A Likely Story: A Wayward Ink Publishing Anthology (8 page)

Cassidy writhed in the agony of anticipation while Jax wrestled his suit pants and snug white briefs over the spread of his hips and off his legs. Jax then reared up to his full height to undress himself. The belt wasn’t exactly an unbreakable manacle, but Jax had twisted it creatively enough that Cassidy could tug against it without pulling himself free, and the notion that his desire to rip and claw at Jax’s clothes could not be quenched drove him to squirm around the axis of his unfurling hard-on, whimpering with want.

Jax pulled his T-shirt over his head, setting a wild mess of unwashed curls free from their bandana tamer in the process. Cassidy gasped and his dick jumped in appreciation of Jax’s magnificent torso. Long and strong, he was narrow as a reed, but muscled with bouncing biceps and pert-nippled pecs. His tattoo sleeves crept from his blue-green hands, up both sides of his neck, colored the girdles of his bony shoulders and decorated the planks of his pecs. But below his chest, his was as white a fishbelly as any Cassidy had seen. Eyes locked on Cassidy’s, he undid his fly and let his jeans—Cassidy had known by the smell of him that he wouldn’t be wearing underwear—drop to the floor. South of his ornate arm art, his marble-hewn body was undecorated, except for a small, smudged bumblebee buzzing around his Spaghettio navel. Cassidy was confident in his own nakedness, fit and flat with a juicy, ripe behind, but Jax’s belly was wrapped so tight around his abs that they looked airbrushed. His hips narrowed as if they’d been planed to draw Cassidy’s eye to the swaying, swelling python of a cock that hung between them. As if he could possibly notice anything else when his hole tightened in fright and he broke out in a slick sweat of need.

Cassidy was nobody’s slut, but he was gay, single, and pretty good-looking. The main reason he even had a bedside table was to have a place to keep condoms and lube (and the vibrating purple dildo that Jax laughed at while tossing it onto the floor) handy.

“You got any big ones?” Jax asked.

Cassidy laughed. “Do I look like I need big ones?”. He was quite erect, and had a nice shape and a handsome, unhooded head, but his was not a big dick.

Jax took a moment, though, to lavish it with his tongue’s attention, murmuring “It’s perfect,” as he licked it harder; then he ripped into a little foil packet with his teeth and wriggled into the condom that popped out the best he was able.

“Besides,” he said, taking Cassidy by the padding of a hip and guiding him onto his belly, “you’re big where it matters.” He smeared himself with lube, greased Cassidy’s hole, and saddled up.

Cassidy yelped. Then he laughed. Then he pressed his plump rump against Jax’s flat front and cried for more.

Jax was creative, Jax was athletic, and Cassidy was delirious with dick-need. They ran up against few limits as they flipped and flopped and climbed and burrowed from this position to the next. Half-tangled in the belt and denied unrestricted use of his hands, Cassidy explored Jax with his mouth. He nibbled his nipples; he tongued the tang of his hole; he licked at his outsized, funky feet until his mouth went dry, and then he flopped onto his back and begged Jax to please, for the love of God, finish him off.

Jax leered and laughed and pulled Cassidy to him by the knees. He hefted and shifted Cassidy until he could get inside again, and then rode for home. When at first Jax froze, Cassidy thought Jax had shot, and wriggled out of the belt so he could free his own load, but Jax swore.

“Shit! The condom came off.”

But even if the bedroom had burst into flames, Cassidy would have needed Jax to finish before he’d have been able to even think about saving his own skin. He couldn’t even get his head around the
concept
of ‘consequences’. He took hold of Jax by his bony hips and guided him back in so there would be no misunderstanding.

“Who cares?” he said. “What, am I gonna get pregnant? Just come in me.”

Grinning, grunting, and almost gagging on his release, Jax did.

“YA KNOW,” Jax hollered over the dueling sounds of the strong, hot shower beating down on him and Cassidy’s miserable retching over the toilet, “it’s not exactly an ego boost when the guy you been fucking all night gets a good look at you in the morning and runs for the puke tank.”

He was teasing, and Cassidy tossed off a woozy laugh. The first three mornings Cassidy had spent naked on the bathroom floor wrapped around the toilet, Jax had been a paragon of solicitude: backrubs and cold washcloths and gentle
shhh
s, offers of tea and toast and ginger ale. But this was day eight of Cassidy’s morning misery, and they were both a little sick of it.

“It was probably something I ate,” Cassidy moaned. He’d waited for Jax to shut off the shower to be sure Jax would hear.

Jax laughed. “Yeah, speaking as the guy who cooks at the place you eat every day, I’m gonna say, that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“Cuz it’s
you
feeling better that I’m worried about.” Cassidy tried to smile, but the smell of the toilet bowl roiled his gut, and he wanted to keep as still as possible. If the last week had been any indicator, the dry heaves were next, and he wasn’t a fan.

His doc had diagnosed an exotic strain of flu, and Cassidy figured if she wasn’t worried about it, he’d try to ride it out.
Flu
didn’t feel right, though—the flip-flopping in his gut yanked him out of bed every morning, and the porcelain bus drive was epic, but by ten a.m. he’d be good and ready for some toast, and by three his body’s bounceback was pretty much total.

Jax had become something of a fixture in Cassidy’s life over the course of the five or six weeks since their first hookup. He wasn’t convinced they were falling in love, but they had fallen into a certain routine that seemed mostly to involve beer, sex, and breakfast, and up until the daily puke-off had become a feature, they’d been having a ball. It was possible to count up the fundamental values and experiences they had in common on one hand and have four fingers and a thumb left over, but Cassidy figured that was part of the draw. It wasn’t like Cassidy thought he had to marry every guy that ever fucked him, but neither was it every day he came across a guy who brought even a fraction of Jax’s skill and enthusiasm into the bedroom. Cassidy wasn’t gonna toss Jax out on his ass just because he never washed his hair.

Jax had been yanked from a shit pit of a prefab tool shed out behind one of his mom’s ex-boyfriends’ trailers by Laramie County social services when he was four years old, and had ricocheted around the system until he ran away from a group home at fifteen to follow his forty-two-year-old ‘boyfriend’ to Denver. Cassidy was a little fuzzy on some of the details, and kept his questions to a minimum as he squirmed his way through this conversation. But the ensuing six years—Jax was ‘almost’ twenty-two—had apparently been a blur of crack houses, hotel rooms, and homeless shelters. He didn’t say why he’d gone to jail, or for how long, but he had been in his halfway house for seven months, and had been working at The Road for five. His house was run by a non-profit, not the State, and he had more privileges than restrictions, including the freedom to spend most nights where he chose. More and more Jax was choosing Cassidy’s, and it pleased Cassidy to imagine that Jax would turn to him and his little world for comfort.

Jax had little interest in politics, and Cassidy had little interest in copping to his voting record on issues like sentencing guidelines and prison overcrowding, which boiled down to ‘throw the book at them and then build more’. It wasn’t like
he
was ever going to go to jail, and he’d always been a firm believer that the punk that couldn’t do the time shoulda thought of that before he did the crime. The system had ridden roughshod over Jax—and over his mom, who was settled into a Montana penitentiary for the long haul, last he’d heard—but he was doing what he could to scrape it together. He had a good job, food in his belly, and a roof over his head, and if he had to get drunk or smoke a bowl once in a while to keep his head in the game, he wasn’t going to apologize to anybody for that. He was a good cook, a great lay, and he’d rather laugh than fight. For someone with whom Cassidy shouldn’t have had shit to talk about, he sure was an easy way to pass the time.

Come to that, Jax might have been a little
too
good of a cook. He’d been feeding Cassidy pretty much every meal, at home or at The Road, for a couple months when he started giving Cassidy shit for the little dome that was starting to strain against Cassidy’s navel. After the first condom had come off—and after a trip to the Free Clinic they’d dressed up with a post-testing tour of a nearby microbrewery and called their “third date”—neither of them had seen the point in trying to mess with more.

It was one morning after Jax had deposited an especially exultant load in Cassidy that Jax cuddled up to him spoon-style and palmed his belly. “You’re gettin’ a little cum tummy on ya, huh, Pickle?”

The blush flooded Cassidy’s face so fast it gave him a little dizzy spin. Jax had noticed? Cassidy had convinced himself that he was imagining the little swell on his belly—he couldn’t have gained ten pounds. It wasn’t like it was a big beer gut. But now Jax wasn’t just rubbing little circles on it, he’d given it a name, too? It was a
kind
of belly?

“What do you mean?” he murmured. He was obviously going to have to work it off, but he’d go this far: he didn’t hate the feel of Jax’s hand loving on the little bump.

Cassidy could hear the smile in Jax’s voice. “I’m putting so much cum in you, it’s starting to show,” he said, giving Cassidy a pat. “I’m gonna have to start giving you Diet Cum.”

Cassidy laughed. “Do you know how to make that?”

Jax gave the swell of Cassidy’s belly a little jiggle. “Apparently I don’t. But I’ll learn. Probably I just have to eat a bunch of aspartame or some shit.”

Cassidy laughed again. “You just say whatever pops into your head, don’t you?”

Jax pulled Cassidy snug against him. “Gotta say somethin’.”

And he had plenty to say in the weeks that followed, as Cassidy’s belly insisted on rounding out. It was good-natured teasing, for the most part—he was unfailingly good-natured, for starters, and like any good cook, he liked to see results—but Cassidy was damn near in a panic. He was busting his balls trying to flatten up using the bike, the running path in Cheesman Park, the stairs at work, and the gym, but he kept swelling. He eased up on the beer as best he could, considering he spent most of his evenings hanging out at the bar at The Road. He tried—no shit, he
tried
—to cut back on the chow, but he’d never even heard of an appetite as demanding as his had gotten. He didn’t know if Jax sprinkled crack into his food or what, but the harder he worked out to trim down, the rounder and harder to satisfy he got.

At first only Jax—or someone else who regularly saw Cassidy naked—would have noticed, but by the time he was coming up on six months of running around with Jax, Cassidy was carrying a bowling ball where his flat belly used to be and there was no getting around it. It tugged on all his t-shirts, fought back against his button downs, and fucked with every pair of pants he tried to squeeze into that wasn’t his new—read: bigger—elastic-waist plaid PJs.

But even if he could shuffle down to The Road in those, he couldn’t wear them to work, and he’d finally had to break down and hit the Men’s Wearhouse in Cherry Creek for a new suit. He had no intention of carrying this weight around for any length of time, and it wasn’t like he had to restock his whole closet, but he needed at least one pair of gray pants he could breathe in and a suit coat he could button. And he’d probably throw in a couple new dress shirts just so he didn’t feel like such a porko when he had to tug on the bottom two buttons, but only if he could find a shirt identical in brand and color to one he already had. He wasn’t trying to make it look like he needed a whole new wardrobe cuz he’d let himself tub out of his old shit.

“We’re talking about a couple inches,” the Men’s Wearhouse guy said as he walked a newly-measured Cassidy over to the sale rack of suits. “Don’t trip over a couple inches. Nobody’s gonna see the label, they’re just gonna see how it fits.”

Easy for him to say
. With long legs, a narrow waist, and a chest like a butcher block, this kid probably hadn’t gone up two inches in his trousers since he was fourteen years old. He had the body and swagger of a natural athlete, what the hell did he know about bumping up a waist size?

He started flipping through the suits on a rail tagged Executive. “Shout if you see a color you like,” he said.

“What’s ‘Executive’?” Cassidy asked. “Like a brand?”

“It’s just a fuller cut. You know, in the jacket.”
No big deal.

“I’m just a Regular,” Cassidy squeaked. God, he hoped he sounded more casual to the sales guy than he sounded to himself.

“Course you are. These are regular-guy suits in regular-guy sizes, man, don’t sweat it. Try one on,” he encouraged, helping Cassidy shoulder into a charcoal coat. “See how nice it fits?” He gave it a tug and pulled the top button through the corresponding hole. “Just gives you a little bit of room for those power lunches, that’s all.” He gave Cassidy’s round belly a man-to-man pat.
It’s all good
.

Cassidy blushed so hot he broke a sweat. But he looked in the mirror. He couldn’t suck it in for shit, and he knew he’d feel more confident in a coat he could actually button. He’d been a 40 Regular since the tux he’d rented for the fuckin’ prom, but he swallowed a big ball of his pride and bought two 44 Executives, the charcoal and a lighter gray, and then drove home. He swung up Josephine Street to Colfax, putting both Popeye’s and McDonald’s in his path. He’d been jonesing for both, and this way he wouldn’t have to make a decision. He ate two fast food value meals in the car without even really thinking about it, and then went to meet Jax for dinner at The Road.

Being shown into a specialty-cut suit by a cocky, flat-bellied jock subverted Cassidy’s self-image just enough that he didn’t sleep for shit. Well, the three dinners he’d eaten one on top of the other might have been a factor there, too, but whatever. The fact remained that he’d squirmed out from under a thunder-snoring Jax a little bit ago and found himself in front of his bathroom mirror, beating himself up for letting himself go blimp, wondering how the fuck he’d gotten
so
round so fast. He was young—well, at thirty-four, he certainly wasn’t old. He was handsome, unexplained seething chin zits after a lifetime of clear skin notwithstanding. He had his father’s laughing brown eyes and his mom’s pink cheeks. He’d always been athletic, he hit the gym every chance he got, and he ate mostly vegetarian shit now that he ate three meals a day at The fucking Road. Hell, he’d even started smoking again since Jax came along, at least every once in a while. If nothing else,
that
should have kept the weight off.