Men in Love: M/M Romance

by Jerry L. Wheeler

  “So, don’t get caught.” He disentangled himself from my grip then dragged the chair across the carpet. He guided my feet onto the arms, leaving my legs wide and my ass utterly exposed. When I bent my knees inward, I felt him, warm and firm and naked. He pushed my legs open then ran ticklish fingers down my thighs almost, but not quite, touching my cock. “The bed’s too low for stuff like this,” he said.

  Like a good little hustler, he came prepared. I heard cellophane rip and soft, fleshy sounds as he rolled on a condom. I tried not to think about how many times he’d done this before, or with how many men. I choked, thinking of the last time I’d seen him and wondering why the hell I was letting myself in for another world of hurt. “I saved you from that raunchy old bastard in the club, took you home, cleaned you up, and you left. Without a word. Are you going to do the same thing now?”

  “That depends.” He pressed lube-slicked fingers against my asshole, circling it until the sphincter relaxed.

  “On what?” He broached the tight entrance, probing inside me until he found that magic spot behind my prostate. I gasped at the sudden tightness in my belly. “Do you know what I make? Not much. I can’t be your sugar daddy.”

  “I don’t want one.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to ask what he did want, because he exchanged his fingers for his cock and jammed it inside so hard, I yelped. For the first few thrusts, it burned, but then it changed to a pleasurable ache. At the same time, he gave me a hand job, timing his twisting pressing fingers with his pumping hips.

  I was reduced to pure sensation. I smelled his sweat and lube, felt my body stretch and clench around his. The desk squeaked and shook a little as we rocked together, and I gripped the edges, hanging on for dear life. His hands never ceased moving. They were slick and wet, up and down, back and forth.

  A few more strokes, and I was close to bursting. My balls tightened and drew up, and then I tumbled over the brink.

  I gritted my teeth to keep from shouting as loud as I wanted to. A noise complaint would bring my colleague to investigate, although I had to stifle a laugh at imagining the look on his face if he found me here, naked, being fucked by a cute little hustler in a room that was supposed to be empty.

  He left me lying there, gasping. After taking a few moments to recover, I pulled off the makeshift blindfold and sat up. True to his word, not a drop of wine had reached the carpet. I looked over to see him guzzling the remains as he leaned against the wall, naked. The dim light enhanced the bruises scattered across his body. My jaw clenched. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded. “Enjoy yourself?”

  “I haven’t gotten laid like that since…” I didn’t have to finish. I got up and went over to him. “Tell me the truth. Why are you here?”

  He wouldn’t look at me. “I want a job, Joe. A real one.”

  I didn’t make a joke. From his voice and demeanor, he was utterly serious and knew just how hard it was to get a regular job without references or previous work experience. I felt for him. Gently, I said, “You didn’t have to fuck me to ask that.”

  It was hard to tell in the low light, but his skin darkened. “You know me. I don’t do favors. Only trade.” At last, he raised his gaze to mine. “I mean it. I want a steady income. I’m tired of…” He made a sweeping gesture to emphasize his battered skin.

  I’d do anything to keep him from getting beaten, but I had to be sure he wasn’t playing me. No way was I going to risk another broken heart. I rested my palms against the wall, one on either side of him, trapping him within a physical prison. “How do I know you won’t cut and run like you did last time?”

  “Because.” He set the empty wine bottle on the dresser with a clunk.

  “Because why?” I rubbed my hips against his semi-erect cock, naked of its condom. All that effort, and he hadn’t come yet.

  He groaned but didn’t answer as I ground against him, hard. After a moment, he wrapped his arms around me and dug his nails into my back. I’d be lucky if I didn’t bleed.

  Hands locked under his ass, I scooped him up and carried him over to the bed. He bounced a little as I dropped him, but I didn’t give him a chance to escape. I clambered atop him and grabbed his cock. I trembled as I felt the soft sacs of his balls and the smooth skin of his hardened shaft. I was afraid of hurting him, of pressing too hard on purpled flesh, but with his free hand he clasped the back of my neck and drew me down. He gave me a ragged smile. “Don’t worry about it. You won’t hurt me.”

  Maybe not, but I wanted to find the guy who had caused him such a world of pain. That, and I wanted to smack this kid upside the head for getting himself into such a bad situation in the first place. “Because why, you little bastard?”

  Arms splayed above his head in submission, he turned his head aside. Damn, but this kid was frustrating. I should walk out and leave him. I couldn’t. So help me, but he’d wrapped his hands around my heart and my cock and refused to let go. If trade was all he understood, then I’d have to barter for an answer.

  Glancing around, I spied the bottle of lube sitting on the corner of the bed. I snatched it and squeezed a generous dollop onto my fingers. His body yielded easily to my two-fingered intrusion. He moaned softly and tilted his hips to accommodate me. He was slick and hot and tight. I loved the way he squirmed as I fingered him.

  His body arched, tensing, but I didn’t want him to come. Not until I had an answer. “What’s it going to take to get you to tell me why you won’t run?”

  His cock was hard and stiff, the tip glistening with precum. I bent down and licked it, taking in the bitterness while I continued to wriggle my fingers inside him. Mercifully, he gave it in a hoarse, choked voice. “Because you were the only guy who ever came to my rescue.”

  The reply stunned me into silence. I couldn’t move, not even to tip him over the edge. He just laid there, quivering and helplessly impaled on my hand.

  “Please, Joe. Please.” He fixed his gaze on me, as hard and penetrating as his cock had been.

  My head spun as I tried to make sense of this turn of events. “You only want a job?”

  “And maybe a bed. And someone to share it with.” The words came out strained.

  “I see. You only want me for my ass.” I pressed against that spot behind his prostate.

  He writhed, nails raking the sheets, and shook his head from side to side. “No. I want you.” He took in a long, shuddering breath then whimpered. “Damn it. I love you, Joe. I can’t get you out of my head. I won’t run away again. I swear. Please. Please.”

  I may have extracted his confession under duress, but I believed him. I had to wonder what I’d get out of this deal. He’d be a needy kid, prone to sleeping around, but he was also someone to look after and care for. I was tired of going home to an empty, silent condo, of cooking for one and sleeping alone. He needed me, and I liked to be needed. That, and the fact that I was crazy about him, was enough to convince me. “I love you, too.”

  All I had to do was give his cock one little squeeze and he came, spurting over my hand. He clenched his asshole around my fingers. Arching back, he gave a low moan of satisfaction. “Damn.”

  After I cleaned up, I went back and spooned behind him. He clenched my arm to his chest as if it were his favorite stuffed animal. I held him tightly, though not so hard as to cause him pain.

  As long as he stayed with me, no one would ever hurt him again.

  *

  Two weeks later, I had to admit he looked sharp in a bellman’s uniform. He had the perfect demeanor, both flattering and submissive, which earned him plenty of tips and more than a few propositions, some of which he accepted. He and I had a deal, though. I knew which rooms he went to, so if he got into trouble, I could bail him out.

  Beyond that, I had keys to everything, and I knew where all the cameras were. If, by chance, we met in the luggage room and took a detour via the storage closet on the way back…well…I knew full well I was putting my job at risk, but after one illicit adven
ture had ended so well, I had a hunger for more.

  “Ever been on the roof?” I asked him during one slow, lazy afternoon as we clocked out for lunch.

  He grinned. “Not yet.”

  I pulled the hatch key out of my pocket and dangled it. “Shall we?”

  I never had to ask twice.

  Continuum

  George Seaton

  The first people who lived in our old house surely gathered near the bright, orange heat of the small coal fireplace in the living room on one frigid night in November of 1893. I suspect, or so I would like to believe, it was then that they discussed and mourned the death of Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, which had occurred that same month, that same year.

  There is a continuum of sorts, a constancy of good feeling in the walls of this old house, and in the spirits who pass through them for the delicate genius, the tragic lover, Pyotr Illyich. Or, again, so I would like to believe.

  *

  His attention is captured by something atop the dining room table. I find some little fascination in the knowledge that I still do not really know this man with whom I have lived for twenty-eight years. Oh, I can tell you, without even looking, he is reading yet another review of the merits of one or another audio component—speakers, amplifiers, connectors, cables. This, I know about him. I know also—evidenced by the six thousand compact discs that line the shelves, floor to ceiling, in the small study downstairs—that he is passionate about music, good music, the music of the masters, from classical to contemporary.

  Do I love this man with whom I have lived for twenty-eight years? Of course, I do. Do I still wonder what the hell that word means? Yes, I do.

  *

  “Let’s go,” I say, tying my tennis shoes.

  He lifts his head from the magazine, and turns. “I’m ready,” he says as he stands and walks toward me.

  We step off the porch and begin the two miles we will walk this evening. The mama finch, which, along with her ruby-headed partner, have made a nest in the recess of the transom above the door, flutters frantically above our heads. “It’s only us, mama,” I say, trying unsuccessfully to communicate that we mean no harm to her or her eggs, her unborn children. Nevertheless, she breaks out from under the porch and flies to a low-hanging branch of the giant and ancient maple in front of our house. There, she examines our passage.

  I close the white picket gate that opens into our small front yard and look back at our old house, which was built the same year Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky died. It is a two-story Victorian, a gingerbread house where, each time we leave it, the spirits who inhabit it smile at us from the upstairs window. David and I have lived in this house for twenty-four of the past twenty-eight years we have been together.

  “Which way?” David asks, leaving the decision of our route to me. We have circumnavigated our northwest Denver neighborhood a thousand times, and any route I choose is not new. But now there is a newness to each walk we take. It is spring, and the whole world is new.

  I turn right from our gate, and we embark on what we have come to call the standard route, which will take us south for nine blocks, two blocks west, and then back north for another nine blocks.

  “Standard route,” I say, and we both turn right at the end of our block like soldiers on parade, in step, and determined in direction. “How was your day?” I ask.

  “Well…” he says, pausing, preparing me for his burst of jabber. “I had told you Scott was back with Jason. Well, let me tell you that it’s the same old thing, and he doesn’t admit it, but he goes over there to Jason’s every night and they…Oh, sometimes they go to dinner or watch Survivor or some other inane series, and then, of course, they fuck themselves silly. And no, Scott says they are not boyfriends, and I tell him, ‘Well, it sure looks like you are boyfriends, and if you are boyfriends, why do you always have to go over to his house? Why can’t he occasionally make the effort, oh, the sacrifice to go over to your house?’ I just don’t understand why it’s always Scott, Scott, Scott making the effort. It just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.”

  I smile. This is my David. This is my jabberer.

  “I don’t know why it matters to you anymore,” I say, seeing the white Lab, our friend, tied to the porch in the yard ahead. “This is…what? The fourth time they’ve gone back together after having had a supposedly irreconcilable split?”

  We stop and kneel down to the white Lab, who greets us, smiling and shaking. We scratch his ears and tummy. “Third time, actually. You are such a handsome boy,” he says to the Lab, whose tail wags, his pink tongue hanging wet in the spring heat. We stand and continue our walk.

  “You know what his therapist says?”

  “No,” I reply, knowing David knows I do not know what Scott’s therapist says.

  “He told Scott that he keeps breaking up with and then going back to Jason because he actually wants the stimulation of both events, that somehow his psyche feeds on the drama of it all. Can you believe that? Can you actually believe that?”

  “Yes, yes, I believe that.” I think what I always think when someone asks, Can you believe that? I think that nothing much that the world conjures has really surprised me for a very long time. It was the Big Party, that phantasmagoria of the time, of our time between 1969 and 1982, that was so truly amazing, so truly liberating, so truly…nasty, that, having come of age during that time, my credulity has forever been slightly skewed.

  “Well, that’s what he told them, and I don’t think…” David goes on.

  My mind is lost to the memory of the Big Party. How do I adequately convey a sense of what it was really like during those times of…revelation, liberation, and senseless primordial devotion to the fuck? I can only try. It was at the tail end, the closing days of the Big Party when my life with David began.

  *

  David and I met one night in 1982, in a bar in downtown Denver where I’d found my niche, my comfortable corner. It, the bar—bare wood, leather / Levi’s, strong drinks, men, and young men seeking men and young men. I was then brown-eyed and haired, always Levi’ed, cowboy boots, and stern but adorable. Well…adorably stern?

  It was that time of our time, when we were being told that we should not have sex with men who were obviously ill: feverish, coughing, purple lesions on the skin. We had been reading in the gay press for almost a year about a hellish, exotic pneumonia, and a rare skin cancer that had appeared, proliferated, and infested the coasts, and was moving inward toward the center, toward Denver, where, on that night in 1982, I saw him: blond, boyish, blue eyes, smiling. David projected a bright and endearing gaze into the crowd of us. It was not the usual hungry, hard, brazen, straight-to-the-bone glare that each of us was so accustomed to receiving and, indeed, projecting. No, David still beamed with the wonder of us all, there, together in that dark and smoky space.

  For several years before I met David, a narrow, wooden, rickety staircase led to the basement of the bar—an even darker and smokier space where we would pack ourselves in, ass to cock, each Friday and Saturday night. Our hands, in that place, were not left to ourselves. We were not beholding to any modicum of restraint, or fear of consequences, or care for…for anything other than the moment, the celebration of ourselves, the essential rite of passage, the tactile manifestation of delayed adolescence, that was the freedom that had come from Stonewall. It was a sexual freedom so intense, so overwhelmingly right, that to ignore it oozed a particular wrongness that belied the core of our very being. Oh, we reveled within the essence of the Big Party. It was the essence of the time, of our time. The baths. The parks. Cheesman Park. Every night, the quest. Most every night fucking a new lover or a new lover fucking me, because that was the fucking point of it all, of the time of our time; of the Big Party.

  For me, the bar had become quite boring by 1982. TV monitors had been hung from the four corners of the ceiling, beaming music videos, and sometimes soft porn. No one touched anyone else they did not know then, there in that space where, a year before, t
ouching a stranger had been the least of the intrusive but oh so pleasing, so welcome behavior that was expected, demanded by the imperative of the Big Party. Indeed, by 1982, luscious leers had become quick glances, not lingering, barely even coquettish in their intent. Men huddled within the convention of fuckbuddy coteries, sewing circles of matronly standoffishness.

  By 1982, the bogeyman had certainly begun stealing the magic of the night from us all. We began to hear and understand the new words, and, oh sweet Jesus, our lexicon, our gayspeak became clinical—pneumocystis, Kaposi’s, neuropathy, cytomegalovirus, T-cells, crystosporidiosis, lymphadenopathy, retrovirus, candidiasis, cryptococcus and on and on—the litany of the boogeyman’s ferocious baggage, a vernacular that beautiful young men should not have to assume as their own. It was assumed, though. Necessarily. “Yeah, Ronnie seemed to kick the pneumocystis, but that fuckin’ lymphadenopathy—even the nodes in his groin, man, hard as fuckin’ rocks.” Yes, and by 1982, many of us were teetering on the cusp of a stark and insidious epiphany that would soon be revealed to the world, a gut feeling that we just simply had not reckoned much with the consequences of the time, of our time. That the Big Party could not just simply go on forever.

  Then along came David.

  I was thirty-three. He was twenty-two. He was my…type. He was a “Music major at CU. In Boulder.”

  “Oh,” I said, realizing that his eyes were not blue, but green, which was not a bad thing. Just not totally my type. The ones with green eyes usually had more hair on their ass than I liked. I could deal with it. I was not getting married, for Christ’s sake. I liked the name, though—David. “I was a music major for a while, too,” I said, wondering about that ass. “Finally graduated with a B.A. in history. From CU, too.”