by Amy Lane
“Donnie….” Michelle’s voice was gentle, and even though she was a nice person, she wasn’t gentle a lot when she was talking to him. “We’re gone about four days out of the month. Where are we going to get a pet sitter that’ll be willing to—” She started laughing, because Donnie was rolling his eyeballs around and making exaggerated movements with his hands, and even Alejandro snickered.
“Yes, Donnie,” Alejandro said. “You will, of course, be able to house-sit.”
“Excellent!” Donnie crowed. “Does that mean Chelle can get a cat?”
“A cat?” Michelle squealed, and Donnie wanted to laugh at the look of panic on Yandro’s face. Something must have happened, though, in the course of the day, because not only did Yandro get both the dog and a matching (seriously, how did one get a matched set of pets?) long-haired white cat that Chelle adored on sight, but he left them at the pet shelter to go buy supplies before they put the animals in the car to take them home.
Which was good. It was perfect, in fact. Because the whole reason Donnie had called his sister up had been to talk to her privately.
They sat in the lobby of the pet shelter, Chelle with her cardboard box full of pissed-off cat and Donnie giving Betty, the Samoyed-partly-puppy, a good rub down. When Betty was a puddle of furry goo at Donnie’s feet, he spoke carefully, just loud enough for his sister to hear, and not loud enough to carry. (Thank God, the sweetheart who had helped them get the animals was helping someone else now.)
“So, uhm, Chelle?” he asked, with so much studied casualness he was surprised a big bullshit alarm didn’t just start whirling around the lobby.
“Yeah?” she said. He didn’t look up to see if she was looking at him or not, and he tried really hard not to remember all the times she’d been bitchy to him when they’d been in grade school, concentrating instead on all the times she’d been really nice to him after she’d gotten her post-puberty personality transplant. They’d beaten each other up for the same toy, and she’d invited him to the movies with her friends when she hadn’t needed to, and basically, she was his sister, and he loved her.
“So, you know I’m gay, right?”
“I had my suspicions,” she said, her voice as forced-casual as his.
“Yeah, how?” Because he really had to know.
“You break out into a sweat whenever Yandro walks by, for one,” she said, and he turned his head just enough to see her nodding seriously, and he blushed.
“Oh God,” he muttered. “Does he know?”
“No,” Chelle said kindly, and her hand patted his gently as it rested in Betty’s soft white fur. “No, he doesn’t. Do Mom and Dad?”
Donnie looked back at Betty, who was dozing with her chin on his knee. “No,” he said in embarrassment. “You’re sort of my trial run.”
“Mmm.” Michelle ruffled his blond hair, so much like her own short-cropped, slightly curly mess that no one had ever not seen the family resemblance. “Consider me a success.”
Donnie actually looked at her and rolled his eyes. “Do you have to make me feel five?”
Michelle’s look was only a little sad. “Honey, don’t you know that to me, you’ll always be five?”
Betty grunted happily, and Donnie took a big, deep, grown-up breath. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Chelle smiled, just like she didn’t know he was about to lead her down the garden path.
“So, if you think of me as your helpless little brother, you, uh, wouldn’t want to, uhm….” His hands were sweating, and Betty licked them complacently.
Chelle’s smile faded, and as she kept the cardboard cat carrier balanced on one slender knee, she wrapped her other arm around his shoulders. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “How about I come over tomorrow night and help you tell Mom ’n’ Dad.”
Donnie leaned his head on her shoulder for a minute. “You think they’ll be okay?” he asked, and Chelle dropped a kiss in his blond hair.
“I think they’ll be embarrassing and weird for a month,” she said honestly, but that felt all right too, because it meant the arm around his shoulder and the kiss in the hair weren’t a lie.
“I can live with embarrassing and weird,” Donnie decided, “as long as we’re all in the same house.”
“Well, you know Yandro’s got a spare room….” She trailed off meaningfully, and Donnie groaned. Of all the…. Oh God. No! Not when his crush was still so painfully near the surface. Not when Michelle was still full of stories about Yandro the Man-God, with a different guy in his bed every week. Donnie couldn’t stand watching the procession, and he really couldn’t stand the thought of being part of it. If this crush didn’t amount to anything more than a yearning, he still didn’t want to ever be just a notch on Yandro’s bed post.
“All things considered, I think I’d just rather Mom and Dad not be complete dicks about the whole thing,” he said seriously, and Chelle’s hug was surprising on the reassurance quotient.
COME Christmas, Mom had stopped staring at him tremulously and asking, “Are you sure?” and Dad had stopped coming home saying, “Hey, Donnie, did you hear about the queer guy who….” (It didn’t matter how that sentence ended. It was either over Donnie’s head, totally embarrassing, or had the potential to be really offensive if Donnie thought about it too much. You sort of had to know Donnie’s dad to know how much this particular salvo meant he was trying, and, well, Donnie did give in and laugh at the really filthy one about two fleas getting to Florida.)
And Donnie had come out to his friends from high school (most of whom were all attending junior college with him this year), and for the most part, they had been okay with it too. He’d come out to Chase over a couple of smuggled beers after high school graduation, and it was Chase who brought it up curiously a lot, especially when they were alone. Like they were over Christmas break, playing video games in Donnie’s room like they had all through high school.
“So,” Chase said, killing a whole slew of people in the newest version of Halo, “totally gay, huh?” It was like the sixth time he’d asked that, and each time when they were alone.
“Yeah, Chase,” Donnie said, bored of the question but really enjoying the hell out of watching Chase’s guy slaughter other characters. “Totally gay. Does this question ever come with a point?”
Chase grunted and his guy died on the television. “Gotten any yet?”
Donnie turned red. “No. You?”
Chase’s grin was lazy. “Nope. Girls don’t know what they’re missing.”
Donnie rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but I do.”
There was an evil chuckle then, and Donnie reached for the remote control in Chase’s lap, only to realize his buddy from high school had shifted and unbuttoned his fly. Before Donnie could catch up, Chase had taken Donnie’s questing hand and mashed it up against that really big cock, and Donnie was a little shocked it was engorged against his tighty whiteys, and against Donnie’s hand.
Donnie could only stare at him with his mouth open and his heart thundering in his ears, and Chase, who was one of those guys with a wide forehead and a bold nose and a chin of granite, gave a lazy-lidded, blue-eyed smile.
“Don’t just sit there, gay boy,” he muttered, “grab it. Stroke it.” His head tilted back and he grunted softly as Donnie did just that, out of sheer curiosity. “Make me come!”
Donnie liked the way it felt in his hand because it was different from his own. It was circumcised and very large, and he could feel the flesh of it throb beneath the skin of his palm. His own groin flooded and he thought wistfully it sure would be nice to have someone else take care of that problem for him, although he didn’t mind at all taking care of Chase’s in the meantime.
Chase’s grunts had become softer, more urgent, more imperative and needy, and Donnie didn’t have to do much more than squeeze at the base (and be careful not to catch Chase’s thick blond pubic hair when he did that) and stroke cleanly up to the top before Chase moaned and spattered all over his stomach and chest, and all over Donnie
’s hand.
Donnie looked at it and fought the impulse to taste it, just to see, when he caught Chase looking at him with something of a sneer and wiping himself with a tissue from the bed. Instead Donnie took the tissue and wiped his hand, feeling a little bit dirty, and arched his hips with a little pleading sound.
“Chase,” he all but begged, and Chase lifted one corner of his mouth in schoolboy contempt.
“What?”
“Dude, I took care of you!”
“Yeah, but you’re the one who’s gay! I’m just along for the ride.”
A flare of anger surged against Donnie’s chest. “Thanks a lot, you stupid asshole. Get the hell out of my room!”
Chase had the balls to look offended. “Oh come on, Donnie! I’m done now—don’t you want to play some more video games?”
Donnie shook his head, feeling used, it was true, but mostly feeling about six million years older and wiser than his thick-headed friend. “Man, no wonder you haven’t gotten laid. If a girl knew this is what you did after you got you some, she’d run in completely the opposite direction. Go home—I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Maybe.”
“What. Ever! I don’t need this noise, you fuckin’ pansy!”
And with that, Chase, the guy Donnie had played football, soccer, and Little League with since he was six flounced out of his room, probably for good, leaving Donnie depressed, horny, and trying very hard to get the come off of his blue comforter without having to put the whole thing in the wash.
HE CAME back, of course, and yeah, Donnie caved and gave him a few more hand jobs—but each time very, very much aware that he wasn’t going to get a damned thing back. Mostly he used them for practice, because someday, he thought, someday, he was going to get a chance to touch the body of someone who was gay (and out of the closet to himself) and who really liked him for him.
Besides. Chase’s cock was really pretty impressive, and as Donnie wrapped his hand around it and practiced getting Chase off using tricks like cupping his balls and skating his thumb across the head and squeezing in the right places, his own groin got heavy and swollen and achy. After the sixth or eighth time he got Chase off, he simply rolled over to his back and spread his legs, shoved his shorts down to his hips, and grabbed his cock in his hand.
Chase was still recovering, wiping himself off, and Donnie heard a rather puzzled, “What… hey! What are you doing?”
It didn’t really deserve an answer, and he grasped himself harder, comfortable with his own erection and with masturbation in general. Donnie was definitely a fan. His eyes closed, and he stroked himself from base to tip, slowly… slowly… oh so slowly….
And then, when his fist was at the base, he felt a little tickle at the end. His eyes flew open, and Chase was closer than Donnie remembered, petting the tender crown of his cock with a tentative finger. And just that, just the thought that somebody else was touching him, was enough to make his breath catch, his body awash in shivers, and his cock spasm in his fist as he spurted over himself.
Chase jerked back and looked at him accusingly. Donnie grinned back, and Chase looked away, suddenly completely vulnerable.
“I ain’t a fag,” he muttered, and Donnie sighed, reaching for the come rag he’d started keeping on the corner of the bed for Chase’s visits.
“Of course not,” he agreed amiably.
“I’m just letting you give me a hand job out of pity.”
Donnie resisted rolling his eyes. “Absolutely.” And he expected that to be the end of it. He expected Chase to stalk out of his room like he had the last few times, then call him up in a couple of days and come back, and maybe or maybe not whip his cock out in the middle of a video game for a quickie—Donnie’s only source of sexual experience to date.
And for a minute, Chase lived up to Donnie’s low expectations. He stood up, stalked to the door handle, and turned it.
Then he sighed, stalked back to the bed, sat down, and grabbed the video game controller, restarting from where he’d stopped.
“Do you ever wish life was a video game?” he asked, and Donnie, all buttoned up and cleaned up and relaxed from his own orgasm, sat up and gave the matter serious thought.
“No,” he said. “I wish it was an art book.”
Chase spared him a glance. “An art book?”
“Yeah,” Donnie said, thinking about the books on Van Gogh and Degas and Monet and Renoir he’d seen at Alejandro’s and Chelle’s. “I’d like that moment—that really beautiful moment—to stretch out so long I could study it. Trace the lines with my fingers. Touch it.”
Chase grunted and killed some more bad guys. “A pretty picture. I hadn’t thought of that. I’ve always wished it was a video game, or a movie, or a comic book.”
“A comic book?”
“Yeah. You know, you’re the hero all the time, and everything’s simple about getting the bad guys and you still get to be a good guy.”
His voice was so wistful that Donnie, who was usually content to be happy and pretty, had a flash of insight. “You can still be the hero if you’re gay,” he said, and Chase spared him a glance.
“Well, I’m not being the hero when I treat you like shit, am I?”
“It’s not like you’re my type either,” he admitted, since Chase was being a good guy.
“Yeah?” Chase didn’t seem to take offense. “What kind of guy would you go for?”
Donnie blushed and then confessed, since this seemed to be the night for it. “Yandro,” he said with a sigh, flopping back on his bed and mooning like a girl. Chase grunted and he sat back up. “What kind of guy would you go for? If you were gay.”
Chase took a deep breath, turned off the remote and the television, and turned to Donnie with eyes that looked as close to tears as Donnie had ever seen them. This was Chase, the guy who didn’t just hit the ball, he destroyed it! Chase didn’t cry, and he didn’t look sad, and he didn’t put his hand gently on Donnie’s face and kiss his forehead.
“I’d go for you, Donnie,” he said as he pulled back from that suddenly breathless moment. “But see, I’m not as brave as you, so I’m not gay.”
He stood up and took a few steps toward the door, and then turned around. “We can play video games some more,” he said quietly, “but that other thing? I don’t think we should do that.”
Donnie swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I think you’re right.”
Chase was gone then, and Donnie was back, alone in his room, wondering about those pictures from an art book he’d so admired. Because it felt like he’d just lived one, and it had been beautiful, so beautiful, and he’d been able to reach out and touch the lines of it, but it still hurt.
Alejandro
SIX months of celibacy was so much suckage Alejandro thought there should be some other word for it. He spoke two languages, right? Shouldn’t there be some emotionally intense, Spanglish variation on “sucks giant scum-covered boulders” that could convey the complete bland void of white noise his life had become since Steve had walked cheerfully out of his bedroom and awakened his conscience?
He now had enough high-quality porn and sex toys in his little end table drawer to fund a small-scale porn operation. The thought cheered him as he woke up and stumbled to the shower. Excellent. Maybe he’d get to be the fluffer!
The thought prolonged his morning wood as he gazed sightlessly at the white tiled wall at the ungodly hour he and Chelle had to leave that morning, and he leaned his head against the shower wall and probed the fantasy with his mind (wishing, yes, that he was probing other things with his aching, aroused body).
He would be a porn fluffer, yes. Absolutely. Just an endless parade of cocks, long and thin, long and fat, medium and fat, and of course the favorite, long and thick, and he would bend his head over them and take them in his mouth and….
He carried on with his fantasy, using memories of blowjobs past while his hand moved on his skin. When the cock in his mind erupted, and the cock in his hand erupted, he looked up the rangy y
oung body of his imaginary lover and into….
The laughing blue eyes of Chelle’s little brother.
And thus, six months of abstinence.
He groaned and leaned his head back and let the water sluice away some of the frustration and all of the come.
HE HADN’T planned on it, not really. He’d walked into the kitchen the morning before they got the dog with some sort of feeling his life needed to change. The one-weekend-one-offs were not healthy for him, not nice to the people he was screwing, and generally, not a phase of life a grown man (he’d officially graduated from college the year before) should indulge in.
And then Donnie, with Chelle’s tousled blond hair, Chelle’s laughing blue eyes, and a wide, mobile mouth all his own, had laughed at him while hugging a big, fluffy white dog.
Alejandro had been so gobsmacked he’d actually agreed to get Chelle a cat to match.
It had been serendipitous on the whole, because Betty the dog and Barney the cat had become indispensible members of the household as well as the best of friends, but something had cracked like brittle façade that day and had since flaked off entirely, leaving Alejandro facing the world alone, without that false shine left by the one-night stands.
He wanted that laughing, boisterous color in his life.
Donnie had been a frequent visitor since—throwing balls for the dog, petting the cat until he was comatose on the couch, looking at Alejandro’s art books, and asking (politely) to borrow his music—and Alejandro found himself oddly resentful.
It wasn’t that Donnie borrowed his stuff, he thought as he came out of the bathroom, still toweling off. He was fine with that because it always came back in good shape and because Donnie was a sweet kid. No, he felt resentful because Donnie took that life and color that sat around in Yandro’s white house and then took it away where it made Donnie happier and more colorful. And Yandro, who knew composers, music, artists, dance masters, and choreographers, was left in his sterile, lovely home with his pleasant roommate, who kept all her color in her room.
