Excerpted from Entagled Lives

One night, I went home with a quiet, friendly pinball ace after he’d let me win a few games. He lived in a big apartment building on one of the top floors.

He rushed me into the bedroom, took off his shoes, pants, and tee shirt, and from a dresser drawer pulled out and handed me a pair of handcuffs. I felt the cold metal in my hands and looked at him, puzzled. I knew I wasn’t going to wear them.

I told him so and added that I didn’t know him well enough. He laughed and told me to cuff him to the brass bars at the head of his bed. He knelt in the middle of the bed and put his hands through the bars.

He was still wearing a wife-beater. Threadbare Jockey briefs hung loosely over his posterior, yellowish from repeated washings. I could see pink flesh through the holes in the bottoms of his once-black socks.

He shivered when I touched him. He bent forward and put his head on the pillows. This pushed his backside towards me as I stood by the side of the bed.

He whispered that I should look under the bed. There, I found a dented cardboard box with lengths of clothesline, some small whips and an assortment of paddles, dildoes and many items I didn’t recognize.

I wanted to look through the box carefully and examine each object, hold it in my hands and envision exactly its use, but he was pleading to be hit. He rasped on about how he had first seen me playing pinball and was attracted to me. That made me smile. I knew that I could be quite physically innovative with the pinball machine. I’d involve my whole body, coaxing every ball into giving me the most points possible.

I selected a wooden spoon, one of the heavier ones, traditionally used for stirring big pots of thickening stew. I tapped his butt with it. He became still, silent. I hit him a few more times, harder. He had a meaty ass. I pulled down his drawers and saw red flaking patches of skin on his cheeks. I recognized it as eczema, yet I reacted inwardly as though it were leprosy. I felt as if I’d been persuaded by a seasoned con man to purchase inferior goods at the store. It wasn’t the first time I had this feeling and would not be the last.

“You have to make it hurt,” he said and moved his backside as close to me as his situation allowed. The whining impatient tone prodded me and I made it hurt.

I hit him hard enough to make him yelp, though he remained frozen, an unlikely statue in his awkward position. I sensed him challenging me to act in a way I had never before dared to act.

I hit him a few times harder, testing him, making him yelp. It wasn’t my apartment and I wanted him to make some noise.

A wave of intensity washed over me, much like the feelings that could arise when I was in the middle of fucking someone hard, that unstoppable gush of chemicals in the brain that push towards the impending climax. This was stronger and I was uncertain of where a wave of this magnitude might carry me. An unvoiced rage pulsed in my temples and I started smacking the fleshiest parts of both his cheeks with a strength I had at first not decided to use. I answered his cries with renewed vigor and turned his ass purple in minutes.

Through his tears, I heard a new kind of begging. He wanted me to stop. The raspy, whining character of his voice was gone. It was a request, not a directive.

Eventually, I lightened up, but took my time before I delivered a last brutal thwack. He was shaking and shivering in his own sweat, while I became utterly calm for a few moments, until I heard the spoon land on the parquet floor. I ran my hands over the bed sheets, looking for the key so I could unlock the cuffs.

I was afraid to touch him. I wanted to run out of the room, through his front door and never look back.

“You didn’t stop when I asked you to,” he mumbled. He sobbed as I released him from the brass bars. I wondered if I should apologize to him, not sure of how all this had happened.
“I like that about you. You can come back anytime,” he continued, “Do anything you want to me.”

He clenched the brass bars tighter and remained in his prostrate position. He looked me with bloodshot eyes that sparkled with hope. His face was radiant, his words heavy with gratitude for what he had wrested out of me just minutes ago.

I hurried home, mind racing, heart pounding. How could something so powerful and sexual come to pass between us when neither one of us had even ejaculated? I hadn’t removed my clothes. Before that night, I’d always thought that successful sex had to result in an orgasm (my orgasm specifically, but even better if my partner had one, too). And the ultimate sexual act had to involve a physical merging. Moving inside another had until then been a literal concept.

 

© 2007 Rob Stephenson

Rob Stephenson’s writing appears online and in print in such publications: Entangled Lives, Mad Hatters’ Review, Skin and Ink, BiGuys, Between the Palms, Blithe House Quarterly, BUTT, Dangerous Families, Problem Child, Best Gay Erotica, and Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness. He edited the anthology Tough Guys with Bill Brent. A CD of music he has composed with Mikael Karlsson is available at www.dog-cd.com.