Tales From Cushman Row

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Nothing. Are you done being an idiot?”

  Jav took a swig of his beer and glared. “No.”

  “When you’re through being offended...” He shook the paper bag with his best Bambi eyes. “We have unfinished business from the other night, remember?”

  Jav shrugged but when he went for another chug of beer he was smiling.

  “Javito,” Stef said, getting up.

  “Don’t call me Javito. You sound so white.”

  “Come here, you moron.” Stef slid arms around Jav’s waist and dug his chin into Jav’s shoulder.

  “Why do I like when you call me a moron?”

  “Because the moron in me recognizes the moron in you.”

  “Namoronste?”

  “Exactly. Now cheer up or I’ll kill you.”

  “I’m perfectly cheery.”

  “How about I start celebrating without you,” Stef said, sliding a hand down the front of Jav’s jeans. “You can catch up when you’re ready. Oh, look.” His fingers squeezed what was growing hard within. “Nice of you to join us.”

  “Smartass.”

  Stef ran his mouth up Jav’s neck and stopped at his ear. “You love it.”

  Jav’s eyes closed, beer bottle poised at his open lips. “So does your mother.”

  “Y tu mama tambien.”

  “God, your accent sucks.”

  “So do you, when you’re not being an idiot.”

  “Why don’t you put your mouth where I used to make my money?”

  “Oh I’ll put more than that.” Tugging Jav by the hem of his shirt, Stef picked up the paper bag. “Hit the shower, Landes, it’s time for clinical trials.”

  “What am I, a lab rat?”

  “You know it.”

  And in a scuffle that was half passionate clinch, half wrestling, they were dragging each other down the hall, bumping off the walls and shedding clothing. Laughter giving way to more blunt, impatient noises, until Stef went silent and Jav was cursing at the bathroom ceiling.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he cried, hands in his wet hair. “The fuck is that?”

  “That would be your prostate, my friend.”

  “I know, but goddamn…”

  “I can’t believe you never had a woman do this to you.”

  “Only my primary care provider. And it felt nothing like this.”

  “Like…this?” Stef curled his finger again, knowing he had it when Jav’s feet clenched, looking for purchase on the bottom of the tub.

  The toes never lied.

  “Holy shit, that’s crazy.”

  “Want me to stop?”

  “I’ll fucking kill you if you stop.”

  Stef laughed. “Then you better hold onto something. You’re about to lose some brain cells.”

  His blood crackled. He was high on power and prowess. Drunk on the thrill of being The First. The Only. The One. Making Jav writhe against the tiles, choking on his own cries, reaching here and there to grab onto anything and not even having the strength to curl his fingers.

  “Feels so good,” he said, gasping. His hand dropped on Stef’s head. Then the other hand. Stef went still within the desperate grip. He let Jav take his head and come like a tornado. Come in a twisting frenzy, yelling through the shower spray, loud enough to wake up Hell’s Kitchen.

  They went still a long moment, Stef still on his knees, his face against Jav’s stomach.

  “Dude, let go my hair.”

  “Oh shit.” Jav’s fists sprung open. “I’m sorry.”

  “Quite all right.”

  They dried off and fell onto the bed. Stef ran a hand in circles on Jav’s chest. Feeling the hammer of his heart beneath. “How’d that feel?”

  “Like the worst blow job ever,” Jav said. He lifted up Stef’s arm and rolled beneath it, curling on his side. “God, that sucked.”

  “Sorry. I’ll never do it again.”

  “I’ll kill you.”

  Stef stroked Jav’s back, still a little damp, the tattoo between his shoulder blades fluttering. Jav blew his breath out and rubbed his forehead against the ball of Stef’s shoulder.

  “I never came like that in my life.”

  Stef rested his mouth against Jav’s wet hair. He looked out beyond the plain of his bed and slowly shook his head at the universe.

  This cannot be real. This cannot be happening.

  As usual, the universe shrugged back at him with a smile. Yet here we are.

  Some Beautiful Day

  A rainy, lazy afternoon. The playlist had shuffled through twice. The bedroom was dark except for the little light on Stef’s corner shrine.

  “So happy,” Jav mumbled.

  “Are you?”

  “Mm.”

  Stef’s hand slowly slid up and down Jav’s back. “You, know, you’re like…oddly hairless.”

  Jav hummed again.

  “Is this the Gil deSoto heritage? Or the way you’ve groomed yourself to look?”

  “Little of both,” Jav said. “My father and his oldest brother were two wildebeests. Hair poking out of their undershirts and all that. But their middle brother, Kiko, his nickname was heuvo.”

  “Egg?”

  “Mm. He was hairless. He could go for days without shaving and still be smooth. My dad said his father was the same way. But his father’s brother was born with a mustache. So there’s some deSoto gene going on that makes some of us beasts and some of us eggs.”

  The hair on Jav’s thighs was dark, but it was short and fine. Below his knees it grew a little longer and started to gather above his skin. A down of the same fine hairs was in his lower back while his butt was nearly as smooth as his shoulders.

  “Wonder if it’s a Native American throwback,” Stef said.

  “Could be.” Jav rolled on his side, his fingers running a circle around his sternum and a small, random patch of those fine hairs. “I used to wax this off.”

  “Why?”

  His fingernails scratched his chest. “Because I’m a vain fuck.”

  Stef’s fingers joined in the caress. “Leave it now. Let it grow.”

  “Why, you like it?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I like. I just want you to be you. You know? You don’t have to be so perfect anymore. You don’t have to look good all the time. Not for me, anyway.”

  Jav’s mouth did that funny thing it did when he wanted to say something but he stopped to measure and weigh the words.

  “What?” Stef said softly, running his thumb along Jav’s bottom lip.

  Jav closed his eyes, which he did when he was being brave. “I like looking good for you.”

  “You always look good to me.”

  “Yeah, but… Christ, what do I mean?” Jav ran a hand over his head. “When I want to…look nice for you or whatever, when I want to do things to please you, I mean them this time. I don’t want or expect anything in return. I like doing it for the liking.”

  Stef pushed up on an elbow and kissed him, eyes open, taking slow, soft bites of Jav’s mouth. Eating every word, every exhale, every brave act.

  “See, when you’re up over me like this?” Jav said, running a hand through Stef’s hair.

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re like…” His mouth trembled.

  “Tell me.”

  “You’re like the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Stef fell back to his side. Now it was his mouth that became a scale. Beautiful on one pan, words piling up on the other, weighing honesty against vulnerability. How much was too much. How much wasn’t enough.

  “Just…this,” Jav said, running a hand down Stef’s arms, then up again and over his shoulder and chest. “Your body. This.”

  His palm glided down Stef’s stomach, fingers spreading to fit between ribs before caressing a path over his hip.

  “This is beautiful to me.”

  His hand squeezed a glute. Then a quad. The backs of his fi
ngers ran along Stef’s penis, sliding between his thighs, cupping a moment then running up his stomach.

  “As a man, I mean,” Jav said. “How you look and feel and how you’re put together. It turns me on. I’m finally in a place where I can comfortably say a man’s body turns me on. I’m attracted to this. And it’s okay that I am. I’m letting myself be attracted to it and the more I let, the more it…becomes beautiful to me.” A corner of his mouth lifted in a wry grin. “I just feel weird saying so. Sometimes. It’s dumb, but I guess parts of my brain still think some words are girl words and I can’t say a man is beautiful.”

  Stef’s hands roamed and glided and squeezed. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted a man to see me as much as I want you to,” he said. “You look at me and… I’m me. And that’s fucking beautiful.”

  The pans of the scales balanced. He was hard now, twitching and dripping.

  “Come on top of me,” Jav whispered. “Come up here. Let me look at you.”

  Kissing, Stef slung a leg over and rolled, rising up on his knees over Jav’s legs. He set his cock next to Jav’s and gathered them both up tight in his hands.

  “God I love that,” Jav whispered.

  “What?”

  “When you rub us together. Feels so good.”

  “I know.”

  “Does this have a name?”

  “Um. I’ve heard ‘brosturbate’ once or twice.”

  Jav laughed, deep and wicked in his chest.

  “Frottage,” Stef said. “I think that’s said in nicer circles.”

  Jav reached for the lube bottle and dripped some on them. “What should we call it?”

  “You’re the wordsmith,” Stef said. “You pick.”

  They both let out a little groan as Stef’s grip turned slick.

  “Shit, I don’t have a word for any of this,” Jav said.

  Stef moved his tightly cupped hands up the length of both of them, squeezing at the tips.

  “Jesus,” Jav whispered.

  Stef let them go and pitched forward on his palms, leaned to lick the hollow at Jav’s throat, then drop a secret into it. “God, I want to fuck you so bad.”

  “I know.” Jav’s hands threaded through Stef’s hair. “Somed—”

  “I know someday. Actually I don’t care someday or not. But I want what I want. And it’s easy to say so.”

  “I want to know you want it. I need to know that. I like knowing that. The more I’m with you and the more I hear it, the more curious I get.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Every time it’s like… I get more used to the idea. Like I’m starting to see it. It’s an easier and easier thing to picture and it gets more and more…appealing.”

  “That’s why I want to wait,” Stef said, hips moving like a dolphin as he rubbed them together. “I want to wait until that picture is so big and bright, so vivid in your head that…”

  “What?”

  Stef dropped down on his elbows, Jav’s face in his hands. “That you ask me for it.”

  Jav kissed him. “I know I’m going to. Someday.”

  “Some beautiful day.”

  Kind of Loving You

  Jav got to Cushman Row and found a note on the kitchen counter: Bad day. On the roof. Come find me. On second thought, you might want to run like hell…

  Jav went up the four flights of steps, one last wooden stairway and out into the cold night. Remembering a blistering hot night when he was seventeen. He and his cousin Ernesto scampering up to the roof with a stolen bottle of Dominican magic, neither knowing what it would cost them.

  I went up to the roof a boy and got thrown down the stairs a man.

  Stef sat on top of the air conditioning vent, forearms wrapped around his knees, staring out toward the West Side Highway and the Hudson.

  “Hey,” Jav said.

  “Hey.”

  “You all right?” Jav said.

  “I will be. Today was just tougher than usual.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “When it’s bad like this… None of my usual methods work. I just have to let it leave me when it’s ready to.”

  “I get it.”

  “If I fight it, it sticks around longer. It just has to pass through like a storm.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It can get ugly. And I’ve never had anyone watch while it was happening.”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “No, I don’t want you to go, but I don’t exactly know how to have you here.”

  Jav climbed up on the vent and sat behind Stef. Drawing Stef between his knees to lean on his chest. Two bobsledders over Manhattan. Stef was rigid and tight in Jav’s arms. Fits of trembling washed over him then left. A quake of them. Then stillness. And another shivering shake. His breath made choppy clouds in the air.

  “Jesus, this kid is six years old…”

  “Shh.” Jav set his temple against Stef’s. “You can’t tell me.”

  “I know, but God, man, he’s so little. And that long road of years in front of him...”

  Jav pressed his head to Stef’s. “Shh.” He spread his palms wide around Stef’s forearms, trying to make everything about himself firm and unyielding and immutable.

  “You do what you can to keep it from sinking into your pores,” Stef said. “But it’s inevitable.”

  “You breathe it in.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lean back against me. Try to give me some of it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Just shake it out. Cry it out. Whatever you gotta do.”

  No tears fell. No sobs shook his big body. Yet Jav knew Stef was crying at a cellular level. An upset so deep and elemental, it wouldn’t budge. You couldn’t force it, like you could force yourself to puke. Putting a finger down the throat of this pain, you’d find no gag reflex. It just sat in your guts and festered.

  “Sometimes I make the mistake of thinking I’ve seen everything,” Stef said. “It’s an amateur move and it usually ends with me in fetal position on the roof.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Stef took a few deep breaths, exhaling each one heavier. “I’m kind of loving you right now,” he said.

  “Same.”

  A big sigh and Stef melted a little bit more against Jav. His hands came up to twine fingers with Jav and held on tight.

  “I need you to know you’re everything to me,” Jav said. “This. Right here. Means everything to me.”

  Stef nodded, face squeezed tight. Shivering and hurting and beautiful in Jav’s arms.

  “You’re freezing,” Jav said, taking a bit of charge. “Come inside now.”

  “Yeah, I don’t need to die of pneumonia for this.”

  “Chinese tonight? Beers?”

  “Intravenously,” Stef said, pulling open the stairwell door. “Lots.”

  “Sex?”

  Stef’s laugh echoed off the concrete walls. “I don’t know. Let me eat something and get drunk.” He stopped on a landing. He didn’t turn around but kept both hands on opposite rails, blocking the way. “I’m still loving you.”

  Jav slid his forearms around Stef’s neck and pressed their cold heads together. “Don’t stop.”

  I Can’t Even Do But Want

  “What’s with you tonight, Landes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Stef lay sprawled on the bed. Arms flung over his head. Huge breaths expanding and contracting his rib cage like bellows, his waist almost fragile beneath. His chest hair slick with sweat. The trail of fine hairs leading down from his belly button drawing up into damp spirals.

  “Jesus,” Jav whispered.

  “What?”

  “Just looking at you.” Staring, breathing just as hard, Jav set his palms on Stef’s sides, holding him above the hips. His knees were open to the sides and Jav could see everything. All of him. Every vulnerable private part naked and blatant and exposed.

 
I want all of this. I need to have all of this. I want to suck him with my mouth, lick him with my tongue, touch him with my fingers and fuck him with my cock. I’m not afraid or grossed out by anything his body does. If he comes on me, drools on me, sweats on me or gets his shit on me, I don’t care.

  I don’t fucking care.

  I want all of this.

  I want all of him. I want him on his back, on his stomach, on his knees. I want in his mouth and in his hands and in his ass until I fucking die.

  “Dude, when you look at me like that?” Stef whispered. “I swear I’m gonna lose my mind.”

  “I swear I don’t know what to do with you sometimes.” Jav fell onto his palms. Stef caught his kiss, fingers digging tight in Jav’s hair, turning his head this way and that.

  “Here’s what’s you’ll do,” he said. “First, you’re gonna get me ready. Then, you’re gonna fuck me the way you look at me.”

  Jav crawled backward along Stef’s body, kissing and licking down his chest and stomach and then pulling him into his mouth. His hands pushed Stef’s legs wide, thumbs sliding into the crack of his ass and pulling him apart, spreading him open. Touching and tasting every fold and ridge and crevice. Drunk on it. Crazed by it. Consumed with needing to make Stef come to him.

  And stay.

  “Last,” Stef said. “Don’t stop. Whatever you got going on tonight, whatever’s in your head, whatever’s driving you to be like this… Don’t even think about stopping.”

  “I can’t,” Jav said. He rolled Stef over. Stuffed pillows under his stomach to get his hips up high so Jav could suck and lick him from behind. He danced on the edge of a dire insanity. No matter what side, direction or angle he came at Stef, he couldn’t get enough.

  Stef’s voice floated over the desperation. “Don’t. Fucking. Stop.”

  Dragging a forearm across his mouth, Jav got up on his knees. His hands slipped and slid as he poured more lube on them and worked it in. His hands shook as he lined up the head of his cock and pushed it into Stef’s ass.

  “Slow,” Stef said, drawing the word out long. “Give it to me slow.”

  Jav shut his eyes and drew the intensity inward, wrapping it around them like golden cords. They stretched in all directions, keeping tension on him, holding him suspended. He leaned into their resistance as he moved his hips forward, taking Stef inch by inch.