On Call Collection

by P D Singer

“With the right props, so could you. You get the next weasel,” he warned me. Unfortunately, with Eugene around, there would be a “next weasel.” “Imagine all those teeth heading toward your junk, and you’d scream, too.”

  “Hey, I scream when it’s your hands on my junk.” I kissed him and rubbed across his body. “I scream when it’s your mouth on my junk. I do a lot of screaming when I’m around you, come to think of it.” Our cocks were growing as we crushed together.

  “You’re going to be around me, all right, and all your screams are going to be from pleasure.” Dante nipped at my mouth and then smacked my ass. “Get upstairs!”

  I ran, not so fast that he couldn’t get a few more swats landed, but fast enough that he had to work at it. He chased me upstairs, across the tiny living room, and into the bedroom. A quick scan for cats before I leaped to the bed let me miss Harpo and Domino, though they bounced off the mattress and came down running. Dante pounced on me, wrestling my shirt out of my trousers and nipping softly across my belly with those full, soft lips I loved so much. Then he bent to gnaw at the fabric covering my erection before undoing my britches and hauling them down.

  My cock jumped free of the fabric to be grabbed, the skin pale against the deep umber of his hand, shading to pink. Waiting for the delicious feeling of sliding into his lips, I closed my eyes, only to open them with a bit of alarm at the clicking sound. Wickedly, he gnashed his teeth again.

  “I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have teased you about the Weasel Dance!” Sitting up and grabbing his head before rationality returned at least let me feel his short cropped hair, crisp against my palms. He wouldn’t really bite, I knew, but it made me appreciate his feelings about the weasel a bit better.

  “Damned right!” Then my cock was in his mouth and neither of us had a coherent word to say for quite a while.

  With a last nibble on my inner thigh, he lifted his head, hunting on the bedside table. “Lube?” He ignored the baby oil we’d rubbed each other down with the night before. “Ah.” A couple of items landed on the bed next to me as he stood up and dropped trou.

  I could look at him forever, standing over me with his cock so hard and proud. Shame to cover it up with a condom, but I did, adding a generous dollop of slickness. He kissed me as I rolled the latex down, his hands on my shoulders, and then pushed me flat again and flipped my legs up.

  “You gonna scream here, Keith?” he asked, as he pushed into my ass.

  “In a minute, yeah,” I gasped as he breached my ring and filled me with hard cock. Torn between wanting to look and wanting to only feel, I finally closed my eyes as he withdrew nearly to the tip, then eased back in. Oh yeah, I’d start screaming any time now, and he worked back in to get the sounds he wanted. Pegging my gland every few strokes and then consistently wrung the noise out of me, and his strong hand around my cock turned the volume way up as I came, pulsing and spurting onto my chest. More shouts of pleasure erupted from Dante soon after, and he collapsed onto the bed at my side. Our dress shirts were rucked up around us, and damp spots speckled mine. Throwing an arm over him hid the mess.

  “Guess we need to change before we go out, or do you just want to order some Chinese food?” he mumbled after we’d settled into the warm post-coital glow. We’d originally thought to hit a club, but we’d already done some dancing tonight.

  “Let’s order in. Lemon chicken, Mongolian beef, and make sure they throw in one of those place mats,” I suggested, trying to keep a straight face as I stroked his back under the dress shirt.

  “We need that why?” He played with my ass cheek, rolling it under his fingers.

  Should have thought about where his hands were before I answered, because he pinched me hard for suggesting, “So we know when it’s the Year of the Weasel.”

  On Call: Dante’s Wish

  Keith hadn't moved in front of the mirror for several minutes, not because he was vain. He wasn't even looking at himself; he was holding the ends of his tie, but his head was bowed and his eyes closed. Dante shrugged into the charcoal gray suit coat and came to help his lover.

  “Let me get that,” Dante told him, and took the silk from his unresisting hands. “Chin up,” he almost said, but stopped, not wanting the request to sound like a demand for a changed attitude. Keith was grieving, and if he hadn't said why, Dante could guess some of it. With a gentle finger, Dante tipped Keith’s head enough to tie a four-in-hand at his throat.

  “I’ll drive.”

  Their destination was a small church a few miles distant, a ceremony for a young man whose name Dante had never heard before, but who clearly meant something to Keith. He’d explain when he was ready, Dante knew; sooner or later Keith would be willing to talk. What little he'd said—"A patient"— was a clue to why he was so torn up.

  Dante pulled his small SUV, the back equipped with the animal cages he needed professionally, into the church parking lot, careful to avoid the streams of people, many of them young, all of them solemn. He glanced up at the steeple and kept his wish to himself: he wanted to drive to a church with Keith, with smiles and flowers pinned to their lapels, to make some binding promises in front of people who’d shed happy tears. That wasn’t going to happen today, or maybe any day ever. Dante dragged his head out of the clouds and turned to Keith.

  “We’re here.”

  Keith nodded without looking up, but didn’t reach for the door handle. Reaching across the console, Dante took on of Keith’s hands, lying slackly in his lap, and squeezed. “I’m here for you.”

  Keith squeezed back. “I know you are.” That brought the corners of his mouth up just a smidge, for a fleeting moment. Dante squeezed again. “Keith, I will always be here for you.”

  Binding promises didn’t have to be made inside the church.

  On Call: Crossroads

  My lover, Dante, sat next to me in the pew, holding my hand so tightly it hurt. The pain anchored me; it was the only thing keeping me from weeping openly. A tear slid down my cheek now and then as it was.

  Today we were burying one of my patients.

  I knew what killed him. I’d tried to prevent it. There was nothing surgical to be done, and damned little that was pharmacological, either, although an antidepressant might have gotten him through the worst of it. What would have saved him involved treating his parents as well, perhaps his extended family. Attitude adjustments, chiropractic for the soul.

  Because I didn’t think there was anything accidental about his little Ford meeting a bridge abutment.

  ***

  Sixteen years old, male, well developed, no present complaints. John Samuel Carstens sat on the edge of the exam table, waiting to get stabbed with the tetanus vaccine that was the prerequisite for the summer camp where he was to be a junior counselor. John was in good shape from running track and playing basketball for his high school, and so far he’d given me no reason to think he was anything but healthy.

  “Anything you’d like to discuss?” I listened for the er-ing and um-ing that meant something important would come out in a moment. “Girls?” An assumption, but a good default for his age bracket. I’d tried saying, “Boys?” as well a few times in the past and met stone walls.

  “Mmm, no. Got them figured out as much as I need to.”

  So did I. Keep them as friends, treat them like people, and call bullshit as needed. I wondered what his method was, and if it matched mine, and for the same reasons. I waited.

  “Dr. Hoyer—what if, what if…girls aren’t who I think about when…” He couldn’t bring himself to use the words, but the little pantomime over his lap was eloquent.

  “When you masturbate?” I spoke calmly and matter-of-factly.

  “Yeah.” His agreement was barely audible.

  “First off, masturbating is natural and normal, especially for guys your age.” I sat down on the little rolling stool, figuring that he could see how sincere I was if I was low enough to be in his field of vision. “It’s nearly universal.”

  “It’s a sin,”
he whispered. I stifled a groan. That one comment said that the ‘not girls’ part was going to be harder than usual for him to accept.

  “It’s a way of getting happy and feeling good that doesn’t bring other people into it before they, and you, are ready for that.” Once again I mentally cursed Onan, his legal dispute over his brother’s widow, and every Bible-thumper who forgot what the real problem was. It wasn’t what he did, it was why he did it. Not an issue that I could really debate with the young man on the table.

  “You really think that?”

  “I really do. It’s your body and a private matter.” I wished someone had said that to me about twenty years ago.

  His face changed as he thought that one over, brightening a bit and then collapsing again. “But thinking about… while I…. That’s wrong.”

  “A lot of men do. It isn’t necessarily an easy thing to accept about yourself, but it isn’t rare, either.” This kid needed a lot more help than I could provide in the course of a camp physical. “Or wrong.”

  A tap at the door signaled my nurse with a tray and a syringe. Normally she would stay and do the inoculation, leaving me free to see the next patient, but I took the tray and shut the door.

  “My parents are never going to understand. They’ll hate me. They think every gay is a promiscuous ‘ho’ who’s going to get AIDS and die a gruesome death and then go straight to Hell. Or should.”

  I stuck his deltoid with the needle, as much to get his attention as to administer the tetanus shot. “They’re still your parents; they may have more flexibility than you think. Look, is there any way you can get some counseling? Think we can get your folks to agree that you need to talk to someone, without being specific about why?”

  “They’d send me to the pastor, and I know what he’d say.” No flicker of hope existed in that statement. “I’m already damned.” I couldn’t tell if he was predicting the pastor’s reaction or assessing himself, so despairing were his words.

  “No, you’re not.” I guess I was going to have to argue theology with the kid. “Do you do yard work?”

  That got his attention. “Yeah, why?”

  “Then when you get back from camp, you can come over to the vet clinic at 92nd and Wickham and mow the lawn. That gives you a legitimate reason to be there, something you can explain to your parents, and we’ll have some iced tea and talk afterwards. You shouldn’t have to bear this alone. Okay?”

  “I’ll… think about it.”

  “I’ll see you after camp.” I’d probably broken every rule about separation of professional and private life, but this kid needed an outside voice in the worst way. He’d already opened up to me and found me non-judgmental; maybe I could help him find what he needed to get to a place where he wasn’t condemning himself. And it wouldn’t hurt one bit for him to see a committed, monogamous gay couple living a recognizably suburban life.

  ***

  But I hadn’t seen John again, not as a patient, not as a friend. Not even as a corpse, because his coffin was closed and would stay that way. The wreck had been brutal.

  The pastor spoke of a young life cut tragically short by accident, and I wondered if he was the one John mentioned. We sang, or stumbled through, the final hymn, and then shuffled from the sanctuary of the little church. Dante’s was one of the few dark faces in the small sea of people, which contained a lot of teenagers, all solemn or weeping. I was glad that his friends cared enough to be here for John, for his family.

  “Are we going to the interment?” Dante asked softly. I shook my head “no.” They were burying John in hallowed ground, for which I was grateful, but I couldn’t bear to watch them do it.

  “Let’s go home.”

  Dante drove us back to the converted house with the “Cat Care, Dante James, DVM” sign in front of the first floor clinic and the second story apartment where we lived. The ride was silent; he didn’t push me to talk, and I hadn’t given him much detail beforehand. It wasn’t the first funeral for a patient that I’d attended, but it was the first that I’d asked him to come with me. He knew that eventually I’d talk, but he let me come to it in my own time.

  With a door between me and the rest of the world, I could yell my mind. “It’s such a damned waste!”

  I wanted to kick something, break something, hurt someone, preferably someone who’d convinced a malleable kid that he was insufficient and unworthy for being what he was, but the only one there was Dante, whom I wouldn’t hurt for the world. The coffee table took the blow with only a creak, and I paced the small living room. “They say despair is a sin, but I say that the people who drive someone to despair sin worse. I had maybe five minutes to undo a lifetime of damage and it wasn’t enough!” The leg on the coffee table collapsed this time, and I was vaguely aware that later I’d be sorry and have to fix it, but right now I just kicked it again and whirled away while all the books slid to the floor. Dante stayed to one side and listened.

  “I did what I could there in the office, and I thought, I thought…” The words stuck in my throat; I tipped my head backward and tried to swallow the lump down. “I thought if I could talk with him more, if he could see…” The lump grew too huge to speak around —I waved a hand at our home, at Dante, at myself. “If he could see that being gay wasn’t the awful thing he’d always been told, if he could see that a good life is possible…” I stopped pacing and stood, chest heaving. “But it wasn’t enough, I wasn’t enough, I didn’t do it right…”

  I would have kicked the coffee table again but Dante was in the way. “Keith, if you couldn’t do it in five minutes, I don’t think anyone could have.”

  “But I was the one there! I was the one who had the opportunity!” I flung myself across the room again, too tense to stand still. “And he still felt that awful.” My voice dropped. “At least they don’t bury them at crossroads any more.”

  Dante puzzled out the sense of it. “You think he killed himself?”

  “Almost positive. Or courted death, telling himself he was only taking risks. But, yeah, Dante, I talked to him, and I think so.” Clenching and unclenching my fists, I tried not to stomp around, because my fat cat Harpo had come to strop on my legs, despite the shouting. He wasn’t intimidated by much, even me. Kicking him across the room by accident was a distinct possibility, but I couldn’t stay completely still.

  Dante noticed. “I’m sorry; that’s really horrible. Keith, you’re about to jump out of your skin. Go get your running shoes; I’m going to tire you out.” He sent me to the bedroom with a slap on my butt, and came to get his own shorts and T-shirt.

  Running wasn’t something I really wanted to do, but the wisdom of his words got through. I had too much nervous energy to stay indoors, so I let him chase me outside.

  We swung down the street, heading to one of the many bike paths that crisscrossed the city, and turned west toward the reservoir. Normally I enjoyed the route; the concrete would turn to unpaved path there, and we’d run through what was actually a nature preserve within the city limits. We followed the path under the busy main street and past a school at a pace faster than I would have chosen, making it harder to talk. I tried anyway.

  “I should have—”

  “Run faster.” Dante elbowed me and sped up, reaching the dirt path ahead of me. Not fair, he could run considerably faster than I could, although I could keep going several miles farther if I picked the pace. Focused on my internal landscape, I barely registered the change in surface, except to wonder if John had been a runner, if he had used his athletic ability to channel his thoughts away from more uncomfortable feelings. Staying on the path was the extent of my outside awareness, and not turning an ankle on the loose stones.

  We got past the prairie dog town, getting barked and chattered at as terrible dangers to prairie dogs everywhere, when I tried again. “I really screwed up. I’m not using my—”

  “Run faster!” Dante commanded, pushing us to a pace that was my maximum, though not his.

  At the water
’s edge, I stopped. “Making me run faster keeps me from talking but not from thinking, Dante.”

  He wiped his forehead with the hem of his shirt. “You need to really think, Keith. Not grieve out loud. What could you have done differently? You reached out, you tried to offer help, you had one brief visit to talk to him, so what could you have done differently that would have avoided this?”

  “I don’t know.” I barked back. “I just don’t know. Maybe I need to go back to school, learn some counseling, maybe I need to practice somewhere that just keeping them from dying of sepsis from a small cut is considered good care, maybe— I don’t know.” I picked up a rock from the shore and hurled it into the water, startling a Canadian goose that swam nearby with her brood. “But I feel like a failure doing what I’m doing here!” I hurled another rock and the goose ushered her little family in the opposite direction. Good move, goose. “I feel like I need to expiate this, maybe go do some medical missionary work, I don’t know.”

  “If you’re going to leave for Haiti or the Philippines or somewhere like that, you need to give me enough time to sell the practice and brush up on diseases of goats.”

  I whipped around, jolted out of my rant by how serious he sounded. He gazed at me calmly, to all appearances utterly sincere about what he’d just said. “Diseases of goats?” I repeated, sounding stupid to my own ears.

  “Yes, they’re economically important animals in most places you’d go as a medical missionary. Cats, not so much; they reproduce pretty fast.” He shrugged.

  “Sell the practice?” I felt like I’d been slapped upside the head.

  “Did you think you were going without me?” Dante did not smile when he asked that.

  “No…”

  “Then whatever you need to do, we need to plan together. Okay?” I nodded, and that got the first hint of a smile. “‘Whither thou goest, I go.’ For now, we run.”

  We ran.

  I was exhausted mentally and physically when we returned, enough that my mind pretty much shut down. The wounded coffee table drew me—I knelt to examine the damage I’d done. It might not be fixable; I stacked the fallen books and tried to make the leg hold the table level. It wouldn’t stay up.