The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 6

by Jakubowski Maxim

  “Never saw a guy get that kind of treatment . . .”

  “Did you see how ticklish his feet were? Jesus!”

  “Never saw a guy come like that, either. Fuckin’ puddles on the floor!”

  Drake tilted his head back against the wall, sighed, shuddered, and gave in to a few seconds of soft helpless laughter. When he opened his eyes again he found he was being cruised. A man leaned against the wall opposite him, a ruggedly handsome older man with a beard, an open shirt and a hairy chest. Under any other circumstances Drake would be interested, but for now he could only smile and shake his head ruefully: thanks, but no thanks. Still the man stayed where he was, openly studying Drake as though he were an anatomical chart. Drake tried to think of something to say, something not too unfriendly that would make it clear he wanted to be left alone. Before he could think of anything the other man spoke.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Somehow it was no surprise to hear that deep, raspy voice again . . . the voice of a tormentor. “Y-you,” Drake stammered, “you were the one . . . that made me talk to you . . .”

  “Ha! I did more than that. I started the whole thing!” The man’s brown eyes gleamed, teeth showed white above his black beard. “You were great.”

  Drake pressed back against the wall. He felt naked under that gaze. At the same time his cock, which had so recently been wrung dry several times, began to stiffen. The two looked at each other for a very long time until Drake finally said, “Wh-what do you want?”

  The man stepped forward, drawing a card from his hip pocket. It was the size of a business card, but it was a personal card, with the name Emmett D’Arcy and an address in the West Village.

  “Just look me up,” he said. “When you’re ready.”

  A few weeks later Drake showed up at Emmett’s apartment. It was on the eleventh floor of a high-rise off Eighth Street, more than a few notches above Drake’s funky East Village tenement. As he nodded to the doorman and announced himself, and as the doorman called Emmett’s number, Drake found himself wondering if Emmett had hot-and-cold-running men at his place. In which case Drake had already been marked as a trick. Normally confident, he wondered why that should bother him this time. His finger actually shook as he pressed the elevator button. His phone call to Emmett had been brief, Emmett saying only, “Be here at eight.” No mention of tickling. But as Drake began his ascent, startled by his own reflection in the elevator’s mirrored wall, he knew full well what he was doing: for the first time ever he was deliberately stepping into a situation where he could get tickled to death.

  And it didn’t take long, once they were seated on Emmett’s white sofa, once they had had a drink of Scotch. All of a sudden Emmett lunged, and Drake, who had been sitting half turned toward him, was easily caught off balance. He gave a shout, and then Emmett’s hands were everywhere, not only tickling but undressing him at the same time, so that before he knew it he was buck naked on the white carpet, screaming with laughter and begging for Emmett to stop.

  It didn’t take long, either, for Drake to discover that Emmett was also ticklish, and that he could freely take revenge on his tormentor. It was a new experience for Drake to tickle a man to feverish exhaustion. Recalling how Emmett had drilled his thumbs into his armpits, Drake learned the technique also, saw how he could make Emmett’s body go limp, his eyes roll upward, his jaw slacken as he panted deliriously. He also learned how to make Emmett scream by applying the bristles of a hairbrush to his lower back.

  They spent a year testing each other’s limits, mostly on weekends. Sometimes they would stay in Emmett’s apartment from Friday evening through Sunday night, naked the whole time, ordering in Chinese food when hunger overtook their desire to play. They grappled and stumbled and rolled through every room, from one end of the apartment to the other. Drake tickled Emmett’s ribs on the dining room table while Emmett’s feet kicked over half-empty cartons of Kung Pao Chicken and Beef Broccoli. In the kitchen, Emmett learned which gourmet utensils worked best on Drake’s feet. When they tired of all the other places, they tumbled into Emmett’s extra large bathtub and literally tickled the piss out of each other.

  The joys of bondage soon followed. Drake suggested it first, remembering how Rodney Cole had tied his wrists and ankles. Emmett balked, till Drake reminded him of how, in that back room in the basement of the porno theater, he had been as good as bound, kept immobile by many strong hands. Emmett owed it to him to at least give it a try. And so their mutual torture reached another level, and another and another, as they learned the most ingenious ways of rendering each other helpless and vulnerable. The bondage naturally led to role-play – the interrogator and the spy, the leatherman and the delivery boy, the older brother (Emmett) making his younger brother suffer for telling a secret.

  The sex that they had, jacking or sucking each other off, was great, but it was the tickling that they took to greater and greater extremes, till there was nothing they would not do to each other to slake their thirst for stimulation. On a Monday morning Drake would move trancelike through his day at the bank, where he was now an Assistant Vice President, his head filled with images of the night before – how, for example, he had hung by his wrists from Emmett’s ceiling, naked and gagged and blindfolded, while a vibrating butt plug threatened to split his ass open and Emmett tickled his dickhead with a felt-tip pen in one hand and a camel’s-hair brush in the other. This was Emmett’s favorite game, and he could spend hours at it. With the felt-tip pen he wrote multi-volume novels on Drake’s knob; with the brush he re-created an impressionist’s entire life’s work, paying special attention to the piss-slit and rim of that German helmet.

  Though he always craved being tickled, no matter how excruciating it was, Drake also couldn’t get enough of tickling Emmett. He saw their relationship stretch on for many years to come, as they found more and more outrageous ways to violate each other’s ticklish skin. Strange as it was, he also felt he was in a relationship that many men could only dream about.

  Then, one night, it was over.

  The two of them were having dinner in a restaurant on Second Avenue near Twelfth Street. It was something of an upscale restaurant – for that neighborhood, anyway – with modern décor, lots of pastel colors and intimate lighting, and it had become one of their favorites. It was to be a typical Friday night, Drake filled with relief that the work week was over, and looking forward to releasing his tension through screams of laughter.

  But everything changed when Emmett leaned over the table, nearly upsetting his wine, to say, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

  “Okay.” Drake was glad to listen.

  “I’m leaving New York.”

  Drake looked Emmett in the eyes. After a few seconds he realized he was holding his breath. Forcing himself to relax, he asked, “You mean, you’re going on a trip?”

  “No. Not a round trip, anyway.” Emmett seemed to be receding, part of him shutting down, leaving Drake alone already. “As you know, I’ve been very unhappy.”

  No, Drake had not known that Emmett had been unhappy. How could he have known? They never really talked about anything but bondage and tickling. And that, according to Emmett, was part of the problem. Who were they kidding – they didn’t really have a “relationship” at all, there was nothing between them beyond the physical. Well, Drake wondered, what was wrong with that, as long as they were both enjoying it so much? It wasn’t just that, Emmett explained. He had grown tired of living in New York, period. So he had arranged with the head office of his corporation for a transfer to the West Coast. It would be a step up for him. A great opportunity: a chance to start over.

  Drake just stared at Emmett – at this hot, sexy guy who had made so many of his fantasies come true, who had helped him discover new fantasies, new intensities of feeling. He had been staring openmouthed at Emmett for so long that his throat was dry; he took a sip of white wine, but it tasted bitter now. “You mean, it’s over between us?”

  Look
ing back, he would see how stupid that must have sounded. Of course it was over, had been over for some time, Emmett had just been going through the motions. And Drake, who had been so busy being tickled into a hundred different states of consciousness, had never noticed.

  He folded his napkin, placed it beside his plate, got up and left the restaurant. He would never go there again, though he would pass by the place many times and feel a chill each time he saw its name. The place was called Tempus Fugit.

  He wanted to see Emmett at least one more time before his departure, but it was no use. Emmett wouldn’t even talk on the phone. Finally Drake was so desperate that he sneaked into Emmett’s building, taking advantage of a shift change at the front desk, and made it to the elevator and up to Emmett’s floor. But something had gone wrong. Either Emmett had had to leave earlier than expected, or had given Drake the wrong date in the first place; the apartment was empty, the door was open and the white carpeting which Drake had known so well was being cleaned. Drake backed down the hallway, turned when he heard a door opening behind him. The neighboring apartment had been owned by a gay couple, whose raised eyebrows and knowing smiles Drake had encountered many times: apparently some of the sounds issuing from Emmett’s apartment weren’t lost on them. But they no longer lived there either, and the man who opened the door to pick up a small package on the mat looked unfamiliar. For a split second that didn’t matter to Drake, he was so close to just walking up to this disheveled-looking stranger in a blue bathrobe and asking, Hey, will you tickle me? He saw it happening in his mind, saw how easy it would be. He would take his shirt off in the hallway, clasp his hands behind his head, expose his ribs and armpits. Go ahead. Make me feel it. Give me a rush. Go crazy. He actually took a few steps in that direction until the man, package in hand, frowned at him, then shut the door.

  I’m lost, Drake thought. I’m lost; I’m lost.

  “So that’s my story.”

  Drake had calmed down a bit while telling Nick about his “tickling life”, even if Nick’s stare from across the table had made him a little self-conscious. Now he was relieved to stop talking for a while. The waiter set a fresh beer in front of him.

  “Very interesting,” Nick said. “That’s not the whole story, though. You’ve been active since then.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. I’ve met a number of guys through the ads. Had some wild times.” Just the thought of some of the things he had been through sent a shiver up his spine. “I think I’ve got nine lives, like a cat. And yet . . . I keep looking for something more prolonged. More intense.”

  “Ever since Emmett you’ve been strictly a bottom?”

  “That’s right. I can’t really say why. It’s just . . .” Drake shrugged. “I just really want it. Even though I can’t stand it.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Nick said. He pulled some bills from his wallet, threw them on the table. He nodded toward the small canvas bag by Drake’s chair. “Is that all you brought with you?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, you won’t need many clothes. In fact, you won’t need any.”

  Most of Nick’s walls were covered with his paintings, and they made an instant impression on Drake as he stepped into the huge studio. All of the paintings were of men – specifically, naked male torsos. No heads, no arms, just a multitude of well-developed chests and abs in all sizes and colors. There was nothing conventional about them, though. They were torsos caught in motion, twisting and stretching, muscles strained to the limit. It didn’t take Drake long to realize that they represented the bodies of men under torture. As he stared, open-mouthed, Nick laughed.

  “I’ve got a freshly stretched canvas with your name on it,” he said.

  They moved on to where, Drake was told, he would be staying. It was a room partitioned off from the rest of the loft, but still a huge room, with a skylight that brilliantly illuminated its furnishings: various tables, platforms and racks, a half dozen St Andrew’s crosses tilting toward the floor at different angles, a chair that might have come from a dentist’s office. One wall was perforated with hooks that held every kind of restraining device.

  “Everything but a bed,” Drake said.

  “Oh, you won’t need one of those. You’ll be much too busy.”

  There was a bed, though, or at least a cot, in what Nick called the Recovery Room. One of the few rooms in the loft with its own four walls and ceiling, it had originally been a large darkroom, back when Nick had gone through a phase of sketching and painting from photographs. (By now, he explained to Drake, he always worked from memory, having become a genius at memorizing a man’s body, right down to the number of hairs on each nipple.) When Nick had redone the darkroom as the Recovery Room he had installed a cot and added a toilet, sink and shower – complete slave quarters.

  After the brief tour they returned to the Torture Chamber, where Nick’s first order to Drake was to strip naked. “And make it fast! We got a lot of work to do!”

  Drake thought, I’ll never get out of here alive.

  Drake was in the Recovery Room when another man from his past appeared: Emmett D’Arcy.

  “Well,” Drake whispered, “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  “Why would you think that?” Like Carter, Emmett was also naked. “I’ve never stopped thinking about you.”

  “Huh!” Drake turned his head to the side. He may have slept for a while, or maybe not. When he looked up again Emmett was still there. “So what do you want?”

  “I just want to say that I’m sorry.” Emmett stepped forward gingerly, as if the floor were cold on his bare feet. “I’m sorry I left when I did.”

  “You went to California, just like Carter. I see a pattern here.” Drake tried to turn over onto his side, but his ribs were sore; he tried lying on his belly, but his belly was too ticklish now, it couldn’t take contact with anything, not even a sheet. So he rolled over onto his back again.

  “I’ve missed you, though,” Emmett said. “In particular I’ve missed your laughing, screaming, and begging. I still fantasize about tickling you to death.”

  Drake chuckled again. “Well, your fantasy’s coming true, only it’s not your fantasy anymore, it’s Nick’s.”

  Emmett came closer. His cock was painfully erect, begging to be touched. “That guy is something else. He’s a fucking genius.”

  “Ha! Some genius . . . I won’t last a month in this fucking place.”

  “Well, you’ve already been here a month, but I can see where you’d lose all track of time. You’ve been so . . . busy.” With that Emmett wiggled his fingers at Drake, and Drake laughed. His laughter, even his chuckling of a moment before, had a different kind of sound now, at least to him. It sounded just a little . . . depraved. More than a little crazy. Something like Nick’s own laughter.

  “I don’t suppose,” Drake asked, “that you could . . . get him to stop? Just for a day or so? Let me catch my breath?” He held out his hand, which passed right through Emmett’s image.

  “Oh, hell, no.” Emmett said. “Sorry, Drake, but I’m having such a good time, watching. I like seeing everything Nick does to you, because to tell you the truth, I’d like to tickle you myself right now.”

  “Greedy spirit,” Drake said. “I think you’re actually drooling.”

  Emmett wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Believe me, Drake,” he said, “if I ever get my hands on you again, I’m never letting go.”

  Drake was in a kind of elevated sling, on his belly, his wrists and ankles chained together. For the past couple of hours Nick had been tickling his asshole and scrotum. Among many other tools he had some long, delicate wires, extremely supple, that were excellent for this kind of detail work. For the past hour at least Nick had been wearing his hearing protectors, Drake’s screaming was even louder than usual.

  Finally Nick decided to rest for a minute. He took the earmuffs off. Drake had stopped screaming and was panting heavily.

  “You know,” Nick said, “I’v
e got a problem.”

  Drake knew what he had to say. His voice, when he finally found it, was no more than a croak. “Yes, Master? What is it?”

  “Well, you see, I’ve been wanting to tickle you till my heart’s content. But even though I’ve just about tickled the last living drop of shit out of you, my heart’s not content. I must have a very big heart, don’t you agree?”

  With all his strength Drake summoned his voice again. “Yes, Sir.”

  “What I’m going to do,” Nick said, “is invite a couple of friends over. Young guys. Hispanic. Real fucking maniacs. The kind who don’t know when to stop, if you know what I mean. Straight guys, but they’ll do anything to get their rocks off.”

  Drake’s thin, reedy voice trembled. “Yes, Sir. Whatever you say, Sir.”

  Raul and Pedro showed up sometime later. It might have been noon, or it might have been the middle of the night. Drake, who was stretched on the rack, wouldn’t know. All that Nick had allowed him to know, for at least the past several hours, was the terrain of his own ribs. It was frightening terrain, with peaks and valleys of excruciating tenderness, vulnerable to many, many different kinds of assault. Drake thought, insofar as he was able to think, that he would never make it through this parched land, his ribs were like the rippling sand dunes of the desert, a desert without end.

  Then Nick showed mercy, just for a minute. Or maybe he was just answering the door. Suddenly there were other voices in the loft, out in the studio. The visitors were so loud Drake guessed they were drunk, or high, or both. Then again it was hard to tell about voices, his own screaming had impaired his hearing.

  “How’s it hangin’?”

  “Great to see you, man. You look fucking great.”

  “Where’s Juan?” Nick asked. “I haven’t seen him lately.”

  The two newcomers collapsed in a fit of giggles. “Oh yeah . . . Juan!”

  “Hee-hee-hee . . . it’s not funny, really, but – hee hee . . .”

  “You see, man, Juan, he’s in the hospital.”