I am going to skip the preliminaries. Like why I left—a long story—and how I got here. This is what matters: I’ve traded one constriction for another. This bed is impossibly narrow, the sheets too tight, shoveled under the mattress by what must have been the strongest arms. I barely fit, and I am small. The room is dark, darker than any American room; the light above the bed austere, unused to picking up the highlights in whorls of red-blond hair, like the ones pushing against my wrist, smuggled down the length of my right arm. My writing arm.

I am writing in bed, in Bologna, the red city. Red because its politics were red once; red because its roofs still are. Because the first time I came here, the first time I really came, a friend of a friend pushed up the thin cotton shirt I was wearing, up over my nipples, up through more hair than any guy my age has a right to have, some shade of wiry bronze. He placed his thick fingers in the midst of it and said: Rosso. Red.

I didn’t correct him. Later, when it was almost morning and we were in the backseat of a car, our friend driving, someone else shotgun, it was my turn to lift and place, bury my fingers, smaller, more fragile, below his belt, undone, in the fur out of which his cock arched up against his sweater, greasing my hand with the stink and the slick of a long day, the longest day. My willing hand. His black hair, which I had seen; his red, wet head pouting in its cowl, which I had not. Careful of the dark, of how fragile a cover it gave us, I looked out the window at the red roofs gone black, as if I weren’t tugging the skin down to the base of his shaft and sliding it back up again; as if I weren’t waiting for his hand, which was on my thigh, to press into me and let me know that my hand, now curved around his head, around what I could only imagine as its viscous, open flare, that my hand would make him come.

I smuggled a fistful of it, still hot, to my mouth, and when I swallowed I swear I glowed as red as the dash, as the city outside the windshield, red and almost stirring, warm for the first time in years.

That was years ago. My fist has had a lot of practice since then. Mostly my own cock, my own come. No one has held me as tightly as I can hold myself. No one has kept me as warm. This bed, its compression, could teach some guys I know a thing or two.

It is cold in Bologna this time of year. I am not here for sweltering sun. I am here because this city coils around me, and I need its noose: the rules of hospitality, the enforced socializing, the canons of fashion. An imperative: you must. I must.

This afternoon I was sitting on the cold steps of San Domenico, the unfinished façade too big, too blunt: a warehouse still under construction, a gym rat’s torso. I was sitting on the steps, getting my bearings, wondering if I should walk up to the university and watch the panhandlers with their dogs, the African peddlers of plastic tchotchkes, the students who, eight years or so into college, were still far from finishing.

I like how long in the tooth Italian students are. Women barely younger than Anna Magnani wear their pink and turquoise Invicta bookbags from middle school. The men, conservatively overdressed, wool sweaters over button-down shirts, never fail to strain the seams of their jeans. This is, I’m not kidding, the country of cock. A constant swell, just to one side of a worn, infinitely distressed fly; a constant summons.

I decided to answer the call. I pushed my boner down—how did that happen, with cold marble so close to my balls?—and turned to walk up Via Zamboni, toward the university. My face, I imagine, was worn red, redder than usual, by the scrape of past desire and the all-too-present chill. But then, as sudden as you’d imagine, the other side of Piazza Maggiore was eclipsed by an oversized, tarnished belt buckle—was it an eagle?—and I felt a hand on my shoulder, insistent through my down jacket, through my wool turtleneck sweater and even the flimsy wifebeater I’d already been wearing for two days: down to the skin, to the bone. A gesture, a grip, that I wanted to respond to as I’d responded hundreds of times in the past: haul the beast out, plant my face around it, suffocate. Swallow.

Five exposed buttons on his fly caught the sunlight. I didn’t know the sun was out. The hand moved up the side of my neck, through the scruff that had grown there in the last month, over my right ear, which it pressed against the side of my head, fingers wrapped around the back of my skull. Then a face, level with mine, thick stubble on high cheekbones, down a long, thin neck, into dense tangles of hair poking from the splayed collar of a pale shirt. More sudden, though, was the smell of him: cigarettes and sandalwood, the press of his fingers against my neck simultaneous with this quick inhalation and acceptance: yes; I must. This is strictly necessary.

Then I focused, breathed out. Marco. No one in particular, and all of a sudden the only person in the world. The guy who had been in the front seat, that night when the red roofs were black and my mouth was full of a stranger’s sperm. Not a stranger, really, but estrangement has a way of happening, distance breaking in and breaking down.

“Marco.”

“What,” he asked, but there was no use answering, no need to, “are you doing here?”

This is what I said: that I had felt compelled to trade one kind of cold for another; to leave my small college town, its gunmetal sky and thin-lipped, thick-skinned people. That I would have been overwhelmed by heat, so hard upon that unremitting frost, so I’d chosen someplace just as frozen, but someplace I could bury myself in. “I need,” I said, “to bury myself for a while.”

His eyes flashed, so dark and clear that it couldn’t quite be called light. Infinitely lucid, infinitely firm, my head still held in his grip, he said, “Come.”

And I did as I was told.

Here is all you need to know. Marco was still a student. His nose jutted out from his face like an Alitalia logo, a plane’s tailfin in reverse. He had a thin blue circle at the crest of his right ear, and as we walked, each time the sun caught the blue I winced as though I’d just tasted cold steel. You can laugh, but synesthesia happens. He growled when he spoke, his voice worn away by too many cigarettes and too many late nights talking—about what, I wondered? About love? I had forgotten these things. These things: they deserve a better tense than the past. His nose still juts; his Adam’s apple still dives under his throat, under the dense black tangle at its base, and stabs back out with every swallow and every liquid moan.

Let me put it this way. We walked up three flights of stairs to a dim, oversized hallway that smelled like chlorine. He wrestled with the lock on the door. His shoes were scattered just inside. “Permesso,” I said as I crossed the threshold. A necessary formality: permit me. Let me in.

He made tea in a small clay pot, a Chinese rooster. His wrist slid out of his shirt as he lifted the pot to a low, red cup—mine—and tongues of nearly straight, nearly black hair lapped up against the bone. A thin vein of pale green tea slid down between his thumb and forefinger, tongue against tongue.

“I am,” he said, “lucky to have found you.” Thick curl of lash as his eyelids closed and opened again. He explained. Yes, he remembered that long ride home, all those years ago. Yes, he was still involved with the driver of that close car, the night of the close call. They lived in separate cities, broken and bound by that distance. Open. “It is—come si dice?—unresolved.” And he blew across the top of his tea and took a fast, hard, brave gulp before setting the cup back down. His eyes, all this time, even when he was drinking, never left mine. His pupils were enormous, radiantly empty, as if I could curl up inside them.

He curled two fingers around a sugar bowl and looked away from me, toward the table. “And you? Where is your life going?” Now, folded into this bed and this darkness—what if, I’m shocked to think, it turns out that I am inside that inviting, fathomless eye?—I think he said how, not where, but that is what I heard, and this is how I answered.

“I am,” and then I corrected myself, “I have been happy.” I explained. I had been lucky to find a job, even in such a small, sexless town; lucky, at not quite thirty, to be paid to teach and write and travel. I had taken pleasure in that freedom. Lately I felt less free. Or free, perhaps, in the wrong ways: free to buy a house, to buy into the life of houses. Free to lock myself behind a thin wooden door, a screen of snow-covered trees, and forget the world, forget myself. Buried alive and alone, untouched, unscathed. I wanted a different kind of burial.

This is what I wanted to say but what I did not say: bury me. Wrap me up in that pale shirt which, even now, is drawn up in thin folds under your arms; wrap me up
in the dry, hot smell and pulse and stretched skin inside those folds. Hold me close and let me fall.

I said that I, too, was unresolved.

Marco pushed aside his tea, and he smiled from the left corner of his mouth. He pushed his chair back across the tile, stood, and walked over to where I sat, immobile. His hand, then, was suddenly in my hair again, pressed to the bone. Strong. Deliberate. Slowly, forcefully, he crushed my face into his abdomen, held me there between flesh and fabric, touch and smell: I closed my eyes, and beneath his shirt I could feel the plane of muscle that, I knew, only ended in other muscle. I closed my eyes, breathed him in, and craved nothing more than the slow climb down that knotted rope.

That is how it seems to me now. Then, I think, I mostly wanted to cry. To say the plain words I never find the room to say in anyone’s arms, the plain words those arms are so rarely equipped to receive. Here. Now. Yes. Everything.

“Come,” he said, and I was back out in the world again, back in the kitchen, and he was walking away.

I followed him to a room barely large enough for a twin bed, three bookshelves, and a desk. There was no chair at the desk. Marco was sitting upright on the edge of the bed, his hands flat on his knees, waiting. Grey, late light threw only the most tentative shadow across the tile, itself grey and slightly luminous. Where did I belong? The bed was too narrow for us to sit side by side; the desk was covered in clothes.

“Come,” he said, and he placed his hands on either side of him. He pushed himself back. Where was I supposed to go? He opened his legs. Even the weak light from the window was able to find the buckle and the buttons on his jeans, to set off a play of shadow across the worn denim against which his thighs shamelessly stretched. Not just his thighs.

I approached him slowly and, when my shins were dangerously close to brushing his, I bent toward him, toward the sharp line of his jaw, and I opened my mouth, ready for stubble and bone. To start with a kiss: this is the oldest ceremony. I placed my hands on his shoulders. Something in me tensed—something, or lots of things. Was there, I found myself thinking, some silver string of nerve linking my mouth to my asshole? I had forgotten it was there.

“No,” he said, and shook his head. His hands moved to my hipbone and turned me around. I let myself be turned. I wedged myself into the thin space between his legs, the room he’d made for me. Then, inevitably, Marco’s arms were around me, and his legs hemmed me in, and it all happened with such a slow vehemence that I knew that I was there and that I was not leaving. I reached back to touch his face, to make sure that there was a face behind these limbs.

“No,” he said again, and one arm released me just enough to grab my hand, to press it against my chest and lodge it there. “Not yet.” And then his mouth was on my neck, immobile, hot and lingering, and his nose was at the pulse point under my left ear, against that tense subcutaneous cord. I was just as unmoving. His heart was throbbing through my spine—or was that his cock? He bucked his hips up into the seam of my jeans and I had my answer. Both.

He held me like that, in the unresolved space between his heart and his cock, for ages.

This is what you want to know: on the other side of that interval, he turned me around and tilted his head back and pushed my mouth into his collarbone. My blind hands stumbled inside his shirt, clutched the tangle of hair around his navel; I pressed my left thumb into one of his ribs and heard him moan. He grabbed my hair and pulled my face up to his, and when his mouth closed on mine I swear I thought I was all tongue and teeth, pulsing muscle and resistant bone: my breath came faster; I wanted more.

I tried to push his shirt up over his head, but it was too tight; I tore at the buttons. He let me tear at them, let me wrestle the sleeves from his arms. I inhaled him right where a white tanktop, whiter than mine, sliced across his sternum. He smelled like fall: brown grass, dead leaves, smoke in the air. My tongue left a trail across that landscape. There were pieces of him—stray hairs, scattered leaves—stuck to my tongue.

He didn’t let me get farther than that frayed edge. It was a quick revolution, and before I knew what was happening, I was on my back, and hey, that was his tongue, not mine, clattering around in my mouth, and that was his hand sliding down under my ass, and my hand was fluttering around his waist, not uncertain so much as in suspense. He ground his dick through two layers of denim against the inside of my thigh, up over my belly, back down again. I pulled him even closer, if that was possible, and my hands slid beneath the denim, found another fragile layer of fabric drawn tight over his ass. I grabbed what I could. What was I wearing? Something white, I remembered, that would soon be full of sperm if we didn’t get out of these clothes, these degrees of separation.

We weren’t talking, but suddenly I felt his throat hum beneath my mouth and he was, I’m sure of it, speaking into me, talking through my mouth, and I pulled back and looked at him and said, “What?”

He breathed. “Ora. Now.”

You can imagine how I tried to unbutton his fly, how I wanted nothing between us but our skin and our fur, red and black, slick with sweat and whatever I could smear from my mouth, whatever my dick would gladly drool. You can imagine how I wanted to say no and then say yes, to feel the slide of elastic down my hips and the snap of latex and then, with the same slowness, the same vehemence of his hand, to feel him open my hole with his cock, to feel his mouth suck me in and choke out that little death rattle, straight into the clenched center out of which the rest of me spirals. You can imagine how I wanted to lick my sperm from his skin.

This is what happened instead: he held our hips absolutely still, one hand at the small of my back, the other beneath my ass. We were frozen like that, on the brink, immobilized. He would not let us move. Our cocks were throbbing; our breathing did not get any slower. He locked his eyes on mine; he bit my lip; he shoved his tongue in as far as it would go. And when he stammered, “Dài,” come on, and he drove his crotch into mine, holding me so tight I could never come loose, his eyes lost their focus, and his throat caught, and in that instant his dick heaved up inside his jeans, and I felt something shoot out of him, and I scraped my teeth against his cheek, and I came.

Dài comes from the verb dare, to give. It is a command. I am not sure what I can give, not sure what that means. But after the spasms had stopped, and it was just his body, still nearly dressed, on mine, and the curl of his bottom lip had somehow sunk into the side of my mouth, I noticed this: that his arms, beneath me, refused to uncoil, refused to let me go. I know what refusal feels like, but I have never known this kind, the kind that holds on.

That was a little while ago. I will turn this light out soon. If I close my eyes, I can see quick flashes of red. I should close my eyes. Beside me, Marco is sleeping. Later he will wake me up, and maybe I will give.

 

© 2006 Cary Steven - Contributor's Bio