Men of Steel

by Ryan Loveless

I can’t, Daniel thought. It isn’t right. Not me.

  But Daniel’s cock said otherwise, and with a groan, Daniel fell upon the mounds of Paragon’s ass. He rained the cheeks with more kisses, licking, finding his way into that crevice. He ran his hands across the smooth skin (velvet-covered concrete!) and with much effort, pushed them slowly apart.

  There, at the base of that cleft, lay Paragon’s tiny puckered anus. Daniel closed his eyes, took it in, opened them again, and brought his face down for the most intimate kiss two people could share. He used his every experience—even tops loved to be rimmed—and made love to Paragon’s hole: teasing it with his tongue, flicking, licking, daring it to relax and open to him. The entire time Paragon was moaning, groaning, nearly weeping, and gripping the rough blankets on the bed.

  “Now! Please, Daniel! Do it now.”

  A sob escaped Daniel’s throat. It was almost too much.

  Once more he climbed over Paragon, pushed the giant legs open, moved in, and let his cock rest in the valley between Paragon’s cheeks. He brought his weight down on the man, his face coming only up to the height of Paragon’s shoulder blades. He kissed the flesh there and then nudged himself against Paragon’s anus. It took only a moment. Paragon opened to him and Daniel pushed inward.

  “Oh!” came Paragon’s cry. “Don’t stop. Please.”

  Daniel pushed again, felt the rapture of the flesh that took him in, the heat, the wetness. So exquisite, it was all Daniel could do not to come. He paused, and then pushed again.

  “Yes!” Paragon shouted. “Fuck me, Daniel. Do it!”

  Daniel pushed one more time and felt himself bottom out, felt his balls gently press against Paragon’s. He waited one more moment, and then began to pull out. Paragon rose up, shoving back so that he was once again impaled by Daniel’s cock. Daniel had to hold on so as not to fall off. Powers or no, this was a strong man!

  Daniel pulled out, thrust in, and soon both men were pushing, thrusting, driving their need. By now Daniel was on his knees. He could see it all. See his cock as Paragon took him in. Watched himself vanish into Paragon’s divine masculinity.

  It was heaven.

  He reached around, or tried to, finally grabbed Paragon’s thick cock, and began to jack it to the rhythm of his thrusts.

  It didn’t take long. Soon both men were shouting out, rising to their desires, exploding, Daniel deep inside the man, and Paragon across the sheets. Daniel thought he would black out from the pleasure and when he somehow didn’t, he collapsed across the hero’s back. Paragon had already fallen to the mattress. They gasped, drawing air into their lungs, catching their breath.

  “My God,” they chorused. Slowly, Daniel felt himself grow flaccid and slip from the man to whom he’d made love. He slid off the mountain of muscle and snuggled against him. Paragon turned slightly and drew him close, pulled him tight, kissed Daniel’s forehead and then his mouth.

  “My God,” said Paragon. “I never knew.” His face was wet with tears. “I never knew it could be like this. I feel so… warm. I know that sounds weird but that’s how it feels. Thank you, sweet Daniel. Thank you.”

  Daniel almost laughed. Thank me? He did laugh then.

  “What’s funny?” Paragon asked.

  “I’m just happy,” Daniel said. “How crazy. Happy when I am about to die.”

  Paragon kissed him again. “I wonder how many people get to die happy?”

  Daniel smiled. How true was that?

  There was a crash.

  A huge one. Ripping metal. Both Daniel and Paragon jumped, but before they could do anything, a woman dressed all in green and yellow stood in the room’s doorway. She was smirking.

  “Well, well. Paragon finally comes out. I knew you were a poofter. Had to be. There is no superpower that would have allowed you to resist this!” she said, pointing to herself. “No wonder PsyBorg was acting funny. He tuned into my soul brother getting his cherry popped!”

  Paragon sat up and pulled Daniel even closer. “Epitome!”

  “In the voluptuous flesh,” she leered.

  “But how? How’d PsyBorg find us?”

  “Oh, we were surprised too,” Epitome said. “Shocked the shit out of PsyBorg. He’s never read you before. Then suddenly he heard you. He said it nearly made his ears bleed.”

  Daniel, who was already embarrassed beyond belief, said, “The collar, Paragon. It turned your powers off. It was your powers that’ve kept him from reading your mind all this time!”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Paragon said.

  “Turned your powers off?” Epitome asked.

  Paragon grabbed the blankets and pulled them over them both. He pointed at the collar around his neck.

  “Kinky,” Epitome said, and tossed back her wave of dark hair.

  “They’re inhibitor collars.”

  “Really?” She strode up to Paragon and, reaching out, grabbed it.

  “Wait!” Paragon shouted, but it was too late. There was the sound of shrieking metal as she pulled it apart in two pieces. “Oh God!” Paragon shouted and lurched. His spine bowed off the bed in a trembling arc, as if being jolted by electricity. Daniel was thrown to the floor.

  Then Paragon began to float up off the bed.

  “I’d say your powers were back,” Epitome said. She bent down to Daniel’s side and broke Daniel’s collar as well.

  “Dammit,” Paragon said. He rose higher and then drifted down to the floor. “I asked you to wait.” He kneeled down beside Daniel and then very, very carefully reached out and took Daniel’s face in his palm. “I wanted just a little more time.”

  Daniel felt a little surge of loss. Paragon’s powers were indeed back. That meant they’d never be able to....

  “Well, from those numbers ticking down in the other room I’d say time is the last thing we have,” Epitome said dryly.

  Paragon rose and pulled Daniel’s to his feet. “You’re right. Come on, Daniel. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  DANIEL put his cosmo down and sighed. He and John were sitting on Daniel’s balcony overlooking downtown Kansas City, which in itself had stunned John. Daniel had been trying to get an apartment on a lower floor for over a year. But after flying over New York City, his eighth-floor balcony no longer seemed so high. Maybe Paragon was right about that “heights” versus “fear-of-falling” thing after all.

  “What happened then?” cried John.

  “That’s it,” Daniel said, and sighed even more dramatically.

  “That can’t be all!”

  Daniel shrugged. “Well, what did you expect?”

  “Well, something happened between then and now!” John whined.

  “You’re whining,” Daniel said, finally glad for a chance to say it to his friend for once.

  “I am not whining!” John whined.

  Daniel grinned.

  “Are you going to see each other again?”

  Daniel shrugged again. “I don’t really know. We can’t be anything to each other.” His smile was gone, replaced by a sad frown. “We did have that dinner. They served him with wrought iron cutlery.” He tried to laugh and failed. “Even if we could be friends, New York is so damned far away.”

  There was a long pause where neither of them said anything.

  “You know,” John said. “I think I’m going to go now.”

  “You don’t have to,” Daniel said.

  “Baby. I know you. And right now this is one of your I-want-to-be-alone times.” He didn’t wait for Daniel’s reply. He just got up, and Daniel followed him to the door.

  “Love you, baby,” John said.

  “Me too,” Daniel said. And closed the door.

  Alone.

  Was he right? Daniel asked himself. Do I really want to be alone?

  There was a knock.

  But it wasn’t the front door.

  There was a second knock. It sounded like the balcony door. “What the hell?”

  Curiously, he crossed to the balcony.

 
“Oh, my God!”

  It was Paragon, of course.

  Daniel threw himself into the man’s arms.

  “Oh, Paragon!”

  Paragon pulled back slightly and Daniel looked up into the impossibly blue eyes he loved so much. Paragon lifted him, crushed him tight, and took his mouth in a long, hard kiss. Daniel struggled for only a second and then let the kiss take him in. Finally, Paragon pulled back again and let him down.

  “Paragon! How?”

  But then he knew. There was a collar around Paragon’s neck. “The inhibitor collar!”

  Paragon was grinning wickedly. “PsyBorg fixed it. He’s more than just a telepath, you know. He links with machines. That’s what he does. Between him and Constellation, repairing it was a snap.”

  Daniel felt his heart leap in joy.

  Paragon leaned down and said, “Want to know the combination?”

  A huge grin captured Daniel’s mouth.

  “Oh, Paragon. Do I ever!”

  Paragon leaned in closer. “Aaron,” he whispered.

  “What?” Daniel looked up in confusion.

  “Aaron. That’s my name. Aaron Morrow.”

  Daniel let out a long breath of surprise. “You’re telling me your name?”

  Paragon—Aaron—nodded. “I want you to know my name if we’re going to continue being intimate.”

  “Are we?” Daniel asked, hope rising up inside. “Going to keep being... intimate?”

  “I sure hope so,” Aaron said. “But first, um, I’m starved. And I know this great little place....”

  “You know places here in Kansas City?”

  “No. I thought you liked where we had our first date.”

  Date! Wow! Our first date? It was a date? And now another? We’re dating?

  “We can be there in a jiff,” Aaron said.

  “Really?”

  “Hey. I’m Paragon. And I am pretty damned fast. When I want to be. We can be there in less than an hour.”

  Daniel grinned.

  Suddenly New York didn’t seem so far away.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  B.G. THOMAS lives in Kansas City with his husband of more than a decade and their fabulous little dog. He sees his wonderful daughter just often enough to miss her when she isn’t there. He has a romantic soul and is extraordinarily lucky to have many friends.

  He loves science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance, and has gone to SF&F conventions his entire adult life. He’s been lucky enough to meet many of his favorite writers. He has made up stories since he was kid; it is where he finds his joy. In the ’90s, he wrote for gay magazines but stopped because they wanted all porn without plot.

  Excited about the growing same-sex romance market, he started writing again. He sent out a story and was thrilled when it was almost immediately accepted.

  “Leap, and the net will appear,” is his personal philosophy. “It is never too late,” he states. “Pursue your dreams. They will come true!”

  Visit his web site at http://bgthomas.t83.net or his blog at http://bg-thomas.livejournal.com, or contact directly at bgthomaswriter@aol.com.

  That Which Doesn’t Kill You

  “WOULD you just eat that already? Spinach is good for you.”

  Victor didn’t bother replying. He simply looked at me with that wide-eyed, farm-puppy expression the bastard knew I couldn’t resist. Given the particulars of our relationship, his resorting to that tactic was especially evil.

  “But it doesn’t taste good, and it looks like slimy, green silly string.”

  “Oh, grow up. It does not look like silly string. Have you ever tasted it?”

  “Well, no.” Victor used his fork to push the steamed mass of dark green around his plate. He’d received the side of vegetables only because I’d ordered it for him in lieu of fries before he could stop me. Whenever I was mad at him I liked to take it out on his palate. “Besides,” he continued, lowering his voice so that no one else in the diner could hear, “it’s only humans who require extra nutrients. I don’t need any help being strong.”

  And wasn’t that the truth. Victor, also known as the invincible superhero El Magnifico, wasn’t even remotely human. Oh, he might look the part, but the superficial resemblance was as far as it went. He hailed from a planet so far away, astronomers speculated the light from its exploded host star hadn’t had enough time to reach Earth. Yet, though El Magnifico was the very definition of an alien, the citizens of what he called Terra Prime had adopted him as one of their own. Literally. A refugee from his planet’s destruction, he’d been found as a baby by a couple of Mexican-American migrant workers—hence the name—and raised as a human until discovering around the onset of puberty that he was anything but ordinary.

  “It worked for Popeye,” I said, pursing my lips into a pout that more than one guy had called alluring. For all the good it did me with Victor.

  “Popeye?”

  I blinked at him. “Yeah, you know. The one-eyed sailor who ate spinach to gain strength?” I sighed as he continued to stare at me blankly. Sometimes I forgot that he didn’t have the cultural reference points that so many of us Americans took for granted. It wasn’t that he was from another planet so much as that he hadn’t had access to a television when he was a kid because of his parents’ humble means. “Never mind,” I mumbled, opting to end the exchange by taking another bite of my oh-so-delicious spinach salad. The baby leaves were crisp and full of tasty iron with nary a slimy string to be seen. Victor didn’t know what he was missing.

  As he bit into his hamburger-with-the-works, I turned away to keep myself from climbing over the table to lick away the bit of grease that had oozed from the corner of his mouth. So, of course, the first thing my gaze landed on was a newspaper in a street vending kiosk that was running a front-page spread on the Big Apple’s beloved super-hotness.

  “Conspiracy—”

  “What is?”

  Damn. I’d forgotten about the super-hearing thing. “Nothing,” I answered, not looking at him and trying not to look back at the newspaper.

  Not that it was easy. El Magnifico was nothing if not, well, magnificent. Black hair, deep brown eyes, six-foot-five, a body that would make Michelangelo weep, not to mention a face that Helen of Troy would envy. At least I had the consolation of knowing that so much perfection wasn’t the product of earthly DNA. That would have been beyond unfair. El Magnifico had flown—yes flown—onto the scene about three years ago, making bad guys tremble and every straight woman and gay man with access to mass media ruin their underwear.

  And just like the comic book heroes I’d read about before learning that, yes, Virginia, boy scout aliens do exist, Victor kept his private and public lives separate by means of a secret identity. A really lame secret identity, if you asked me. By day, he was a reporter for a cable television news affiliate. Cliché much? It wasn’t at all original, making me suspect that Victor must have had some access to pop culture as a kid. Not to mention that he hid himself from the public when he wasn’t being El Magnifico by the most ridiculous means possible. I mean, come on, who did he think was fooling with those green contacts? The entire planet, apparently. Everyone who knew Victor—from his boss at the station to his cleaning lady—had bought into the deception. No one suspected that the hot guy who looked remarkably like El Magnifico was, in fact, the hero himself.

  Not that it had duped me for longer than five seconds, but then again, I was an ace reporter myself and, as I liked to think, smarter than the average bear. Of course, the fact that my cock had reacted to my first meeting with my new partner and my initial encounter with the city’s new savior in exactly the same way had been a dead giveaway. I confronted Victor with the truth the very evening after El Magnifico rescued me from a bank robber’s bullet and refused to let up until he confessed everything. He swore me to secrecy, and I readily complied, on the condition that he let me fuck him on a regular basis.

  No, it’s not as bad as it sounds. At that point, I had known Victor for several
weeks, and he had been giving me a constant supply of these shy glances that both clearly let me know he was interested and were driving me and my dick insane. Besides, I’d been half-joking at the time… sort of. Still, I never could have guessed how my forwardness would be received. Instead of laughing and saying yes, the gorgeous bastard started crying! Not very hero-like, to say the least. After cuddling with him for an hour on his couch and plying him with alcohol, which didn’t seem to affect him in the slightest—more’s the pity—he finally dropped the irony bomb on my head.

  I can’t sleep with you. Not because I don’t want to. I do! But if I engage in any, um, intimate activities, I’ll lose my powers.

  I was totally stunned, not to mention depressed. Distraught, even! I asked him how he knew, because I had a strong suspicion that my sexy partner was a virgin. He told me that when he’d kissed another guy during his senior year of high school, his powers had vanished for a week. To his immense relief, his powers had finally started to settle down after several years of haywire near-catastrophes, and then, out of the blue, poof! Gone without a trace. A shared hand job with his school’s track star half a year later had resulted in no powers for nearly a month. Not being a slow boy, Victor had quickly figured out that sex equaled normalcy. Since he’d already decided to dedicate his life to fighting crime and righting wrongs, there would be no nookie in his future.

  Beyond feeling a blinding jealousy toward those unknown teens who’d provided Victor with that important self-discovery, there was nothing I could do. As the weeks of our partnership grew into three years as the most respected reporting team on cable TV, my lust had turned into love. But not even the surfeit of burning passion in my heart could change the awful truth: to be with Victor meant being celibate. It wasn’t a state that I had ever envisioned for myself, since I could barely even spell the word, but there it was. And here we were, sitting in a diner near Times Square, Victor eating his hamburger and me trying not to jump him.

  “How’s your mom?” I asked by way of distracting myself.

  Victor’s adopted mother was the sweetest woman in the world and nothing could put the brakes on my libido faster than picturing her wholesome, matronly face. Of course, Victor, being the inhuman genius that he was, caught all of the hidden implications of my innocent question, even the ones I hadn’t consciously intended. I felt his stare and glanced up at him just in time to see him cut his faux-green gaze over to the paper featuring his more public persona. The article was about El Magnifico’s continued battle against a plague of extra-terrestrial monsters that had begun appearing several months ago after apparently discovering that human beings were the perfect late-afternoon snack. At first, the creatures’ attacks had been limited to the more remote locales of the planet, so it was a while before news of them surfaced. But when a group of them decimated a mid-sized hamlet halfway between Paris and Dijon, the story blew up worldwide.