by Amy Lane
“Not a problem,” he said and then pretended it was a shoot, turned toward the bed, and stripped. He was pulling his boxers on, his back to the open door, when he became aware of the absolute silence. He turned then, boxers just to his thighs, and saw that Jonah was staring at him appreciatively, mouth parted, tongue between his lips.
“I…,” Ethan said, knowing his whole body was blotching. He’d seen it on film—embarrassment, sex, and he blotched, ginormous continents of pink skin marking his body like a globe. He saw that Jonah’s eyes lingered on his chest and darted to his groin, and suddenly the semi he’d been sporting since Jonah tried to clean him up with towels became full-on wood, and his cock throbbed and bounced. “Uhm,” he said, letting out a shaking breath and pulling his shorts up. “This is really dumb. This is dumb, and I’m turning my back now, and you… you need to turn around too.”
“Like virgin girls at a sleepover?” Jonah asked.
Ethan knew he was trying to be bitter, but his voice was breathless and throaty, and Ethan’s boxer tent inflated a little more. “Uhm, Jonah, I’m sorry. I, you know, here, my pants. I need to put my pants on. Pants are a good way to keep this from happen—what are you doing?”
“I’m… wow. Can I touch that?” Jonah had dropped his jacket and moved right into Ethan’s personal space.
“My cock?” Ethan squeaked.
Jonah looked up, luminous gray eyes wide and dancing. “No, just your stomach. Do you wax?”
“Yeah, uhm, I, you know, occupational hazard.”
Jonah’s fingertips skated along Ethan’s lower abdomen, barely grazing his boxers. “I sort of like happy trails,” Jonah murmured, and he lifted up his sweatshirt to show a gentle strip of sand-colored hair dropping from his navel to the waistband of his jeans.
“Yeah, well, mine is more like a happy forest,” Ethan admitted, and then the hand on Ethan’s stomach flattened, rubbing in concentric circles across the ridges of Ethan’s abdomen. “Look, Jonah—”
Jonah dropped his own sweatshirt and held that hand up to Ethan’s mouth. “Yeah. You’re not good enough. You’ve slept with a thousand guys. You should stay away from me. That’s fine. But just tell me the truth? Am I doing this wrong? Does it feel good?”
He took the hand away from Ethan’s mouth and, using both hands, kneaded Ethan’s chest.
The sound Ethan made defied description. It was a moan and a breath and a sigh, and he closed his eyes and pressed Jonah’s traitorous hands flat against his chest to stop them from moving. “It feels great, Jonah. Look… I—I mean, I’m like a fuckin’ come pony, okay? You could make me shoot off from that alone. But… I mean, that doesn’t make me someone you want to touch!”
Jonah smiled luminously. “Really?” he asked. “You could come from that alone?” He put his nose in the hollow of Ethan’s neck, and Ethan shuddered hard enough for his muscles to clench. “That’s amazing.”
Ethan took a deep breath and a big step back. He let go of Jonah’s hands and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I’m not an amusement ride,” he said a little desperately.
Jonah shook his head, looking at Ethan with his head tilted down and his giant gray Disney cherub prince eyes peeking at him almost coyly from under a lowered brow. “No, Ethan. You’re a gorgeous man, and for some reason, you want to spend time with me. And you like it when I touch you. And you’re obviously… I don’t know… damaged somehow, but you keep trying to be really nice to me. I don’t know what you thought was going to happen, but what is happening is that I want to get to know you better!”
Ethan made a little whimper, because Jonah was right there, and Ethan was dying to touch him. “I am such an asshole,” he whispered. “I just… I just wanted some company, you know?”
“Well, yeah—isn’t that how romances happen?” Jonah advanced on him.
Ethan closed his eyes and sighed. Skin. God, he was so hungry for Jonah’s skin. “Didn’t we have this discussion in the car?” he said. “If I’m the Hulk—oh God—” Jonah was running reverent hands along the backs of his triceps, and the skin was so tender, it was like butterfly kisses on his cock. Just that touch made him lean toward the heat coming from Jonah’s body. He threw his head back against the wall instead and tried to finish his plot. “My flaw will bring you down,” he murmured, and Jonah kissed his neck, along his shoulders, his chest, every touch of his lips making Ethan buck harder against the hands restraining his arms.
“Mm….” And whatever the thought, it lost itself when Jonah closed his mouth over Ethan’s nipple and pulled.
“Omigod,” Ethan muttered. He tangled his hands in that lush, curly hair and pulled Jonah closer, and Jonah just kept suckling, playing with the little nub with his tongue and flirting with the fine edge of his teeth. “Omigod!”
He really did pull Jonah off then, because his cock was throbbing, and his boxers were wet. Jonah kissed his way down Ethan’s body slowly, using tongue, and when he pulled Ethan’s boxers down, all Ethan could do was knot his fingers in that curly hair, hold on, and whimper.
Jonah wrapped his hand around Ethan’s prick like a born cocksucker, and Ethan couldn’t even spare a brain cell for the professionalism of masturbating virgins. “Gungh… Jonah, you didn’t even—” Crap. He was tested before and after every shoot. He knew he was disease-free, but Jonah had no business putting that thing in his—
“Oh God.”
Jonah was careful of his teeth, almost too careful, because Ethan was used to sloppy, openmouthed blowjobs with an edge of roughness. That exquisite care, those soft lips, the clumsy tickle of the tongue—it almost teased him. But Jonah’s grip—he knew what he was doing.
“Oh God,” Ethan breathed, closing his eyes. His hands shook. He wanted to pinch his nipples, because they still tingled from Jonah’s mouth, but his hands were shaking, and the grip in Jonah’s hair was all he had.
Jonah pulled back and Ethan looked down.
“Good?” Jonah asked hopefully, and Ethan nodded and bent to wrap his hands around Jonah’s arms.
“You should get up,” he whispered. “It feels great, Jonah— but I—”
Jonah narrowed his eyes, and he opened his mouth and sucked Ethan’s cock right back in. It was big and wide enough to stretch his lips, and Ethan stroked Jonah’s hair back from his forehead, listening to him try to breathe around it. It felt so good, and Jonah… God, he wanted to do this, and Ethan wanted to be touched. He closed his eyes again, leaned back against the wall, and felt the joy of it, no rough fingers on his balls, no spit grope up his ass, just Jonah’s sweet mouth and his firm hand and the fact that it was Jonah, and Ethan liked him, and he thought Ethan was worth something, and he was touching him.
“Jonah!” Ethan pleaded. “God, Jonah, I’m going to come, baby, you gotta—”
Jonah lunged forward, taking Ethan all the way to the back of his throat, and sucked hard. Ethan roared, sobbed, and spilled needy, bitter come down Jonah’s throat.
He heard Jonah swallow deliberately, the gulping sound almost as hot as the feel of his throat working, and this time Ethan managed to pull him up. He slanted his mouth over Jonah’s, closing his eyes so he couldn’t see the look in his eyes, to know if it was worshipful or disappointed or worse. He just kissed him, wrapped one arm around his shoulders, and thrust the other down his pants. God, he knew this—reciprocation. Everybody on the set had to come; it was his duty. Jonah made a helpless, happy moan, and Ethan kept his eyes closed while he reached to his root and stroked up. He knew the taste of his own come, but he’d only tasted Jonah once, and the bitter musk of his own semen was odd, overwhelming, in Jonah’s mouth.
Jonah whimpered again, and Ethan remembered his skill, his tricks, porn-star standbys: stroking the frenulum, skating his thumb along the slick glans, teasing the slit with the edge of his finger. Jonah made a restless sound, and Ethan figured him for a more direct lover, which was awesome. He reached down farther, grabbed Jonah’s cock harder, stroked, firm, steady. Jonah’s body went
taut in his arm and his attention faded from his kiss as he bucked, bucked, groaned, and….
Ethan shuddered when the hot spill covered his hand. He missed the come shot, missed being able to see, missed having Jonah’s come on his face, in his mouth, even in his ass. He let Jonah pull away from the kiss and bury his trembling face in Ethan’s neck while Ethan pulled his hand from Jonah’s pants. Like a child sneaking candy, he wrapped his lips around the webbing between his thumb and forefinger and sucked the come off his hands.
When he opened his eyes, Jonah was looking at him, leaning back so he could focus. “How do I taste?” he asked shyly.
Ethan shuddered and sighed and kissed his forehead. “Sweet,” he whispered. “Too sweet for me.”
Jonah’s vision seemed to focus, and his look at Ethan had shadows in it. Ethan hated himself for putting them there.
“Here,” he said softly, helping Jonah sit down on the bed. “We need to clean up.”
First he pulled up his underwear, because his shit was flopping out, wet and semierect in the chilly air of the apartment. Then he went to the bathroom and got a cloth and came back and sat down next to Jonah. He wrapped an arm around his shoulders and very gently wiped off his mouth, where the glaze of come had escaped. Jonah watched him, wide-eyed, and he smiled a little.
“You swallowed really good,” Ethan said softly, wanting to compliment him but feeling stupid. Complimenting him on sex tricks—it felt… cheap. Or, well, professional. “You, you know, that was good. Here, uhm, take off your pants and I’ll wipe you, uhm, off.”
Jonah stood up and undid his fly. He wasn’t wearing a belt, but the jeans were snug against his ass, so he didn’t need to. He shoved his pants and undershorts down and turned around to Ethan almost defiantly. Ethan looked at him—he was still semierect as well, glistening with come. He wasn’t huge—maybe six and a half inches—but he was thick and perfectly straight, with a wide head.
Ethan closed his eyes, put the cloth down, and opened his mouth. Sucking very slowly, he pulled all of Jonah’s cock into his mouth until his lips rested at the very base and Jonah’s sand-colored hair tickled his nose. Just as deliberately, he pulled back, cleaning off all the remnants of Jonah’s orgasm and swallowing as he went. When he got to the tip, Jonah’s hands clenched in his hair, and his breathing was coming in quickly. Ethan thought they could probably spend all day here having sex, holding each other. He had so much to teach this boy, so many things they could do, and he could watch those gray eyes light up when they did each one.
He looked up at Jonah, at the open, guileless look in his eyes, and he quailed.
“You are really beautiful,” he said softly, pulling up Jonah’s pants over his newly reborn hard-on. “You are really beautiful, and I could touch you forever, but you are not for me.”
“But—”
Ethan shook his head and looked down at Jonah’s feet. He was still wearing tennis shoes. “I’m sorry, Jonah. I promised you comic books and dessert and a movie. I… I need to keep that promise, and then I need to take you home.”
Jonah combed his hands through Ethan’s hair, and Ethan leaned against his stomach. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I don’t have ‘whore’ tattooed on my ass, but I should. I need some better way to scare you off.” He looked up then, into Jonah’s puzzled face, and tried again. “You make choices sometimes, and you make them for the best reasons, like, like say you need food, and nobody’s feeding you, so you steal it. And you wouldn’t change that choice because you needed something—needed something, and you were shaking with needing it, but you gotta give up things, real good things, to take that choice. You can’t work in the town where you stole the food because they won’t hire you, and you can’t eat in good restaurants anymore because you stole the food and you don’t deserve to be there. So you get to live, because you have food, but you stole it, and that’s all there is to it. So this time with you, this is like stealing the food all over again. It’s real good food—maybe the best I ever had—but it’s stealing the food, because it’s not honest, and I’m going to have to be happy with just a little bit of food.”
Jonah kept stroking his hair back. Ethan thought that maybe he’d have to fix it in the mirror, and that was okay because it was something to think about besides how badly he wanted Jonah, how much he could touch him, just maul him, all over, wrap his arms around Jonah’s slender body and keep him.
“Ethan, you’re crying,” Jonah said softly. He wiped his thumbs under Ethan’s eyes, and suddenly the skin there was stinging.
Ethan stood up abruptly. “I gotta get new underwear,” he said, and then, keeping his back to Jonah, he walked to his drawer and did just that.
He kept his promise. They dressed in awkward silence, and he made sure Jonah was mostly to the door before he picked his jacket up off the floor. After that he took Jonah to the fudge factory in Old Town and to the comic-book store nearby. By the time they’d emerged from the fudge factory, both of them cramming chocolate and marshmallows in their mouths with terrible urgency, they’d regained some of their easiness. Ethan turned to Jonah, his cheeks full of chocolate, and crossed his eyes like a third grader, and Jonah held his hand in front of his mouth to keep from cracking up, and that set the tone for the rest of the day. They lingered in the comic-book store, bumping shoulders, looking at new issues. They found a stack of manga in the back, and Ethan bought an entire series of bishonen just for Amelia, so she could look at them with Jonah.
He handed Jonah the bag as they got into the car, and he drove to the movie theater, talking excitedly about Tom Hardy and how he got to go mainstream after doing gay porn, and how the guy should just ’fess up and admit he did it and liked it, even if he wasn’t gay.
Jonah grunted. “But how would you do that—get wood, come—if you were with a guy and you weren’t gay?”
Ethan shrugged. “Lots of guys do—I think their skin is just supersensitive. If you think about it, gay guys are with girls all the time. They have kids and their wives never know the difference. I mean, my first sex friend was a girl, and she came out last year, but, well, we were sort of lonely, and it was better with each other than no one at all.”
“Wait, so you had a girlfriend?” Jonah asked, fastening his gaze avidly on Ethan’s face.
Ethan shifted uncomfortably in his seat, wishing for the sculpted bucket of the really expensive car. “Yeah. She was real nice. She went away to college, and, you know, she brags she’s got Barbie with a six-inch tongue on her arm, but yeah.”
“But… but why not a boy?”
Ethan darted his eyes, feeling hunted. But, hell. He was about to dump Jonah not just as a romance but as a friend, and he owed him a painful truth, even if it wasn’t the painful truth, the big one that would make him hate Ethan worse than Ethan hated himself at the moment.
“I, well, I had a hope for one. We read Starfighter, and we were totally going to… I don’t know. Try it, that shit they were doing in the comic, but, you know, with lube and a lot more time. Anyway, he really spazzed out. And when he was done spazzing the fuck out, he came up for air with a girlfriend on his arm. And Ryane, she sort of consoled me, I guess, because it hurt, and then, when we thought, ‘Okay, this hurt, but we’re all okay,’ it turned out he wasn’t okay, not even a little, and he tried to kill himself.”
Jonah gasped, but Ethan couldn’t leave it there, because Brittany’s ending could so easily be forgotten. “His girlfriend—she was never the same. She like, OD’d in a back room while getting gangbanged by the basketball team or something. It… I mean, you don’t use people. Curtis tried a second time and almost succeeded. You… you just gotta not use people unless they know they’re being used, right? It… I mean, if you need something like, I don’t know, sex, or acceptance or whatever, you gotta take care of that shit yourself, and don’t hurt anyone to do it. That’s like… it’s like karma or the way to be a perfectly decent fucking human being, you know?”
“Yeah,�
�� Jonah said, and he had that tone that Dr. Uncle Stottemeyer used to have when he knew something but Ethan was too young to understand that he’d just revealed something really personal. “I get it, Ethan. I understand. Don’t worry. I understand.”
“What do you get?” Ethan said, not wanting to risk a look at him in traffic.
“I get that you’re going to dump me after the movie. Don’t worry about it. Hold my hand in the dark and we’ll pretend I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, okay?”
Ethan grunted. “You say that and I think you don’t really understand what that story was all about.”
“You say that and I think you might really not get that I’m not going to let you dump me that easy.”
“Jonah, there is no ‘dumping,’ okay? We had….” A good time? A blowjob and a hand job and a cleanup? Good conversation? “It was a, whatd’youcallit? An interlude. We had this really nice moment, and it’s going to….” Haunt him. It was going to haunt him for much longer than it took to wash the come off his boxers. “It was nice. I’m going to remember it. But that needs to be the end of it, okay?”
“Yeah, Ethan, you told me. So you can go bang guys you don’t care about and have ‘whore’ tattooed on your ass.”
“I care about them,” Ethan mumbled. “Not the way….” That I care about you! “Not that way. But they’re friends.”
“So I can’t even be your friend?”
“I don’t want to use you!” he snapped, and he wanted to curl up like a pill bug until the world scuttled him into the grass and forgot about him and he could go back to being brainless, a creature of his drives and nothing else.
“Yeah, Ethan. That’s what whores do—they push you away so they don’t hurt you.”
“Aw, man—just… just stop,” he begged.
Jonah did, just that easy. They sat in the car and listened to Kodaline wail plaintively about “All I Want,” and if Ethan wasn’t trying to dodge Sacramento traffic over the J Street Bridge, where people actively try to kill you, he would have turned that shit off. God. He was starting to identify more and more with Curtis and Chase, because sometimes life just fucking hurt that way, didn’t it?
