It was an odd thing to do, invite a sexual partner, hardly a boyfriend, into a virtual stranger’s home. But I was feeling childishly defiant. Not only did I want them all to know I fucked boys, I wanted to provide a healthy example.

For the past few years, Passover had come and gone without my participation. I was now across the country from the greatest concentration of my family, and without their assistance, the only thing I could remember about the holiday’s whereabouts was that it showed up roughly around the time that the opposing team started dying hard boiled eggs. Passover, like many traditions from my childhood, became an old school friend I kept meaning to look up.

But I was a good kid, brought up on the wisdom that even the weakest of symbolic gestures was better than none, so when I was invited to the conveniently located new home of a small family on some remote and dusty corner of my genealogical chart, I knew better than to say no. The mother, I remembered from when I was young, was one of those “family at any cost” types who would call up my parents whenever they were in town, and we would jump in the car to meet them at some restaurant of their choosing. I never understood back then what their relationship to us was, and I always suspected my parents didn’t exactly know either. Apparently, though, the relationship was strong enough for me to get a phone call, a little over fifteen years since the last intersection of our lives, just because they happened to have moved twenty minutes away and it happened to be Passover.

I had another, more important reason for bringing Brian: it would be hot. My fantasy life was my only foothold in the world of sexual gratification these days and it often barked orders at my real life. I’d fantasized about how Brian, five years my junior, would stick out like a sore thumb at the gathering, and the resultant discomfort would make me so unmanageably horny that I would have to rush him into their bathroom and stick my dick, like a sore thumb, deep into him.

I had imagined the interior of their bathroom as early as two weeks ago, almost immediately after getting the invite. In my head it was newly renovated, a standard job for the resale of an old home, with large, peach-colored, diamond-shaped tiles on every wall. Brian’s faded jeans and torn black shirt would be a pleasant contrast to a pastel underwater theme. It would be before dinner, when only a few people would have arrived and would be sitting around, talking. In the fantasy, I close the bathroom door and press him against the sink counter. I come up behind him and put my arms through his, grab onto his shoulders and press my crotch into his ass inside those tight jeans. There’s a small circular tear in the denim on the back of his upper right thigh, leaving the weaver’s loom of thread intact to screen me from his soft, nearly hairless skin. I try to lift my knee, with its own tear in the pants, in order to make contact between our clothes, but it is too awkward an effort and I have to abandon it.

In the medicine cabinet mirror we both watch as I lick the perimeter of his left ear. He then watches my head sink down and disappear behind his left shoulder and then only feels the remainder of my descent to his tight-jeaned ass. I press my face into the depression and reach around for his zipper. He is silent the entire time, so I can hear the clanging and scraping of kitchen preparations at the other end of the house. In a second I have dropped his jeans and underwear both and his boyishly white cheeks are in front of me. I spread them apart and the entrance contracts in response to the breach. I give him one long, slow lick from the back of his balls all the way to the small of his back, pressing as hard as I can across the plane of changing textures, rough at first and then varying shades of the smoothness of skin in its early twenties. Brian presses against my face in a plea for another go round, but I stand up quickly and open the medicine cabinet instead.

I try to be quiet so the son in the adjacent bedroom won’t suspect anything over the sound of the video game he’s playing instead of helping his family in the kitchen. I see that Brian has turned around to see where I have gone and I guide him firmly back to his original position. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I find it anyway.

A peppermint-flavored bottle of mouthwash now in my hand, I motion Brian to bend over the toilet with his hands on the seat so that his ass is in the air, his balls swinging lazily like sweethearts on a porch swing. He has seen me twist of the cap on the bottle and so he steels himself for what he knows I am going to do. Gently but firmly, I fit the head of the bottle into him and push his head farther down so that his ass is higher in the air and I can pour in a good mouthful. The subdued sloshing of the bottle’s contents as it goes in can’t compete with the sound of the video game that the sixteen-year-old son is playing on the other side of the wall.

As I slowly take the bottle from his tight ass a few stray beads of mouthwash trickle out before he can tighten himself and these bright blue beads become a light purple as they travel down his legs and balls, like new veins. I make him hold it in while I clean up these trails with my tongue and then, when he complains of a growing discomfort, I seal my lips around his asshole and he relaxes. I swish it around my mouth and gargle, and Brian whispers that the air feels great against his hole. I spit the mouthwash into the sink and quickly return to his ass. The freshened air between us feels condensed and magnetized as I lick him clean. He is now breathing in short, ecstatic spurts. His excitement affects me and I can no longer take it. I unzip my fly and stick my dick into him with minimal warning. He holds on to either side of the toilet seat for dear life. But it is my hands on his shoulders that’s really holding him up, because I am repeatedly undermining his balance with each thrust. His head is now inches away from the toilet water and I am both keeping him from the water and dangling him precariously close to it. Soon I notice the euphoric effect of the mouthwash on my cock, his natural warmth mingling with an icy hot. Brian feels similarly, I can tell, because he is whimpering the way he does when he habitually reaffirms his faith in sex. But with the kid not four feet away from us in the next room, it is unwise to reaffirm so loudly in the gossipy acoustics of a bathroom. Maybe if he were a fag, but he’s one of those straight jock types. To shut Brian up, I press his face down into the toilet water and his head reemerges sputtering but no longer betraying sexual arousal. His asshole feels like heaven and I thrust harder.

I then feel like a hypocrite, because I begin to hear sounds similar to Brian’s coming from the other side of the wall, and I welcome it! Is the kid jerking off in the next room? He is! I pound into Brian even harder, as if to emphasize the double standard. It becomes clear to me, in my fantasy, that the kid must have been playing one of those just-this-side-of-X-rated video games and watching half naked girls jump around on screen to a different time signature than their breasts, because there is the sound of computer-generated cooing and, on top of that, the sound of a healthy young all-American boy dropping his pants and taking care of business. Immediately I forget about Brian, only remember the mentholated portal surrounding my cock, and imagine the sixteen-year-old lying on the floor beside his abandoned game controller with his pants and underwear pulled merely halfway down his thighs and pulling furiously at his young, ambitious dick. I fuck to the rhythm of the boy’s increasingly audible grunts and I am ready to come at any point, but I want to wait for him. I want us to come together. (Brian can come, too, I guess). I fuck Brian furiously and the peach diamonds behind the toilet dance past each other as my eyes cross with pleasure. I want to come right now but I can wait, aware that I won’t have to wait much longer if I know anything about young all-American boys. I break formation with the kid’s strokes so that I can slow down and bide my time, grinding my teeth I want to come so bad. I hear in Brian’s breathing that he likes it slow. At this speed, I can feel the peppermint coolness of the open air reveal itself to every inch of my tingling shaft while the tickle of impending orgasm radiates from within. I grow increasingly impatient and want to scream through the wall that time is now very much of the essence—I can fuck only so slowly. Brian’s ass, now a veritable school zone, is also growing impatient. Even in fantasy, it and its owner can take only so much teasing.

Just as I finally decide to abandon the partnership, the boy comes through like I knew he would, his rapid, seemingly plaintive breaths trumpeting his glorious return, for the thousandth time, to that secret, short-lived frequency—he is almost at the gate now. Though I had already given up on him and begun to fuck harder, I now find myself in the trailing position and have to kick it up a notch. Brian grunts loudly. I put my hand over his mouth because I know this is a delicate operation, that the kid in the next room is an unwitting participant and must remain so. But I fuck harder still and the kid breathes harder still, but then he pulls back a bit, only in volume, not intensity, perhaps because he shares another of his walls with his sister’s room. My hand is still absent-mindedly over Brian’s mouth and he takes two fingers into his mouth and bites down approvingly, which feels good in the way a burning seat belt buckle feels good on exposed skin when returning home from eight hours in an air-conditioned office.

And then, finally, the unmistakable sound of the height of adolescent ecstasy—equal parts abandon, shame, and gratitude—issues from his room and I let go myself, pressing fast and furious over and over again into Brian’s tight asshole as I come inside him. At this point, I must cover my own mouth.

“Ronnie, what’s wrong?” Brian asked me again.

Now it was the real thing, the real evening. Reality served, for me, as a localized anesthetic. Wherever I needed to feel something, reality traveled there and deadened me; it especially had it out for my groin. I wondered now why I had brought Brian.

He asked me what was wrong as we stood in the kitchen before most of the other guests had arrived after having been served the first of many drinks that evening. I didn’t answer him, but instead put my hand lovingly at the back of his head.

After twenty minutes, I had narrowed down my connection to the woman who’d invited me tonight to some variety of cousinship. Though her relationship to me in the role of bartender was far more immediately significant. I emptied my gin and tonic nearly as quickly as she had made it for me and she didn’t miss a beat in refreshing my glass, like a soccer mom with Gatorade. When it occurred to her to invite me, she must have expected that we could pick up in much the same place as we had left off fifteen years ago, and I believe now she must have realized that she no longer harbored the same maternal affection for me and probably wondered, as we stood across from one another in her large kitchen, why she had invited me at all. It’s not like we weren’t practically strangers all those many years ago, but it’s far easier to be strangers with a child than with an adult. She discovered now that difference, and I think she was compensating for her lack of, well, love in a way that I had quickly demonstrated as very agreeable to me. Maybe her rapid transformation into a bartender was my fault. Maybe the dismay in my head was all too apparent on my face when she’d opened the door when we’d arrived. I was disturbed by what I can only describe as fifteen years’ worth of deterioration apparent on her face. I realized it wasn’t fair to have expected her to look exactly like the young mother she had once been, but it was nonetheless a shock. The aging I had done in those fifteen years was broken to me gently, slowly over the course of fifteen years, and my attention was diverted with millions of little distractions.

I knew, in almanac terms, that fifteen years had past, but I was not keen on knowing it any other way.

Equally disturbing was being reminded of the goofy, clumsily intellectual, frustrated virgin she’d thought she was inviting tonight, with his eager speeches about philosophically interesting Twilight Zone episodes or about words whose origins he’d just looked up in the Oxford English Dictionary. The years since, ones in which she hadn’t seen me, included the monumentally unpleasant time when I’d made the shift from childhood to slutty childhood. In despair, I’d prepared for myself a total immersion program in which I could learn all there was to know about sex in as short a time as possible, so that I might be satisfied that I’d made up for all the wasted time jerking off to my own fantasies while my schoolmates were merrily acting theirs out.

I was now a young man with a life far removed from both television and the OED, a young man whose demeanor had grown reserved in his twenties, whose system had grown slightly dependent on alcohol and pills, and who was now slightly embarrassed about the boy he used to be. I was also more than a little envious of him. Little did I realize that those virginal years would turn out to be the most erotically charged and fulfilling of my life thus far: I was not yet aware of the prosaic realities of sex—the pain, the boredom, the inadequate degrees of friction. The first time I put a penis in my mouth, I remember thinking, I’ve had better dick than this! Half the boys in my high school had penises larger, tastier, and with the natural ability to slide down my esophagus and back to the tip of my tongue. I could also, with these boys at my school, or boys on the street, magically see their tight little asses clench from behind, and simultaneously feel the puff of pubic hair tickling my cheeks and eyelids as my lips kissed the base of their dicks.

Those were dicks.

That was sex.

There was no learning curve in the fantasies. Real sex was such a disappointment in comparison, such a trial. I despaired when I realized that the boy with the OED in one hand and his aching penis in the other had it so good.

Now, in my late twenties, the learning curve rounded, I found that experience didn’t make sex any more enjoyable. Now I just longed for those awkward first experiments, but only because those days were now a part of memory, fantasy’s accomplice. I could now drop a young man’s shorts and slip his dick down my throat with the same cool experience as I’d had in my imagination at the age of fourteen. I could anticipate the oncoming spurts of semen and take it all in my mouth as passively as if it were intravenous. I no longer yelped in pain when being fucked in the ass. I’d long since taken control of those muscles, could invite anyone I wanted inside and even forget they were there. Sometimes remembering was the hard part.

Watching this woman as she cooked and tried to make conversation, and then settling for making another round of drinks, reminded me of the good old days, when sex was more vivid and real for having been not real at all. I can tell you, this was certainly nothing I had anticipated. I had suspected I might feel a bit of nostalgia, which I certainly did, but I hadn’t expected this feeling of loss.

I was exceedingly drunk by the time the majority of the party had arrived. Seated in the den with us now were about fifteen or twenty men and women with a couple of kids running around their parents, the circumference of their orbits determined by the boldness of their ages. For the most part the conversation in the room was comfortably communal: it turned out that very few of the guests knew anyone else besides their spouse and children, so the lot of us settled into a system in which a topic was tossed into the middle of the room like raw meat and the more ferocious dogs ran for it and chewed it up between them while the rest of us were content to pick up a scrap or two.

Eventually, though, Brian and I were pulled into a private conversation. The man looked to be in his fifties and was wearing a brown suit that lay so loose and droopy on his body that he must have worn it every day to work. He wanted to talk about Jewish youth and its not so firm grasp on tradition—a topic that does not particularly engage me—and we did so with uninspired results for a good fifteen minutes. As the man was picking up speed in his campaign to shift from a dialogue into a monologue on the same subject, something that did often engage me, Brian’s hand, slowly insinuated itself into the triangle of space between my crossed legs. The man in the brown suit suddenly stopped what he was saying and looked at Brian’s fingers peeking out from under my right leg. He looked away, puzzled, and took a sip of a dark soda fizzling in the short glass in his hand. He must have known well before this action that we were more than friends, but I guess he had expected us to be on our best behavior. Stubbornly, the man picked up more or less where he had left off on the subject of Jewish youth, though more awkwardly of course. But even his discomfort was unstudied and malformed. There was certainly no malice behind it, simply an ignorance of how exactly to proceed.

Still, the awkwardness was enough to make me grow beneath my jockey shorts. I thought about Brian slyly unzipping my pants, finding my cock in the mess of cotton and pre-come, and jerking me off with the lubrication of my own dribble while the man in the brown suit tried to continue his monologue. I had been half listening to what he’d been saying before, but now, in my fantasy world, I could do no more than recognize that his lips were still moving.

“You know, I’m gonna need a cigarette before dinner,” Brian interrupted. “I’ll be right back.” Despite effectively being silenced, the man looked appreciative. It was clear to me that Brian wanted me to come with him, and I was slightly annoyed. I was perfectly happy right where I was, in my element, which is anywhere devoid of sexual energy in which I inject massively inappropriate amounts of said energy.

But I was, contrary to what the content of my fantasies often suggest, a dutiful lover, so I unsuccessfully tried to make the man believe that I also needed a cigarette and followed after Brian.

We slipped out to the backyard without anyone thinking much about our absence—aside from the man in the brown suit, of course, and I could tell he wasn’t going to tattle on us. There were two women and a man in the kitchen, one being the mother, who didn’t pay any attention to us as we walked through the solemn and lonely living room with a long table set up for the seder. I’ve always found an empty seder table to be slightly unsettling, as I suppose any unpeopled, finely set up table would. It just seems begging for ghosts.

Brian took my hand and opened the screen door, leading me around the corner to an area I tried to quickly appraise for privacy. I didn’t get a chance to make a final judgment, though, as Brian immediately secured me to the side of the house with three of his major points of interest: his mouth, chest, and crotch. He kissed me hard and all I could see beyond him was a peripheral view of a high fence frothing over with morning glories. At least the neighbors wouldn’t be able to see. He kissed me for a while more and then went for my Adam’s apple, licking its soft perimeter compulsively and repeatedly, giggling softly under his breath. It was an odd feeling and an odd thing for him be doing, so I could tell immediately that he was under the influence of more than the bartending mother’s hospitality. He perhaps understood that he’d just given himself away because he then reached into his pocket and produced a small prescription bottle. He placed it in my hand and I read “VICODIN,” which I already knew, mixed with alcohol, made Brian want to fuck.

“Where did you get this?” He licked my neck and snatched back the bottle. Without looking, he pointed to the name on the prescription. Because he was busy licking, he had only guessed that the right side of the bottle would be showing as he pointed and so the name was a little farther around the corner than it should have been. Consequently, I only caught the first name of the man who would be leading tonight’s seder in his home.

I hadn’t told Brian about my fantasy in their bathroom (which, incidentally, had no peach diamonds, but rather a mildewed cream wallpaper with rows of strawberries), so I was struck a little by the coincidence, and I was irked. I fantasized. Brian did. It was merely a matter of preference, but I still envied him.

Though I was now genuinely interested in the doing.

It did happen. Sometimes the real thing did get me off, and to see Brian so engrossed in the preliminaries of sex while so many people we didn’t know sat inside—it did temporarily convince my groin that there was a reason to live.

But my feelings on the issue were really sort of beside the point. Brian would have dropped to his knees either way. He would have stuffed my flaccid penis into his mouth and been content just to breathe me in. But my penis was not flaccid. It was in fact pressing against the inside of my pants like a fat man pushing his overheated car off the road. I was reminded of Sisyphus and thought my younger self would have been eager to impress the family inside with the learned comparison.

Brian, the great liberator, frantically worked to bring my cock back out into the open air. But freedom was not really Brian’s cause, for the prisoner didn’t get to take in its surroundings for more than half a second. It was merely being extradited. Brian’s hot mouth now owned my cock.

He knew I couldn’t get off by being blown, so he quickly relinquished control and I fucked his mouth. With every thrust, the waist of my pants slid a little further down my ass, and, with the family inside, this is the part I worried about most. Never mind that I was fucking a boy’s face in their backyard on a religious holiday—I just didn’t want them to see my underwear. These are the kinds of things I think about during sex, because even when it is pleasurable, it is only so in waves. I lose it quickly and must work like a serf to get the feeling back, and it often never comes back. Brian knows my secret, that I don’t really enjoy sex, and it is a sadness between us. He admitted to me that it is a great loss. I try to explain to him that the fucking is a necessary point of embarkation, that it fuels my fantasies. I assure him the pleasure is merely delayed, but he says it’s not the same. And of course it’s not.

I tried so hard to gain back that feeling of pleasure, but I just couldn’t visualize it. Yes, I actually had to visualize pleasure.

Right then, as in my fantasy, I heard the son of the family just inside the wall, though in the reality he was a twelve-year-old (I guess I’d done my math wrong) with precociously bad skin who was emitting sounds only of impatience as he found his seat at the seder table, knowing the actual dinner would be the final act of a very long pious play. To counteract the disruption, I fucked harder and stuck my cock down his throat. He gagged and I pulled back a bit. Soon the whole party could be heard making their way to the seder table and I began to get really nervous. Did we leave the screen door open? Then the potential for being discovered turned me on and I caught another wave of pleasure, of recognition. I fucked now with shallow, rapid motions and soon I was ready to come. I pinched Brian’s nose, which was his cue to stick his tongue out as far as it will go. It is my particular desire, when I’m coming, to drag my swollen cock hard and slow across his tongue, like a carcass dragged across a red carpet, slowly coming my way down to the tip.

Brian was silent throughout the reading of the Haggadah. He was not Jewish and I supposed maybe he’d decided the role of a gentile at the Passover table was to sit quietly and not call too much attention to himself. Or maybe he was just a little intimidated. I had never seen that side of him before and I found it cute and touching.

At one point in the reading, the father of the family asked Brian if he would be so kind as to read the role of the son who does not know how to ask a question. Brian immediately reddened and shook his head no. The man insisted, pointing to the English transliteration in his book, and Brian shook his head again and conveyed stage fright by putting his hands over his face. I have to say it was rather embarrassing. I didn’t know what had gotten into him, but it was a bizarre display and the father was clearly displeased with him. I wondered if this man’s Vicodin had made him act that way, but there was really no logic in that.

I quickly offered to read the lines. This seemed to satisfy everyone (most people weren’t really listening anyway) and the father continued with his role, not returning to either Brian or me for any further part.

When I was young, my family conducted a mercifully abridged version of the Passover Seder, which can last an awfully long time for an event to which everyone is expected to come hungry. This family did the entire thing, cover to cover. About three-fourths of the way through, my mind, which had been entertaining itself with a variety of subjects, thought back to the golden days of forty-five minutes ago, when the only things that existed in this world were a high fence of morning glories and the hot tunnel in the skull of the sexiest boy in the world. Indeed, that tunnel was now sexier to me because it was back down the road a piece.

Dipping my finger into the wine glass in front of me and tapping it onto the plate, ticking off the ten plagues, turned me on in a way that it was not likely intended to do. I thought, too, of the salt water on the table. The liquid metaphors of the Passover ritual aroused me. I revisited my coming into Brian’s mouth, him sweetly looking up to my eyes and patiently waiting for me to release it all on his tongue like he was taking Communion.

Then I put two and two together.

I turned immediately to Brian and looked at his mouth, which was still sealed unnaturally tight. My eyes widened. I leaned over to him.

“Swallow it,” I ordered, almost inaudibly.

He smiled subtly, impishly, and softly shook his head. The father asked us all then to turn to page forty-eight in a book of sixty pages.

“Swallow. It.”

He shook his head softly. He smiled again, though minus the mischievous expression. I looked at his profile, at the side view of his sad eye as it rested near his nose. He was making his plea again, trying to offer me the present as he saw it, as he tasted it, and I couldn’t accept it, not then. He stared at the space just across the table from him and tried to enjoy himself alone, as he always tried to do. I was never quite sure if he was ever successful.

Brian swallowed, then took a deep breath, but he remained silent. He continued to follow along with the book and I put my hand on his thigh. Squeezing it, I was glad I didn’t have to explain whether I was thanking him or apologizing.

 

© 2006 Jason Shamai - Contributor's Bio