by Rick R. Reed
“Whoa there, partner. As Dorothy said to Toto, ‘We haven’t been asked yet!’”
Ethan leaned back, hardly able to tear his eyes away from the manhood facing him long enough to meet Brian’s brown-eyed gaze and his bemused smile. “Don’t you want me to?” he whispered.
“Well… yeah. But there’s a little matter we’ve yet to address, young man. Someone in this room has been bad, and I think the only way he’s going to learn his lesson is to be punished.”
Ethan had a little quiver of anxiety as he worried that this was going to turn into some sort of S and M scene, which he was most assuredly not into. He didn’t know if he had the courage or the strength to stop Brian from doing whatever he had in mind, but he also didn’t want the pleasure to end.
“Don’t worry,” Brian said, sitting up and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. “I have a suspicion you’re going to remember this punishment and will eventually ask for more.” He stood. “In fact, I’m counting on it.”
Brian stepped away from the bed to look down on Ethan, who reclined on his side with what he knew was a big, stupid grin plastered across his features, terrified, aroused, and curious all at once.
“You need to roll over on your stomach.” Brian’s voice came out a little hoarse. Ethan could see the anticipation in his heavy-lidded gaze as he took in his form spread across the bed. Ethan also felt a curious sensation along with the fever of his lust: pinpricks of tears in his eyes. He couldn’t remember when he had felt so sexy and appreciated by another man. He had been starving and had buried those hungry feelings for so long, he’d almost gotten used to them.
Almost.
He complied, stretching out on his stomach and wrapping his arms around a pillow. He wasn’t quite sure what—or who—was coming next, but he was open to almost any possibility.
“You’ve been really bad. Didn’t your mother teach you that lying was wrong?”
The thwack of Brian’s hand against his ass made a satisfying slapping sound and sent a stinging tingle all through Ethan’s prone body, but most especially in his dick, which throbbed and jerked against the sheets beneath him.
The hand came down again. And again. And again. Ethan was reminded of the phrase “hurts so good” and thought Brian was right that he could see himself asking for more… please, sir.
The spanking continued for a good five minutes, maybe longer. In his mind’s eye, Ethan could see the red welts standing out across his white cheeks, and the image made him even harder, if that was even possible. He never realized such depths were within him. He liked this!
And he liked it even more when Brian spread himself out on top of him like a big, furry blanket, wrapping his arms around him and encompassing him in warmth. He growled into Ethan’s ear and nipped at the nape of his neck. Ethan sighed and quivered.
“Have you learned your lesson?” Brian’s breath was hot and wet in his ear.
“I… I’m not sure.”
“Maybe we need to go deeper into your instruction.”
“I think we do. I think I haven’t learned a thing yet.” Ethan spread his legs and raised his ass to press it firmly against Brian’s sex.
Brian leaned back, and the cold air rushed in to replace the heat of his body. Ethan clung to the pillow, eyes shut tight, knowing what was coming next and delirious with anticipation… and anxiety.
It had been so long.
He listened as Brian fumbled in a bedside drawer, heard things being taken out of it, heard the sound of foil ripping, and knew what it all meant. To confirm, the next thing he felt was a cool, viscous liquid being rubbed into his crack. Then he felt one of Brian’s fingers gently massaging the little muscle nestled there, then slipping inside. Ethan saw stars, and it was all he could do not to rear up and swallow the finger with his ass. Brian worked slowly, his breath coming more quickly, taking what seemed like forever to work one, then two, then three fingers into his ass. The full sensation had Ethan almost to the brink, and he was biting his lip to keep himself from coming right into the sheets beneath him.
He wanted to moan as he felt Brian slowly withdraw his fingers. Then Brian stretched out on top of him again, positioned the head of his condom-wrapped dick at his opening… and then slipped inside, more—pause—and then a little more, until he was fully buried within Ethan.
“Oh God,” Ethan whimpered. He had thought there would be some pain, since the last time a man had fucked him had been three years ago, but Brian was such a slow, careful lover that he was brought only to heights of pleasure he didn’t even know existed before this day. He shut his eyes tighter, delirious with the fullness of Brian inside him and wanting nothing more than to give him the most extreme pleasure.
Brian began to thrust, slowly at first, making sure Ethan was comfortable. Indeed, making sure Ethan was thrusting back, hungry to get more of his dick inside him. And finally, after countless long, slow thrusts that took Brian almost all the way out, then all the way back in, he began to fuck him hard, pounding into him until the bed creaked and vibrated, and almost involuntarily, Ethan found himself biting the pillow and squeezing his ass muscles to urge him in deeper, to keep him going.
“Oh fuck,” Brian whispered. Ethan felt him tense, and inside, rockets exploded as they climaxed together.
After, they lay panting, Ethan rolled over on his back and nestled into the crook where Brian’s arm met his shoulder. Ethan stroked Brian’s smooth chest and whispered, “I think this could work.”
And Brian raised up on one elbow, looking down on him and smiling. He stroked his cheek with his finger. “I think so too.”
After a while, they fell asleep.
Ethan awakened with a fierce urge to pee. Not very romantic, but it was the truth.
He hopped from the bed and headed toward the bathroom he had seen earlier that adjoined the bedroom. On his way there, he couldn’t help but notice Brian’s desk and his laptop, tucked into a corner. A dim light from the screensaver illuminated a stack of papers on his desk.
Knowing—and hoping—he would be punished once more for his indiscretion and lack of good judgment, he allowed himself to linger at the desk and to move the papers slightly so he could see what they were.
He was touched. Brian had printed out and kept all their messages to each other. He paged quickly through them, looking up every so often to make sure Brian was still asleep.
When he got almost to the bottom of the pile, he got a shock. The papers, he knew right off, had been arranged in descending chronological order: from his most recent email to his first. Below his first message to Brian was another sheet of paper. This one wasn’t a message, but was a printout of a screenshot, a screenshot that looked disturbingly familiar.
It was his original wingpeople profile, with his very own picture. For a moment, Ethan was confused and then realized the truth. Brian had known who he was and what he looked like all along.
Ethan felt tears spring to his eyes. So this, he thought, is what it feels like to be loved for oneself, warts and all. He gently put the papers back into place and hurried into the bathroom.
He really needed to pee.
Part Two: 2009
NEG UB2
ETHAN SCHWARTZ was stunned.
He sat in his doctor’s office trying to absorb the news. He felt numb. He had never fainted and wondered if right now was the time for losing his virginity in that arena.
The antiseptic interior of the doctor’s office, with its posters about flu vaccines and the latest prescription magic from companies like Pfizer, suddenly seemed unreal, like something he had conjured up in a dream. He saw and faintly heard an “L” train rumble by outside the doctor’s window. In the corridor just off the doctor’s office, he heard his nurse, Shelley something, talking to a patient, a man with a husky voice. Ethan couldn’t understand her words, but then the pair burst into laughter. Their frivolity made the news he had been given seem that much more surreal. Laughter had no place anywhere near Ethan.
&nbs
p; Not right now.
“Are you sure?” Ethan looked up at the doctor he had been seeing far too intermittently for the last ten years.
Frank Morris had a rugged face, topped with close-cropped light brown hair that had nearly vanished on top, warm brown eyes, and a kind smile. A rakish diamond stud glinted from his left earlobe. He radiated compassion. But right now his smile seemed to have a touch of pity in it. He leaned forward on the rolling stool upon which he perched so he could lay a comforting hand on Ethan’s knee. Ethan glanced down at the hand, then back up at the doctor, mouth open, already knowing the gist of what his physician would say. Ethan’s scalp prickled; he felt droplets of sweat begin at his hairline.
“When there’s a positive result, we always retest. First we do an EIA, which is short for enzyme immunoassay. That’s the test most labs do these days, and it’s pretty darn accurate. If the test comes back negative, we stop there. But if the lab brings us back a positive result, we verify with something called a Western blot test, which makes us pretty certain.” Dr. Morris caught Ethan’s eye, making sure he understood the import of what he said, squeezed Ethan’s knee, and then removed his hand. Ethan wondered how many of these death sentences the doctor doled out in an average working day.
“So, while there’s always a chance for a false positive, even with the safeguards, it’s highly unlikely the test is wrong. I’m sorry, Ethan, but you are HIV positive.”
Ethan stared down at the floor. How could this have happened? HIV positive? Even as a gay man, he thought he had escaped this particular scourge unscathed. In more lonely moments, he had comforted himself with the thought that remaining neg was the one consolation he had for his long dry spells. He had always been so careful… except for a few times lately, with Brian. But he had trusted Brian and thought they were monogamous, thought there was no chance of any pesky little virus being swapped. How could this happen to me?
What was the harm in abandoning the condoms a couple of times? After all, they were in love and had quickly pledged their fidelity to one another. Again, where was the harm?
Well, honey, the harm is right here, right now, staring you in the face.
Ethan’s mind flashed on Brian’s winning smile, his short blond hair, and warm eyes. His thick arms topped with downy yellow fur. His quick wit and shared love of all the same things Ethan loved. Ethan did a quick montage of the last six months: the dinners, the weekends in Door County, the plays, the movies, the quiet evenings at home with a DVD of an old noir classic and a big shared bowl of popcorn… and the hot times in bed, which the prim Ethan had never thought he’d experience.
Brian? Did Brian infect me? Ethan caught his breath. He found it hard to swallow… both literally and figuratively.
Ethan surveyed the bleak landscape of his love life before Brian, an almost barren wasteland for his entire adulthood. I should be the last person turning up HIV positive, yet here it is. Join the club. And then his thoughts zoomed back to Brian. Is he positive too? He has to be. I can’t see any other way this could have happened.
Oh no, not Brian….
It felt like Ethan’s stomach had dropped out of its place in his midsection and was now hovering somewhere in the vicinity of his ankles. Panicked, he looked up at Dr. Morris, who appeared poised on the brink of saying more. And there was more Ethan needed to hear, things like medications, hope for the future, how to live his life in this new role as a gay man with HIV. Ethan knew he had lots of questions, because he had pretty much avoided all but major news stories about HIV and AIDS, thinking that was one health scare he didn’t need to worry his pretty little head about.
But these questions—and the information he would need—were not for now.
Right now, all he could think of was Brian. In spite of a bumpy beginning, theirs was almost a fairy—hush!—tale romance once they had gotten together. A lot of the bumps at the beginning were over honesty, and Ethan thought they had cleared those hurdles.
Did Brian know? Could he have knowingly infected me?
The thought was too horrible to contemplate, nauseating. Ethan felt a hot rush of tears spring to his eyes. He might be in his forties and had experienced his share of disappointments, but this blow had no match. If Brian had knowingly risked exposing him, what kind of man was he?
Had Ethan ever really known? Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, Brian’s face loomed before him once more, now cast in the role of stranger. A mental image flashed, one that made him want to vomit. Kissing Brian goodbye at the door on a summer morning, then watching as Brian went back to his bedroom and logged on to Manhunt, or got dressed and went to the bathhouse on Halsted, or picked up the phone, snickering and telling someone on the other end to come over, that “the coast was clear.”
Ethan covered his face with his hands and angrily wiped away the tears gathering there. He didn’t know which was worse, his diagnosis or the horrible suspicion about Brian that followed it. Dr. Morris was talking, sounding almost like the adults sounded in a Charlie Brown TV special. Wa-wa-wa. Wa-wa-wa-wa. In other words, the physician’s words made no sense. A couple of things filtered out, “course of treatment” and “CD4 count” among them, but Ethan couldn’t get himself together enough to listen.
He held up a hand. “Stop. I can’t deal with this right now. You know? I need to process this.” And with no regard about being rude or a melodramatic queen, he stood and rushed from the office, not looking back on what he could only imagine was a very stunned physician.
In fact, as he got to the reception area door, he heard Frank Morris call from behind him. “Don’t rush off! I need to talk to you.”
Without looking back, Ethan said, “I’ll call you.” And he dashed out the door.
There were people waiting for the elevator in the corridor. What ailments were they suffering from? Common cold? Gingivitis (a dentist plied her trade at the opposite end of the corridor)? Mumps?
Suddenly the whole world looked healthy to Ethan Schwartz. And just as suddenly he felt completely alone. He bypassed the elevator and headed for the stairs, rushing heedlessly down them and almost twisting his ankle.
ETHAN SAT in his Halsted Street studio as the wan light of an afternoon sunset filtered in. He recalled the nausea and near hysteria he felt as he charged through the revolving doors of his doctor’s office in the Loop, out into the unseasonably warm day. Wabash Avenue was all bustle and excitement: crowds, traffic, “L” trains rumbling by overhead. Again, Ethan felt surrounded by rosy-cheeked, hearty, robust specimens of human health and fitness. A young mother licked an ice cream cone while pushing a double baby stroller with adorable twins inside. Nearby, a young college lad bit into an apple and read a book as he sat on a bench. Two joggers rushed by, vigorous and full of vim.
It was a world from which Ethan suddenly felt excluded. Worse, it was a world that didn’t know about and didn’t care about the horrible news he had just been given. How could he blame these pictures of health for being so oblivious, so blatantly disregarding their perfectly functioning systems? He even paused to examine some of the faces rushing by him, hoping to catch a sympathetic eye or an understanding smile, but they all hurried past, getting on with the heady business of life.
It’s not like they know, Ethan. What do you expect? You don’t look like you’re HIV positive, and even if you did, why should these masses of strangers care about your diagnosis? If they knew, they’d probably only feel gratitude that this time it wasn’t them chosen to ride the bad news carousel.
He remembered standing there on the corner, under the “L” tracks, like some kind of bizarro opening-credits Mary Tyler Moore, full of pessimism instead of optimism like the spunky Mary Richards. Instead of flinging his hat—a sporty fedora Brian had bought him just last week—into the air, he felt more like flinging himself in front of a CTA train.
Like a drunk, Ethan collapsed onto the curb, his khaki-clad legs splayed out before him. He just didn’t feel, for that moment, strong enough to support his own weight. H
e tried to breathe deeply but could only gasp. He wondered if he was about to hyperventilate… if he would die without a paper bag close at hand in which to breathe. He worried only briefly about how he must look, but the Loop was filled with crazies. Again, no one paid him any mind. They simply skirted him, on their way to normal jobs and appointments.
They had lives.
He was still sweating and knew his blood pressure must be going through the roof. He took off his fedora—“It gives you a little private dick flair!” Brian had quipped when he had set the gift upon Ethan’s head, turning Ethan’s face this way and that, admiring, and then planting a kiss on his cheek—and set it on the ground beside him. Someone paused to drop a dollar into the hat.
That made him laugh, if only bitterly. And like the whack to the back of his head his mother used to dispense, it made him feel silly for sitting on the ground in the middle of Wabash Avenue, at the heart of Chicago’s downtown.
Oh, grow up, Ethan! You’ve had some bad news, but you don’t need to act like an imbecile… at least not in public.
So he got up, dusted off the seat of his pants, and thought he needed to pull himself together, if only for the immediate future. That future included calling his employer, LA Nicholes, and letting them know he was taking a very, very sick day and then going home to wallow in self-pity… preferably with whole-fat milk, Double Stuf Oreos, and a bill of 1940s melodramas on his HDTV.
A nagging voice inside him, not unlike his mother’s, told him he needed to call his doctor.
He knew—and the prospect made him start to feel sick, start to shake all over again—he needed to call Brian.
But except for the call into work, the other calls could wait.
