Tales From Cushman Row

by Suanne Laqueur

  Mm. The same night. Catch Stef in an awkward situation easily misunderstood.

  “Do I have to? Hasn’t Jav suffered enough?”

  Write it. You don’t have to marry it.

  Sometimes The Thing is such a yenta. But she’s often right, so I scribbled this down in my notebook.

  Obviously I didn’t marry it. —SLQR

  Stef gets a text from Thomas who’s something of a fuck buddy. The buzz of meeting Jav is still crackling in his veins and Stef is suddenly hesitant at diluting it with Thoma-drama. But Tom is persistent so Stef meets him at a local pub for a few drinks. Maybe some other buddies show up. It’s a good time but Stef catches himself watching the door, as if Jav is due to show up as well. Reaching for his phone a half-dozen times, wanting to text. Wanting to make sure Jav hasn’t texted and Stef couldn’t hear the chime.

  Christ, who is this guy?

  The euphoric buzz gives way to an itchy, frustrated and fretful burn. He hasn’t been laid in quite a while. He was sort of getting into the celibacy. The Zen of delaying gratification. Exploring unsatisfied desire. The mindful horndog.

  Now he’s hungry.

  Thirsty.

  “Want to split?” Thomas says, sliding a hand down Stef’s spine, into a back pocket and squeezing.

  They stumble, laughing and carrying on, to Stef’s place. They’re cracking up on the front steps, Stef trying to get his keys out of his pocket and the key in the lock while Thomas holds him from behind, face buried in Stef’s neck. Thomas’s laugh breaks off in the middle and he twists away from Stef.

  “Can I help you?” he says.

  Stef looks up and his stomach plummets to his shoes. Jav is standing on the sidewalk, hands in the pockets of a leather jacket. Dark and beautiful. A narrow-eyed gaze and one corner of his lip smiling.

  Oh. Fuck.

  “Hey,” Stef says, running a hand through his hair and squirming in Thomas’ suddenly possessive grip. “Where are you… What are you doing here?”

  “Eh. Just walking around being stupid.” There is nothing shy or uncertain in his demeanor right now. He could be a close relation of the Jav that Stef met this afternoon.

  “I just got back,” Stef says, stupidly.

  “I see.” Jav’s in perfect command of the situation and investing zero emotion in it. “Have a good night, you guys,” he says, wrapping the casual words around him like a scarf and tossing the end over his shoulder.

  “Wait,” Stef says softly. A word bubble in the air over his head. A sick feeling in his bones.

  Fuck.

  “Who was that?” Thomas says.

  “He’s… Just someone I met.”

  “Oh. He live around here?”

  “No. I mean I don’t know.”

  “Huh.” Thomas glances down the street and back. “I get the terrible feeling I’ve interrupted something.”

  “No, it’s just…” Stef licks his lips and lets the cool night air fill his mouth. All his horned-up lust snuffs out like a candle flame, smothering his chest with smoke.

  “Dude, I’m losing my erection here.”

  A stab of annoyance behind Stef’s eyes. “Sorry. Why don’t you go home, okay?”

  “You fucking kidding me?”

  Stef meets his eyes dead-on. “No. Goodnight. Safe home.”

  Inside the garden apartment, he paces for ten minutes before grabbing his phone and texting Jav: I’m sorry. That wasn’t what it looked like.

  He paces. Finally a text comes back.

  Nothing to be sorry about.

  I was just drunk and being stupid.

  Why are you explaining yourself?

  I’m not sure. But I feel like crap now.

  Why?

  Because I had a good time meeting you today and I wish I’d just gone to bed.

  With me?

  Stef gives a bark of out-loud laughter, the heat flooding his face. No. I mean… No. Shut up. LOL.

  I had a good time too.

  I was kind of looking for you all night. You know. Like watching the door. Like you were going to show up.

  LOL. I guess I picked the wrong door.

  And I picked the wrong date.

  Stef’s filled with equal parts relief and goofiness. He goes around checking windows, turning off lights and turning locks. Brushing his teeth, stripping down to shorts and waiting for the phone to chime.

  Jav texts: Where is he?

  Headed home.

  Sorry I killed the mood.

  I’m not. Sounds weird, but thanks.

  Glad I could help.

  Stef falls back onto the bed, holding the phone over his face. What are you doing tomorrow?

  The reply takes forever.

  I don’t know. You got a date I could interrupt?

  The Bottom

  Boston.

  Jav’s last stop on the tour.

  Two in the morning and he and Stef were still talking. More than a little drunk and playing Truth or Truth.

  “Have you ever had sex without money being involved?” Stef asked.

  “Yeah. I didn’t get into the business until I was twenty-one so I went to a few rodeos.”

  “I bet. But no girlfriend.”

  “No. I was living in one room in Washington Heights. My bank account was a coffee can. Outside of my looks, I wasn’t what you’d call a catch.”

  “Since leaving the business, have you had payment-less sex?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I told you. I was bored.”

  “Ah. You did. Your turn.”

  “You ever get harassed?” Jav said. “I mean, walking down the street with a boyfriend?”

  “I’ve never walked down the street with a boyfriend.”

  “Would you say you’ve ever made love with a guy?”

  “No.”

  “No hesitation there.”

  “It might’ve been my Y chromosome talking shit. Let me think.”

  “I can’t say I’ve made love with anyone so…”

  “Well, I remember this one time with Quinn,” Stef said. “That guy from college who had all my firsts. We were doing it and… Shit, it’s hard to put this into words.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “No, I want to, but I’m kind of drunk.”

  “I’m drunk, too. And I don’t offend easy. Say whatever.”

  “You know what I hate?”

  “What?”

  “When it comes to male-on-male, you got no good words. Pussy may be crude but it’s still got sex appeal. You go to bed with a guy and you got crack. Ass crack. Ass cheeks. Asshole. Anus.”

  Jav’s laugh bounced off the hotel room walls.

  “No sexy terminology whatsoever,” Stef said. “Anyway, what was I saying?”

  “Crack, cheeks and this one time with Quinn?”

  “Oh. Yeah. So comes this one night we’re doing it.”

  “It?”

  “It.”

  “Top or bottom?”

  “With him I bottomed. He had no interest otherwise.”

  “Huh.” Jav rearranged a few mental pictures. He always pictured Stef topping.

  “Up until then,” Stef said, “he’d always been behind me. And hell, I didn’t know any different, I figured that’s how it went. Fuck, I’m drunk. So this one night we’re doing it and he’s on top of me. I mean, I’m on my back and he’s…on me.”

  “Missionary.”

  “Yeah. And call me naïve or stupid or whatever, but I didn’t know you could do it like that. It threw me a little, because…” He trailed off a few seconds. “The idea is there. It just doesn’t want to turn into words. Give me a minute.”

  “Take your time.”

  “I was under him,” Stef said. “I got my arms and legs up around his body. I’m just spread out for him and I have this really clear thought, This is what a girl does. It’s like an instinctive…classification. I
’m in the submissive role. The bottom. The captive.”

  “The bitch in the scenario.”

  “Right. The one not in control. Because I’m opening up, you know? I’m opening up so he can get in me. I’m an entrance and not the force. And everything in my mind points to it and says, feminine. I never had that kind of thought when he was behind me, but now I’m face-to-face and looking up at him. Holding his eyes. Putting my knees and arms up around him. Does this make sense?”

  It did, in that Jav could picture the action. But when he put himself in Stef’s place, it didn’t make sense. Nor was it anything he found sexy. Putting himself in Quinn’s position, however…

  “You there?” Stef said.

  Jav nodded, transfixed, before remembering Stef couldn’t see him. “Still here,” he said. “I get it.”

  “Then the thought of it as a feminine behavior is followed by this insane flash of insight that I’m wrong. Everything I thought about being a man and sex and masculinity… Right at the moment, it all turns inside-out and right side out. Like I’d been living backward up until that point. It’s not a matter of gender. It’s not about positions or power. Entrance or force or top or bottom. Who puts it in and who takes it in. And I relaxed into it. Let it be part of the leaning thing I talked about the other night. I looked up at him and he looked down at me and the eye contact definitely took it to another level. Came my fucking brains out.”

  “Good evening, and thank you.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call it making love, but it was a bit more than just fucking.”

  “What made you guys break up?”

  Stef snorted. “He dumped me for some chick who gave better blow jobs.”

  “Did he actually say that?”

  “Yeah. Hurt my feels.”

  They laughed, but it trickled away into an awkward silence.

  “What was that like for you?” Stef said.

  “What?”

  “Getting paid to be blown.”

  Now Jav snorted. “It didn’t happen too often.”

  “No?”

  “It was rarely about me.”

  “Ah. You were giving more than getting.”

  “Yeah. Usually I was on the receiving end because the woman wanted to role-play some alpha male scenario where I ordered her around.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “If she paid, I played.”

  “Huh.”

  “But I was never, like, lying back and getting it because we were in love and she wanted to please me.”

  A beat. “This is a weird question, but when was the last time you lay back and had it be all about you?”

  “I don’t remember.” He closed his eyes. Thinking, hoping, Maybe you and I could…do something about that.

  “I see,” Stef said. Soft in Jav’s ear. The same thoughtful, hopeful tone in his voice whispering, Yeah. Maybe we could.

  Smug

  A smile lifted up Jav’s mouth, making every hair on Stef’s body lift up. God, that mouth. His mouth and his body under his clothes. The skin that stretched over muscle and bone. The frame enclosing all that vulnerability. Stef wanted to touch him. Move up and put his head on Jav’s shoulder. Instead he pivoted sideways on the bed, and rested the back of his head against Jav’s hip, pillowed against his side. He folded his hands on his chest, knees crossed, one socked foot jiggling. This was good. Bodily contact without the intense scrutiny of eye contact.

  “Honestly,” Stef said. “There’s a world of stuff to do before topping or bottoming comes into the picture. And if it never comes in, so what? It’s not the gold standard. For what it’s worth, I like it, but it’s not my automatic go-to.”

  His head rose and fell as Jav took a deep breath. “I just wondered if this was all kind of frustrating to you.”

  “Physically frustrating?”

  “Or mentally.”

  “Mentally, no. Frustrating isn’t the word.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Interesting,” Stef said. “It’s new. I’ve never done this.” He waved a general hand at the two of them and the room. “Lie around with a guy talking about sex. Lie around fully dressed shooting the shit with no expectation. Yeah, I get impatient and physically worked up over you. I’m a mortal male. Sex is always lurking around in my head, usually right behind food. But I’m also forty years old. I can deal with delayed gratification. It’s kind of cool, actually.”

  “For real?”

  He closed his eyes as Jav’s fingers slid through his hair, his palm spreading wide on Stef’s crown. “I do want you,” Stef said. “At the same time, everything in me, in my head and my gut, it’s all saying this is something good. Something unique and worth holding my horses for. Something worth being patient for. So I will.”

  “Holding your horses,” Jav said. “Cool metaphor, Pony.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m not attracted to you. Because I am. You turn me on and work me up. You get me so fucking hard sometimes. I go out of my mind wanting you and just when I think I’m ready to do something about it, I…”

  “Panic?”

  “No, I just stop. But it’s not stopping out of fear. It doesn’t feel fearful. It feels…”

  Stef waited.

  “It feels almost smug,” Jav said, sighing. Then he chuckled. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Smug,” Stef said. He rolled toward the headboard, the side of his face burrowing into Jav’s flank. Jav pushed fingers through Stef’s hair, scratching a little. “Smug means pleased. Proud. Self-satisfied.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t want to put words in your mouth,” Stef said. “I’m just thinking out loud here so push me off the bed if I’m full of shit. But maybe you stop because you can stop. Because money isn’t part of whatever’s happening with us here.”

  “Mm.” The single exhaled syllable invited more.

  “Let me ask you something,” Stef said. “Did dates with your clients feel like constructing one complete love story, start to finish, within the span of a few hours? Like you went in as a stranger, but acting like you were already crazy about her? Already the perfect boyfriend and she was the perfect woman, no matter you’d never met before?”

  “Kind of,” Jav said slowly.

  “So you packed the chase, the courtship, the amazing sex and the happily ever after into four hours, then took the envelope, turned the page and headed into the next story.”

  “With new clients, yes. Toward the end it was mostly regulars. So not so much starting new stories as continuing old ones. Serial love stories.”

  “That’s a lot to juggle around in your head,” Stef said. “That you’re X in this story, but Y in that story. Being an escort kind of means being an actor.”

  “Not kind of,” Jav said, smiling.

  “You’re like the ultimate understudy. Ready to step into any part at any moment, depending on what script your client gives you.”

  “Mm.”

  “And I’m not giving you a script,” Stef said. “I’m not paying you. You don’t have to stay. You don’t have to do anything. You can just lie here and…be you. And part of you is smugly enjoying taking your sweet ass time figuring this all out. Makes sense to me.”

  “You make it sound so much cooler than what goes on in my head.”

  “My job is to make the mess in people’s heads sound cool.”

  The Role Loneliness Played

  I’ve been sleeping alone for so long.

  Jav was never more aware of the role loneliness played in his life than when he slept with Stef. Literally slept. Sometimes with Stef curled against his back, sometimes with Stef’s shoulder blades against his chest. Sometimes with nothing more than his little toe touching Stef’s calf under the covers. But always that extra physical presence in constant contact through the night. After decades of sleeping solo, it ought to have been weird. A disruption of rou
tine.

  Jav loved it.

  Christ, this is what it’s like.

  “I keep going back to that thing,” Stef said, one night at Hickory’s BBQ, as they demolished two-for-one ribs. “Of sex never being about you.”

  “What about it?”

  “I mean, never like…never? Was that just in your work or in your personal life, too?”

  Jav took his time chewing his last mouthful, along with the question he was reluctant to answer.

  “How much of a personal sex life did you have anyway?” Stef asked, sucking sauce off his thumb. “I mean, if it’s not too personal to ask.”

  “Not much. And to be honest… Any relationships I had with women felt like relationships with non-paying clients.”

  Stef’s expression was thoughtful over his beer bottle. “Ever been tied up?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Ever been tied up in bed?”

  “You mean literally?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jav barked a laugh. “No.”

  Stef didn’t laugh along. “You ever do the tying up?”

  “Sure.”

  “Handcuffs?”

  “Few times.”

  “Spanking?”

  Defensiveness prickled at the back of Jav’s eyeballs. “If she paid, I played.”

  “But you never had a client or a lover who wanted a night to call the shots or dominate you in any way?”

  “No.”

  Stef’s eyes softened into something that looked like sadness. “So it’s fair to say that in the entire time you’ve been a sexually active male, which is…what, thirty years? Give or take?”

  Jav nodded.

  “You’ve never once not been in control in bed.”

  Looking at the table top, Jav shook his head. “No.”

  “Dude, think about that.”

  “I know.” He looked up, and Stef was smiling now, the dimple creasing the side of his face.

  “I don’t mean this date to turn into therapy,” he said. “You can punch me if I start to get too shrinky.”

  “Wait, this is a date?” Jav said.

  Stef kicked him under the table. “Who took care of you all these years?”

  “I took care of myself.”

  “But what if you… I don’t know, broke your leg or something? What if you had a debilitating stomach bug. Did you have one person to bring you soup and sympathy?”