These Violent Delights

by Whitecroft, Jess

  “Yep.” I take up the jug and start pouring, a slow, thin stream. My hands are steady and I realize it’s been a while since I had an anxiety nightmare or found myself bouncing off the walls at eleven at night because I thought my heart was about to leap out of my chest. I think I might actually be relaxed.

  “Is he okay?” I ask, as Nicky slips out to the dining room.

  “Oh, yeah. He’s fine. You know us. We pick our battles. In this case he knows damn well I came down with altitude sickness in Colorado.”

  “Bull-shit,” Nicky singsongs through the partition, and I laugh, relieved. Otter’s right; it’s just them, but all the same I’d be sorry if they weren’t just them. I’ve known them for several years now, Nicky longer than Otter. Otter’s real name is Matt; he came along on a dating site and announced himself as a bear, only for Nicky to clock the five foot three Matt and insist he was maybe half a bear or a whole otter. Then as they got more into each other and Nicky found out what he did for a living he became - irresistibly - Otter the Potter, and the name stuck. I could never have survived the last year or so without them. Probably would have drank myself to death, or worse.

  “We’re dysfunctional,” says Otter, whisking happily. “But we make it work.”

  The jug empties. I set it down and take a sip of my drink.

  “Well?” he says.

  “Well, what?”

  “What’s going on with you?”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t play the innocent. You seem...different.”

  “I do?”

  “You do,” he says. “Perkier. More like your old self. Before...you know...everything.”

  “Hmm,” I say. “I didn’t realize.”

  I did. I realize all too well why I’m feeling better. Through the whole ordeal with Simon I learned that a lot of anxiety was about control and the loss of it, but that can’t be what’s making me feel so good. I have a brief flash memory of Milos, gasping with lust and surprise as he fucks between my folded thighs. Control? I’ve never been more out of it.

  “Have you seen Simon?” asks Otter.

  “I have, yes.”

  “And?”

  I drain my glass. Milos lingers in my head like the glare-shadow of the sun after you’ve looked up at it, despite being told not to. “I can’t remember my exact words,” I say. “But I think I told him to fuck off and leave me alone.”

  Nicky pokes his head around the door. “You did what?”

  “Exactly what I should have done six months ago,” I say. “He kept bugging me, asking for forgiveness or closure or some such drivel. I told him that if he felt bad then it was because he’d done a shitty, shitty thing and that I wasn’t about to absolve him of it.” Otter’s open mouth is a perfect circle. “What? Stop looking at me like that.”

  “I wasn’t. It’s just…wow, Tom. That sounds really…final.”

  “It was. It is. I’m done. It’s over.”

  “Yeah, but you know he’s brainwashed,” says Otter. “They have people that specialize in getting people out of cults–”

  Nicky snorts and I laugh. “You’re assuming I even want him kidnapped and deprogrammed, Otter.”

  “You don’t?”

  I shake my head. “Uh uh. I told you – I’m done. Besides, Simon isn’t some child whose parents took him to Jonestown to drink the poison Kool-Aid. He’s a grown man who made his own decisions, and one of those decisions was to exclude me from his life, because apparently the things we used to do in bed together make the Baby Jesus cry. And that’s fine. All I ask from him is consistency in his decision, because I’m over it. I’m moving on.”

  “Good for you, Tom,” says Nicky. “For what it’s worth I thought he was being an asshole. And it’s obviously doing you good; you look at least five years younger.”

  That’s the magic of getting laid. Gloriously, stickily, royally laid. As the old dirty joke goes, you’re as young as the lover you feel, and I’m feeling a twenty year old. In class today I thought my head would spontaneously combust with the heat of my blushes. When he’s not around, Milos rolls and sighs and stretches through my thoughts, tracking sense memories through my head like wet footprints through a house; a shudder, a stifled moan, the soft, furred weight of his balls in my hand or the crumpled look of his just-kissed mouth. In person the effect is three times as powerful; I had to stand behind my desk in case he so much as looked at me.

  I haven’t taken him up on his offer of watching him dance yet. Not sure I could handle a thing like that in public.

  He texts me after dinner, while we’re caught in one of those long, drawn out political conversations that feel so much like obligation in such interesting times as these. A simple message.

  RU busy?

  Sort of. Why?

  “…there needs to be an IQ test you have to fill out before they let you vote,” Nicky is saying. “Never mind age limits. Fucking brain limits.”

  “Yeah, but that would exclude like at least thirty per cent of the electorate.”

  “Exactly. Trump voters. Buh-bye. You have been found officially too dumb to vote. Sorry about it.”

  Otter glances over at me. “Tom?”

  “Hmm? Sorry? You were saying?”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Who’s that?”

  I hide the phone in my lap. “Nothing. What were we talking about? Trump voters?”

  “Nuh uh,” says Otter, giving Nicky a look. “I’m bored of politics. Seriously – the bitching feels pretty much reflexive at this point. And your thing looks way more interesting.”

  “Oh my God,” says Nicky, eyes widening. “Are you blushing?”

  I laugh. “Leave me alone.”

  The phone brrs again in my lap. I glance at it. Want some dirty pics? it says, along with a tongue emoji. God, no. Not now. Knowing Milos he’d probably send video, and he’s a groaner; he makes the kind of thrilling noises that are the reason why you always watch porn with headphones on whenever there’s someone else in the house.

  I quickly text back. I’d rather have you. I’ll be home in 30 minutes.

  Nicky is still staring at me. “Tho-mas,” he says. “Is that a booty call?”

  “That is absolutely none of your business,” I say, but I can’t keep the smile from my face.

  “Oh my God, it is, isn’t it?”

  “Leave him alone, Nicky. Let a man have some sordid secrets.”

  “Thank you, Otter. At least somebody gets it.”

  I really need to work on my poker face. I’ve been lecturing Milos up and down about the need for discretion but I’m not helping matters when I feel like a teenager every time he texts me. If I’m honest with myself I have to confess that the sneaking around only adds to the thrill, more so now that I’m more than a little stoned.

  I walk the few blocks home, to find Milos waiting behind the mature rosemary bush outside the front door. “Boo,” he says, looking so black-eyed and tempting in the dark that I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to smell roast lamb again without erotic associations. The smell of the herb wafts from the branches he’s disturbed.

  “Are you stalking me?” I say, as I turn the key in the door. We slip inside and Milos doesn’t even wait until the door is fully closed to peel off his t-shirt. He tosses it onto the floor and turns in my bedroom doorway, pants already halfway down his muscled white hips.

  “It’s not stalking if you want it,” he says, turning on the light and walking into the bedroom. I hear the bed creak as he bounces onto it and pick up his t-shirt in his wake, only to find his shoes and socks all over my bedroom floor. He’s in the middle of skinning off his jeans, yanking them off feet first, so that I get two lovely eyefuls of hard thighs and bum. He leans back on his elbows, knees apart and with his thick, eager cock already stirring to attention. His skin looks like pearl in the low light, and he’s smiling – that irresistible lopsided smile where he’s biting down on the corner of one lip with his diminutive little fang.

  I can hardly believe
he’s in my bed.

  “‘It’s not stalking if you want it’,” I say, mulling the words over in my head. “I have a terrible feeling that sentence has featured verbatim in a court case somewhere.”

  Milos’s smile turns into a grin, freeing the corner of his lip. “Shut up and kiss me,” he says, spreading his legs wider.

  I’ve eaten a huge amount of garlic, but he did ask. I crawl over him on the bed. His skin is chilled under my hands and I wonder how long he was waiting out there for me. Stalker. And yet it gives me a wrongheaded thrill. Isn’t that part of the excitement? The knowledge that – with a few well chosen words to the wrong people – he could do me immeasurable harm?

  He pushes his tongue into the kiss and draws back, but it turns out its not the garlic that bothers him. “Wait – have you been smoking?”

  “Yes, but not tobacco.”

  “No fucking way.” That’s one of the most delightful things about the very young; they think they’re shock proof, until you shock them. He tips me over onto the bed and crawls astride me, his cool fingers sliding under my shirt. “You’re a dark horse, you know that?”

  “Well, I try.”

  Milos shuffles down on his knees, working on my belt buckle. His eyes are liquid gold, his smile pure devilry. “What else have you got going on?” he says, lightly blowing on my exposed skin. I automatically tense; he hasn’t got to that yet. “That I don’t know about?”

  “Oh, you know. The usual schoolteacher side hustles. Meth lab. Chemical body disposal.”

  I hold my breath as he lowers his head. Is he trying to…oh, no. He manages to extract my cock from my pants, but he has this uncanny ability to stumble across my ticklish spots, and right now one of his hands is splayed with the fingers just millimeters from my lowest ribs. He plants a kiss on my navel and I know I should be into this but I’m stoned and giggly and that hand really isn’t helping matters.

  “You’re doing something interesting down there?”

  “I’m trying to.” He looks up, annoyed. “Tom, are you laughing?”

  “I’m trying not to. Honest. It’s just…I’m quite ticklish.”

  Milos’s scowl turns to a laugh. “Holy shit. How much did you smoke? You are buzzed.”

  “I know,” I say, fishing in my shirt pocket. “And you’re not. You should really catch up before we do anything else.”

  He stares open-mouthed at the blunt in my fingers and I roll over onto my side, reaching in the bedside drawer for the lighter and the ashtray. Milos – for once off balance – flops on his back on the bed beside me. I light up, hand it to him and set the ashtray on his chest.

  For once he’s speechless. I slide off the bed and start picking up the clothes he’s strewn all over my bedroom floor like a barbarian. Milos takes a couple of long drags and watches me, narrow eyed. “Okay,” he says. “Should I ask where you were tonight? Or is this going in a blue meth and bodies dissolved in plastic barrels direction?”

  “Dinner with friends,” I say, undoing my last remaining shirt buttons.

  “Friends or dealers?”

  “Stop asking questions and smoke that joint, will you?”

  Milos splutters, smoke shooting out of his nose. “Yeah, I’ll take ‘Things your college professor is never supposed to say to you’ for five hundred dollars, Alex.” He coughs, wheezes and half sits up. “Oh, fuck me…”

  “We’ll get to that,” I say, parting his thighs with my body as I crawl over him. “Trust me.”

  This time his kiss is as smoky as mine. He opens his mouth, his tongue soft and wet. His skin is warm now and he arches his back to press his body close to mine. Our kiss is deep and slow, the kind you can just fall into, and he feels the heat of it, too; he groans low in the back of his throat.

  “You are so fucking sexy when you’re high,” he says, as I sink lower, kissing his throat and his collarbones. When he’s naked like this I barely know where to begin with him. Everything is so tempting; everything demands to be kissed at once - his muscled belly, his strong thighs, the pink tips of his nipples and his swelled, straining cock. I want to lick him all over like a cat.

  I suck first on one nipple then the other, watching the thin stream of smoke stutter and waver as he shudders and exhales all at once. He’s already so hard in my hand that I can feel the tip wet under my thumb, and all I want to in that moment is taste him. I lower my head and lick, and he moans, his free hand coming down on my hair.

  “Stop,” he says. “No...stop.”

  I look up. “What? Why?”

  “Because. It makes me feel bad...no, not like that. I mean, it feels great, but I feel bad that I’m not...I’m not returning the favor.” Milos sighs. “I feel like...you know. Whatever the guy version of a pillow princess is.”

  I laugh and reach for the joint. “Where on earth did you hear that expression?” As far as I know he’s definitely not a lesbian.

  “Orange Is The New Black.”

  “Ah.” I eke out the last toke and grind it out in the ashtray, leaning over him to set it on the bedside table. “I don’t want you to do anything you feel uncomfortable with,” I say. “So handjobs it is, I suppose.”

  “No,” says Milos. “I don’t mean it like that. I want you to keep doing it, but I want to...” He turns pink in the lamplight and I swear it’s the sudden, touching bursts of shyness that get me more than anything. “I want to take a more active role. I just...I’m going to need some instructions. So far my entire life experience of delivering oral sex has been eating pussy – which, for the record – I am really, really good at.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “I’m just saying. I think I have a lot of potential.”

  Potential. Yes, he does. And more besides. I rest my forehead against his, afraid he’ll see in my eyes just how much he makes me feel already. And I mustn’t. I can’t. Sex is sex and this is fun, but am I really ready for that again? The drug is making me sentimental. His fingers tiptoe across my thigh and I feel the huff of his breath against my face as he begins to speak again.

  “Just...tell me where to start,” he says, as his fingers curl around me, his thumb stroking gently under the head. He touches me like I’m something exotic and all the more precious for its strangeness. “I want to be good at this.”

  “You are.” I put my hand over his, my cock still warm inside his loosely curled fist. I kiss his lips. “I have an idea.”

  “What?”

  I pull away and shift my legs underneath me so that we’re lying top to tails. He doesn’t get it immediately but I put my hand on his hip and draw closer, close enough to catch the sweet, musky scent of his pubic hair. I lean over and kiss the shaft of his cock and he lets out a short breath, his eyes glimmering with that mixture of lust and apprehension that makes me want him so very, very much.

  “Just copy what I do to you,” I say. “What could be easier?”

  Milos gives a nervous little laugh and moves on the bed, bringing his body close to mine and his head level with my dick. He puts his hand on my hip - in the exact corresponding position to mine on his - and I picture him in a studio somewhere grinding out those arabesques and attitudes one painstaking move at a time. Over and over until he gets it right. “Okay,” he says. “I’m ready.”

  I rub my thumb over his hipbone. He does the exact same thing to me, so that it comes back like an echo.

  Where do I even start? I try to remember my own first time, but it wasn’t a success; he went straight to humping my face and almost choked me. No, start slow. I lick him from root to tip, and as I do I feel him. His tongue, on me. Oh God. I’ve fantasized about this a hundred times, about looking down and seeing him with my cock in his mouth, his cheeks hollow, his lips red and his vivid tiger’s eyes full of a heat that makes me ache with wanting him. His tongue makes a liquid noise, and I quickly smother my own moan with his dick.

  Milos follows suit and takes me in, stroking the backs of my thighs as he mimics me, sliding his lips back and forth. He gro
ans deep in his throat, already improvising, his tongue flicking and swirling on each down stroke. I absolutely believe that he’s good at this; I imagine him wet-chinned and grinning between the thighs of some shuddering girl who he’s licked past the point of hypersensitivity, and the picture sets my fantasies spooling through my head. Milos moaning as I push inside. Milos bending me over the end of the bed, a red handprint stinging my arse as I stiffen further to the sound of his belt buckle opening. His cock slapping the backs of my thighs as he bends over to whisper in my ear – “I’m gonna eat your ass and then I’m gonna fuck it, okay?”

  Yes. God. I could come right now. He’s reading my body perfectly, every sigh and shiver. The wet, muffled noises he’s making are driving me insane. I wrap a hand around the base of his cock, squeezing gently the way I like it. His balls feel firm and tight and I’m sure mine feel the same to him; we’re a loop of endless pleasure, infinite lust. I feel his spit slide over my balls and moan around my mouthful, making him groan and shudder in turn. I can’t last much longer, but I can’t resist either; I have to know if he’ll do it. Spreading his thighs with my shoulder, I reach behind his balls, stroking and working my way to the edge of his arsehole. I tease the edge with my fingertip, circling slowly, making him buck into my mouth, almost gagging me. Is he going to do it?

  His hand squirms between my legs, and as he nudges them apart I can feel the moisture cooling there. He’s sloppy in the best kind of way and when he works a finger between my cheeks he finds me wet. Holy Christ, he’s going to do it. His finger is right on the hole, pushing almost imperceptibly. I gasp around his dick and I feel it sort of jolt in my mouth as – emboldened – he pushes with his fingertip and breaches me.

  And I’m done. I suck frantically as he moans around my spurting cock, his finger driving deep inside me. He’s hot on my tongue and then I pop out of his mouth with an obscene slurping sound as he howls his pleasure to the ceiling – “Oh fu-uck!” – and comes hard in my mouth.

  I lie quiet for a long moment, my face against his thigh and his fingertip receding, driven out by the contraction of my muscles. I’m tingling from arsehole to cock head, still pleasantly buzzed, and astonished by the success of our experiment.