by Rob Rosen
The words of Claudius II Gothicus, signed this day, in the calends Novembribus, the second year of our reign
THE HEALING
Richard Michaels
The bar that night was more than dark; it was murky.
Even though the entrance was at street level, I felt, as I stood at the front door, as if I were looking down a long flight of stairs that didn’t end but dissolved into a swirling blackness. From the inky eddies came a hum, changing patterns, pitch, density with the ebb and flow of the dimness below me, in front of me, around me.
The closing door striking my back jarred me from my contemplation, and I waited until my eyes could adjust before I dared move into the room without falling down the stairs that weren’t there.
Then the whorls began to coalesce into two points, as if a pair of magnetic fields were drawing their surroundings into opposing spheres of influence. These two polarities seemed to be pulling the light toward them, leaving the rest of the bar in obscurity.
I was at the point of a triangle, and at its base were the two whirlpools, and in the middle of each pool stood a man, the rest of the bar fading into the blackness.
The man to my right was dressed in leather pants, a leather vest and boots. Half covered by a brown biker’s cap, his black hair was shaggy. He stood with his back to the bar, leaning on it with both elbows. The open vest revealed a sleek and shiny chest accented by the twin circles of his nipples. As I stared at him, he hooked the heel of one boot behind him over the railing around the bottom of the bar, the leather pants glistening over the bulge of his cock. When I again looked at his face, he was smiling, not a smile of welcome or interest but of supreme self-confidence; he knew he was good looking, and he knew his body was hard and firm, and he knew the swelling in his leather pants was enticing.
Around the curve of the bar, to my left, the second man sat gazing into his drink. As my eyes moved to him, he swiveled his head slightly in my direction so that he was regarding a point farther along the bar, an acknowledgment of my presence even though he wasn’t looking directly at me. He wore a plaid shirt and jeans and cowboy boots. His hair was light brown, and even from a distance and even in the shadows, I could see flecks of gray. He was probably in his late forties, twenty years or so older than the man in leather and I.
The magnetism of these two men pulled me toward them, and, not entirely of my own volition, I moved forward, down the illusory stairs, descending into the swish and swirl of the bar. I took no notice of what or whom I passed.
It seemed a long time, as if I were moving in slow motion, before I arrived at the bar. I stood halfway between the two men and ordered a beer from the bartender.
Under most circumstances, I would have approached the man on my right. I sensed him next to me, hot, like an animal in his leather, his sex straining against his pants, his eyes glowing with the promise of unrestrained carnality.
But even as I began to turn toward him, even as I opened my mouth to speak my lines in the ritual, I turned instead to the man on the left, who, after a few seconds of gazing down as if reading some message in the scars and incrustations on the wood, looked up at me.
Knowing that I must appear slightly dim-witted with my mouth open, holding my beer in my upraised hand, I was still unable to recover my poise, so entranced was I by his eyes. Entranced—like someone in a foolish romance novel—and yet that is indeed what I was, mesmerized by the velvet depths.
For a moment, or for longer, or for just a few seconds, we stared at each other. After I had recovered at least part of my equilibrium, I struggled to find something to say that would have at least a modicum of coherence, and I struggled, and I struggled some more, and all the while, however long or short that while was, he regarded me calmly, as if he were willing to wait indefinitely. At last, I said, “Hello,” in a voice that sounded to me not the least like my own.
“Hello,” he said. “I was hoping you’d join me.”
His voice was low, and yet every word was audible, and his statement sounded not like one of those inane things you say to a stranger at the bar as you prepare to ask him to go home with you, but like something he really meant.
“Yes, I saw you, too,” I said, realizing that I couldn’t tell him that when I walked across the floor, I hadn’t been interested in him. He smiled, slightly, as if he were aware that I’d really intended to approach the man in leather, that it was still odd to me that I was talking to him and not to the other man.
“My name’s Paul,” he said, holding out his hand.
“I’m Kevin,” I said, glad for something to say that didn’t require contemplation and planning, and I shook his hand.
He took a drink from his glass, and I took a sip of my beer, and we stood for a while not speaking. It seemed oddly companionable, this silence, or rather this relative silence, this island of silence in the midst of a stream of noise from the other men in the bar and from the syncopated mutterings of the jukebox, as though we were old friends who had arrived at the end of one piece of conversation and were gathering our thoughts before we began another topic.
As we started to talk, I studied him. His face was not ostentatiously handsome, like the face of the man in leather, but quietly attractive, just as something about his voice was quietly authoritative, just as something was quietly intriguing about the way his clothes fit him, about the grace of his movements, about his aura of subtle assurance.
And I thought, as I studied him, that I knew him, or someone very much like him—or maybe he was someone I ought to know.
After we’d been talking for a while, a comfortable exchange of ideas about nothing of any particular import, he said, “It’s a little difficult to carry on a conversation in this noise.” I looked around, a bit surprised that there were indeed other people here and that, yes, there was noise, a noise that I’d filtered out as I’d listened to him.
He looked at me as if expecting a response, and when it was obvious that he wasn’t going to get any, he smiled slightly again, and he said, “Could we go somewhere else to talk?”
“Oh—sure,” I said.
“I live close by. We can go to my apartment. If you want to.”
“Oh—sure,” I repeated. “I want to.”
“Good,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He led the way through the clusters of conversing men toward the front door of the bar. I thought it was peculiar that even though I had seemed to descend stairs when I came in, I seemed to descend stairs when I left, as if when I exited I entered a lower level of something, as if this night were multitiered, and I suddenly felt uneasy. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs that weren’t there, stopped just inside the front door while Paul waited outside, waited without saying anything, as if my uncertainty were quite normal, quite expected. Finally, I mentally shook myself, shook off this unexplainable reserve, and stepped out into the night.
I felt as if I were at a point of departure, but from where and to what I had no idea.
We walked about three blocks before reaching his apartment building, and as we walked, we talked about inconsequential matters, again in the manner of friends who chatter amiably about nothing in particular. And yet I was nervous, and I didn’t know why, which somehow made me more nervous. Everything seemed slightly out of focus, as if I were watching a 3-D movie without the glasses.
When we came to his building, he said, “Here we are.” We went up two flights of stairs—I know we went up, but once more I had the curious sensation of going down flights of stairs—curiouser and curiouser it all became—and then we were in his apartment.
Everything in his living room looked as if it had been carefully chosen: the furniture, the pictures on the wall, the magazines on the coffee table. The room was like the man: economical.
We sat on the sofa. He sat beside me, his leg touching mine. I felt a jolt of sexual electricity even greater than what I’d felt looking at the leatherman’s feline allure, and I glanced at Paul’s face. He’d turned on only one li
ght, a table lamp, and so we sat in shadows, but even in those shadows I could see more clearly the lines around his eyes and mouth and the flecks of gray in his hair. I didn’t know why the lines and the gray made him more attractive—I had never before found the signs of age and experience particularly appealing—but in this case, they drew me to him even more.
“You look a little tense,” he said, and I thought that his comment was a small masterpiece of understatement. I was tense; my stomach and my crotch both ached; the tension in one made it impossible for the tension in the other to bloom into full hardness.
“Turn around,” he said, and when I did, he began to massage my shoulders. He found a knot at the base of my neck, and he kneaded it with his fingers. Involuntarily, I moaned with pleasure. I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to his ministrations, and I began to feel the stress slipping away. “That’s better, isn’t it?” he asked, and I moaned again in assent.
After a few minutes, after the knot in my neck had dissolved, he said, “Lie down,” his hands gently pushing me until my head was in his lap. He rested one hand on my shoulder, and I put my hand on top of his, my warm hand on top of his comforting hand, and we remained that way for some time, as if we were familiar friends sharing this quiet moment of intimacy.
Then he unbuttoned my shirt and with his finger traced a line from my neck down to my navel and two-thirds of the way back up, detouring to circle each of my nipples. He repeated his journey, and although his finger was cool, the route he traced was warm, and the warmth spread through me, spread down to my groin, and my cock grew hard, and his cock pushed against the back of my head lying in his lap.
“Sit up,” he said, and I did. He held my face between his hands and stared into my eyes as if he were searching for the answer to some question, some important question, and he nodded as if he had received the answer from my quivering silence, and he kissed me. The kiss was sexual approach and camaraderie and exploration; it was at once strange and familiar. He held me in his arms tightly, and I felt as if I were anchored.
“Take off your shirt,” he said, releasing me, and he started to unbutton his own.
I hesitated, watching my anchor float away. Getting undressed in front of another man has always rendered me more vulnerable than I care to be. My naked body is defenseless; it reveals so much—how I regard myself, how I regard the person with me. Standing exposed before a friend or lover is difficult enough; stripping off the layers of protection before a stranger, even a familiar stranger, seems folly, seems to be inviting disaster.
Paul appeared to have no reservations; he slipped off his shirt and let it fall to the floor. His torso was slender, topped by a thatch of hair almost entirely gray. His stomach was flat.
He waited while I summoned the courage to begin my disrobing.
I removed my shirt, folded it and carefully laid it across the back of the sofa.
Paul sat down in a chair and took off his boots. Then he unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his jeans, slid them down over his slim hips to the floor and casually kicked them away to join his shirt. He leaned back in the chair, as if we were playing follow the leader and it was my turn.
I reached down to take off my slip-on shoes. After I had aligned them by the sofa, I unzipped my pants and stepped out of them. I made sure that they were placed neatly on the back of the sofa beside my shirt before I turned around.
Paul had stood up again. He took off his boxer shorts and added them to the mound of clothing on the floor. His bush had not even a touch of gray; it was brown and luxuriant. As he straightened up, his hard cock bounced and pointed at me.
I wished that my dick were as enthusiastic. Hidden, it had responded to the attraction I felt toward Paul. Now, out in the open, it bowed its head as I reluctantly removed my cotton briefs and put them with the rest of my clothes, fiddling with them as long as I could before I turned to face him with proof of my inability to properly respond.
I expected to see in his face something like amusement or possibly disdain or even contempt. But all I saw was something more like a sympathetic understanding. He held out his arms, widely open, and I went to him and was enfolded.
“Do you trust me?” he asked, softly.
“Yes,” I said. I said, “Yes,” and I did, I did trust him. I trusted him to not harm me, to understand and respect my limits, whatever they might be. I trusted him to kindly treat my fears and inadequacies.
And if I trusted him, which I did, why was I continuing to act like a dewy-eyed beginner at the vagaries of sex; why was I acting as though I were some neophyte who had to be coddled and cajoled to at last surrender his virginity? My virginity had been surrendered a long while ago, and I had observed its loss many, many times.
“What do you want?” he whispered into my ear. I thought for a moment that he was asking what I wanted sexually, what would engage me and my reluctant cock, what would cause us both to rise to the occasion.
“I want—” I whispered back, and then I stopped, because I couldn’t think of what he might do to excite me; it wasn’t his fault, it was mine. His cock wasn’t a magic wand that could wave away the acquisitions of a lifetime.
“You want to be safe,” he said. I could only nod speechlessly into his shoulder, because I knew that he meant safe from sexual ravages. I believed that I was, naive as a part of my mind thought that belief to be, and I knew that he also meant something else. “You want to be secure. You want to be protected.”
“Yes, yes,” I said into his shoulder, into his steady shoulder. “You are,” he said. “You are.”
He drew away from me, holding my hands in his cool, cool hands, and he looked at me, looked deeply into my eyes.
“You are,” he repeated, and I believed him.
Deliberately, he put the condom over his prick, guarding me against possible damage, guarding himself, guarding us.
Then he turned me around so that my back was to him, and he said, again, “You are.”
He put his right hand over my shoulder and across my chest, and he pressed his body to mine, and he whispered, “You are.”
When he entered me, there was not the pain I had felt all of the times I had been fucked; there was no discomfort, no intrusion. Rather, there was a sense of completion, as if somewhere, at some time, part of me had been omitted, had been removed, and now it had been returned to me.
For a moment, he remained fully inside me, and I felt the heat of his cock spreading through me like the warmth of a summer night, and then he began to move, and each time he withdrew and plummeted into me, he went farther—not farther into my body but farther into some essential realm of me.
At each thrust, my cock grew harder, until it was standing straight out from my crotch, as if it were an extension of his cock, sharing its ardor.
I was a kaleidoscope, and each thrust of his cock spun the bits of glass into a new picture. He increased his tempo, and the bits of glass flew like birds, and some of the pictures they formed I recognized, and some of the pictures they formed I did not, pictures of the past and pictures of the present and pictures of the future and pictures that were from no country I recognized and pictures that were from terrain terribly familiar.
His cock sheared into me, and he held me tightly, and I clung to his arm with both hands so that I could not spin away like the bits of glass, even though at some of the pictures I would gladly have done so. Inside me there was a fervor building, an intensity. As he drove me forward with his force, as he pulled me backward with his strength, my cock became painfully rigid. This was not just a sexual fire, as his cock seared me, but an emotional whirlwind, racking me in ecstasy and despair.
His breath became louder and my breath joined his in concert as we both struggled toward consummation. His hips slammed against me and his cock blazed into me, driving me to an orgasmic height I had never before attained.
And I came, I came crying, my chest heaving, tears running down my face and a river of balm and fire flowing from my heaving cock.<
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I shouted in exultation and in rage and in sorrow and in fear and in triumph. At last, the storm abated. The seas receded. Paul and I stood locked together. I leaned back against him, passion spent.
When he withdrew his cock and turned me to face him, I had a moment of panic. Would this night, as had so many others, dissolve like a fanciful dream? After I had achieved such heights, would I now tumble back into the valley, into the dreaded familiar?
He held both my hands. He looked steadily at me. His voice was strong and firm.
“Now we can begin,” he said.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JONATHAN ASCHE (jonathanasche.com) has published work in numerous anthologies, including Sweat: Gay Jock Erotica and Wild Boys. He is also the author of the erotic novels Mindjacker and Moneyshots, and the short story collection Kept Men. He lives in Atlanta with his husband Tomé.
EVEY BRETT (eveybrett.wordpress.com) is a queer writer who lives in southern Arizona—home of some of the first vaqueros and cattle ranches in the New World—and has a horse, cowboy hat and boots. She’s published numerous stories with Cleis Press, Lethe Press, Loose Id and elsewhere.
DALE CHASE (dalechasestrokes.com) has written male erotica for seventeen years with stories published in numerous magazines, anthologies and collections. She has two erotic western novels in print. Her latest book is Hot Copy: Classic Gay Erotica from the Magazine Era, from Lethe Press. Chase lives near San Francisco.
NICK DI TIEMPO is a fourth-generation Italian from Bay Ridge, New York. He grew up Catholic, with an abiding interest in the lives of the saints. The bones of his story about Valentinius are history, the meat interpolation. He still lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan.
