ROMANCE: PARANORMAL ROMANCE: Coveted by the Werewolves (Paranormal MMF Bisexual Menage Romance) (New Adult Shifter Romance Short Stories) (21 page)

              They had found me.  The boys at school, from their traditional lives with their traditional values and their traditional families.  Their traditional mothers made traditional marinara sauce from fresh-peeled tomatoes, and nobody once thought of updating anything in those days.  Because who would ever give all of the money up?  The fathers would come home from another hit job, never talk to their children except for the hard-fisted discipline that would break tables and bust kneecaps with equal ease, and the bank accounts would never be legally filled.  Instead, there was always a silence about how the bacon was brought home, never mind the pig that just got slaughtered for it.

              Before I was the banker, before the slim ties and slicked-back strands of hair, I was fresh meat for slaughter.  Before the white button-down shirt, I was painfully skinny and equally painfully shy.  I talked to no one and dressed in the kind of clothes that would let me blend into the gray walls of our high school if only the school would let me. 

              Who ever knows how these things get started?  Was it a look I had on my face one day, or was it simply that I was a tiny, knobby-kneed boy whose entire appearance was enough to elicit jeers and remarks?  All I know is that it began with the girls, as it often does.  Nowadays, they call it relational aggression, this thing that the womenfolk do.  Women fight and kick and slap almost more viciously than men do, but there’s this other side to them that’s far more dangerous than anything physical that could ever come out of a man’s body.  They talk about you.  And the words can often seal your death sentence.

              All it took was for Serafina Pielli to start whispering about my clothes one day.  And then the rumors started. 

             
I hear he whacks off to boys in his room.

              I’ll bet he wears rainbow shorts and roller skates around the West Side, where all the fags live.

              You think he has a poster of Babe Ruth and kisses it at night?  Makes believe he’s his boyfriend?

             
And often, in response to that last one,

             
Ew, who’d ever want to be HIS boyfriend?

              That was all it took.  A few words.  A few side sneers and giggles with no founding base for any of it.  To say that the words hurt would be untrue.  I was only conscious of what damage they could lead to, but not even that prepared me for the day I stood at my school locker and Tony Fiuconelli suddenly appeared behind me and slammed my head into the door.

              I hear you like boys, he said.  And we don’t appreciate your kind around here.

              And from then on, they’d hunt me.  Tony always led the gang, emulating the forced machismo of their fathers, beaten from the beatings themselves, desperate to take out their aggression on anybody who was different.  What was the crime, really?  Not being good at baseball—I never did join in with the other boys during their street matches—not knowing myself who or what I was attracted to?  The biggest question of all, of course, was how the other people at school seemed to know the answer to that one when I myself had the fuzzy gray feelings of the start of adolescence.

              The sickness of it started the day I caught sight of Tony Fiuconelli’s face as he lead the hunt for me.  As I lay on the ground, blood trickling from and stinging my nose, I found myself overtaken by the look in his huge brown eyes.  They were framed in thick lashes like a girl’s, and the anger I saw in them was strangely enough not directed towards me.  It was a living thing, my tormentor’s anger, and it was bubbling inside of him as surely as if he were a witches’ cauldron built especially for the purpose of containing it.  It was the way his muscles bunched underneath the worn cotton of his shirts, the tattoo on his upper bicep that would have broken his mother’s heart if she had known about it.  When he unleashed his anger onto me, I felt as if I wanted to take it all from him, absorb all that pain, all those kicks that mixed in me with a sense of self-loathing that was fast becoming a permanent companion.

              The hair on Tony Fiuconelli’s chest curled heftily, and I wondered what it would be like to taste the sweat in it after he got home from baseball practice, just before he popped into the shower.  To taste the mismatched ribs of him underneath this bumpy tongue of mine, to hold one of those surely brown nipples in my mouth until it popped out, fully erect.  There he was, stepping just into the shower, and we only had moments before one of his six sisters started banging on the door, and with that same anger in his eyes that always came upon him when he told his boys to get me, he slapped me, rammed me up against the shower tiles and took my cock in his hand, wrenching it almost to the point of pain, but not quite.

              Not quite.

              And our wet bodies would slap together as we almost grappled, but everything was so wet and good underneath the water spilling from the shower head that I almost couldn’t take it…

              And my mother would start banging on my bedroom door.

              Because I was never in that shower with Tony Fiuconelli.  Of course I wasn’t.  Back then, I could only imagine it and stifle my groans with my pillow as the bedsprings creaked furiously.  My mother would pound on my door, over and over, shouting that I would go blind if I continued doing what I was doing.  I thought it might be good if that happened.  Because then I wouldn’t have to go to school anymore, and the boys wouldn’t find me.  And I wouldn’t imagine Tony Fiuconelli with his hands all over me, making it hurt until it felt good again.  Twice around the bend, so to speak.

              In my sophomore year, I took to sitting underneath the school bleachers, smoking cigarettes, hiding from the world.  It was never during a game; I found other places to hide then.  I’d sit in the dark, plumes of smoke rising from my mouth, and count stars to not think about fluffy brown hair and whether or not Tony’s penis curved left or right, like mine did. And it was quiet, for long stretches of time, and I could blank out the thoughts I had about Tony and the breasts of young girls in my class, because of course, it was all a jumble of everything, and I could not separate one erotic thought from another.  But back then, it could be silent, if only for a brief while until I emerged back in the world again.

              And then the night came when I wasn’t alone there anymore.

              When it all ended, I would go to confession and not be able to tell the listening priest one damn thing.  I assumed nobody in the family would ever be able to understand and I’d just be worse off than when I started.  Eventually, one of my father’s brothers would notice me wandering aimlessly through life, and train me to become a banker.  A no-nonsense job and demeanor that would finally let the neighborhood take me seriously, as if the beatings had never happened.  The beatings were, after all, a normal part of life in our particular family.

              But what happened that night surely wasn’t.

              My shoulder was grasped, and I turned around, mouth dropping my hissing cigarette onto the ground.  Tony Fiuconelli had found me, and the look on his face was indistinguishable in the dark.  All I knew was that there was a dry, meaty mouth on the side of my face suddenly, and I realized that he was trying to find my mouth, a sort of pleasure hole that would receive him in a way that he had tried not to be received before.  We fumbled blindly in the dark, banging our shins and legs and arms into the aluminum bleachers, gasping at the sensation of hot hands against flesh in the crisp, chill air of the night.  Was this Tony Fiuconelli touching me?  Kneeling down, kissing the flat nothingness, no abs or muscles on my hairy stomach, and finally reaching my cock?  I waited with baited breath, not knowing what he was going to do next.  There is so much danger, I realize now, in a person that unpredictable, in a simmering pot whose lid is always kept on.

              When the hard press of his mouth finally encircled my penis, I gasped out loud.  The air was wet with the condensation clouds of our breath, and I felt my lower stomach heave in response to Tony’s then unskilled workings on me.  Still, I bucked my hips against his mouth, afraid to touch his head and guide him, afraid to do any single thing in the world that would stop him from taking me into his mouth, unsure of what to do with the scrape of his teeth and all.  And when I came, as I eventually did, more from the excitement of the venture alone than anything else, I slid down the aluminum siding until I was on my heels, helpless and weak and sated.  We did not say anything, because what could we say?  There were no words for our particular situation, and only psychologists can classify it now.

              It did not surprise me the next day to find myself on the ground by the corner store, getting the living shit kicked out of me by Tony and his friends.  Although could he really call them his friends when I was the only one who knew his secret?  The circumstance did not surprise me because what could Tony do to explain his behavior from the previous night?  Nothing.  He could do nothing but assert his dominance over me in front of his friends, the desperate sadness in his eyes as he cracked my ribs with the steel-tips of his shoes filling me with loathing and simultaneous arousal.  People who have felt it will tell you that they are not far from each other, hate, pain, and sex, and that a mixture of those three compadres will screw with your head and you may never understand it. 

              As the sour spittle from his mouth landed on my face and Tony and his boys—oh the irony of that turn of phrase!—sauntered off, leaving me coughing up great gobs of blood onto the city’s cement, I knew something very keenly.  I knew that I would always want pain with my sex, that the rumors about me were indeed true, if only to an extent, and that I would like it when men hurt me and I would never want to know any other way.

              We continued that way for so long that I lost track of the days, weeks, months, and feelings.  It was all a nasty tumbled jungle inside of me, and every time I came into his mouth or ass, I’d be filled with the disgusting type of self-loathing you only get when you debase yourself and you like it.  But there were so many avenues to explore, so many more things I wanted to try, and none of it was during a time in my life that made any sense, if any such times exist at all. 

              Santa Maria’s Festival always fell on the hottest day of the summer, the kind that made thighs stick to vinyl and leather seats, and always closed down an entire avenue of the old neighborhood.  I drove my dad’s old auto back then, and there were always girls around.  It was difficult for the Italiano girls to give me the time of day after all the rumors they had spread, but there were always pink-faced Irish girls who liked to hang out on the fringes of the festival, glorying in the bright string lights and exotic smells of basil and tomatoes and frying meat.  They were like cotton candy to me, too sweet and vapid and cloying, and they always talked too much.  Besides, back then I was still painfully thin, and few developed a taste for me beside the macho ideal of the day.

              Except for that summer that Molly O’Neil picked me up.  I was off to the side of the street, leaning against my car, observing bitterly and avoiding locking eyes with anyone in particular.  And suddenly there was this girl, gritty and real beside me, all her imperfections adding up to make her less of a dream and more an actual, corporeal person next to me.  She had stringy blonde hair, blue eyes and ginger freckles; her blue polka-dotted dress outlined a thick waist, straps firmly set on narrow shoulders.  Her skin had the quality of farmer’s cheese, lightly marbled with blue veins beneath its vague translucence.

              Let’s drive, she said, and got right into my car.

              Her breasts were large and substantial, with pink lemonade nipples that were just a little sour to the taste.  The smell of her was slightly spicy, and her thighs were wavy as I pressed her into the car seat.  She unbuckled me herself and sucked on my neck, bruising me; when she pushed my pants down my narrow little hips, I was already stiff and hot against the balmy night air.  All I could think about were those chapped lips with traces of raspberry lipstick eaten off as she consumed Italian sausage over the course of the evening, and how none of the girls I had grown up with would have ever gotten into this car with me.  They were all church-righteous, but snuck off into the alleyways during the Santa Maria festival to be done in the ass by boys like Tony and his gang.

              Because if it’s in that hole, they argued, it doesn’t count, right?  You could still be a virgin, even if every guy in the neighborhood knew what your hindquarters looked like nude.

              I groaned and spilled sticky semen onto Molly’s thighs, the folds of her blue dress and white petticoat bunching up around her middle.  Her white underpants ringed in pink swirls stretched between her ankles, and she moved to the side to light up a cigarette.  I collapsed next to her on my nothing butt and lit it for her.  Neither of us said a word as we sat side by side, the tarantella playing somewhere deep in the background.

              Eventually, she pulled her underwear up around her hips, snapping the elastic band in place.  Her hair was more matted than before, the pinkness of her plump arms deepening as she clutched her purse to her side.  I drove her back to the outskirts of where the Irish families lived, that vague border between our community and theirs, and stepped out of the car to open the door for her.  It was at that moment that Tony Fiuconelli rounded the corner.