by Rob Rosen
“I hear Fidel and people shouting and…ah, ah…” With Leo still playing with his nipples, Martin loses control, can’t talk.
Leo stops, looks into his eyes and says, “Tell me what you hear, coño.” He sounds angry. Martin laughs. Now he can laugh. At first he was shattered by Leo’s sudden spurts of feigned anger. “Come on,” says Leo. “You’re making me crazy. Stand up by the door. Look out. Look at the people. Look at the funny people, silly people on the street.”
Martin has also learned to indulge Leo’s whims since the results are almost always gratifying. He stands up and peers through the door’s slats again. Leo hops out of bed and positions himself behind him. He begins biting the back of Martin’s neck. His tongue plunges into his ear. Martin’s knees go weak and he grips the doorjamb. Then Leo wraps his arms around him, steadying him, pulling him close.
“Look at the people. Look at my country,” he whispers, his mouth on the other’s ear, the hot wisps of air tickling deep nerves. “All right,” he says, rolling the latex down his shaft. There’s a slap, slap, slap on the ass. “Open now.” He inches into his private territory, his little tropical paradise. “Do you feel it?” he asks. “Do you feel it? Look at the people. Can you see them? Come on. Look. Look. Look.”
Martin turns his head to kiss him, but no; Leo roughly points his head back to the street. A pair of eyes down below leaves its concentration on an ice-cream cone and looks up at the slats. Martin returns the gaze. Leo pushes harder. “Todo para ti, amor. It’s all for you, love. And they can see us. Yes. Yes. Everybody. Look at them. Look at them. They see us. They see me in you. This is the revolution. The revolution. Here. You and me. You and me. We are it, baby.”
Martin stretches his hands up, he, the bigger, stronger man, giving himself to the darker, smaller southern neighbor. Leo pounds with the force of the downtrodden rising up. The door rattles. Puzzled people on the street look up. In the distance the voice is saying libertad and something about the imperialistas. Big applause and all the lost people on the street turn their heads away from the rattle and toward the roar of the crowd.
The voice goes on and on, building, building. It’s feeling its power. Leo is in sync, rising, rising, rising, then slowing down and rising again.
“Socialismo o muerte,” shouts the voice. “Viva la revolución. Viva la revolución.”
“Viva!” the crowd responds.
“Coñooooo…” screams Leo. There is a boom, boom, boom of fireworks from the gathering. And then Leo explodes. Quickly following, Martin shouts something unintelligible and answers with a splat on the flowery Spanish tiles of the floor. They fall back onto the bed, holding each other tight. Leo’s body twitches and jerks, twitches, jerks, twitches. Then, like ripples in a pond, the feeling fades into eternity.
“Oh, god. Oh, shit,” Leo says. “Shit. Oh fuck.” He starts to laugh. Martin laughs, too, and both bodies are shaking to the beat of the cheering and clapping of the crowd, the cheering and clapping, the clapping and cheering.
After a long time the noise dies down. Silence. No voice. No crowd. And the couple goes still as well.
The steamy air from Leo’s lips moves closer, finds Martin’s ear. He whispers, “We are the revolution, baby.”
THE HUSBANDS
Gregory L. Norris
Jasper’s hand worked lower, beneath the abdomen of the nude demigod stretched across the crisp whiteness of the high-thread-count sheet. Jasper was supine. He and the other man formed a kind of yin and yang. A modern take by a band he didn’t recognize crooned their version of “See You in September” over the clock radio. The orange light working through the bedroom’s tall windows established that they were still in the thick of August.
His fingers gripped the man’s steely cock. Jasper gave a few stiff jerks, his fingertips recording details: trimmed pubic hair, shaved balls—though big ones, impressive ones. But where was Gudmunson’s foreskin?
The man, who was lying with his face turned away from Jasper, groaned his approval, and Jasper knew for certain that it wasn’t Tom Gudmunson in the bed beside him.
“Yeah, keep going,” the man growled. He thrust his hips forward, fucking his erection into Jasper’s fist. “That feels good.”
“Good?” Jasper parroted.
A dream. It had to be. Except that Jasper felt his lips move, and on his next shallow sip of breath he smelled the man’s scent—clean, peppered by chemicals from some masculine soap, shampoo and deodorant. Gudmunson never wore body spray, or deodorant, for that matter—and how Jasper loved his natural male scent.
“Keep going, Jazz,” the man growled. “You make my dick happy.”
Gudmunson never would have uttered a sentiment so sappy, even in the thick of morning sex.
Jasper’s hand stilled. The faceless intruder in his bed pumped his thickness several more times into his grip, leaving a sticky mess across Jasper’s palm. The man wasn’t Gudmunson—and the room, Jasper realized, wasn’t their bedroom. Jasper’s eyes wandered over the white walls, the shiny minimalist furniture. At least the face gazing back in the mirror above the dresser was his, though.
The body beside him rolled over. Staring back in reflection next to his was one of the most handsome men he’d ever seen—dark hair in a neat professional athlete’s cut, pale-blue eyes, classic jaw with a thin scruff of five o’clock shadow showing just after seven in the morning, according to the radio’s clock. Even his prickle looked intentional and put together.
The man sat up. His cock’s reflection added a stroke of purple-red color to the otherwise white landscape. A chill tickled the fine hairs at the nape of Jasper’s neck. He fought it, but failed. The shiver tumbled. Jasper waited, expecting the white landscape to evaporate, replaced by Gudmunson’s dirty clothes piled beside sneakers and work boots. Tom Gudmunson was a rugged, no-nonsense man’s sort of man. A scar bisected Gudmunson’s right eyebrow, a permanent flaw earned in a skateboarding fuckup when he was a teen. He, too, wore his hair pro-jock short, and routinely greeted the morning with a prickle of dark scruff on his chin, cheeks and throat, though he never looked as pristine as the man now beside him. It was, in fact, Gudmunson’s imperfections that had caused Jasper to fall in love with the ex-soldier, current lawman.
Jasper released the stranger’s erection and seized in place.
“What’s wrong, Jazz?” the man asked. Concern replaced lusty joy. “Jasper.”
“Who are you?” Jasper gasped. Before the man could answer the first question, he added another. “And what the hell am I doing here?”
An amused grin broke on the man’s face. The gesture revealed a length of clean white teeth, and seemed more snarl than actual smile, more wolf’s than man’s. “Let me guess: that Gudmunson dude again?”
“Where is he?” Jasper demanded.
The man reached over and mimed a knock against the side of Jasper’s head. “In there, Jazz. Tom Gudmunson’s only a character you created, in one of your novels. If you don’t cut the shit, I’m going to get jealous.”
Character in a novel? Jasper choked down a dry swallow. His next breath smelled of the man’s chemical scent. No, it couldn’t be real.
“Hello, it’s me, Marcus, remember?”
Jasper didn’t. The man stretched out, and Jasper quickly recorded the rest of the details: perfect torso with defined abs, all of it trimmed of hair down to nubs; sculpted legs left with a dusting of fur only on calves and shins; big feet—easily as big as Gudmunson’s sexy size-thirteens; thick tool, circumcised; balls, meaty and loose, shaved of hair. Jasper sensed he was being watched and gazed again upon the man’s cocky, confident smirk.
“Now do you remember?” Marcus asked.
Gudmunson, a figment of his imagination? For a brief and startling instant, Jasper’s mind wandered to that other bedroom, to Gudmunson standing over him, his old T-shirt damp beneath the armpits. It was on him one second, gone the next. Dog tags dangled over the pattern of dark hair superimposed over chest muscles. Blue jeans and
bare feet. It was a heavenly distraction.
A stranger’s touch drew him out of the dream and back to the concrete, too-white world. Something about Marcus was familiar.
“Do you plan on finishing what you started, or do I have to give myself a tug?”
Jasper didn’t answer. Sighing, Marcus reclined, one big hand with its perfect fingers choking up around his erection while the other toyed with his balls. The wolf’s grin persisted on his face. Pale-blue eyes pinned Jasper. The stranger licked his lips, the language of his body clear and easy to translate, though Jasper couldn’t be certain that Marcus didn’t want to dine on him as well.
Gudmunson was a dream, nothing more. A strange emotion Jasper couldn’t identify gripped his body. He felt his resistance crumble. Suddenly, his lips were on Marcus’s abdomen, his tongue seeking the man’s navel, his nostrils searching for the scent of crotch, balls and masculine sweat. Some sort of body spray aroma filled his next desperate sip of breath.
“That’s right, Jazz, suck my cock. Show your man how much you love him.”
Jasper gazed up. Marcus was perfect in every way that should have mattered. Except he wasn’t Gudmunson, Jasper’s definition of a real man. Even the nectar leaking out of the man’s slit lacked the acrid taste of precome he remembered—and loved—from Gudmunson: a man he’d dreamed up; a character in a novel.
“Yeah, deeper,” Marcus ordered more than urged. “Like that…”
Jasper spit out Marcus’s cock and lowered for a taste of the man’s heavy balls. Though impressive in size and looseness, they, too, lacked the wildness of a real man’s set of stones, like Gudmunson’s, which were hairy and ripe with a perpetual scent of sweat. At least in his imagination, it seemed.
Marcus moaned and kicked up his legs, offering Jasper’s tongue access to the puckered knot at the center of a muscular pair of buttcheeks. The man’s ass matched the rest of his magnificent physique, but his hole lacked fur. Jasper hid his disappointment and licked, again tasting only the chemical mixture of body spray and soap.
A memory window attempted to inch wider in his mind’s eye: another man’s asshole, ringed in dark hair. Oh, how he’d feasted! Jasper’s tongue salivated. Marcus praised his work, and the window slammed shut.
Gudmunson, Jasper thought, and then ached.
All too soon, Marcus entered him, missionary style, perfunctory, safe. The position left Jasper unable to look away. He recorded the slap of the man’s balls, acknowledged the effectiveness of the cock inside him, rubbing his triggers and activating responses. But when they kissed, the attraction felt like someone else’s, an awkward fit. And when Jasper closed his eyes, it was Gudmunson’s face he climaxed to.
Marcus showered and dressed in a fresh summer V-neck and a pair of loose-fitting shorts made of some sort of breathable material. He then padded barefoot down the stairs to the kitchen and brewed coffee. “I’m going for a jog,” he said.
Jasper nodded and smiled, and made sure to accept the offer of a kiss when Marcus leaned closer. Marcus’s breath smelled of mint—the moment sex had ended, he’d jumped up to brush his teeth.
The front door closed. Again alone, Jasper’s eyes roamed the kitchen. He knew what he’d find behind cabinet doors: the perfect white plates and expensive crystal goblets. If he opened the fridge, there would be soymilk, heirloom tomatoes, a container of orange juice. Testing the theory, Jasper did, and all was as he imagined, no surprises.
He glanced out the French doors at the deck, pool and manicured gardens beyond the glass. Everything sat neat and perfectly orderly beneath a shower of August sunlight, the house and grounds a clear extension of Marcus.
Jasper located the den. Here, too, the walls were white, with a glass-top writing desk and bookshelves filled with stiff volumes. He took the chair at the desk and studied the stack of paper and pages lined up beside a tablet.
Jasper jabbed at the folders and bound-together documents until they were at odds with one another, a bit of clutter among the rigid uniformity within the house. The back of his hand jostled the tablet. Its screen lit. Text appeared, the latest pages of a novel.
Gudmunson took his hand, Jasper read. A strange sound filtered through the trees. The signal.
“Can you hear it?” Gudmunson asked.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“What does it say?”
The answer dangled, as yet unwritten. The screen called to him. Jasper set his fingers on the keyboard.
“It says, ‘I wish you were real, Tom Gudmunson,’” Jasper typed.
He glanced around at the house’s white interior and wondered if he, too, was a character in the novel. Perhaps he’d fallen off the empty page. Sighing, he deleted the words.
The door closed again. Jasper jumped up from the desk and greeted Marcus in the mudroom, just as he was kicking off his cross trainers. New ones, Jasper noted. A warm haze of perspiration hung about Marcus, but it smelled synthetic, of sunblock and deodorant more than actual male sweat.
“Hey,” Jasper said.
Marcus lifted the base of his T-shirt and mopped his brow. “Hey, yourself,” he said, and flashed a cocky smile.
They kissed, a sharp, brief peck that was mildly painful on Jasper’s lips. Marcus broke it and straightened. Jasper gazed at the handsome, perfect man before him and boldly reached up, groping the meaty fullness between Marcus’s legs.
“Hello,” Marcus said, and bucked his hips backward, denying Jasper’s touch. “I’m all sweaty.”
“I know,” Jasper said.
He tried again and got as far as slipping his fingers down the front of Marcus’s shorts, feeling up the other man’s cock and nuts. That Marcus had gone out free-balling added a layer of attraction.
Marcus shot him a look that telegraphed he was quickly growing impatient. “Maybe after I shower, Jazz.”
“Come on. I bet you smell so manly now, after your long jog…”
Marcus seized Jasper’s wrist. With very little effort, Jasper imagined that hand capable of bruising skin and breaking bones.
“Jazz,” he huffed.
Jasper released Marcus’s junk and surrendered. Marcus let go. Jasper pulled his hand out of the other man’s shorts. “Okay, I just thought…”
He backed a step away. Marcus matched him with a shuffle closer and smacked a kiss to the side of his face. Whatever interest Jasper had worked up evaporated.
“Give me a chance to clean up. Then I promise you that your husband’ll do you good. Real good.”
Marcus offered a tip of his chin, his gaze pure cool. Or evil. Jasper couldn’t be sure which. The other man strutted away, and the things he found so attractive on his imaginary mate—muscled butt, enormous bare feet, all of it—triggered an entirely different reaction than what should have been expected.
“You making any progress?”
Jasper pulled into a fetal curl on the bed and faced away from Marcus, toward the wall. “Huh?”
“In your new novel. Still blocked?”
Marcus’s blue eyes tracked him in the mirror. For a terrible moment, Jasper had the sense that the two eyes in the glass were actually two-dozen, two hundred. A thousand eyes had watched them fuck. An equal number of ears were listening.
“Yeah,” added Marcus. “You told me you hit a roadblock, right as they were listening to the signal.”
Jasper reached for the top sheet and pulled it up to his neck. He wanted to yank it over his head and hide. The slime of Marcus’s seed cooled on his chin. Jasper licked his lips. Tasteless.
“So,” Marcus pressed. “About your story…”
They dined by candlelight after Marcus put on an impressive performance in the kitchen—shaking his butt while he danced more than cooked, and attempted to seduce through the language of slices, chops and precise chiffonades. A salad made from the freshest produce from the gardens outside materialized, along with slices of lean beef roasted over an open flame. The wine was a deep claret color and, in the flickering glow of candles, reminded
Jasper of blood.
“Did you have a good day?” Marcus asked, his voice hypnotic. From the other side of the table, he didn’t seem to blink.
Jasper mouthed, “Yes.”
“Good, because taking care of all your needs is my biggest wish.”
His needs? Jasper thought about the vacuum that existed where his greatest lusts waited unfulfilled. He thought about Gudmunson, who was everything Marcus wasn’t, and his mind drifted.
“Something wrong?” Marcus asked, drawing him out of the clouds and back to the moment.
Jasper blinked. “No, just thinking.”
“About Gudmunson?”
“No,” Jasper lied.
“The signal? Did you figure out what it said?”
Their eyes connected through the candlelight, and cold fear slithered through Jasper’s guts. “The signal?” he repeated.
Marcus raised the expensive crystal goblet to his lips and sipped. “Sure. Isn’t that what’s got you blocked? The actual message.”
Blood. Jasper wondered how much of it had been spilled leading up to this moment by the stranger claiming to be his husband.
A summer breeze stirred the curtains, scattering teases of newly mowed lawn, pool chlorine and the flower gardens beneath the bedroom windows. A lazy chirrup of crickets played in counterpoint to the steady cadence of inhales and exhales from the other side of the bed.
Jasper always got tired after dinner, and had suspected he was being fed tranquilizers in the gourmet meals Marcus prepared.
Tonight, for whatever reason, sleep eluded him. His thoughts wandered out the window, into the balmy August night. For several strange seconds, he levitated outside the window and gazed in.
“I gave him half the usual dose,” Marcus said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Jasper focused. Something in the shape of a man was stretched out beside his body on the bed, maintaining an illusion of respiration. But Marcus stood at the bedroom door, his bare spine and buttocks partially illuminated in the glow of the clock radio. He faced another figure, unrecognizable in the darkness.
