It's funny, don't you think, the way an accident can become a habit. Unclear, though, how a habit develops into a ritual. Then, before you know it, the ritual transforms itself into a fetish. Shoplifters, for instance, are said to get a sexual charge from quickly, discreetly slipping something unpaid for into their coat pockets or purses, boldly strutting toward the exit. But is it the thrill of the act or the threat of getting caught that can repeatedly bring the petty criminal to the brink of orgasm? Ask a fire starter or the person who follows the sound of sirens to the scene of the head-on collision in a busy intersection, if they know what it is about these events that make the tops of their heads feel as it they might become unattached.

My lover Cary and I were cleaning up our apartment after my sister, brother-in-law, and two nephews Cruise and Willis, went home. They were the last of the stragglers from my biological family, that had been in attendance at our annual friends-and-family winter-holiday party. At a little after midnight, Cary and I were both on the receiving end of what amounted to a second wind. We both enjoyed entertaining, did it frequently and, weren't averse to leaving dirty glasses and dishes in the kitchen sink if we could see the sun coming up over Lake Michigan, through the kitchen window, which wasn't an unusual occurrence after any one of our parties throughout the calendar year. However, the combination of the cold temperature outside, the threat of a potential Chicago snowstorm, and the presence of family members of all ages, guaranteed that this party would not be one of those.

Cary was the one who had suggested that we invite our respective families to what had traditionally been a party consisting of our chosen family. Over the years, four to be exact, our "chosen" family began to include members of Cary's biological family. Initially, it had been Cary's first cousin Jon who cracked the barrier of the family, and that was only because he came out to us at Cary's parents' fortieth wedding anniversary party, and we soon began to socialize on a regular basis.

At first, I was a little jealous. I didn't have any gay cousins. As far as I knew, I didn't have any gay relatives at all. From all appearances, I was the one exception to the heterosexual rule in my clan, but, fortunately for me, I was never ostracized or treated any differently by any of my immediate family members after I came out at the age of twenty-two.

Eventually, our "all-inclusive" holiday party (Christmas, Solstice, Kwanza, Hanukkah, and any other winter holiday of note) also grew to include our blood relatives. In surveying the damage from the evening's entertainment, it would seem that we had emerged unscathed. In fact, we felt quite proud of our achievement. We threw a party consisting of some forty (including significant others) invited guests, and tossed our relatively small families (my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and nephews, Cary's recently-widowed father, his two older brothers, and their wives) into the mix, and nothing was spilled that couldn't be cleaned up, or broken that couldn't be fixed or discarded without too much fuss.

I'm not sure what it was then, that possessed us to do the clean up in the buff. Perhaps one or the other of us had become aware of the smokey smell that permeated our holiday finery, even though all of our smoking guests had been instructed to do so on the balcony. It was such a blustery night that the cigarette smoke managed to be blown into the room every time a smoker returned from the outside, opening and trying their best to close the balcony door as quickly as possible. Maybe it was just that it was really very warm in the apartment. The heat had been on all night, and it was as if the walls of the apartment, the furniture and the area rugs, had managed to retain some of our guests' body heat.

Whatever it was, we were suddenly, scurrying about, collecting wine glasses and empty beer bottles, festive paper coffee cups and crumpled napkins, messy paper plates and plastic silverware, and filling the tall, black Hefty kitchen garbage bags, naked as the day we were born. There was already a garbage bag filled to the brim with glittery wrapping paper scraps from the grab-bag gift exchange. It was tied up tight, looking like something mummified, and leaning against a wall in the kitchen.

"There's something sticky on this table," Cary said, kneeling on his bare, lightly hairy knees, before the vintage teak coffee table in front of the oversized sofa, running his fingers over something blurring the surface.

"Do you want a moist sponge or a paper towel?" I asked, heading for the kitchen, while keeping my ear cocked for his response.

"Paper towel, I think," he said, "and a couple of dry ones, too, please."

I grabbed a half-full garbage bag and collected trash on my way into the kitchen situated at the other end of the apartment. I wasn't watching where I was going and, five steps into the kitchen I stepped on something gooey and slick, feeling it adhere to the bottom of my bare foot while it ground into a couple of the black and white checkerboard parquet squares beneath me. I righted myself before twisting my back too much, and simply said, "Shit!"

"Ira? Did you say something?" Cary called out from his watchful station in front of the sticky stain on the table.

"I said, 'Shit,'" I said, looking down to determine what it was that I had stepped in and smeared across the floor. A few inches away from where I was standing were the empty bent gold foil discs that I recognized as the covering for the large milk chocolate "coin" I had stepped on. Who knew how long it had been sitting there, out of its protective wrapping? Apparently long enough to have softened up to a mushy, not crumbly, consistency.

Earlier in the evening, when Cary gave my nephews their little plastic mesh bags of chocolate Hanukkah "gelt," he had specifically told them that when they wanted to eat one, that the kitchen was the place to do so. If there was one thing I could say for my older sister Ina and her husband Jim, it was that their children always did as they were told. Just as I was about to try to decipher whether it was Cruise or Willis who had done this, Cary came into the room.

"Is that your imitation of a pink flamingo?" Cary asked over my shoulder.

When he said that, I realized that I had been standing on one leg, with my right, chocolate-smudged foot crossed over my left knee.

"I stepped in something," I said, pointing to the darkened soul of my bare foot. Cary moved closer to me, his soft body hair brushing against my bare back. He stood a full head taller than me, and as I leaned back against him, I felt the crown of my head make contact with his Adam's apple.

Earlier in the evening, at the party, I became aware that I was not making as much physical contact with Cary as I usually did in social situations. We've earned a reputation among those who know us for being something of a demonstrative couple, completely at ease with ourselves and our relationship. While we never do it to shock anyone, we are, within reason, prone to public displays of affection. But for some unknown reason, the presence of both of our families, perhaps, I felt myself holding back. At one point during the party, Cary became especially animated, while telling a particularly funny story. I felt this sudden urge to excuse both of us from our guests, while we took to our bedroom, to alleviate the unexpected hard-on I felt expanding within my khakis.

He nuzzled the back of my neck, and before I had a chance to put my chocolate-coated foot on the floor, he wrapped his arms around my waist, lifted me up, and carried me to the kitchen counter near the sink. He helped me ease my bare butt onto the cool, and slightly cluttered Corian surface.

For a second, I was embarrassed by our nakedness in the kitchen, but one look at his completely erect penis told me I had nothing to worry about. I waited for him to turn on the tap so that we could rinse off my foot, and was surprised when he crouched down in front of me. He took my chocolate splattered foot in both hands and proceeded to lick the sweetness off of my skin. I felt his tongue on my heel, then his lips, and just a tease of teeth. It tickled in a different way than fingers did. It felt like fingers wrapped in warm velvet. He dropped one of his hands between his legs and alternately pulled on and stroked his erection, as his tongue and lips moved sweetly across the arch of my foot. He turned my foot sideways, stretching his mouth open wider, gripping it gently with his teeth, while he ran his tongue back and forth across the most tender part of the flesh.

I had been using my hands to support myself on the counter-top, which had warmed up enough for me to move one hand into my lap and over my boner. I reached over to the bottle of environmentally safe dish-washing liquid to lube myself with, when Cary tightened his grip on my foot. Our eyes met and with only the slightest motion, he shook his head no, his chocolate-coated lips and tongue making their way to the ball of my foot and my toes.

"Kiss me on the mouth," I said, "I want something sweet, too."

Cary stood up, his erection not allowing him to get too close to the kitchen cabinets, and looked at me smiling. He had the look of a little boy who had just stolen all of the just-baked, still warm, chocolate chip cookies off the rack where they had been cooling, and eaten every last one. My first urge was to find something with which to wipe off his mouth and chin, the tip of his nose. Instead, I wrapped my legs around his waist, my arms around his neck and kissed long and hard.

While we were kissing, he reached up to the cabinets behind me, where we kept the spices and the baking supplies, and pulled out an unopened bag of Nestle's Tollhouse chocolate chips. He opened the cabinet below where I was sitting and retrieved a pot. He pulled away from me and tore into the bag of chocolate chips, pouring more than half the bag into the pot and putting it on the stove, a low, blue flame pulsing from the burner. He came back to where I was sitting, looking at him with eyes both dejected and curious. He kissed me quickly, jamming his still chocolatey tongue between my lips, as he retrieved a wooden spoon from the drawer below where I was sitting.

At the stove, he stirred the pot with his back to me. His shoulders were wide from years of regular workouts at the gym. His back was modestly muscular and hairless, narrowing down to his hips, and his slightly furry bubble-butt. His legs were nicely defined and slightly bowed, the hair from his butt-cheeks growing darker and a little thicker on his thighs and calves, stopping where his ankles met his feet. I wanted to go to him, my erection losing a little of its hardness. I tried to move discreetly off of the counter-top, but my hairless buttocks made a squeaky sound when I moved forward.

"Stay where you are," Cary said, "I'll be right there. All the chips have almost melted."

In less than a minute, what he said was true, and I watched him pour the liquefied chocolate chips, which let off a whisper of steam as it flowed, dark and slow as proverbial molasses, into a soup bowl. Using his foot, he dragged the step-stool I used to reach things on the upper shelves of the kitchen cabinets, over to where he had been standing in front of me and stepped up, giving himself, and his unflagging erection some leverage, and allowing me an unobstructed view of more of him. Without speaking, he spread my legs apart, making room on the counter for the bowl of hot chocolate. He cupped my genitals in both hands, scooping them up, while slightly tipping the bowl back toward my groin. He released me and there was a thick, slow-motion splashing sound.

When my cock and balls made contact with the chocolate dip, it felt as warm as a mouth. My dick quickly regained its hardness, skimming the bottom of the bowl, then rising out of it, like a water-borne creature surfacing from the deep. The tips of my pubic hair, closest to the base of my dick, were frosted in chocolate, glistening briefly, before drying and clumping together. He massaged the chocolate into the taut skin of my dick and balls, it felt so good, I sighed, as if close to orgasm.

"Don't you dare," he said, recognizing the familiar sound.

"I won't," I said.

He crouched down, again, still on the step-stool, both feet dangling off the edge of the narrow surface, and began to eat and suck my chocolate-dipped dick. His lips smacked with every motion he made, forward and back. He sucked each chocolatey ball gently into his mouth, grazing them with his teeth. And when they emerged from between his lips, the skin was only lightly veined with chocolate.

"Lay back," he said, his voice thick with chocolate, and I did.

Some of the chocolate must have streaked down below my balls, into the space above my asshole, because his tongue followed a trail down there, slurping, as he went. His chocolate-stained thumbs spread my ass-cheeks and I figured that Cary either found more chocolate spillage or that he wanted to personally introduce my prostate to chocolate with his tongue. Even without touching myself, I knew I was dangerously close to coming with Cary's mouth firmly planted between my buttocks and his chocolate-breath melting my defenses.

"Cary, if you don't stop that, I won't be able to hold back much longer."

He stood up and leaned over me, planting a kiss on my mouth that tasted like a mocha version of me. Our lips detached and he was back at the stove.

There was a little chocolate in the bottom of the pot that only took a few seconds to heat up and turn into a sexy cocoa -based sauce, sufficient to coat the head of Cary's still rock-hard cock. He smoothed it into the head, working as methodically as a safecracker. He scooped the remaining chocolate from the pot with the index and middle fingers of his other hand.

He subtly moved his head from side to side, indicating to me that he wanted my ankles on his shoulders.

I eased the lower half of my body forward, while leaning back, careful not to knock anything over. It was a surprisingly graceful move in a limited space. As soon as my heels made contact with his shoulders, his chocolate-slicked fingers were sliding gently in and out of my asshole. I had never before considered the lubricating qualities of chocolate, and was surprised by the silky texture. Just as I was beginning to enjoy the sensation of his fingers, I felt something more substantial in their place.

My eyes went wide and my head was thrown back like a Pez dispenser. He was halfway in before I let out a sweetened grunt. Such an action was completely out of character for both of us, advocates of safe sex and long lives, but we were obviously under the spell of the chocolate narcotic.

Still, we both knew that the chocolate would have probably done more damage than good to a condom, and experience had taught us not to do anything foolish.

I grabbed my fudge-sicle dick and stroked it in rhythm to Cary's thrusts. He pulled out after a few minutes, our orgasms synchronized, our cum like white chocolate pools on my chest and stomach, only sweetened the deal.

While I never considered either of us creatures of habit, pretty soon, anything chocolate or chocolate-coated was stockpiled for variations on this theme. Once, after shaving Cary's chest and armpits, I slathered his upper torso in Frango mint chocolate, and spent more than an hour licking him clean. We tried Belgian chocolate and Hershey's syrup. We pelted our fannies in Fannie May and Fannie Farmer. We'll never look at a Whitman Sampler in quite the same way again. You can only imagine what happened to the five pound, red-satin, chocolate-filled, heart-shaped boxes of candy we exchanged on Valentines's Day, can't you?

I'm just thankful I didn't step in peanut butter or raw liver.

 

©2002 Gregg Shapiro - Contributor's Bio