Foolish Fire (22 page)

*

It was much later. It was dark. I heard the door open. He came in and turned on the light. When he saw me, he was momentarily startled, but that passed. He didn’t seem too surprised to find me there.

“You waited for me?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“How did you know I wouldn’t mind?”

“I just knew.”

Though I was acting so nonchalant, in fact I was ecstatic. I’d been right! Right! He knew!

“Where’s Wendy?” he said.

“She’s sleeping in her room. That’s why we have to be quiet.”

“I figured as much.” He turned off the room light and went over to the night table and turned on a tiny reading lamp. Its red shade put a strange glow in the room, a glow strangely reminiscent of the light in the photograph I’d seen of him.

“Do you know Mark Warren?” I asked on an impulse.

“Mark Warren? No. Who’s he?”

“No one special.”

“Listen, I’m gonna change. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No. Go right ahead.”

He tossed the pack of cigarettes onto the bed then began slipping off his T-shirt. As his upper torso came into view, I saw that it was just like his body in the photo. There was even the same glow. And the expression on his face was exactly the same. Only now I understood the meaning of the contempt in his eyes: he knew what it was that I wanted. But I didn’t care. I thought of all the times I’d dreamed of something like this. I thought of how easy it all was if you just didn’t think about it too much.

I found myself moving toward him, sinking to my knees.

He just stood there as I reached up and undid the snap on his jeans, then pulled the zipper down.

He wasn’t wearing any underwear. As I slid the jeans down his thighs, his half-erect penis popped out and bobbed for a moment before my face, then reared up with a series of twitches until it was nuzzled flat against his stomach.

Fully erect, it was exactly the size of my own. The sight made me dizzy. I reached up and felt his hardness, shyly at first, and then grasped it more boldly and stroked it. I looked up to see his reaction.

His eyes went wide as he gazed down at me with just the hint of a smile.

My hand trembled as I held him. I shifted my weight so I could bring my face closer.

Like all boys, I’d often fantasized about being able to suck my own penis. I’d once seen a photo of an Indian yogi who’d bent his body so that his face was down at his groin. If he hadn’t been wearing swim trunks, he could easily have sucked himself off. That photo had always haunted me. Try as I might, I could never duplicate the posture.

Now my face was so close to Sean’s dick that I could feel the damp heat from it as it quivered and twitched in response to my stroking. I caught a whiff of the familiar spermy smell which all young boys seem to carry about them like a symbol of their youthful malehood. It was a perfume I often caught from a passing boy, or in a friend’s bedroom.

Now I could do something about it. Now all my dreams were about to come true.

I hesitated for the briefest moment, to overcome a momentary squeamishness. But my desire was too strong to hold back. As I lowered my face I felt as if I were breaking the tensile surface which separates fantasy from reality. I tracked a slow, careful lick along the entire length of his dick, from the pulsing root all the way up to the moist tip. Holding the hot captive in a tight grip I had another moment of stage fright; I felt all the eyes of the world upon me. Any moment now, the whole world would burst in and catch me in the act. Then, carried away by some fierce and deep momentum, I banished all thought from my mind and set to work.

Though I was doing it for the first time in my life, I found myself taking to it instinctively and naturally, as most boys do, knowing best how to provoke and satisfy their own desires. I closed my lips around the warm flesh and held it in my mouth before doing anything. Except for the slight salt taste, it was everything I’d expected; the throbbing warmth seemed to melt the softness of my mouth like butter.

I filled my mouth with as much as I could without gagging. Then I began to move, bobbing back and forth, my sucking making my lips stretch out. I could feel the ridges and bumps, even the veins.

Still holding his dick tightly with one hand I went to work with my lips and tongue, concentrating on the glans, rolling its smooth roundness around in my lips, making it slick with my spit. I thought of the lollipops I’d licked and sucked as a child—lime green, strawberry red, lemon yellow—all precursors to this hot pink one…as if all the childhood candy was an elaborate preparation for just this moment. I imagined a lollipop thrust deep into my mouth as I twirled its stick, giving it loving caresses of my tongue, worrying and worrying its tantalizing sweet roundness, rolling and curling my tongue over, under, around it.

There was a certain sense of power in knowing the pleasure my mouth was giving him. I kissed the hot head and with the very tip of my tongue worried away at that strip of skin just under the glans which is the most sensitive spot on a boy. Then I twirled my tongue around the circumference of the head in a continuous fluttering.

I was as good as Mark. I was better than Mark.

With my free hand I reached up and touched his balls, crinkled up small and tight now against his groin. As I stroked them, his dick twitched in response. I bent my face down again and clamped my lips tightly around the entire glans, slowly taking in as much as I could. Then I moved my head up and down to stroke it, feeling his fingers raking through my hair, then close tightly against my temples, urging me on. As if from a distance I heard his soft whimpers; it wouldn’t be long now before I could experience the sensation I’d dreamed of so often: the warm explosion in my mouth which signaled the wrenching climax of another boy’s pleasure.

It felt good. Nothing had ever felt this good. I knew he was poised on the verge of coming because I myself was.

His hands gripped the sides of my head and his pelvis pumped his dick into my mouth hard, two, three, four times. And then he stopped and held still; I felt his whole body tremble as his dick twitched spasmodically and sudden warmth filled my mouth.

And I was coming, too.

*

“Oh!”

I was coming, awake now, into my pants as I popped my eyes open in the dark.

My heart hammering, and still trying to figure out what had happened, I lay still and felt the uncomfortable clamminess in my briefs, the tacky trickle of warm semen creeping into my pubic bush.

I was in my own room. It had been a wet dream. I looked at the clock and saw it was two o’clock in the morning. The house was dark and quiet.

I lay there for a long while before finally mustering the energy to get up and change out of my soiled underwear. In the dark, I cleaned myself up with some tissues and got out another pair of briefs from the dresser. The new pair felt refreshing.

Silently I crept out into the hallway and deposited the soiled pair in the hamper by the bathroom, then returned to my bed. I still couldn’t shake the incredible disappointment of waking up to reality. The dream had been so real that my regret was poignant; I felt all the anguish of an actual forced parting.

I turned on the lamp and reached down between the mattress and bedsprings to pull out the photo. I’d sneaked into Sean’s room and stolen it from the bundle of photos in his dresser while Wendy was in the bathroom. From the moment I’d seen it, I knew I’d end up stealing it. After that, it was all I could do to give a convincing performance of reluctantly parting from Wendy….

And coming home tonight, before going to sleep, I’d masturbated twice to the picture. But even that hadn’t been enough. My sleeping mind had returned to the image of my desire, to tease me with it, to give me the fuller satisfaction I craved.

I felt now as if I’d eaten the rotten fruit which has fallen off a forbidden tree. But I’d had no compunctions about eating it, knowing that its very sweetness came from its forbiddenness. Why did it have to taste so delicious if it was rotten? Why did our poisons have to be so seductive?

I pulled the photo closer, and then put my lips to Sean’s face, his chest, then closed my eyes. If Sean had wanted it, I would have gladly done the same thing in real life. But of course it could never happen.

…Could it?

I thought of Mark, and what we’d done in his bedroom. It had been good. I couldn’t deny it. As I remembered all the details of what we’d done, I felt a hard knot settle in my stomach. I suddenly knew I would do it again sometime, if not with Mark, then with someone else very much like him. Another faggot.

I thought of all the faggots in school, of all the faggots in the world.

I remembered that morning long ago when I’d first heard the word. It had sounded so innocuous. In fact, it still did; the dictionary on my desk defined faggot as “a bundle of sticks or twigs, esp. for use as fuel.” I knew: I’d looked it up so many times.

Some boys go through a phase…which they outgrow in time…those who don’t are called…from the Greek word….

I thought of Mark Warren, and how it must feel to be a faggot.

I thought of Jack as he’d looked at his peak, his beautiful peak, and of the sad new Jack.

I thought of Sean.

I thought of Bobby and our little games, our innocent games.

I thought of Mark again, and of how his dick had looked as I was fucking him in the ass.

I thought of Bobby’s dick, the first hard-on I’d seen on another boy.

I thought of all the boys in the shower room, moving slowly in a mist of desire.

I thought of Sean again.

I thought of how his dick had looked in my dream.

“Kind of salty…like a warm, salty gob in your mouth.”

The hard knot in my stomach wouldn’t go away. I felt all weak inside.

I got up from the bed and walked over to my desk and sat down. From the top drawer I pulled out a packet of notebook paper, bought so eagerly in the fall of my first year of high school along with notebooks and color-coded subject dividers. After three years’ use, the plastic-wrapped packet of ruled sheets looked shabby and bedraggled, but many fresh, unused sheets still remained at the bottom, perhaps fifty of them.

I slipped one out and laid it flat upon my desk top. I stared at its cool clean whiteness for a long, long time. Then, taking up a pencil, I printed carefully upon it in even block letters, with cruel precision: GUY WILLARD IS A FAGGOT.

I tried to imagine it scrawled upon the boys’ room walls where I’d seen so many similar accusations inscribed (with only the name—the many names!—different.) Suddenly I began trembling like a leaf, violently, as if I were in the clutches of a fever, but there was no fever. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably; I closed my eyes. When it finally subsided, I began to feel a satisfying glow of pain gradually welling up inside me.

So that’s what it felt like. It wasn’t so bad.

I took another look at what I’d written, then crumpled it up and threw it away. I drew out another sheet and wrote upon it again: GUY WILLARD IS A FAGGOT.

I stared at it for a long, long time, then crumpled it up, too.

As if pressed onward by urgent warnings, I wrote the same message on all the remaining sheets, until I had no more left, until the floor around my desk was littered with piles of crumpled-up paper balls.

*