me by the balls, and I didn’t want to give him any ammunition. I briefly considered telling him they were for Good Housekeeping and Field and Stream, but I figured I was already in enough trouble.

  “Those are research materials,” I said weakly, hoping he’d buy my bluff and not ask any more questions.

  “Research materials?” he said grimly. “What kind of research materials?”

  “I write for those magazines,” I said.

  “Can you prove that?”

  He had me up against a wall. Opening my briefcase, I pulled out a recent issue of a magazine with one of my stories in it. It had a big muscle stud on the cover along with a headline about outdoor sex. As I reluctantly handed it to Mitchell, I was thinking about the nasty letter I was going to write my editor as soon as I got home. He was going to owe me big for this.

  Mitchell leaned back in his chair, opened the magazine, and began thumbing through the pages. Every so often he stopped and looked at something. I watched the expression on his face, waiting for him to toss the magazine at me and tell me to get out of his office.

  After a few minutes, he looked up. “You’re Tom Caffrey?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said, taken aback. “Doesn’t it say that on my file?”

  He shook his head. “I just didn’t put the two together until I saw this. I love your stuff. Had more than a few good jerk-off sessions with it.”

  I couldn’t believe what he’d just said. “Well, thanks. I’m glad you like it.”

  “Sure do,” Mitchell said. “Helps me get to sleep on those restless nights. I always wondered if any of this stuff actually really happened to you.”

  I considered the position I was in. Mitchell was good looking. And I couldn’t really get in any deeper. “You want to find out?” I asked, holding my breath while I waited for him to respond.

  Mitchell looked at me. After a second, a smile broke out on his face. “Sure,” he said.

  He didn’t seem to know what to do next, so I helped him out. Getting up, I checked the door to make sure it was locked. The pane was frosted glass, so there was no chance of anyone seeing in. If they did look, all they’d see is shadows and they’d probably think I had gone nuts and was trying to kill Mitchell.

  Turning back to Mitchell, I walked over to where he sat in his chair. “Stand up,” I said, adopting my butchest voice.

  He stood up. I moved closer to him until my face was right in front of his. He was breathing heavily and was obviously nervous. I put my hand on his chest, and he flinched. I pushed him back until he was backed up against the desk, then began to unbutton his shirt. Swirls of dark hair appeared as more and more of his shirt opened beneath my fingers. While he wasn’t overly muscular, he had the body of a man who managed to get to the gym a couple of nights a week.

  When his shirt was fully undone, I pulled it off him and threw it on the floor. Sweat had formed on his face, and a bead of it was running down his neck toward the hollow of his throat. I ran my finger over his skin and stopped the drop just as it was about to roll over his collarbone. Mitchell watched intently as I brought my finger to my lips and licked his sweat off it. I stared deeply into his dark eyes as I moved my finger over my lips, wetting it. Then, never taking my eyes from his, I brought my hand to his nipple and squeezed. His eyes fluttered shut and he pushed against the desk.

  I had started to get hard the minute I saw his beautiful hairy chest, and my cock was rapidly swelling against my jeans. Moving in toward him, I put my hands on the desk on either side of him and leaned in to kiss him, pressing my growing hard-on against his stomach. As I did, Mitchell put his hands on my chest, as though he were trying to push me away. I felt like the boss putting the moves on a pretty secretary in an old 1940s movie, and half expected Mitchell to slap me across the face and tell me he wasn’t that kind of a girl.

  Instead, his hands moved down my body and around to my back, pulling me tighter. His mouth opened, and his tongue entered me, warm and wet as it slipped past my lips. One of his hands went up my back to my neck as he kissed me deeply. I felt the whiskers on his cheeks scrape against my skin as he pulled away and moved his mouth to my neck, sucking forcefully. I was going to have one hell of a bruise there, but it felt great.

  Soon his fingers were pulling at my T-shirt, urging it out of my jeans. I helped him out, fumbling at the buttons on my pants until they finally fell open and my shirt came free. Mitchell quickly pulled it over my head and dropped it to the floor. Without a word, his mouth dropped onto my nipple and began sucking, his tongue working in small circles around it. At the same time, his hands went right to my crotch, slipping into my jeans and grabbing my prick. His fingers slipped under my balls and held them tightly as he licked at the hair on my chest.

  “I’m glad to see that it’s just as big as you say in your stories,” he said in my ear, running his hand the length of my shaft.

  Now I was the one getting all worked up. Urging Mitchell up, I undid his belt and pushed his pants down. His prick was rock hard and stuck straight out from his body. It was topped by a thick head that rounded to a perfect point, just right for fucking. His balls, fat low hangers, dangled between his legs waiting to be sucked dry of their load. I ran my hand under his nutsac, feeling the thick hair that lined
the path to his asshole and letting his balls rest in my hand as I rubbed them.

  Once more I pushed Mitchell back onto the desk, this time until he was actually sitting on it, his ass resting on top of some files. His full sac hung down between his spread legs and slid over the edge of the desk. Sitting in his chair, I pulled it up until I was right between his legs. He leaned back, pushing his cock toward my face. Close up, his prick was quite a sight. Perfectly straight, it rose up in a neat line, one thick vein running up the side of it. The crown split neatly in half, as if a sharp knife had been plunged into the very heart of a soft, ripe peach.

  The dark fur that covered Mitchell’s chest exploded at his crotch in a dark cloud that surrounded his prick like fog around a tower before spreading out again over his thighs. Even his balls were hairy, covered in soft tendrils that stuck to his skin with his sweat. I put my hands on his legs, running them up his calves and onto his knees. Pushing them farther apart, I leaned forward and ran my tongue over the soft folds of his pouch. Carefully, I took one round nut between my lips, sucking on it softly. Mitchell’s hand came down on my head and began to rub my hair as I did this, his long fingers kneading my skin.

  “That feels so fucking good,” he said.

  Remembering that my financial future might depend on just how good Mitchell felt in the next half-hour or so, I went to work on his cock. Starting at the base, I ran my tongue lightly up the shaft until I reached the top. Pausing just long enough to make Mitchell uncomfortable with anticipation, I went down on him until I felt his bush beneath my lips. His prick slid into my throat smoothly and easily, and soon I was moving up and down his big tool, slurping at the sides and teasing him by running my tongue around the tip before deep-throating him again.

  His prick tasted wonderful in my throat, and pretty soon I forgot that this was an IRS agent I was blowing. While I sucked his big dick, I played with my own cock, which by now was hard as a rock. The friction of my hand on my meat was too much. I stood up and put Mitchell’s legs over my shoulders, pulling up on them so that he was forced to lie back on top of the papers that covered the top of his desk and knocking a few piles onto the floor. Spitting into my hand, I rubbed it into his ass crack, roughly fingering his tight hole.