by Tanya Chris
“I’m doing fine with ninety-nine percent.”
If I had to pick a man, I’d pick Joshua, but I didn’t have to pick one. I loved women. I loved everything about them, not just the obvious stuff like breasts and butts. Deb had once tried to pin me down—was I a breast man? an ass man?—as though she could do more leg lifts or get a boob job and thereby earn the fidelity she yearned for, as though she’d be enough if she had more this or less that.
But I found women beautiful generally. I was as entranced by Sherry’s soft curves as by Jenny’s rippling abs, would not have been able to choose between Jenny’s perky breasts and Deb’s perfect handful. I loved Sherry’s curls, the depths and variations in the shades of brown, the shine and bounce. I loved her colorfully decorated cleavage and the dark rings of her areolas.
I rolled over and nuzzled into her, exploring what I loved, diving lower to get to what I loved best. A well-used pussy smelled like ambrosia to me.
Yes, I loved pussy—shaved or hairy, clean or sweaty, tidy folds of flesh or gaping purple lips. I loved the smell of her arousal or of my own come or even of the coppery tang of blood. I vividly remembered my first look at Irene’s pussy. I’d been so full of want—grabbing at it like a child clutching two fistfuls of candy even though he can only eat one piece at a time. The smell, the taste. Even before I’d ever experienced pussy, the memory of it was written on the tablet of my soul.
“I love pussy,” I murmured into Sherry’s.
“You think Joshua doesn’t love pussy?”
I sighed and rolled onto my back, my head snug between the V of her legs. If I’d hoped to distract myself and her from this conversation, it hadn’t worked.
“It’s not either/or,” she went on. “It’s like chocolate and ice cream. You can love them both. Or you can love chocolate way more than you love ice cream, but still like ice cream. Maybe you’ll eat chocolate in any form—milk chocolate, dark chocolate, chocolate-covered cherries and chocolate-covered pretzels, hot fudge sauce, chocolate milk—but you’re picky about ice cream. Maybe for ice cream you only like butter pecan.”
“What if I only like butter pecan when it’s covered in hot fudge sauce?”
“That’s OK too.”
“It doesn’t feel OK. It doesn’t feel fair or ... or honest.”
“You know,” she said, ruffling a hand through my curls, “for a guy who’s pretty anything-goes about sex you’re being bizarrely puritanical. What’s right, what’s wrong?”
“Sex is right. Taking advantage of people is wrong.”
“So this is a moral high ground you’re defending, not a homophobic fear of being gay?”
“Not a fear of being gay.” Because I wasn’t. Gay. I wasn’t.
“OK. If you say it, I believe it, and anyway, no one’s going to make you engage in anything you’re not feeling, whatever your reasons. Now, are you going to finish what you started down there?”
“Maybe. I’m kind of hungry. Do you have any ice cream?”
Sherry laughed. “Ice cream ice cream or metaphorical man-love ice cream?”
“Literal ice cream.”
We put on a smattering of clothes and trooped out to the kitchen to check. While Sherry dished up the ice cream she’d unearthed from the freezer, I wandered into the living room and found Joshua asleep on the couch, the DVD screen saver bouncing around the television, whatever movie he’d been watching long over. I leaned over him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey,” I said softly.
He opened his eyes directly into mine, seeming almost to have expected me to be there, a happy gratitude springing into them. I stepped back, tripping myself so that I landed on my butt on the carpet.
“Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to startle you,” even though I was the one who’d been startled. “I thought you’d be more comfortable in bed.”
He sat up and swung his naked legs over the side of the couch. Like me, he was dressed in only boxers. He blinked, the sleep still heavy in his eyes. Sherry came in with a bowl of ice cream and sat on the carpet next to me. She spooned some into my mouth.
“It’s not butter pecan,” she said rather pointedly.
I couldn’t take my eyes away from Joshua. There was something in the way he looked at me sometimes that made me want to be looked at that way, with this raw physical hunger that even Sherry, for all the lustiness of her appetite, couldn’t match. This was what it felt like to be objectified, I realized. It was kind of hot.
“Joshua?” Sherry asked, holding up the spoon to him. He opened his mouth and let her slide it in, but he didn’t take his eyes off me either.
I knew I should blink, look away, say something. I was encouraging again. I was ... enjoying, enjoying what I got without giving anything back. But I didn’t turn from him. Instead, I let Sherry alternate spoonfuls of ice cream between us, feeding us while we watched each other.
“You two are hot enough to melt this,” she said, putting down the bowl.
She crawled around behind me and circled me with her arms, one hand drifting down to find my cock. I flinched when she touched it, as if I hadn’t known it was hard until that moment. I leaned back against her, my eyes closing tight. Fuck. If Joshua had touched me instead of Sherry, I would have ... would have ... fuck. I opened my eyes and caught Joshua’s cringe above the bulge of his fading erection.
“I’ll sleep in the spare room.”
“You don’t have to.” Fuck. What was I saying?
“I’d rather.”
And then that hurt too, but I deserved it.
The bed was too big with just the two of us. I slept on the same side as always, Sherry pulled tight into me, a lonely space open beyond her.
Chapter 19
“I’d forgotten how much fun tech week is.” Joshua dropped into a chair across from me.
I looked up, surprised. It was the first time he’d sought me out all week, not that he’d been avoiding me exactly. He’d just been very, very busy with other things: running lines with Pete who, as predicted, was only barely off-book and still stumbling his way through scenes that required precise timing, or talking quietly in a corner with Deb—Debra—who after the tumultuous rehearsal last week had been keeping mostly to herself.
I missed him. It wasn’t as though either of us had a lot of free time for socializing, but I followed him around the green room with my eyes during those moments when we were both backstage. I hadn’t realized how much I expected Joshua to come to me until he stopped doing it.
“Almost over,” I answered him.
We only had to make it through the second act tonight and then dress rehearsal tomorrow and it would be opening night—the whole point of the last six weeks. I survived four to six tech weeks a year, so I was accustomed to the whole-body exhaustion and high stress levels that accompanied them, but it never got easy.
Carol had promised us an early night tonight—a quick run through without costumes or makeup and no director notes after, and then home, maybe early enough to do something besides drop directly into bed.
“Did you take any time off this week?” I asked Joshua.
“Friday. I’m planning to sleep until noon and then take a nap. How about you?”
“When I take time off, I don’t get paid, so no.”
My uncle offered me overtime—which I rarely took because there was always a rehearsal or a show or a woman to get to—but he didn’t offer me vacation time.
“If we were in New York, we’d be getting paid to do this,” Joshua said.
“If we were in New York, we’d be waiting tables and hoping that our next audition lands us a walk-on role in an off-Broadway show destined to close on opening night.”
“Wow, you have a lot of faith in our potential.”
“If you had any more faith than I do, you’d be in New York.”
“I guess only Sherry has faith in us. Or are we just cowards?”
“Realists,” I corrected. “Think about how many actors there are i
n New York compared to how many people were at the auditions for this show. How many guys did we have to beat out for these roles?”
“Well, I had to beat out you for this role.” He smiled teasingly, and for a moment it was easy again.
“Then you should go to New York,” I said, smiling back.
“If you believe Sherry, I will.”
The smile dropped from my face. Sherry didn’t bring it up every day, but she brought it up relentlessly.
July.
Like a doomsday device ticking in the background of our lives. The show would end and this would end, and I didn’t even know what “this” was. I drank in the sight of Joshua sitting across from me while I could, the confident squareness of his shoulders and the soft curve of his smile against the chiseled, fur-edged line of his jaw. Butter pecan.
I’d spent the last few days looking around, asking myself if any other flavors of ice cream appealed to me, and getting a lot of no’s in response. If I was only ninety-nine percent heterosexual, the remaining one-percent was hard to find. None of the other guys in the show did it for me in the least—I refused to imagine myself in a Pete/Repeat sandwich—and the guys at work were even worse, their aggressive machismo rougher and less approachable than Joshua’s more nurturing maleness.
His quizzical head tilt made me realize I’d dropped the ball conversationally, too stuck in my head to banter.
Don’t leave me—that was what I wanted to say—and don’t give up on me. The train of thoughts in my head would arrive somewhere, if only Joshua had the time to wait for it to chug laboriously through some very constricted passages.
“It would help if you didn’t look at me like that,” he said, “like I’m candy.”
“Ice cream,” I muttered, although Joshua wasn’t in on that joke. “Sorry.”
I put my elbows on my knees and dropped my head between my hands. Time was running out. Joshua’s patience was running out. I heard him sigh and then his hand was on the back of my head, stroking through my hair.
“It’s OK,” he said. “It’s all a fucking mess, but it’s OK.”
~~~
After a while, I started counting along. I didn’t want to. What I wanted to be doing was relaxing with my beer and some mindless television in this blissful hour of not-rehearsal I’d been granted before bedtime, but when someone did push-ups on the floor in front of you, it was impossible not to count them.
I’d made it up to twenty-eight before Derek flipped over and switched to doing sit-ups with the same fervor.
“Didn’t you just get out of the shower?”
“Didn’t work,” he said, not sounding as winded as I would have under the circumstances.
“If the point of the shower was to get clean, I can’t imagine how doing calisthenics is going to work any better.”
Derek only grunted, still cranking out sit-ups. I stopped counting those.
“Amanda not been putting out?”
No answer to that either.
“Dude, if I have to visually participate in your gym class, I deserve some kind of explanation. You’re harshing my mellow.”
He stopped mid-sit-up and flopped back on to the floor, letting his head hit it with a smack.
“So?” I prodded.
“Ever heard of orgasm denial?”
“No. What is it?”
“Pretty much exactly what it sounds like. We screw around, Amanda gets off, I don’t. Repeat.”
I’d never been more glad I didn’t share Derek’s kink.
“So who needs her? You’ve got a bedroom and a hand. Go take care of it.”
“Not how it works,” he said. “Not the way the game is played.”
Really, really glad. That shit wouldn’t fly with me. I shook my head. “How long?”
“Going on a week now.” He went back to doing sit-ups at a more courteous pace.
“A week’s not so bad. You can do a week.”
“You ever gone a week?”
No, no I hadn’t, not since I’d first discovered the easy joy of masturbation. I probably hadn’t gone more than two days that I could think of. Maybe that time I had the flu so bad.
“I could,” I said, not all that sure. “How much longer?”
“No way to know.” He reversed his body into another set of push-ups.
“Seriously? You don’t even have an end date? That’s kind of sadistic.”
“Bingo.”
“What do you get out of this?”
Derek stopped with the push-ups and sat up. “It turns her on. She’s wet before I touch her, which she says is because I’m hard if she just looks at me, which is true. After a week, everything gets me hard. Nothing gets me hard. I’d stand back, if I were you.”
I laughed. For Derek to even joke about homosexual interaction was beyond his normal comfort zone. Amanda was good for him, crazy at it was. She opened him. Still.
“You know how after you’ve had sex, you’re kind of done for a while?” Derek asked. “Like maybe you could get it up if there was a reason, but the drive isn’t there. And you’re kind of tired and—”
“Satisfied?”
“Empty. Soft. Not just soft in the dick, but soft. No edge. When you don’t come, that doesn’t happen. You feel—”
“Frustrated?”
“Powerful. Strong. Ready to go, anytime. Bring it.” He laid down on his back, his arms behind his head. Looked like another round of sit-ups was coming. “Besides, it’s fucking hot.” He smiled to himself and started crunching.
“All right, dude, whatever. Take it to your room.”
“OK, it’s almost eleven anyway. I get to call her at eleven and you probably don’t want to know what she’ll make me do on the phone.” He jumped to his feet and walked down the hall to his room.
I watched him go, shaking my head to clear out the unnecessary image of Derek futilely stroking himself according to Amanda’s instructions. The conversation had made me think, though, about Derek’s sexual journey and my own.
“Derek! Wait a second. Can I talk to you about something for a minute or are you going to get in trouble if you’re late calling her?”
“I’ll text her.” He ran and got his phone from his bedroom and spent a minute poking at it, then sat down on the other end of the couch and looked at me expectantly. “What’s up? You find an apartment.”
“No.” Shit. I hadn’t even been looking. “No, it’s about sex, actually.”
“What are you going to ask me about sex? I think you have sex with more women in a week than I’ve had in my whole life.”
That wasn’t true. Exactly. And it wasn’t the point.
“It’s not about quantity. God, what is?” I waved a hand in dismissal and then used it to bring my beer to my mouth while I worked on formulating the question I wanted to ask. “When you first started this thing with Amanda, you were surprised, right? I mean, you didn’t know you’d like it until you started doing it.”
“Pretty much. I knew I liked Amanda, for sure, and if you’d asked me what I liked about her I’d have said some stuff about her being strong and confident which was basically code for her being dominant—only I didn’t know that then—but the sex part was a surprise. When she clued me in that this was her kink, I went and read all about it on the internet and ...” He trailed off with a glance up at the ceiling.
“And what?”
“It’s hard to say now. At the time, I don’t know if I was turned on or freaked out—some of both—but when I look back on it ... it’s sort of like all that was a sham, like I wasn’t learning something new. More like uncovering something old. It took me a while to see that.”
“Why?” That was exactly what I needed to know. Why had Derek hidden this information from himself? Why, if I were sexually attracted to men, had I?
“I guess it didn’t fit my image of myself. Like those people on the internet couldn’t possibly be me. I had this idea of what being submissive meant—which really wasn’t me, because that idea was a
stereotype, nothing to do with me and Amanda. I had to actually try submission to find out, and for Amanda I was willing to try anything, which actually, you know, might be a little submissive.” He laughed. “So what’s that got to do with you? You looking to get into BDSM?”
I explained the situation with Joshua, hesitantly at first because I didn’t want Derek to feel uncomfortable living with me if I were suddenly going all gay, and then more eagerly when he only sat and listened without reacting.
“It’s not as big a surprise to me as it is to you,” he said when I finished.
“Really?”
“Dude, you’ve always been a little too interested in my junk.”
“This has nothing to do with you.”
He laughed. “OK, only this one guy then.”
“Joshua,” I agreed, wanting to say his name again, even though I’d just said it maybe twenty times.
“I thought it was all for Amanda at first, that I’d only ever want to submit to her. Used to bug the hell out of her, actually, until I figured out the urge started farther back than her, but it didn’t bother me. So what if it was only Amanda? It wouldn’t change things between me and her. And it’s not like I’d want to submit to just any woman. So what difference would it make if Joshua is the only guy in the whole world you like? It’s normal to have some standards. I mean, it’s not like you’re interested in all women, right?”
“Maybe fifty or sixty percent?”
“Seriously? You’d fuck sixty percent of the women in this world?”
“I mean, it doesn’t come to that. We’re talking physical willingness, right? Like if the situation arose.” I thought about it some more. The number seemed way too high. I’d be exhausted. “Let’s say fifty percent of women below a certain age, like forty-five.” Irene was forty-two. “And who are legal, of course.”
“That’s still way high though.”
“What’s your percentage?”
“I don’t have a percentage. I have a number: one.”
“Oh, come on. You were attracted to women before Amanda and you haven’t gone blind since.”