by Neil Plakcy
“How was your date?” Manny asked.
“He fucks like a stallion,” I grumbled. “My ass is still sore.”
Manny nearly spit his coffee out. “Coño,” he said. “No dinner?”
“Oh, sure. We went to this place across the street from his apartment. Very fancy.”
“Details,” Manny demanded. We sat across from each other, and I told him everything that had happened—including the handcuffs and Victor’s explanation.
“I don’t know, Larry,” he said when I was finished. “Handcuffs? That’s kinky.”
“Come on, Manny. That’s nothing. Take a look online, and you’ll see a lot worse.”
“But what if this is just an introduction? Next week it might be whips and chains.”
I said, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but whips and chains excite me,” even though I wasn’t sure how I felt. I sipped the strong, hot coffee.
“I’m not joking. What if he tries to hurt you?”
“He’s a sweetheart. And he couldn’t have been nicer the whole evening. Don’t worry; I won’t get in over my head. It’s not like I’m in love with him or anything.”
After I was sufficiently caffeinated, I opened my laptop and worked on Julian’s project. I’d already uploaded most of the back-end work to his website, so I focused on the interface. I suck at graphics, but I found some public-domain buttons and popped them in as placeholders. Then I tried to work through the process of uploading a manuscript and choosing a translator as if I were an author.
It was slow going. Every step forward required coding and testing, and my brain buzzed with thoughts of Julian. What would he say if I told him about my adventure the night before with Victor Kunin? Would he be freaked out by the handcuffs, like Manny was? Would he be jealous? Did I want him to be?
It was hard to concentrate with so many ideas roaming around in my brain, and I wasn’t able to get into the zone, stopping and starting every few minutes. I was glad when I could give up and head out to pick up Gavin at Java Joe’s for our shopping trip with Dylan. “So what’s the deal with this guy?” he asked as he slid into the seat next to me. “Some loser programmer?”
“Pretty much. But he looked like such a puppy dog when he asked for my help I couldn’t say no. And you know what a disaster I am at shopping.”
“Absolutely. Look at you today.”
I was wearing a pair of khaki cargo shorts that had begun fraying at the hem and an FU T-shirt that had already been through the wash too many times. “Hey, I’m financially challenged,” I said. I hadn’t gotten any cash from Julian so far, and my salary went to food, rent, student loans, and the occasional cocktail at Java Joe’s.
“Which leads me to my plan.” He suggested we hit an outlet in North Miami Beach instead of the mall. “Why don’t you call your bud and have him meet us there?”
I called Dylan, and he agreed to meet us.
“Hope you brought your plastic too,” Gavin said. “Your wardrobe needs some life support.”
He leaned back in his seat, his feet up against the dash. “How’d your date go?”
“It was sick,” I said. I told him about the dinner, the sex, and the Sambuca. “I don’t get what he sees in me, when he could have his pick of models on South Beach.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Larry,” he said. “You’ve got a lot going for you. Some guys really like the whole string-bean look.”
“Thanks, dude,” I said drily. “That means a lot.” I hesitated. “Victor did say something kind of weird. That I was an innocent kid with a sweet ass, and he was going to make me his.”
“Some guys get off on that. Did he think you were a virgin or something?”
“I only ever had one guy try to fuck me, and it hurt,” I said. “But with Victor it felt awesome. I kind of made him think he was the first to go back there.”
“You don’t have a lot of meat on your ass,” Gavin said. “So he probably was able to get in pretty deep.”
I felt my cheeks redden. Gavin had noticed my ass?
“Does he have a small dick?” Gavin asked. “Sometimes guys who aren’t very well-endowed look for virgins so they won’t suffer by comparison.”
“I didn’t see it,” I said. “Everything was from behind.”
“Probably small, then,” Gavin said. “Thus the handcuffs and the rear entry.”
I deferred to Gavin’s greater experience, and we pulled up in the parking lot. “There he is,” I said, pointing to where Dylan was leaning against his car waiting for us.
“Oh, hell to the no,” Gavin said to me. “Not the rapper wannabe?”
“Yeah.”
Gavin shook his head. “This is going to require major work. Fortunately I am up for the challenge. From fucked-up to fuckable.”
Gavin took charge like a field marshal. I hadn’t even realized Dylan had an ass until he tried on the jeans Gavin picked out for him. “And wear a belt, dude,” Gavin said, handing him one. “See, it goes through those loops there.”
“I know what a belt is,” Dylan grumbled. “But it’s not cool.”
“Dude, you have a body,” Gavin said. “When I first saw you, I thought you were some kind of dough boy the way your crap was hanging. What girl wants to bang that?”
Dylan looked at himself in the mirror. In addition to the artfully studded and ripped jeans, Gavin had picked out a polo shirt in a color he called celadon that showed off Dylan’s green eyes. A pair of teenaged girls passed and one of them said, “Money,” and the other, “Fly.”
Dylan saw the way they looked when they spoke and said, “Fine, I’ll take them.”
Gavin picked out a pair of dress pants for me and a skintight Armani Exchange markdown that hugged my skinny chest and made me look buff.
By the time we were done, Dylan had two pairs of jeans, two polo shirts, a pair of dress pants, a funky Hawaiian shirt, a couple of decent T-shirts, and a pair of board shorts. “Now for the pièce de résistance,” Gavin said, stopping at the underwear aisle.
He picked a pair of 2xist boxer briefs from the display. “I don’t need...” Dylan began.
“You bet you do,” Gavin said. “I’ve seen your tighty-whities, and they are the opposite of sexy.”
I decided to splurge on some sexy underwear myself—a black thong and a pair of boxer briefs that accentuated the package. I was curious about what Gavin had suggested—that Victor had a small dick, which was something he wanted to hide from me. Not that I was a size queen. Any dick that made its way to my mouth was a good dick. But that might explain his behavior, and why he’d gone for me in the first place.
I wasn’t going to obsess. All through college I’d struggled to get a guy interested enough in me to go out more than once. I couldn’t call Victor a boyfriend, and I doubted I’d ever feel that way about him. But Julian? I could see us hooking up after his website was launched, the two of us holding hands and walking down Lincoln Road together.
That was assuming he was willing to have anything to do with me after he no longer needed my coding skills.
12 – Falling
I got back to the apartment in time to shower and dress for Julian’s visit. I wanted to make an effort, so I wore the shirt Gavin had picked out for me, with my black slacks. I even went into Gavin’s bathroom and tried some of the cologne samples he had. I settled on one that smelled like wood and flowers.
Julian showed up with a big shopping bag from the Epicure Market—a gourmet grocery on Alton Road that was way too pricey for my budget. “I brought us dinner,” he said. “I thought we could eat while we work.”
He wore a black silk shirt that hugged his muscular chest and a pair of tight-fitting black jeans. He looked as handsome as he had when I’d seen him the week before, though there were dark smudges under his eyes that I had a feeling were the result of too many late nights. Partying or working? I didn’t know, and it wasn’t my business.
“I don’t have that much to show you that you haven’t already se
en,” I said as I led him to the dining room. “But I thought we could walk through the experience of registering as an author and uploading a manuscript together and see how it works, what you want changed or improved. Have you thought about the interface yet?”
“I thought you’d already taken care of that,” Julian said as he unpacked the bag. “I saw the images you uploaded.”
I shook my head. “Those are placeholders. I took one class in interface design in college, which was enough to demonstrate that I don’t have the graphic skills, and that I’m too caught up in the back end to have a clear picture of the user experience.”
“I’ll have to look into that, then,” he said. “I know some people back in Silicon Valley I might be able to use.”
I brought out plates, napkins, and silverware. As I set the table, Julian opened the plastic lid of a big container, and the aroma of meat, potatoes, and carrots wafted out. “I hope you like brisket.”
“I’d never have pegged you as a guy who liked Jewish food,” I said. He’d brought matzo ball soup, rye bread, and potato knishes along with the brisket.
“I’m half-Jewish,” he said. “On my mom’s side.”
“Really? I didn’t even know they had Jews in Mexico.”
“Back in the 1920s the US restricted the number of southern Europeans who could immigrate, especially Italians, Slavs, and Jews,” he said as he scooped some brisket onto a plate. “So a lot of Jews ended up in Mexico and Central America. I have cousins in Nicaragua and El Salvador.”
“Wow.” I uncapped a bottle of black-cherry soda and took a drink.
“I grew up with my abuela making pollo con mole poblano, and my bubbie cooking chicken soup. A weird combination, I admit.”
“You must have had a really fascinating childhood.” We talked as we ate, about his boarding school, then about going home to Mexico City for vacations.
“It was this huge dichotomy,” he said. “Exeter was cold and Spartan, in a small town. There were other foreign students, but we all wanted to be American so we struggled to fit in. Then I’d go back home, and everything would be in Spanish, and the city was so crowded and bustling, and our house was very nice, with a maid, a cook, a gardener, and a man who did odd jobs and drove us around.”
How different from the way I’d grown up, I thought. “It was a big deal for us one year, when for Mother’s Day my dad hired a maid service as a surprise for my mom,” I said. “We took her out to brunch, and while we were gone, these two women swooped through the house cleaning everything. My mom was so happy when we got home that she cried.”
“My dad has his secretary buy gifts for my mom, and my mom buys for the rest of us,” Julian said. “I remember once my first year at Exeter when he came to Boston for a business trip, and I took the train down to meet him. It was so cold, and I didn’t have a scarf, so he took me into a store to buy one.”
He laughed. “The salesman recognized my Exeter shirt, and he figured out what was going on. He convinced my dad to buy me a whole wardrobe of sweaters and coats and long underwear. There was so much we had to have it shipped to the school.”
“When I was a kid, my father used to take us to this farm store in the Redland,” I said. “We each got a candy apple, even though my mother said they rotted our teeth.”
“It’s funny the things we remember,” Julian said. “Maybe because I was so lonely and far from home, or maybe because it was one of the few times it was only Papi and me, but that’s one of my best memories.”
“Does your family know you’re gay?”
Julian nodded. “I never would have told them, but this jerk I dated at Stanford got pissed when I broke up with him, and he sent pictures to my dad.”
“Ouch! How did he take it?”
“Lots of yelling and screaming. He blamed it on Exeter, he blamed my mother, he threatened to cut me off, make me come back to Mexico and work as a garbage collector.” He looked down at his plate, speared a piece of brisket. “My mother and my brothers and sisters all stood up for me. Mexicans are very family-oriented, you know, and eventually my dad came around.”
“That must have been a tough time.”
“It was.” He looked up at me. “How about you?”
I shrugged. “I haven’t told my parents. This whole life here, it’s a foreign country to them. I couldn’t even begin to explain it.”
We talked some more as we finished eating, and that initial connection we’d felt at Java Joe’s was starting to deepen. I had to resist the urge to stare dreamily into his eyes.
I left him at the laptop as I cleaned up our dinner dishes. When I returned, he was excited. “This is amazing, Larry. I can’t believe you’ve accomplished so much in such a short time.”
He jumped up, pushing his chair back so hard that it fell backward, and he grabbed me and kissed me, first on the left cheek, then on the right. “You are a genius!”
I was speechless, overwhelmed by the feeling of his arms around me, the tingle on my cheeks where he had kissed me. I gaped at him, and Julian was immediately apologetic.
He bent down to pick up the chair and said, “Sorry, I get very excited sometimes. It’s the Latin in me, I guess.”
“No need to apologize,” I said, though what I really wanted to say was Kiss me again, please. My dick had pronged up when his body pressed against mine, and I quickly sat down to hide it.
Julian sat beside me, with the laptop in front of us. “You’ve made more progress in a week than my other programmer did in a month,” he said. “Así como una puerta se cierra, otra se abre. When one door closes, another opens.” He looked at me and smiled. “I’m so glad that the door to you opened.”
“Well, we still have a lot of doors to go through. I have a list of questions for you. Let me go get them.”
Manny was spending the night at his boyfriend’s, and Gavin was out on a date. Which left me and Julian alone in the apartment, definitely a dangerous situation. I needed to get away from Julian for a moment, to let my pulse return to normal and my dick deflate. I stumbled up from the table and hurried to my room, where I sat on my bed.
What kind of a loser was I? I thought. Julian had made it clear that this was a business deal between us. And I’d gotten laid the night before with Victor Kunin, who was surely interested in me. Why was I crushing so much on Julian?
Yeah, he was smart and charming and hella sexy. I didn’t even want to have sex with him; I wanted to hold him and kiss him, look into those deep dark eyes. But he wasn’t. Into. Me. I needed to get that through my head.
I grabbed the spiral notebook with the FU logo on the front where I’d been keeping my notes, and walked back to the dining room.
“Everything all right?” Julian asked.
“Yeah, great.” I sat down beside him again, careful to leave room between us, and I explained the routines I needed, and how I was going to handle them. Julian knew a lot more about programming than he let on; he understood and made good suggestions.
I loved working with him. Our brains were in sync—every time I asked a question, he had an answer, and every time he had a suggestion, it was as if I’d thought of it myself. As we finished and I shut down the laptop, I wondered if Julian felt the same way I did, if I should make a move on him, or if he’d make one on me.
Then he opened his wallet and pulled out a check, and that reminded me how he saw our relationship. “This is for you,” he said, handing it to me. “The first installment.”
I looked at the amount. “Julian, this is too much,” I said.
“No, no, it’s based on the contract we signed. You’ve made so much progress.”
He stood up. “Thank you very much for showing me everything. It’s so amazing to see something from my head come to life on the web.”
He stuck his hand out for me to shake, and I was disappointed that there would be no good-bye kisses, even if they were only on the cheek. I shook his hand, feeling the strength and warmth in his grip.
He turned t
oward the door, and I watched his ass move in those tight black jeans. He walked like a cat, confident on his feet. I realized I wasn’t breathing, and I took a deep breath, then walked out to the elevator with Julian, unwilling to let him go. I stood there smiling as the doors closed, feeling like a big goof.
There was no denying it. I was falling for Julian Argento.
13 – Gay Guys Rock
After Julian left, I got into bed with a case of blue balls, but nothing that a bit of self-gratification couldn’t handle, as long as I accompanied the hand job with fantasies of Julian Argento. What would he have done if I’d kissed him back when he’d kissed me? If I’d grabbed those sweet butt cheeks of his and pulled him close to me, devouring his mouth with mine?
Hell, I wasn’t that kind of guy. And if I were, Julian would probably have backed away from me, all embarrassed, maybe even decided it wasn’t a good idea for us to work together. But I couldn’t help imagining him naked, wondering how his lean body would fit against mine. I’d seen hair on his forearms and a few tufts of chest hair peeking out of his shirt. What would that hair feel like against my skin? Except for a patch around my dick and under my arms, my body was as smooth as a marble countertop, flecked with freckles.
Guys sometimes teased me, asking if my dick was proportionately as long as the rest of me. It was, but that wasn’t always so great—few guys could take all of me down their throats, and I’d never had the chance to experiment with someone’s ass. I fell asleep to pleasant visions of Julian’s strong, tanned fingers wrapped around my shaft.
When I woke up Sunday morning, the apartment was quiet. Manny was still at his boyfriend’s house, and it looked like Gavin hadn’t come home. I savored the naughtiness of walking around the apartment naked. My family wasn’t comfortable with nudity, and even when I’d shared a room with Lincoln and Leroy, we kept ourselves covered up, first in pajamas, then in gym shorts.
I had to get started though, so I pulled on a pair of shorts and sat down at my laptop. I worked all day, incorporating the routines I’d received from Rajesh and Rajneesh. I sent them new assignments and worked on the database that would hold the authors, the translators, and all their accompanying data and files.
