Chapter 29: Epiphany
"Oh, Jesus," Doug said, embarrassed for me. He had walked in with me naked and tied to the bed while Dan stood over me, his big toe all but fucking me while he slowly jerked himself off. I blushed deeply and closed my eyes as if it would make me invisible. "We can go somewhere else, man. Sorry. Didn't mean to interrupt."
"No problem," Dan said calmly. "You can stay." I waited for the we-can-move-to-Mark's-room part, but it never came. I opened my eyes in annoyance. Dan was still casually stroking his dick. Doug had his back to us out of politeness. Seating himself on his own bed, Adam watched the exchange with detached amusement. Doug reluctantly followed Adam's lead and accepted Dan's invitation by plunking himself down on the bed next to Adam. Deeply embarrassed, I frowned and stonily looked up at Dan as he towered above me.
"Anyway," said Adam, continuing, evidently, the conversation he and Doug were having before they walked in, "you gotta work on your floor. We need more depth there. We only have four strong tumblers. We need two more to be safe."
Dan removed his foot from my asscrack and brought it back to hook it under my left knee. Bending his own knee, he lifted my knee with his flexed foot, and directed it up to my torso, making the approach to my pucker easier.
"You, ahhh...you know I'm weak at tumbling," Doug said to Adam, clearly uncomfortable with watching what was happening in our half of the room. "Steve would be better at it. I should stick to the strength events."
"Stevie's hitting a wall," Adam returned. "He's been working his ass off on the floor, and he's just not getting better."
"Dan could. That'd make him a contender for the all-around."
"I suck at floor," Dan said, bringing his foot back to my crack and running the length of it with his toe. "Not interested in the all-around. That's Adam this year. Matt, maybe in two. Not me. I'm a specialist." His eyes never wavered from me as he spoke, nor did he interrupt the slow, full stroking of his own dick. I desperately wished a hole in the universe to form just under the bed so that I could fall into it and hide.
"It's just that...tumbling is...look, dude," Doug said to Adam, "we gotta go somewhere else. This is just too weird." Doug's embarrassment only served to make mine worse. I could feel the flush of my cheeks, but didn't know if it was from self-consciousness or anger.
Adam shrugged. "Whatever," he said. The two of them rose and headed out the door.
I turned to look at Dan, and fumed.
"What?" he said.
"What's the point of that?" I asked, angrily.
"The point of what?"
"You into public humiliation? Is that it? 'Cause I'm not, you know."
Dan put his heel down on the bed just shy of my crotch and laid his foot flat against my perineum. He applied pressure to the point of vague discomfort - enough to remind me that pain was well within his means.
"Let's get a couple of things straight, here," he said. "I don't give a shit if you're into public anything or not. You got that perfectly clear?"
I nodded, tight-lipped. This was not fun. I was not assuaged.
"Secondly, you gotta think through what y'all want to be embarrassed about and what y'all don't."
"Huh?" I hadn't expected this line of argument. I was sure he was going to continue with the classic, "I'm the master, what I say goes" line.
"You're Mr. Gay and Proud," he said. "You haven't figured this out yet?"
"What are you talking about?" My confusion began to overcome my anger. I could feel my features softening. Dan saw it too and removed his foot from its threatening position to return to stroking my crack with his toe as he talked.
"All y'all are so big on Gay and Proud, but it's crap," he began. "You spend all this time saying gay is just as good as straight and that straights are wrong about you. "Oh, we love that we're gay. We're proud of being gay." But then what do all y'all do? You fucking make fun of each other for being bottoms. Fucking hypocrites."
"I..." I stammered, "No, it's not like that. That's not what we...That isn't what it's..." I found I had no ending to the sentence I had felt required to begin.
"Oh, it's fucking exactly like that and you know it," he said. "You don't see girls embarrassed about liking getting fucked. It's what they do. So you tell me. What's so humiliating about doing what you know turns you on? I thought there was supposed to be pride in that?"
"I'm not embarrassed about liking getting fucked!" I protested, at last able to latch onto something he said. "I'm embarrassed about having a friend see me tied down to a bed."
"Why? That's what you like. That's who you are. That's what you do. What's there to be embarrassed about? Y'all are supposed to be so enlightened. Who the fuck cares if you like being tied down to a bed?"
"I just don't like public displays of sex..." I said, but he interrupted me, his baritone commanding me to silence.
"That dog won't hunt, and you know it. You wouldn't be embarrassed if I was giving you a blowjob and someone you'd already messed around with came in.
And if he were embarrassed by it, you'd be, like, "it's the most natural thing in the world. Get over it." You'd think he was homophobic."
I stared up at him slack-jawed. He continued.
"But because you're on the bottom, and, fucking worse, you so obviously want to be on the bottom, now it's humiliating, right? All y'all are so into pride. "Queer" isn't an insult, and all that shit. But then some top calls you a "pussyboy" or a "cocksucker" and it's supposed to be humiliating? What the fuck? Why is it okay for you to be proud about being queer, but not about being a total pussy?"
I swear when you're lying naked on your back, hands trussed above your head while a possibly straight SM top slowly jerks off over you, the last thing you expect to hear is a polemic on sexism within the gay male community and the reclamation of the language of oppression. The most extraordinary thing about it was, of course, that he was exactly right. We do make fun of each other for being bottoms. It is sexist. We insist that doing guys does not signify a diminution of our masculinity, but secretly cling to the notion that getting done by them does. And this man - this man who from encounter to encounter did everything except what I expected him to do - he had thought this through and come to a truly enlightened conclusion.
"I would give anything right now," I said, "to get you off."
He laughed. He laughed easily and freely. "You're a fucking case, you know that?" He knelt down so that his knees straddled my rib cage almost to my armpits. The hair on his shins tickled my sides. His dick stretched over my face, his balls inches over my mouth.
He renewed his stroking, and I became transfixed by the sight of his foreskin as it stretched on the down strokes, then folded over his head as he brought his hand up the length of his shaft. Circumcised, myself, I have always been fascinated by the mechanics of the foreskin. Dan's was beautiful. Ample enough to cover his cockhead when he drew his hand fully over it but not loose enough to completely hide it when he was soft, it spread the precum oozing from his slit over the mushroom of his crown to make it glisten and shine. His stroking caused his balls to wave gently forward and back wafting periodic shots of his smell into my nostrils. Spunky. Sweaty. Sharp. How wet my mouth had become for want of a taste of him! And how close to exploding the over-inflated, concrete flesh of my dick was!
"So y'all my little Yankee, cocksucking pussyboy or what?" he said, smiling.
"Happily," I returned. "I'm just my big, strong, smart Rebel's proud, cocksucking pussyboy."
"So if I went and got Eric and brought him back here, you'd be okay with it?"
"Couldn't it be Brad?"
Dan laughed. "Work on it," he said. His pumping was getting more deliberate, and his right pec, bicep and tricep began to swell asymmetrically from use. From beneath his dick, I could see the tips of his thumb and forefinger just able to meet as they encased his flesh. The blue vein stuck out in a more pronounced way than usual. He abandoned his long strokes and began centering his attention on the place where movement caused the skin to fold over the flare of his head. Back and forth in little jerks, his foreskin flexed and stretched, flexed and stretched.
I stuck my tongue out as far as it would go, trying to get a taste of his ballsack. I came within millimeters, able only to tease myself with some of the long straight hairs that hung from it. I was reaching for him, body arched, head off the bed, soul extended. He looked down at my thirst for him with full satisfaction. Need gets him off, he had said. How effectively he had turned me into an instrument for his own satisfaction! I was, at that moment, no more than, no less than the incarnation of need.
His head tilted back, his eyes glazed and his balls began their telltale rise. He returned to long stroking again, but at a vastly increased tempo. Veins appeared on his forearm as he worked himself, his grip as tight as it would be on the high bar, his dick as wooden. There was nothing I could do to assist him, much as I desperately wanted to feel him, to help him, to work him. He would not let me, and for me to try further would only distract him, close as he was to coming. Instead, I laid my head back down on the bed and opened my mouth wide, my tongue resting slightly extended over my lower lip. I could offer him nothing, I had realized, except a target. It was the correct gesture. Seeing it brought him over the edge. With air hissing between his teeth, his face contorted into the agony of ecstasy. His abdominals contracted, his entire body quivered in spasm. His hand shot to the base of his dick forcing the longest rope of cum to emerge that I have ever seen. It was endless, viscous, dazzling. It landed diagonally across my face, burning a scar from my hair to my left cheek. The second string was aimed at my mouth. The bulk of the shot hit my soft palate, but enough landed across my tongue that I could begin to savor the complex taste of it. But Dan wasn't done. He shot again and again, drenching my face and hair and mouth and making me wonder if he had been celibate as long as I had. By the time he was done, I was a canvas that would have put Jackson Pollock to shame.
He collapsed onto my chest, sitting full weight on me, holding his dick as the last few precious bobbles of fluid oozed from it. Panting, cheeks flushed red, covered in a light sheen of sweat, he looked to me, for the first time, less the God and more the young man. Given the time he needed to recover, I was able to begin to savor the taste of his ejaculate.
Is it the taste of cum itself that is so overwhelming? There are no words that can describe it, of course. Smoky, earthy, salty, musky, all come short of its gustatory complexity. Is it its texture? The viscous sliminess that can not be cleared from your mouth regardless of how many times you swallow? Or is it the symbolism of it? Incorporating into your very being the means by which your man self-propagates. When we swallow cum, we absorb his essence and, somehow in a way that harkens back to prehistory, his power. He becomes part of us in a ritual as potent as the taking of the host onto our tongues: his flesh becomes our flesh. Or is it that it was Dan's cum that was sliding slowly down my throat, Dan's substance that was coating me, Dan's little soldiers that were conquering me from the inside? Dan had injected me, infected me, and I wanted no cure. Consuming him, he consumed me.
Dan reached down and gently began to trace the strings of cum around my face, periodically bringing his finger to my mouth to allow me to lick his residue off it. I sucked his fingers greedily, and he let me, calmly running them over and under my tongue, exploring the insides of my cheeks, my teeth. I concentrated every fiber of my being on not cumming spontaneously. When he finished, he leaned down and took my mouth in his, tasting himself on my lips. He ate my breath, my tongue, my being. When he released me, I was in a daze.
"You are the hottest man in the universe," I said, breathlessly.
"Really?" he asked, pleased with himself. "Hotter than Adam?"
He sat back and looked down on me, smirking self-contentedly.
It continued to drizzle Wednesday, the kind of weather brought us by an indecisive God. It was not wet enough to be a storm, it was not dry enough to be fair. Being outside, at least, woke me up. If I had slept more than an hour the night before, I could not recall it. I was a big walking dick. I had been called it before, but never felt it so completely.
"Hey," I said to Matt when I caught up with him on the way to lunch. "Long time no talk."
"Hey."
"You okay?"
He looked at me impassively.
"Yeah," he said after a beat. "Fine."
"Shmu phoned. He wants to come out here this weekend." The boy brightened noticeably.
"No way!"
"Yah way...and other Biblical references."
"Huh?"
"Nothing, pu...nothing, Matt." I smiled, catching myself. "A stupid private joke."
"Doesn't he work or something?"
"Shmu? Be serious. He' already spent the millions he thinks he's going to get. Shmu wouldn't hold a nine-to-five if you put a gun to his head. And his camp doesn't start until August."
"That's way cool."
"Way way." I said. I watched him for signs, but couldn't read the writing.
Matt was too close to the closet. He was still good at hiding.
Eric sat across from me at lunch.
"So you been spending a lot of time with Dan, huh?" he asked as he finished his meal.
"Yeah," I said. "I like Dan a lot."
"So you into getting raped now? Is that it?"
Silence fell at the table. It was only Matt, Brad, Evan, and Steven left, but they clearly heard something that disturbed them.
I laughed. "Honey, you can't rape the willing."
"No," he said, "but you can rape the unwilling."
"Huh?"
"Don't you know why Dan transferred here?" he asked.
"Shut the fuck up, Eric," Steven said.
"Am I lying?" he asked.
"It's none of your fucking business. Jesus, Eric, sometimes you can be such a dweeb."
Eric smiled a humorless grin, got up from the table and took his tray. "Why don't you ask him about it, Mark?" he suggested smarmily on his way out.
"What the hell was that all about?" I asked when the screen door shut behind him.
"Drop it," Steven said, still frowning. "It's just Eric being Eric. Don't worry about it." I looked over at Matt, who pursed his lips and held his hands in the air as if to say "I wouldn't touch this one if you paid me."
When I got to the gym, Adam was leading the boys in their warm up. They lay on the floor doing bicycle crunches as he grunted out a number every fourth sit-up. Knees came to opposing elbows in perfect unison rhythm. The boys had, to a one, forgone shirts. The gym was holding the accumulated heat like French onion soup.
Had the treasure trail always been the sexiest part of the human anatomy? Blond and wispy, black and full, straw and sculpted, coal and thin, there were ten arrows, ten invitations twisting before me to Adam's hypnotic count. And had men's areolae always been so perfect in their variation? Small and sharply defined, large and full, bare or circled with a crown of hair, bumpy or smooth, each drew the eye happily to its protruding focus where it remained trapped by desire and fixation. And had I always had trouble sleeping? Had I always had this curious inability to concentrate? Had I always been hard? Had I always been falling?
The boys were stretching now. Two rows - five of them facing me, five facing away. Ten Russian splits, with torsos folded flat onto the floor. Adam called for toes to be pointed. Ten perfect unbroken lines of muscle. Five pairs of shoulders pressing to the floor. Ten dimpled deltoids, round and firm as melons, winking at me. Five jock straps digging into ten delectable cheeks under tightly stretched, glossy onionskin training shorts.
Did Freud ever write about polymorphous perversity in one's twenties, or just the polymorphousless kind? Was polymorphousless a word? Poly-morph-ous-less. Many-form-having-without. And why wasn't Morpheus visiting me? Did dreams only come to the limp?
Fuck, I was tired. Was this the beginning of disassociation? What would my advisor say? I leave to study an alpha male, I come back two months later nuts - a sleep-deprived, horny toad. I took my green notebook and opened to the week before. It was a tapestry of seemingly meaningless shorthand scribbles. Hip pose three. Head tilt back. Lower lip lick. A catalogue in which, as indecipherably plain as the language of whales, lay the key to power.
The warm-up finished, Adam assigned pairs to apparati, then walked off with Johnston to discuss the afternoon's session. Nothing unusual. This was how all practices began. It was only because some part of me had learned to always be aware of Dan that Steven's cross to him caught my eye. There were words exchanged quietly. I couldn't hear what they were, but I could clearly see the effect they had on Dan and...
The green notebook fell from my lap as my brain made the stunning cognitive leap. Perhaps it was because I was so tired. Perhaps my exhaustion had allowed me to think outside the box. But how could I have missed it for so long? In one dazzling second, it was perfectly clear. It had always been there, but I had been completely blind to it.
I was looking at Dan react in anger to Steven's words. The muscles of his jaw flexed until he consciously relaxed it. His tongue came out and rested on his lower lip. He strode over to Eric. Interfemoral angle - there. Bet it was 12 degrees. Angle between hip and elbow. Check. He stood. Akimbo pose two. The inclination of the head as he talked to Eric. And Eric's reaction! He shrank. He took an unconscious step back. He drew his tail between his legs. I picked up the notebook and furiously flipped through pages looking for a similar interaction. Yes. The same! Gestures? What few there were were the same. The interaction I was looking at in person between Dan and Eric, from the perspective of the language of non-verbal communication, was exactly the same as the one I had transcribed a week and a half before - between Adam and Brad. Dan was an Alpha!