It's Like This (2 page)

I squeeze my eyes tight. He stops moving, cock huge and thick down my throat. My eyes fly open and I stare up at him, terrified. He stares back, an eyebrow quirked curiously. He grips my chin with one hand, and with the other—he slaps me. This is also new, and sort of scary, but it has the desired effect: I feel like a car that’s gotten a jump and I catch a deep inhale through my nose and I trust that he knows what he’s doing, and would never do anything to hurt me for real and I should maybe just enjoy.

I know my eyes are wet, not from emotion, but just from the not being able to breathe thing, and my face is probably all red and there’s spit and pre-cum around my mouth, possibly on my chin, his and maybe remnants of mine, and as he fucks in and out of my mouth, completely setting his own rhythm. I think of the view I’m creating, and I love it, love the me he brings to the surface, and I would give anything to come right now. But I can’t. There’s nothing there. And the thought alone isn’t
quite
enough. So fucking close, though. And then, as if my thinking about it egged him on, Rylan comes, hard and deep, holding my head over his cock until he’s finished and I’m choking awkwardly on semen. Ry pulls out, slowly, lingeringly, until just the head is resting righteously on my tongue. Rylan smirks and I blush and thrust with humiliation and need. He runs the tip of his cock lightly over my lips, like some obscene chap stick, and then suddenly walks out of the room, leaving me caught and aching.

He returns a few minutes later. I’ve got a desperate boner; he has a fucking sandwich. Lettuce, tomato and cucumber. He hates condiments and he’s a fucking vegetarian. Turns out all I can do is kneel here knowing useless shit like that, while he sits cross-legged on the floor, still naked, to watch me. Fuck him. Christ. I want to break the code, the silence. I want to plead for him to just get me off already. But the expression on his face as he finishes his sandwich, wipes away the crumbs, and slowly starts to jack himself makes it clear that he has other plans.

After what feels like a fucking eternity in cock years, Ry stands and meanders over. He grabs my wrists, and jerks them painfully upwards. I get it though: he wants me to follow. My shoulder joints grumble and thrill at the release but I ignore them. He doesn’t lead me very far, just back to the foot of the bed. He unstraps my hands, and I am pathetically tempted to just grab my dick and get there, but I know I’ll just be cheating myself out of whatever he’s got planned if I do that. He takes my shoulders in his hands and turns me towards him, so my back is against the bed, and indicates that I should crouch down. He curls my hands around two of the vertical wooden bars spaced evenly along the footboard. He encourages my feet outwards, away from each other and away from the bed, before sliding in between my legs. Ah. I get it now. If we could just use words like normal people, I would’ve figured out that he wanted me to fuck myself on him a lot sooner.

But maybe it’s because we do stuff like we do that he doesn’t talk, maybe he can’t admit it with words—but sometimes I think that if I just figured out how to ask, there’s not much Rylan would have a problem admitting. Maybe it’s just me with the problem. A confident finger teases at my asshole. I growl or something, because we are so past teasing. For once he obliges and quickly applies lube and works me open with a couple of fingers, but it’s getting to be desperate times up here, so I make another noise in the back of my throat urging the proceedings forward. The next thing I know he’s moved again. Away from me. Fuck. He’s tying my hands to the posts again and I can’t help feeling that it’s in punishment for my protests. My shoulders are screaming almost as loudly as my dick. But finally, he’s ready, lying underneath me, cock hard, eyes watching me almost lazily. I lower myself down, hunching forward a bit to try to release some of the pressure on my shoulders. It hurts a bit from lack of diligent prep, but by now I just need release so bad that I try to push past that. I thrust myself up and down, trying to get the right angle to hit my—fuck.

Yeah. It won’t take long now. Genius. He’s not doing any of the work, just watching as I pull myself closer and closer, fucking impaling myself on him with need, the pain of the entry becoming a whacked-out sort of pleasure, and then suddenly he’s gripping my cock hard, squeezing and pumping and I don’t get why until when I thrust down on him once more, and find he’s coming and then I’m coming, shoots of the stuff all over my chest, matching the hot spurts inside me. He pulls out. I collapse against the foot of the bed. He’s tracing a finger through the cum on my chest, and I’m almost too dead to the world to notice. But not quite.

CUM SLUT.

He writes, his fingertip rearranging the mess on my skin. How lovely. And then he catches my unimpressed expression and laughs, smudging it all out with his palm.

“Just kidding.” He grins and kisses me, his lips warm and comforting and happy as they mesh pleasantly with mine. He pulls away the ties at my hands which allows me to melt on the floor, him resting contentedly on top of me, our power dichotomy somehow reversed as he loses consciousness. And I’m exhausted. But I can’t sleep.

Just kidding.

Three years of silent fucking, and the first thing he says in terms of sex between us, ever, is, “Just kidding.” Not, “Gee, that was fun,” or, “By the way, Niles, I really fucking love you,” or even, “Was that good?” or, “What can I do better?” or whatever normal people might say after incredible sex. Just…Just kidding. You’re not a cum slut. Um…thanks?

* * *

He leaves after a few minutes of sleep: unsticks himself from me, smiles, fucking tousles my hair, and leaves.

He kisses me in public. He kisses me before we fuck. But afterwards, or after the comedown, there’s a whole lot of nothing.

I assume I should be acclimatized to this by now. That I should accept the whole situation as “this is how it goes” but of course I don’t. Instead, I turn to my favourite activity: obsessing over it in the shower. If I counted up all the frustrated, mind-churning showers I’ve taken in the last three years, I think the actual number would make me slice my jugular with a plastic fork.

Except for that I know that I wouldn’t. Instead I would just be like, “Oh God, that’s literally the worst!” and keep right on going with it. It’s like Surgeon General’s warnings on smokes. It doesn’t matter how many of the facts you know, or the statistics, or the risks, or anything; you still just want your fucking smokes. Of course, I quit smoking. But that was only because Rylan told me to. Guess you could say the stronger addiction won out.

He calls early the next morning, like he always does. Even still, if the call comes more than a few days later, I allow that malignant worry to blossom in my brain: maybe that was the last fuck, maybe he’s done with me. You know, the usual plaguing fears of an insecure moron. Feeling this way kind of messes with me, because I’m not all that insecure about stuff; like I know I’m not unattractive, and I could have a significant other,
other
than Rylan, if I wanted one (though thinking about being with someone other than him just seems abstract and foreign and a little more terrifying than I’d like to admit), and that I’m smart and we’re adults (OK, so we’re nineteen, and considered adults by, like, Statistics Canada or the police, or whatever, but I mostly still see myself as, well, a teenager), and I feel pretty autonomous (even though I am totally not, because my parents are paying for my education and rent and everything, really because they say I shouldn’t have a job while I’m at school, because they think school should be my focus and all, and yeah—I know I’m spoiled but I really do try not to act it), and I have a steady family life and on and on. So, logically, I shouldn’t have this massive uncertainty in my life. And yet, here I am, obsessing.

“I’ve got tickets for the symphony tomorrow,” is what he tells me when he calls.

“The symphony. Really.”

“People in this community care about the Arts,” he says, adopting a pretentious telemarketer tone.

“And I realize that that is something my formerly redneck Albertan ass can’t possibly comprehend…but still, the symphony?”

“You like music.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Excellent. Meet me downtown noon-ish? In front of the Douglas Centre.”

“Fine. How much are the tickets?”

“I’ll take care of it. See you in a bit?”

“Yeah, alright.”

I show up in a suit. It’s getting a little warm for a jacket and it turns out a suit just makes me feel like an asshole in front of the homeless people hanging around my bus stop. I give the guy closest to me all my change to attempt to assuage my conscience.

“The reason you’re always broke, Nigh,” Rylan says, appearing from the entrance of the mall and linking his arm with mine, “is that you choose to throw your money away. They’re just going to spend it on drugs and alcohol.” His tone is facetious and mock-WASPy. He casually drops a twenty into the basket of a run-down woman with a mangy German shepherd before leading me deftly to the crosswalk.

“Are you wearing a tux underneath that jacket?” he demands. “Because I could swear those are your grad shoes…”

“It’s just a suit. I thought it was appropriate, considering this is one of your so-called cultural society events.”

“It sure is. Hence why I feel the need to add some clothing of the non-conformist variety.”

He’s wearing about six layers of different, tight-fitting T-shirts and sweaters, all topped off with a zip-up hoodie, none of which seem to increase his bulk (or lack thereof) even slightly.

“You look plain old hipster to me,” I bite back.

“Better than being a sell-out to the previous generation.”

“Spoken like the true child of a broken home.”

“Says the offspring of the bourgeoisie.”

I don’t exactly have a comeback for that one.

* * *

The symphony is something by Dvořák that I won’t venture a guess at pronouncing. Rylan has been saying it at every opportunity, because before he quit (or, took a break from, as he likes to say) uni, he took a semester of Russian, and feels that this entitles him to adopt a pseudo-Czech inflection. We’re part of the one percent of the people in here under the age of, oh, I don’t know, dead? Everywhere you look is a sea of white hair and everywhere you turn, you almost knock the walker out from under some retiree. My thoughts on the matter are confirmed when I open the program and find an ad: “Have you put the Symphony Orchestra in
your
will?” Oh, Jesus.

“A bit morbid, eh?” Rylan grins, comfortably dropping his arm on my shoulders. We’re seated. The auditorium is a neoclassical throwback, complete with nude Grecian figures over the massive doorways, sporting the masks of comedy and tragedy. There is next to no space between us and the row in front of us. I’m glad we sat early so I don’t have to disrupt the string of seniors whom I’m sure will gradually materialize in the empty seats to our sides.

“Hardly!” I rebut, sarcastically. “There’s nothing I’d rather think about on an afternoon out than planning for my future demise.”

“You’re from Calgary. You don’t know shit.” He grins, affectionately.

Whenever Ry’s losing an argument, he pulls the Alberta card, even though I’ve been here since sixth grade. I didn’t meet Rylan ’til tenth grade, though. We went to different elementary schools, and even though I must’ve seen him in the halls during our first two years at high school, it wasn’t until our English 10 teacher, who was still into organized seating (pods and everything), put us together that we actually got to know each other.

Neither of us subscribed to a particular social clique in high school. Of course there were cliques, but none were particularly vicious (other than to the unfortunate few) like in teen movies or anything. I was mostly friends with Brice and Parker and a few other guys I’ve mostly lost contact with, besides being like, Facebook friends, and he was mostly friends with Ian and Dylan. So when Rylan and I started hanging out, we just sort of threw them all together, and everything worked out pretty well.

What I’m getting at is that stuff with Rylan and me hasn’t always been the way it is now. We honestly did just start out as friends. I never saw any of this coming. Not until it was pretty much happening. The first time…well, it wasn’t really “the first time,” because that sounds like sex and I guess that depends how you define sex, but either way the first incident thing, happened over Christmas break the year we met. There was Brice’s parents leaving a day early for their holiday (he was flying out the next day to meet them), alcohol, the group of us guys, and a whole lot of stupidity.

I don’t remember what we did, besides from scratching the hell out of the pool table, and spilling cheap vodka mixed with chocolate milk (this was a mistake) all over Brice’s parents’ new carpet and then, of course, the ritual passing out in various parts of the house (Ian, our resident over-drinker, in the bathroom) around three or four in the morning.

I was in the guest room. I know that for sure. I was sprawled diagonally on the quilt of a single bed, the angle, mixed with my being drunk, obscuring my perception of the room. I woke up when Rylan entered a few hours later. 7:28 was glowing on the digital clock, which made the guest room feel even more like a hotel room than the washed out flowered walls and brass lamps already made it feel. Looking back, it seems like such an ironic, innocent time of day to have one’s first homosexual encounter. Or any-sexual encounter, for that matter, seeing as we were the kind of guys that mostly just hung out with guys; we were still pretty awkward and immature around girls.

I remember I checked the time because I didn’t know what he was doing there, or I thought it was time to go…somewhere. Mostly I was almost still drunk, or at least tired enough to feel drunk. When Rylan didn’t supply me with any information, I dropped my head back down. I was really fucking tired. I heard him inhale, deeply, and I think now that he was trying to steady himself for what he was about to do (he got over that need for self-assurance in about a week, because I haven’t heard him take a great, stabilizing breath since), but I didn’t know that at the time.