Men in Love: M/M Romance

by Jerry L. Wheeler

  Terence grunted his approval, squirming toward Joey’s tongue as Joey feasted on him like a starving man at a patisserie. They shifted into a sixty-nine so both could have their just desserts. As Terence’s tongue worked him open, shocks of arousal spread from Joey’s asshole to his dick, then up his spine to his nipples, and further until Joey’s scalp and toes tingled. He wrapped his hand around Terence’s heavy cock, felt its breadth and weight, longed for it inside him.

  “Fuck me,” Joey panted. “Please.”

  “Did I hear that right?” Terence slid a finger into Joey’s spit-slicked hole. “Did you just say ‘please’?”

  “I’ll say anything you want if you put your dick inside my—yessss,” Joey hissed as Terence stroked his prostate.

  “Hmm. Then say I’m a better baker than you.”

  Joey bit his lip. What had he gotten himself into? Still, he really would do anything for that dick. He’d wanted it since he’d first laid eyes on Terence, that much was clear to him now. “You’re a better baker,” he grunted, “but only because you’ve got seventeen years on me.”

  “Good enough.” Terence smirked as he worked another finger in.

  Joey’s mind flooded with images of long crullers sliding in and out of donut holes. He reached for the condoms and lube in his bedside drawer, jellying up Terence’s dick like the inside of a Swiss roll, then flopping stomach-first onto the bed, his legs spread wide.

  “Uh-uh.” Terence’s hands were warm on Joey’s hips as he flipped him over. “Face-to-face. I need to kiss you.” He crashed into Joey’s mouth as hard as they’d done back in the studio, teeth making contact almost as soon as lips. Joey didn’t know if he was being devoured or the one doing the devouring. He didn’t care. He was happy to be both pastry and chef, dessert and diner.

  Terence drove hot and thick inside him, stretching Joey just right. He fluttered his blue eyes as Joey clenched his ass. “Damn you, kid,” he grunted, and kissed Joey even harder this time.

  They fucked and fucked. Joey was dough, and Terence the hands that pounded and shaped it, working Joey at a relentless rhythm, pulling him apart and pushing him back together into something stronger than he was before.

  Joey looked down between their bodies, watched the muscles of Terence’s abs and arms ripple and his own hard cock bounce as Terence pivoted in and out of him, mortar and pestle. Joey ran his hands over Terence’s nipples and the flame of silvery pubes that licked up his belly, wiry and translucent like spun isomalt sugar, and over his firm, perfect ass, the muscles in it quivering with each thrust.

  “Jesus Christ, I’m gonna come.” Joey tugged Terence down, felt the muscular weight of Terence’s belly heavy on his cock, pulled Terence balls-deep inside him.

  “You do that, kid.”

  Joey’s orgasm roared through him, splattered onto his stomach like warm sugar-glaze, but he still didn’t have everything he needed. He kissed up Terence’s jaw, whispered into his ear, “C’mon, now. Drizzle me with your icing.”

  Terence bit Joey’s shoulder as he pulled out and flung off the condom. He groaned, and then with one stroke, two, he coated Joey’s chest.

  Terence collapsed onto the bed. “Damn it, kid. No point in continuing with pastry now. I’m pretty sure you’re the hottest cake I’ll ever decorate.”

  Later, when Joey opened his eyes, Terence was leaning over him, tracing patterns through the semen on his skin. “Flowers?” Joey asked. “Spirals?”

  Terence’s smile was different from any Joey had ever seen before. It almost looked—well, shy. “Hearts,” he said, and buried his face in Joey’s shoulder.

  Joey felt a strange warmth in his center and a giddiness similar to the terror and exhilaration of being in an airplane about to take off. He kissed Terence’s hair. “I think I’m over hating you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “In fact, I might be heading toward the opposite, you asshole.”

  Terence looked up at Joey, gave him a solid kiss on the lips. “We’re screwed, Joey. We’re so fucking screwed.”

  “We totally are.”

  They smiled themselves to sleep.

  *

  Despite their newfound ability to cooperate in the bedroom, neither man let go of his competitiveness in the studio, and they both survived the next episode.

  But in the end, American Master Bakers could have only one champion.

  It wasn’t either of them. It was Zina, the ninety-pound elf girl who shouldn’t have the upper body strength to work a piece of dough, but somehow did. They both had to admit she deserved it. Her pièce montée in the final episode had two more layers and three more types of pastry and sugar-work than either of theirs and, embarrassingly, its components tasted the best, too.

  Terence got second place, and Joey third. “Just wait until next year,” Joey said. “I’ll cream your ass.”

  Terence slipped an arm around Joey’s waist and leaned into his ear. “I was hoping you’d do that tonight.”

  The rematch never took place. They were too busy with their new bakery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood to bother with more reality TV. It offered the most phallic éclairs in the whole city, and was the only place to taste the original American Master Bakers beet entremets and Schichttorte.

  To this day, orders for the pink pastries skyrocket each February, requiring Terence and Joey to put in long hours as Valentine’s Day approaches. The work finally stops at three o’clock on the fourteenth with the locking of the front door.

  That’s when they go upstairs to their apartment for a private celebration that involves drizzling warm icing on each other’s skin.

  Bathhouse Backstabber

  Michael Bracken

  I first met Joshua—Josh—at a cocktail party hosted by mutual friends. When I discovered we were the only two men attending without a partner, I realized we’d been set up, and I confronted Scott in the kitchen as he was pulling a tray of prosciutto-wrapped asparagus out of the oven.

  “How could you?” I demanded. “I told you I’m not ready to date again, not after what Alex did to me.”

  Ever one to trot out a cliché when he thought it appropriate, Scott said, “It’s been two months since you fell off that horse. Isn’t it time to get back in the saddle?”

  Alex and I had been together for nearly eighteen months when he dumped me for a grad student teaching in his department at the university. The sting of his rejection had hurt all the more because his parting shot had been to denigrate my writing as fit only for sub-literates who sounded out each word as they read, and I had not written a word since he dumped me.

  As he moved the asparagus onto a serving tray, Scott said, “You know Alex was denied tenure last week.”

  “He was?” I hadn’t heard, and the news brightened my outlook.

  Scott handed me the tray. “Take these into the dining room and put them next to the seafood dip.”

  I did as requested, and then prepared myself a plate of appetizers from the dozens already crowding the dining room table. I had just made my last selection and was about to pop a cube of Swiss cheese into my mouth when I felt someone brush against my elbow. I turned and found myself facing Josh. He looked nothing like my ex. With closely cropped blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, and a square chin, he had the stunning good looks of a surfer.

  “So, we meet again,” he said with a smile.

  “You realize we’ve been set up, don’t you?”

  “I figured it out a few minutes ago,” he said. “Apparently you know more of these people than I do.”

  I admitted to knowing everyone else at the party, though some were only nodding acquaintances.

  “I really only know Scott and Drew,” Josh said. He put two stalks of the prosciutto-wrapped asparagus on his plate, added some Triscuits and a dollop of the seafood dip, and then we stepped away from the table to let other guests graze. “We met last week at a fundraiser for the symphony. When they discovered I was new in town, they invited me to this evening’s get-t
ogether.”

  “How new?”

  “A month,” he said. “I’m still getting my bearings. It would be nice to have somebody show me around.”

  Without thinking, I said, “Maybe I could do that.”

  “Maybe you could.” Josh smiled. “So, what do you do?”

  “I’m a writer.” He didn’t ask if I’d ever been published, so I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t. “You?”

  “Photographer.”

  Scott interrupted our conversation. “How’s the asparagus?”

  “Looks good,” Josh told him. He had yet to try it.

  “And how are you two getting along?”

  “Fine, thank you,” Josh replied, “but you could have let us know this was a set-up. I might have dressed differently.”

  Scott winked at me, laughed politely, and moved on to a cluster of four men standing at the other end of the dining room discussing politics.

  “What was the wink for?” Josh asked.

  “Scott knows I wouldn’t have come if I’d known he was setting me up.”

  “Oh?” Josh finally picked one stalk of asparagus from his plate, and I found myself unexpectedly watching his lips as he drew the head into his mouth and bit.

  “It’s only been two months since my last relationship ended.”

  Josh placed his hand on my upper arm, an impromptu act of commiseration that sent a warm tingle coursing through my entire body. “I’m so sorry.”

  Something about Josh’s demeanor convinced me of his sincerity, which I hadn’t felt from some of my long-term friends when I’d told them about the end of my relationship with Alex. Those who didn’t mention that they’d seen it coming for months were too wrapped up in their own personal dramas to care one way or the other. Only Scott and Drew made any effort to console me, taking me to an expensive new restaurant where Drew, a tenured professor in the English department where Alex taught, repeatedly apologized for introducing us, and Scott insisted, as if he had inside knowledge, that “Karma’s a bitch.”

  At that moment, with Josh’s hand on my arm and his sparkling blue eyes searching mine, I melted a bit. Maybe, just maybe, I was ready for a new relationship.

  *

  I started writing again the morning following Scott and Drew’s cocktail party. By Thursday evening, I had made good progress on a new short story and was writing the climactic scene where my private eye enters the bathhouse and confronts the killer, an English professor who had murdered his lover, a thinly veiled reference to Alex killing our relationship. I was interrupted when Josh phoned to ask if it was possible to tear me away from my keyboard for a few hours.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I have a photo shoot Saturday morning and was wondering if you’d like to join me,” he said. “It’ll mean getting up before dawn. I’m doing a ‘day in the life’ of the farmers market, so I need to be there when they start setting up.”

  “That’s no problem.”

  I gave him my then-current address, confirmed what time I needed to be ready, and was standing on the front porch of the English Tudor I was housesitting that semester, already fortified with three cups of black coffee, when he arrived Saturday morning in a recent model SUV.

  I didn’t have much to do but follow Josh around as he took hundreds of photos that morning, but we ate breakfast burritos and cream cheese kolaches prepared on the spot and we talked between shots.

  As the morning progressed, Josh explained that he earned much of his living shooting photos for magazines, but he did other photography as well, including advertising and some wedding photography for close friends.

  The farmers market was only open until noon, and just before the booths closed, Josh asked, “What about lunch?”

  I looked around. “It’d be a shame to leave here without shopping,” I said. “Why don’t you let me fix lunch?”

  I purchased organic vegetables, free-range chicken, bread fresh from a wood-fired oven, and half a dozen blackberry kolaches for dessert while Josh photographed the vendors packing their unsold goods and taking down their displays.

  Instead of returning me to the house where I was staying, Josh took me to his loft, the third floor of an old warehouse converted into living space. Except for the enclosed bedroom and bathroom suite behind the kitchen area at one end, the entire loft was open and divided into separate functional areas through judicious placement of furniture and area rugs.

  The end closest to the freight elevator was his work area, with two computers attached to large high-resolution screens, two desks, and a worktable. That led to the living area, followed by the dining area, and then the kitchen. Several large-format prints of Josh’s photographs hung from the walls, and I admired them as we walked the length of his loft to the kitchen. All were of men in their natural surroundings, none of them studio portraits—a craggy-faced cowboy in a sweat-stained Stetson, a hirsute biker in his leathers, a shirtless construction worker with his yellow hardhat tilted back, a drag queen channeling Marilyn Monroe, and half a dozen more. None of the men captured in the photos were classically handsome, but all were appealing for their obvious self-confidence.

  “These are prints from my All-American Male show last fall,” Josh said. “My first gallery showing ever.”

  “That was here,” I said, surprised. I named the gallery, and he nodded. “I was invited to the opening but had a conflict of interest.” Alex had taken me to a lecture at the university, where I had listened to a snooty poet who couldn’t earn a dime from her writing denigrate the crass commercialization of publishing. I hadn’t enjoyed myself.

  “It’s one of the reasons I moved here,” Josh explained. “There’s a thriving arts community I hope to connect with.”

  By then we’d made it to the kitchen, a well-appointed work area gleaming with stainless steel appliances, and he showed me where he kept everything. While I chopped the vegetables, boned the chicken, added spices, and slid the result into the oven, Josh uploaded that morning’s photographs from his camera to his computer. While lunch baked, I joined him in the work area, and we viewed his photos on one of the large computer screens.

  As we went through them, he made notes about some of the photos, winnowing down the number he planned to present to his client. By the time we finished, he had selected three dozen and lunch was ready to serve.

  Josh set the table, poured two glasses of wine, and soon we were settled into place. Over lunch, which he raved about after only the first bite, he asked me, “So, where have you published?”

  There it was, the question I dreaded because I had to admit I’d never been published. “I have several dozen short stories making the rounds,” I said, “and I’m working on my first novel.”

  “You should let me read some of your stories.”

  “You like mysteries?”

  “I love mysteries, especially the old stuff—Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, all the Gold Medal books.”

  I brightened. Alex had always dismissed genre writing as pabulum for the masses, not worthy of his time or attention, and his attitude had done more to destroy my fragile creative spirit during our relationship than I wanted to admit. “Really?”

  “Absolutely,” Josh said. “My father got me hooked on the hardboiled stuff when I was a kid, and I’ve even taken jacket flap photos of a few mystery writers.”

  We talked about our favorite hardboiled novels before Josh brought the conversation back around to the inevitable follow-up question. “So, if you don’t support yourself with writing, what do you do?”

  I told him I was a housesitter, taking care of people’s homes and sometimes their pets while they were away for extended periods of time. I’d become a favorite among university faculty during sabbaticals, long research trips, and teaching assignments abroad. “That’s how I know Scott and Drew,” I told him. “I sat their house several years ago while they spent the summer in Europe.”

  Though I didn’t earn much, I didn’t need much, and housesitting
afforded me tremendous amounts of uninterrupted time at the keyboard to write. As soon as I could, I turned the conversation around and asked how Josh had made a career of photography.

  “I learned from my grandfather. He had a studio in the small town where I grew up, and he was the go-to guy for portraits, wedding photography, and the like,” Josh said. “I wasn’t interested in studio work, so I took photos for my high school yearbook, worked as a stringer for my town’s weekly paper, was photo editor for my college newspaper, and double-majored in art and journalism, both with a concentration in photography. After a few years working for a city magazine, I realized I’d rather be my own boss. I’ve been freelancing ever since.”

  We finished lunch, filled the dishwasher, and ate blackberry kolaches while Josh showed me his bedroom, where three of the four walls were covered floor-to-ceiling with bookcases filled with paperback mysteries he’d collected over the years.

  Late afternoon we divided the leftovers from lunch and Josh returned me to the English Tudor I was housesitting for a chemistry professor and her husband. He walked me to the door, told me how much he had enjoyed spending the day together, and made me promise to join him for dinner mid-week. I wondered if he would try to kiss me, but he didn’t, and I watched from the living room window as he drove away.

  As soon as his car was out of sight, I emailed five stories to Josh, including “Bathhouse Backstabber,” the new short story I’d been working on when he invited me to accompany him on the farmers market photo shoot.

  Over the years, I had shared my unpublished manuscripts with many friends and potential lovers who expressed interest in my writing, but those expressions of interest were often more polite than sincere, so Josh’s failure to mention my stories Wednesday when we met for dinner didn’t surprise me. After he still didn’t mention them the following Saturday when we attended the symphony and had drinks with Scott and Drew, I suspected he never would. Though I was disappointed, Josh’s silence was far superior to my ex-boyfriend’s outright dismissal of my work, and by then I often caught myself daydreaming about Josh when I should have been writing.