“I know you’re in there, you lying slut!”
Rory shot me a hard look. This wasn’t his fight or his problem.
“All right. I’m calling the cops,” I blurted.
I was almost into the hallway when he seized my arm.
“No—please.” His eyes were large, liquid, frightened. “My parole is in another state.”
The revelation opened inside me. If the police showed up, Rory was the one going to jail. Yet he wasn’t threatening me, he was asking. It was a strange sensation to have this big man pleading with me.
“But what am I going to do? If I walk out of here, I won’t get home.” I could hear the shrill, desperate note in my voice. “And if we don’t get rid of him, someone else will call the cops.”
Rory hesitated, then held a finger to his lips. Shh. He strode back to the metal door and wound up and hammered it with the side of his fist.
“What the hell are you wailing about, man?” he roared.
There was a second’s stunned silence. My ex wasn’t expecting that deep basso.
“I’m looking for a bitch named Richard. Someone told me he’s in there.”
“That nut in the dress? I sent him home an hour ago. The most useless piece of shit I ever had in my kitchen.”
The pain was swift, a boot in the stomach. But Rory held up his hand to me—hold on.
“Well, just let me in to check,” my ex said.
“I open this door and my balls are breakfast. Staff only.”
“You’ve gotta come out sometime.” The threat was dark, rumbling, a storm I already knew.
“Yeah, I do,” Rory called. “But I hope you brought a chair, man. I’m night crew. I don’t walk for another five hours.”
Silence. I twisted on the hook, fingernails digging into my palms.
“Fuck.” The word was a low thud of defeat, the last stone pitched backward by a man leaving. For long seconds Rory and I were transfixed, straining for more sounds, but there was nothing. At last I exhaled, a rush of relief like the air from a punctured balloon. I backed against a wall and slid down, bones melting. I put my hand over my face, eyelashes trembling against my palm. Don’t cry, don’t cry.
Just another day at the office, I thought bitterly. Betrayed, threatened, terrified. And for what? So I could stand on a stage for three minutes and feel…real? All I wanted was someone who understood the woman I was going to be and yet desired me now, too. Instead, I found lovers who loathed themselves for wanting me. I felt like a wineglass, a toast you drank, then smashed in the fireplace.
“What was the name of that song you sang tonight?” Rory’s voice was soft.
I looked up, blinking tears. He was back at the sink, washing quietly.
“‘Skylark.’ It’s an old jazz tune.”
He nodded without looking at me. “It was beautiful. Sad but beautiful. It pulled me right out of the kitchen. They wouldn’t let me out front to watch, but I stood in the hallway, listening.”
The surge of gratitude almost closed my throat. In that instant his few words meant more than the waves of applause that had rolled out to me under the spotlight. It kindled an idea that pulled me to my feet.
“Rory, why don’t you take a break? Go sit down at a table, relax for a bit.” He turned. I was leaning against the wall, head tilted back, my bare neck arching out toward him. At last a slow, smoky smile lit up his handsome face.
“All right.”
I gave myself three minutes in the dressing room to brush my hair and freshen my makeup. On impulse, I peeled off my stockings, and the rich, smooth fabric of my dress caressed my bare thighs as I moved. Anticipation ran over me like waves of champagne. I stepped into my high heels again, and the sudden lift straightened me, thrust my silicone breasts forward. The dark-eyed siren in red who gazed back from the mirror was a flame. A torch. Some people might call this a fantasy, but it was my deepest truth.
Rory hadn’t turned on the lights. The spillover glow from the hall swept out over the empty tables in a soft, dreamy wash. He’d lit the candle on his table and sat upright in the chair, dark hands on his white, uniformed thighs. Anxious. Peeking from behind the partition, I took a breath to slow my pounding heart, then stepped out of the shadows and began to sing.
“Well, the men come in these places, and the men are all the same…”
The long night had rasped my voice to husky velvet, and I softened Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” to a lullaby. Each stride a slow undulation, my long, pale legs emerging through the slits of the skirt, then retreating. A tease. I let my elegant, gleaming nails skim the surface of the polished tables.
Rory’s gaze was rapt, devouring. I meandered toward him, exhilarated by the desire I could feel radiating from his body. When he reached between his thighs and squeezed the bulge, longing leapt beneath my dress.
I’d reached him at last and slid my ass onto his tabletop. The flickering candle lit up the sheen of sweat on his throat; his eyes had the glaze of a dream. I settled a foot against his thigh, the spiked heel indenting the muscle, and crossed one leg over the other, close enough that his warm, quick breath whispered over my naked knees. He closed his hand around my ankle, then leaned forward and opened his mouth on my bare calf in a soft, wet bite. Desire twisted the song in my throat to a moan.
He stood to embrace me, and I spread my knees wide to receive him, still perched on the table like an ornament. He opened my mouth with a demanding kiss, entered me with his tongue. I sucked on it eagerly, wanting to take him inside me any way I could. When his thick fingers began to creep under my panties, I edged away, afraid to ripple the surface of his fantasy. He pulled away from my lips and panted lightly against my ear.
“I want to see you—your hard-on and tits. I want to see it all.”
I prickled with apprehension. I’d never done this for anyone, not in a dress. “Close your eyes first.”
Rory took a step back, grinning faintly, and did as he was told. The hard jut in his white pants made my mouth swim. I slipped off my underwear, and my erection surged to full height, a slender rapier bobbing under the weight of the swollen bell cap. I gathered my skirt back and let it cascade down both sides in a satin waterfall. When I gently stroked myself, the tingling rush was amplified. Dizzying. The feminine fabric against my skin and the big-boned male in front of me were a potent cocktail.
“All right,” I said.
Rory opened his eyes. For a second he just stared, eyes darting from my face to my breasts to the erection I still tugged between my legs.
“Oh, girl,” he breathed. “You’re so fine.”
Oh, girl. The words ran through me in an electric current. I squeezed myself, my cockhead surging in a sweet throb on top of my delicate fist. Rory unzipped, clumsy with want, fumbled with his shirt and sent a button sailing. It rolled in a spiral on the ugly burgundy carpet. Then he gathered me up and swept me down to that carpet, too.
He was vast, dark, undulating—a powerful wave of a man. I was the red sunset dancing on his surface. On the club floor between the tables, I lapped at his chest and sucked hard on his nipples, feeling his low, hungry sounds vibrate against my lips. He touched me with a rough, workingman’s awe, as if he were afraid he might break something.
“It’s my real hair,” I said. “You can pull on it.”
Emboldened, he wrapped the silky length around his fist, tight enough to make my scalp burn. But it wasn’t pain—as soon as he stepped into a wide-legged stance in front of my mouth.
His cock was an angry, plum color, a swaggering brute that twitched toward me, taut and urgent. I licked the underside of the fleshy ridge, teased the satin surface with my teeth. Rory growled deep in his throat and urged me forward, his fist at the base of my skull. When I opened my mouth to take his full length, he thrust forward and stretched me wide. It was like being entered—deep, thrilling, necessary.
I gripped both his thighs for better balance, and he pushed one of my hands away.
“No, work
your dick. Ride it, baby. I want to see you come.”
I didn’t need a second invitation. I flipped up my skirt again, and we fell into an extraordinary rhythm, pumping like a machine with two pistons. He bucked into my mouth, and I rode my own familiar grip, stoked by sensation and the thick, guttural sounds of his pleasure. My own rushed up quickly, churned in my balls in exquisite curls. I gripped my cock around the base, stalling.
Rory was driving faster, harder. Every time he hit the back of my throat, the impact hurtled down through me and throbbed between my legs. He was fucking my whole body through my mouth. Just as I wondered how long I could hold off, he yanked my head back. His cock pulled out with a soft slurp, my mouth hung open in a surprised O.
“Come!” Rory blurted.
The jets struck my bare chest like hot cream, pulse after pulse that snaked down into my cleavage. The triumph released me—my own bliss caught me in that instant, a low thunder that pulled a cry from my center. I clung to his thigh and rode one galloping wave after another, spasms twisting me, wrenching me with joy as I shot far out between his legs.
The floor was hard and it didn’t matter; we floated on a languid stream. I lay in the crook of his big arm and watched the faint flickering of the candle against the ceiling high above. A corner of my mind nagged at me: Rory’s record, his broken parole. But I refused to worry about it tonight. Happiness was the most temporary thing of all.
“I guess I owe you a dress.” Rory touched the stains below my neckline, which were already starting to stiffen.
“The night’s not over,” I said. “It could be two.”
He laughed, a single happy note that gave me courage. I rolled onto my side and nestled my cheek against his chest.
“What made you want me?” I asked softly. “Seeing that you’re not queer.”
Rory took a breath. “Oh. Because you’re beautiful and you looked so alone.”
“We’re all…kind of alone, if you think about it.”
He hesitated shyly. “Nobody ever sang for me before.”
I heard the words yet felt something else beneath them, as delicious and intimate as a squeeze. Oh, girl.
I fluttered my fingernails down his chest in a teasing, butterfly trail. “And she just might sing for you again.”
DON’T TOUCH
Jamie Freeman
I thought for a moment it was him, ducking out of the men’s room on the main concourse, about twenty paces ahead of me. Even after a decade, I see him sometimes, in New York coming out of a restaurant that serves only rice pudding, in London in that bookshop across from the National Gallery, in Budapest in line at a McDonalds, and now, ducking out of a men’s room in Salzburg after midnight in a blowing snowstorm. Those same dark features, the same short muscular build. I imagine I can see the thin nose, the small perfect hands, but now I am surely succumbing to the lure of memory. I imagine him turning to take another look at me, then, seeing who I am, he will drop his bag and his coat on the platform and fly into my arms. We will hug like Ilsa and Rick would have in the Paris train station if the world had been a simpler place. But films, like life, have a way of making the simple complex and nurturing our bitterness, and Ilsa will always leave Rick standing alone on the platform. And the man coming out of the men’s room does look at me, light eyes touching mine for a moment too long, but then he hurries down the corridor in the direction of the trains. And it is not who I thought it was.
I stop off at the men’s room for a piss, the sad sound echoing through the empty tiled room, then make my way to my train.
It is nearly 1:00 A.M. by the time the train starts rolling north toward Berlin and I am ensconced in an otherwise empty compartment, long coat tucked around my shoulders, legs propped on the seat opposite me, thinking of him. I lay aside my copy of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, flip out the overhead light, and stare into the cold night.
Grove was perfect. And I’m not just saying this because he was my best friend and my first love. He was one of those people that everyone loved, everybody wanted to be with and, for a time, he was mine. And he made me feel special, winking at me when people said stupid things, touching my shoulder when we stood together listening to a new song on the radio, rubbing his leg absently against mine in our favorite booth at the deli near our apartment. He was so alive, so physically entrancing. No wonder people love him, I used to think. No wonder, when he moves like that, body sinewy and graceful as a dancer, small and solid with muscle. He would sometimes stand next to me on the Metro, when the train was crowded or when he was too keyed up from the movie we’d seen to sit, and his arm would be wrapped around the pole, small hands grasping the smooth metal like a lover. I would watch his arm muscles flex with the slowing of the train as we approached each station, the ropy vein sliding along the pale inside of his forearm, and I would pray that we would somehow never reach our destination, that we could somehow ride on in this hot compartment forever, my throat dry and full of my desire for him, his hands wrapped around the cold chrome pole. But our stop would come and he would look up and smile at me and I would be pulled along in his wake, out the doors, through the turnstiles, and up the towering escalator into the night.
The first time I saw Grove naked, we had been out to one of the clubs in the southeast dancing, Tracks, probably, and the men had circled him like jackals while I watched him dance alone or while I danced close myself, brushing my hands protectively against his sweaty mesh shirt and listening to him laugh and sing along to the music. Our bodies crushed together that night like they never had before, and I felt certain that this was the night he would pull me into his bed and begin things with a kiss.
But when we staggered back into our apartment, and we were roommates once again, he was talking about Lucy, his girlfriend, whom I reluctantly loved, who was in Boston visiting her parents this weekend.
“God, Chris, I love her so much,” he said, pulling his shirt over his head, muscles aligned in an inverted triangle that pointed to the thicket of pubic hair that peeked out the top of his loose jeans.
I pulled off my own shirt silently and watched him kick off his shoes, feet pale and perfect against the dark carpet, toes digging into the shag as he stretched again and again. I couldn’t bear it any longer when he reached for the zipper of his jeans, and I staggered drunkenly into the bathroom. The shower was biting cold and it sobered me somewhat, flushing the alcohol and the cocaine and the desire down the drain in swirling circles. And I stood there for a long time under the icy rush.
“Fahrkarte, bitte,” a voice startles me and light suddenly floods the compartment.
The man is tall and plain, cheeks a little too full, stomach a little too heavy, but he has the Austrian precision of dress and he is smiling as he holds out a gloved hand.
I hand him my ticket, which he punches and hands back to me. “Gute Nacht,” and I am again in darkness.
“Bitte, ist hier frei?” Another voice says even before my eyes have fully adjusted to the darkness. A tall backlit figure with a large duffel bag on his shoulder stands in the doorway.
“Genau,” I say, sure, pointing to the empty seats across from me. The stranger comes into the compartment, stows his bag on the overhead shelf, and pulls a paperback book out of his coat pocket. He drops down on the seat opposite me, props his feet up, and leans his head back against the headrest. His eyes close as his head touches the cushion, and I think again of Grove and that night after the club.
I was in the shower for what seemed like a long time when I heard him open the door. “You’re gonna waste all the hot water,” he said, padding across the room and flinging open the door to our standup shower stall. “You,” he said, grabbing my arm, “out.” He pulled me onto the bathmat and stepped past me into the shower, our bodies colliding for an instant, the hair of my chest brushing against his shoulders, the tip of my cock sliding lightly along the top of his buttocks. “Jesus, Christopher, it’s fuckin’ freezing,” he groaned. Then he flipped the hot water on in a swi
ft sure motion, and pulled the door shut behind him.
I’ve thought about that moment a lot over the years, as though it was a moment of great import, a moment of potentiality, but I think now it was a moment of drunkenness and misplaced desire. I stood there for a full five minutes, cold water dripping off of me onto the fuzzy bathroom rug and the old orange bathmat, and I considered just opening the door and stepping back into the shower with him. I watched him soap himself, hands running along the muscled planes of his legs, reaching up between them to the dark triangle that was obscured by the steam and the textured glass of the shower door. But I couldn’t get past Lucy and history and, finally, defeated, I left the bathroom, soaking wet, and climbed into bed, burrowing under my comforter and wishing myself into oblivion.
When I woke the next morning, Grove, in a pair of my boxers, was sleeping next to me. He was lying on his stomach, snoring slightly into the pillow.
I reached out and grabbed his shoulder, shaking him awake. “What are you doing here?”
“Bitte?” The response is from the man opposite me in the train car. I realize I have spoken out loud.
“I’m sorry,” I say in English. “I was dreaming.”
“No problem,” he says, smiling and shifting slightly in his seat, his crossed legs resting next to mine.
“You’re American?” I ask.
“Genau,” he says, laughing.
We talk for a while, laughing and recounting travel stories in the dim confines of this train compartment, hurtling north through the snowy night. There is a sliver of moon and, when the train reaches higher ground, it occasionally makes its presence known, light sliding across the man’s lap, his arm, the stubble on his chin. He is animated, with hands that tell more of his story than his rumbling voice cares to, but he wears a gold band on his left hand, barring my way to more intimate discourse.
We lapse into silence after a while and I watch him shift in his seat, searching for a comfortable position to sleep in. His long legs stretch next to me, rolling against me as the train turns, then rolling off me as the train shifts direction again.
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