by Daryl Banner
I’ve not even made it to the living room yet, stopping by the kitchen first for a drink. “Hot chocolate? That’s about the least sexy thing I can think of.”
“I was doing this thing with my straw and the marshmallows and he wasn’t even paying attention. His name’s Casey. Ugh. He even has a cute name.”
So the name “Dmitri” doesn’t do it for you? I swipe two bottles of water from the back of the fridge and come into the living room with them, plopping down on the couch next to Eric and tossing one into his lap. “Hot chocolate makes my stomach turn.”
“Water?” Eric scoffs at the bottle, not touching it. “Seriously?”
“Just drink it, dude. I haven’t had the best day either.” I sink into the couch, throwing my head back and shutting my eyes.
“Hmm. Some girl got you all twisted up?”
Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know. “I’ve never liked Valentine’s Day. Except for maybe the candy.”
“You eat candy? You sorta always came off to me like a vegan health nut who fasts on kale juice.”
I chuckle without a smile, my eyes still shut. Eric might have led me on and friend-zoned me—the exact thing he’s all frustrated about—but I’m the one he thought to come to for comfort when shit fell through. That means something, doesn’t it?
In the colorless, blank peace behind my eyelids, I relive Sam’s last words to me. “But isn’t it more important to be … friends first?”
“Huh?”
“You have to also just like a person before you … go deeper. I mean, sure, you can look at a girl—sorry, a guy—across the classroom and think he’s all hot shit or whatever. But after you get used to him and all that tumbling in your belly goes away, don’t you get afraid of having nothing left to enjoy?”
“Not at all. With the right guy, that initial excitement won’t fade away,” claims Eric. “That’s the whole point. You want someone you can be insane about all the time. Problem is, sometimes the feelings only go one way. Like with stupid Casey.” Eric tosses his water bottle onto the coffee table in front of us, the sound of which makes my eyes snap open. The bottle rolls until an Xbox controller sitting there stops it from falling onto the floor. “The goal’s to find a two-way.”
“A two-way. Is that what you call it? Sounds like a threesome minus a person,” I tease.
“It is,” says Eric.
I grunt at that, then close my eyes again and bring my bottle to my lips, taking a long swallow of cold water. I miss my face a bit, letting some of the water run down my chin to my chest, but I ignore it, caring not at all. I keep my eyes shut and just let the peace and quiet of the room soothe me, breath after breath.
There’s a long stretch of silence. My breaths grow so slow, I wonder if I’m actually drifting off. Maybe when I wake up, it’ll be the morning, Brant and Clayton will be snoring in their rooms, and Eric will be cuddling Brant’s lucky afghan on the floor.
I feel Eric shift ever slightly on the couch, but I ignore it, since I might or might not be asleep. Then he shifts again with a touch more force, and suddenly there’s a hand on my thigh.
His hand.
I still don’t move, but my lungs tighten up considerably. I don’t know what that does to my breathing, but I keep perfectly still, eyes closed as I wonder whether I’m dreaming or wide awake.
Eric’s hand slides up my thigh as slow as a scorpion, then gently eases between my legs, nestling onto my crotch.
Yes, I’m wide awake.
And hard. Insta-hard.
I swallow nervously, eyes still shut. He probably hears that.
Eric leans toward me. I feel his body against my side when his lips graze my ear. He gives the lobe a tiny nip, then traces the line of my jaw with his lips. I can’t help but turn my cheek ever slightly toward him, like the tiniest, subtlest of invitations.
And he accepts the invitation greedily.
Our lips attach in one hot, open-mouthed breath.
Then his hand starts to gain confidence, kneading my crotch like hot, fresh dough—except this dough is unforgivingly hard and throbs in response. Soon, the pressure is too much to take, and I catch myself moaning against him.
“Thaaaat’s it,” whispers Eric against my mouth. “Don’t resist it.”
His tongue slips past my lips.
I cave, throwing my arms around him and diving into his body with all my weight. He falls back into the couch as I crawl atop him, sucking his face with such vigor that even my tongue and lips throb.
His hands disappear and become busy undoing the button of my jeans, then unzipping them with impressive speed.
The way he undresses me, it’s so easy, like peeling a banana.
He strips off my shirt button by button, and then the cool air of the apartment kisses my skin.
Quite suddenly, he’s done kissing me, and he starts to worm his way south while I remain hovering over where his face used to be. His lips trail down my chest underneath me, then tickle the hairs of my happy trail on his way lower and lower.
And lower.
And then the warmth of his mouth swallows the whole length of my cock, tip to base.
From my parted lips, a sound comes out of me I didn’t know I was capable of. But Eric is hungry, and he doesn’t stop for one breath. He slowly drags his slippery, wet mouth up and down my cock, working me toward the edge in seconds.
I’ve never gone anywhere near this far with a guy before, despite my secret wishes and hopes whenever one I’m attracted to gets close to me. I haven’t even had sex with that many girls, if I’m being totally frank. Most of the girls I dated in high school only lasted a couple of weeks each, and the “more serious” girlfriend I had my senior year wouldn’t go all the way with me. She was a no-premarital-sex believer, and I did everything in my power to respect that, no matter how many adjustments of my stiff cock in my pants it took.
But there’s no adjustments needed here on this couch. My perfectly steel-caliber cock is relentlessly driven into Eric’s mouth as his lips ride its length up and down.
I’m so close. He gives his all, but it wouldn’t have taken much.
“Eric,” I warn him.
Muffled around my cock, he moans the words, “Go for it.”
“Eric,” I warn him again as my insides ripple and thrum with the electric current of impending orgasm. My thighs tingle and my ass clenches as I struggle to hold back. “Eric, Eric, Eric, Eric—”
“Yeah, bitch, say my name,” he mumbles, still while gargling my cock. Or at least I think that’s what he says. To be honest, it’s mostly vowels that come out of his mouth.
And vibrations.
And my cock as it goes in, comes out, goes in, comes out.
The orgasm catches me by surprise. I feel my body lurch, my cock stiffens to bursting point, and then wave after wave empties from me into Eric’s opened, still-sucking, hungry mouth. I collapse onto the couch even while I’m still coming, my cock buried deep into him and my arms shaking too much to hold myself up.
I’m out of breath, sucking in lungful after lungful as I blink and try to bring the world back into focus. Somewhere during the act, my glasses fell off. I’m sweating all over. Hair sticks to my forehead in short curls and tangles.
And then a voice comes from the kitchen: “Knew it.”
I look up over the back of the couch. Brant, grinning and cocky as ever, stands behind the counter holding a bottle of beer in his still-gloved hand.
I gape after him. When the fuck did he come in?? I can’t move, not even to lift off of Eric, who I’m probably gagging with my slowly softening, spent cock. I don’t even know what to say.
Brant takes a swig, then lifts his bottle and, innocent as a sprinkled cupcake, asks, “Was it as good for you as it was for me, Valentine?”
Junior Year
Chapter 15
Dmitri
Brant slaps my shoulder, nodding at a chick who passes by us as we walk the path in front of the grassy knoll by the Psychology building.
He lifts the camera from his chest and snaps a sly shot of her ass without flash, then punches my arm and giggles.
And New Dmitri who doesn’t give a shit about anything anymore punches him back and grins stupidly, cheering on the pussy-hunting woman-whisperer that is Brant Rudawski, my new best friend.
I don’t know when it happened. Clayton moved out. I was the last person to know among our broadening circle of friends. (Do I call my friends’ friends my friends? I don’t know. I’m not used to knowing so many damned people.) Apparently Dessie has a condo now on the rich side of town, which pulled her out of the dorm and my hot deaf friend out of our apartment.
And after a spring of sexual tension and awkwardness between Eric and I after that fateful Valentine’s Day, Brant decided it would be a delightful idea to invite him into the empty room that once occupied Clayton. Eric, ever hungry to escape the stuffy confines of East Hall, jumped on the opportunity like a wolf to a juicy, dripping steak.
But neither I nor Brant were the steak. It’s like I’m suddenly off-limits, like that spontaneous, totally unsafe, reckless-as-fuck blow job on the couch never happened. It was almost comical, how fast the whole thing just cleaned itself up. Eric slipped out from under me, hopped into the bathroom, and washed his face. As I stuffed my junk back into my pants and righted myself on the couch, Brant grabbed two more beers from the fridge and dropped himself right next to me, then picked up the Xbox controller and started up a game. Eric joined us minutes after without a word, and suddenly we were just three dudes playing Xbox until something-o’clock in the morning.
I guess it’s only natural that Brant thought Eric would fit in living here with us, now with Clayton gone. But Eric, I’ve learned, is not an easily satisfied man, and he somehow finds an endless supply of his own brand of steak. I have no idea what last year did to him, but he’s obviously obtained some sort of homo-megaphone that magically summons any available, horny gay guy within a ten mile radius to our doorstep. Over the summer, our apartment became a boy buffet of one cock-hungry guy after another. Every single one of them, Eric invited unannounced, and every single one of them made noise. Noise. At 3 in the morning. I can’t even step foot into Clayton’s old room anymore for fear of what my bare, precious feet might discover on the floor.
“Think Eric has one of his boy toys over?” asks Brant as we pass by the School of Theatre on the way to our apartment complex.
I frown. I’m so tired of our lives revolving around whether Eric has someone over or not. “At this time of day?”
“Any time of day is gay time of day. Don’t let him get to you. You’ll find your own boy soon,” says Brant, wrapping an arm around my neck and pulling me in for half a headlock.
I break free and push him off me, which only makes him laugh. I’ve told him countless times over the spring and summer that I’m not gay, that I’m actually bi and what he walked in on just happened to be my first genuine experience with a guy, but Brant never listens. When he’s convinced of something, it’s hard to shake him from it.
I don’t know why people are so uncomfortable with grey areas, like bisexuality. Why can’t someone be genuinely bi? Why must they be all-the-way straight or all-the-way gay? Sexuality isn’t so cut and precise for everyone. Any frat boy with enough alcohol in him who’s done a questionable thing or two behind closed doors can attest to that, provided they’re not in denial. But people are so determined to fit everyone into a box with a nice, easily grasped, perfectly defined label. It helps them sleep at night, to know their world as certainly as they know math, or numbers, or the spelling of their own name. Black. White. Right. Wrong. Gay. Straight. Female. Male.
But sometimes there’s grey. And sometimes people do things that are neither right nor wrong, but something in between. Bisexuals exist. Asexuals, too. There’s countless who don’t fit our rigid definitions of female or male.
“And they deserve a voice too,” I say to Brant an hour later in the food court, telling him all of this over the cup of fries that remains of the lunch we just shared.
Brant shrugs. “Sure. I totally agree with you, too. Everyone deserves a voice, bro, and you got yours. I’m proud to know a guy who can put all of that into words,” he says absently, his eyes scanning the table of girls sitting at our side—some sorority, I presume.
I give up trying to get through to Brant. “See something you like? Is that all my life is now? A series of watching other guys picking over girl-and-boy buffets?”
Brant shakes his head. “Nah. No. I sort of have my eye set on … well, never mind. It’s nothing.” He fidgets with the strap of the camera that hangs around his neck.
I don’t know how long this photography thing is going to last, but it’s his latest major. I can’t even remember what he was studying last year, if anything at all. Maybe he’s still undeclared.
“Don’t your parents ever worry about you?” I ask him with a bit of a bite. “Like, asking themselves what their precious son is doing with all their hard-earned money at school? You don’t work, I know that much. I still have no idea how the apartment gets paid for beyond my and Eric-formerly-Clayton’s rent.”
Brant snorts at the bundle of fries pinched between his thumb and forefinger, but he doesn’t eat them. He just stares at them, like my question cast him into a well of remorse and self-doubt.
Maybe I’m frustrated a bit with the departure of Clayton, too. He was the whole reason I moved in, and now he’s gone. Now, I’m left to contend with two roommates who are so horny for sex all the time that I can’t remember when we last had a decent heart-to-heart. Sometimes, I feel like I don’t even know them anymore.
“I gotta get to class,” I say suddenly, gripping my backpack and rising from our table.
Brant looks up, stirred from his thoughts. “Hey, Dmitri. Can I ask you something?”
I stop and look down at my roommate whose eyes are full with an unexpected softness. The change in demeanor makes me pull back at once, worried something’s wrong. “Yeah?”
He shifts in his chair, pops the fries in his mouth, then folds his arms on the table and speaks through his food. He knows I hate it when he talks with a mouthful. “If there was, say, a girl you suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about. Or a dude. Whoever. But she doesn’t seem like she wants to have anything to do with you at all. Yet … she’s definitely into you. And you’re definitely into her. What do you do?”
I have to pay careful attention to his words and not draw any direct parallels to exactly how I feel about Sam. It’s an effort that makes my eyes pinch together.
“Do you pursue her anyway?” he goes on, looking up at me. “Do you see if it’s just a wall she’s put up, and she’s just waiting for you to be brazen enough to knock it down?”
His words aren’t doing anything kind to me right now. I don’t want to think that I turned away from Sam just because I was too stupid not to push through her wall. I’d rather like to think that I’m respecting her feelings and giving her space.
And I gave her space. Months and months of it. I guess she afforded me the same courtesy, because I haven’t seen her beyond passing by her in the food court once or twice. Maybe she’s made a home in the Music building, being a happy hermit among her pianos and crowded music stands. I thought that maybe her and Dessie would’ve kept close, but even at the Throng & Song, I only had one fleeting experience of seeing her at a distant table with that two-by-four named Tomas. I guess to be fair, if she snuck any glances my way, she was seeing me with a drunk gay dude hanging on my shoulder and touching me more than just any buddy would. I’m not sure what she’d make of that, if anything at all.
The cold truth is, I just need to move on. After all, everyone else has.
“Sorry,” says Brant suddenly, snapping me out of whatever zone I was floating in. “Didn’t mean to make you think of Eric or nothin’.”
Wait. Eric? Huh? “N-No,” I say quickly. “I wasn’t thinking of any—”
“I’ve noticed it too. Him with th
at same guy last three or four times. You think they’re gettin’ serious, him and that skinny shrimp whose name I don’t even know?”
I blink. Who’s he talking about?
“Anyway. We got class. Like you said.” Brant rises from the table and slaps me on the shoulder. “And also we gotta get to class. Don’t let Eric or his maybe-boyfriend-finally annoy you, bro. And I won’t let any tough, voluptuous, smart-tongued lady-girl break me,” he adds with a righteous smile, sounding like he’s talking about a particular someone whom I do not yet know.
The next morning, I wake up with the biggest case of morning wood I’ve ever had in my life. I know it’s more of a physiological thing and completely unrelated to waking up horny every sunrise, but with the amount of sexual frustration I happen to have built up inside me, I am ever sensitive to the erect state of my cock. And I don’t hesitate to start beating off right here in bed, thinking about nothing specific. There are soft, explorative hands all over my body, and then there’s a sexy shape before my eyes, slowly stripping away a robe—or is it a tight shirt, or a dress, or a sexy leather jacket? Female or male? I feel lips on my chest, working their way down to my cock, and my jerking speed increases more and more.
But the thing with masturbating on an empty mind is, you never want it to end. Something in the sexual void of unknown faces, secret lips, and mystery hands never quite satisfies, no matter how satisfying it may seem. And as you desperately try to optimize your orgasm to be the most gut-igniting one in your life, you tell yourself over and over that in five more minutes, the ideal moment will arrive when your fantasy, your hand, and your cock all align in perfect, mutual bliss.
Then an hour goes by. Then two.
And you’re still hunting that perfect orgasm.
