Chapter 8: No Means No.
I ate dinner alone that night in my room, feeling like I needed some time to process. Brad was a really great guy -- pretty much everything I would want in a boyfriend except for one glaring problem: he was straight. And he truly was straight. Of that I had no doubt. I'd met plenty of closet cases over the years who posed as straight because they couldn't handle what they feared they really wanted. They posed, they postured, they bragged about the pussy they snagged, they begged you to fuck them. That wasn't Brad at all.
Brad had set up a schema in which men and women loved each other and made love to each other, but, when that wasn't available, buddies helped each other out. He was right, of course. It was enlightened. His reported response when guys came on to him was most telling: "no thanks." Most guys don't answer, "no thanks." Most guys answer, "I'm straight." Brad usually didn't need to point out he was straight because he was perfectly comfortable with the fact that he was.
So my job included getting the boys off when they wanted me to. That stark fact kept returning to my consciousness. After the day's work out, I had approached Johnston privately.
"When you said my job was to do `anything it took' to keep the boys happy, what did you mean by that," I had asked him?
"Just what I said," he replied matter-of-factly. "I don't want any distractions here. They have to concentrate on their routines. I don't want them to have anything else on their minds."
I stood there, staring at him blankly, trying to find a way to formulate the next question. Johnston read my face, and smiled.
"One of them asked you to get them off, didn't they?"
I nodded.
"Brad?"
I nodded again.
"Figures. Wish he'd use some of that forwardness in his routines. Gotta figure out a way to make him more aggressive on the floor. He takes everything too easily -- emotionally, I mean. He needs more of an edge." Johnston had brought the conversation back to the only topic which concerned him: the team's performance in the gym.
"So that's part of my job?"
"Of course," he replied absentmindedly. "You think if I purposefully piss him off during a practice it will have a positive effect on his routines?"
I talked about some motivational methods he could use, but excused myself from the conversation as soon as it was appropriate to do so.
Despite my lingering discomfort, I had to admit that getting Brad off was kind of fun. He was certainly beautiful. In fact, he was one of the most beautiful guys I had ever had the opportunity to lay hands on. And he was both responsive and appreciative -- two qualities I liked in a guy when it came to matters sexual. Upon closer inspection, I found that there was a deeper appeal involved. As a gay man, the whole straight-male-bonding thing had always been somewhat out of reach. But Brad included me in his world as completely and unquestioningly as he did the rest of his buddies. The fact that I was gay was a non-issue for him. A plus, in fact, as it made negotiating getting his sexual needs met less problematic. He laughed and joked and included me in his circle of friends. Then I got him off. Then he laughed and joked and included me in his circle of friends. It was as easy as that.
As for the others, I had to figure out how I would handle them, as Brad had already told me, animatedly in fact, that he couldn't wait to tell them about our little encounter. I didn't feel like there was any danger of them reacting badly in a physical way -- something I had to seriously consider, since each and every one of them was far stronger than I was, and able, with little effort, to beat me to a pulp if they so chose. Brad seemed to know the rules here at the camp in a way that I didn't, and indicated that the other athletes did as well. He inferred that the others would be just as delighted with my...talents...as he was. I decided to present an air of casual indifference. Yeah, sure. You want a towel? Here. You need a hand job? There you go. All in a day's work. That seemed to be Brad's expectation of the situation, so I had to assume that the others would feel the same. Johnston hadn't said that Brad was unusual in his attitudes -- just forward. That decided, I took out a journal, began thumbing through the abstracts, and returned to my dinner.
Half an hour later, I was relaxing on the couch, still reading, when there was a knock on the door. I threw the book aside, and went to answer it. It was Eric.
"Hey," I said, opening the door, and walking back to the couch, indicating he was free to come in.
"Hey," he said, entering the room and shutting the door behind him.
"What's up," I asked, sitting back down on the couch?
"Well, you weren't at dinner," he said.
"I needed to get some reading done," I explained, gesturing to the journal. "Thought I'd eat in tonight."
"Oh," said Eric.
A few beats passed. Too many. Eric looked uncomfortable, but just stood there. I understood. Dinner. Brad must have been effusive in his praise.
"Is there something I can help you with," I asked? Clearly, Eric was not as secure with his needs as Brad was, and I was rather enjoying his discomfort. It would have been cute if it were possible for a man as powerfully built as he was to look cute.
"Um.
I thought if you weren't busy..." His voice trailed off, and again, he waited dumbly, just standing there in front of me. He wanted me to say it for him. I wasn't about to.
"I'm not busy. Just reading. I was going to come into the commons soon anyway."
"Oh, good," he said. "Then it's okay." "What's okay?"
"Okay. So you'll give me a some head."
I smiled. He had asked me without asking me. Score one for his ability to keep his straight self-image sacrosanct. Brad's the outlier, I thought, somewhat pleased with myself. Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
"Sure," I said, with a studied casualness. "Where do you want it?"
Eric merely unzipped his jeans and walked forward, standing directly before me, and waited.
Eric was a stud in a totally different way than Brad was. Where Brad was rounded and light and smooth, Eric was dark and angular and hard. His thick dark hair, brooding black eyes under dense, wide eyebrows, nose with a slight aquiline hook to it, smallish mouth and strong, though somewhat pointed chin came together in the way that made so many Mediterranean men unspeakably hot. The olive glow of his skin was contrasted by the whiteness of his wife-beater, which stretched tautly over his broad chest and clung to the pronounced curves of his midsection. The shadow of the small patch of dark, curly hair that was centered between his pecs showed clearly through the material.
He dug out his dick, which, though unengorged, was relatively long. Circumcised and with a generous head, it grew from a dense, dark pubic bush. I surveyed it, along with the athlete behind it. Evidently, I wasn't moving fast enough for him, as he took his dick by the root in one hand and pointed it at my mouth. Putting the other hand somewhat roughly behind my head, he pulled me forward. I opened my mouth, half to tell him to slow down, half to insist that he be more polite about it. He took this as an invitation to shove his dick fully in my mouth.
It lay on my tongue, heavy and thick, despite its flaccidness.
The taste was slightly of musk and salt and soap. What the hell, I found myself thinking again. They couldn't all be as nice or comfortable about it as Brad was. And while this one was gorgeous, he had all the sexual subtly of a horny mongoose. Eye candy, true, but not particularly appealing. Resigned, though, to completing a job well done, even if it was only a blow job, I tightened the ring of my lips around the base of his dick, sucked inward, and began sweeping my tongue back and forth under it. The lose skin caught and vibrated as my taste buds ran under it. There was an immediate reaction: an elongation, and a swelling. As my lips were already forward on his dick, it lengthened into me, sliding back to push against my soft palate.
Eric let go of the base of his dick, and brought his hand around to join the other behind my head, pushing the last inch into my mouth. My nose buried in his scratchy pubes, his balls rested on my chin. His dick continued to grow, pushing toward my uvula, while it stiffened on my tongue. Shortly, he began rotating his hips in and out, fucking my mouth with his dick.
He set up a quick pace. His biceps flexed, holding my head completely immobile while he jabbed at the back of my throat. His knees bent, and he raised up onto the balls of his feet without gaining any height in an effort to be able to get a better angle in his attack. I could taste the salty stickiness of his precum as he periodically withdrew his dick to the front of my mouth before shoving it back in again. He wasn't gentle, nor was he talented. This guy just wanted to get off, and to get off quickly.
And that's what he did. With little warning, he pushed my face off his dick, grabbed it, and began milking it while he came, dripping his jizz onto the rug in front of the couch. What was it with these boys and cuming on the floor? He finished himself off, wiped his hand with the napkin I had used for dinner, then stuffed his dick back into his pants. He turned to leave.
"Um...thanks," he mumbled, as the door closed behind him.
"No problem," I replied to the empty room. "It was a pleasure. Especially the witty repartee."
I got up and began to clean the floor, thinking, again, that Brad was right. In most cases, getting them off was just going to be a duty, and like most duties in most jobs, it would be neither interesting nor entertaining. With some of them, it might be a pleasant duty, as it was with Brad, but with most, I guessed, it would be more like Eric, who was clearly uncomfortable with his need to get off, and his use of a guy to do it.
It was funny, I thought as I got up to go get a bucket and rag from the utility closet down the hall. Most of my friends would actually consider killing me if it meant they could land the job I was now doing. Surrounded by close to a dozen flawless specimens of raw, young maleness, I was the only sexual outlet they would have for two months, as they concentrated on perfecting their already perfect physiques. Still, it was not my idea of a particularly good time. Sure, I appreciated looking at them day in and day out in all manners of dress and undress. I'm not dead! But the joys of sex were intimately connected with sharing, for me, and there was likely to be little, if any, of that this summer. Ah well. At least I'd get some good research in.
I opened the door to my apartment and started down the hall toward the utility closet, but was stopped by the sight of the open door to my left. It was Adam's room, and he was in it.
He was on his bed, seated leaning against the headboard with his legs, crossed at the ankles, stretched out in front of him. He wore gray sweatpants whose drawstrings, untied, hung loosely at his waist. He wore no shirt. He was reading a Sports Illustrated he held in his lap.
I didn't want to stop. Hell, I didn't even intend to look into the room. But it's human nature for the eye to be drawn in when passing an open door, and once there, it was trapped. Frozen, I simply stood there and surveyed the view.
He was a picture of relaxed intensity. I found myself thinking of large cats -- even when lazing, they exude sleekness, power, ferocity. It was not just his figure, though I had never seen one so stunning; simply laying back and relaxing, the serratus and latissimus dorsi muscles over his ribs, thicker than my fingers, stood out proudly and distinctly. Nor was it merely his face, which, in repose and not focused on his prey, held an appeal that went beyond beyond beauty to something primal and unconscious. There was something about him -- something I still could not name or understand -- that acted directly on one's animal brain. I had identified a series of behaviors in the four days I had been watching him that helped convey his power: his stance and hip rotation, the way he manipulated the tilt of his head, his ability to actively hold one's gaze without looking away. His pupils did not contract when he looked you in the eye -- a completely normal and instinctive defense mechanism that everyone, except Adam it seems, possessed. But these were only symptoms of his ability, not the cause. They were the mechanisms, and only a few ones at that, with which he exercised his domination.
He had looked up, and was staring at me. Only his eyes moved, and his lips, which, tightening imperceptibly, curled slightly in. I was as a deer caught in the headlights. Blinded, I was unable to move. Time ended, and the universe ceased to exist. There were just his eyes.
I have no idea how long I stood there, frozen in my innocent, unplanned glimpse into his room. I only know that he must have told me to come in, as, trapped as I was in a place without language, without thought, my body turned, and my legs propelled me forward.
When one faints, one's consciousness returns in stages. First, an awareness of orientation: I am vertical. Next to return are physical sensations, which spread laterally from one's center: my heart is beating, I am breathing, my arms are at my side. Hearing is regained late in the process, and while sight returns at the same time, the ability to recognize and categorize the images one's eyes are perceiving is the last to be recovered.
I had not fainted. And yet, this was the process in which I found myself. I was standing in the center of his room, facing him. Having broken eye contact with me, he had gone back to reading the magazine, which I suspected was the only reason I had regained the ability to be aware of my environment.
And the environment -- his den, his lair -- was, in itself, captivating. Most strikingly, the smell of him permeated the air, making it thick and syrupy. It was raw and sweet and raunchy and savory. It was musk and sweat and cum and honey. People who return to the ocean after long absences breathe deeply and with longing the smell of low tide, though it is the smell of detritus. Such it was that I found myself breathing in Adam. The room was also a sty -- clothes strewn everywhere in cluttered piles, no surface uncovered by the buildup of daily life. How could it have gotten so messy in five days, I wondered?
To my absolute surprise, I found myself at his desk, reshelving books. What had possessed me to start cleaning? True, I don't like clutter, but I'm not in the least inclined to clean up other people's messes. I had even ended a relationship once when I felt my partner wasn't doing his fair share of the chores. And yet, here I was, tending to Adam without him even having asked me to do so. Or hadn't he? At once, I was confused. Had he asked me to clean? I honestly couldn't remember. My ears had registered no words that my brain had recorded. But he must have, otherwise why would I have started doing it? Adam continued to read as I finished straightening out the papers on his desk, paying no more attention to me than he would have an ant walking across the floor. Clearly, he was not surprised by what I was doing, so he must have asked. Why, then, couldn't I remember?
I started to gather the clothes from his floor. The material did not feel familiar. This one was cotton, that one lycra, that one linen, yet they did not feel like cotton, lycra, or linen had ever felt. My fingers tingled as the material came in contact with them, and slid over my newly sensitized skin. The tingling raised goose bumps. And again, to my shock, I realized that that was not all it had raised. What could this new trick be? I was touching the clothes that touched Adam -- that hugged his chest, that drank the dampness of his armpits, that caressed his thighs, that jealously hid and clung to his manhood. I was only one step from his skin. But the sense of touch knew nothing of transitivity. How could it? This tank top, this pair of jeans, this jock -- there was no way they could be responsible for the erection growing painfully strong in my slacks.
The clothes dumped in the hamper in the closet, his desk tidied, all that was left was to make the bed on which he lay, but I was not supposed to do that. I don't know how I knew -- I just knew. I walked back to the center of the room and stared out the window, as if captivated by the blackness beyond it. If I was to have any chance at all, it was to not look at his eyes. My hand rested casually in the pocket of my pants in a hopeful attempt to hide the erection which, in the quarter hour of my ministrations to his room, had not subsided.
"Anything else you need, tonight," I asked? Else'. I had said, else'. He must have asked me to clean the room. He must have.
"Yeh," he said, casually flicking the magazine aside onto the floor I had just cleaned. "Rub my shoulders."
I can not walk to his bed! I must not! I was defenseless before him already, and had become completely compromised. If I was to be able to retain even a shred of objectivity, if I was to salvage anything of the summer, I had to find a way to stay strong.
Athletes have trained themselves to endure pain - to work beyond what is physically possible. Grad students have trained themselves to read the unreadable and write the unwritable. Athletes have trained themselves to ignore the messages and imperatives their bodies gave them. Grad students have trained themselves to kiss the asses of arrogant, self-absorbed thesis advisors. These were not the credentials I needed right then. My body was not responding to my superego. I needed a way out, and my only hope was to use the part of me I had been exercising since birth: my intellect.
Still staring out the window, I took the chair from his desk, and placed it, back to me, in the center of the room, and waited for him to come over and sit down. His mouth formed itself into an asymmetric, tight-lipped grin as he swung his legs over the bed, rose, sauntered the few steps to the chair, and sat before me. It was so small, this victory of mine, but it felt, at the time, so complete. I had made him move. I had made him come to me. I had avoided his bed, and with it, avoided losing the last of my restraint, of keeping at least some shred of dignity.
And yet I had seen the grin. I had seen, through the corner of my eye, the comprehension in his face, the complete understanding of the situation, of my move, and the decision of how to react to the challenge. I had seen the total confidence that he would win. How could this kid understand all of that? How could he know?
He sat before me, bare topped. I looked down on his dark hair, his chorded neck, the etched definition of his deltoids. I shut my eyes, determined to keep my head clear, determined to return to the realm of the analytical where I was so comfortable, determined not to feel, but to understand. I brought my hands to his shoulders.
They were warm. No, they were hot. No. They emanated heat. His metabolism must run very high, I thought, and of course, that made sense. His deltoids, even relaxed, were unexpectedly firm. Massaging them was like kneading a 15 pound block of plasticine. His skin made my fingers tingle again, in the same way his clothes had, but more intensely. With crushing clarity, I registered the next symptom, the next in his litany of mechanisms of control: there must also have been a chemical component to it. Something in his sweat, in his skin. And with that realization, despite myself, despite everything I knew and understood and had studied, despite my hopes and expectations for the summer and my future career, I knew I was lost. To be safe, I could not look at him, could not smell him, could not touch him. In short, the only way to be safe from him was to be away from him.
I still fought. I fought as I felt my hands change from kneading him to needing him. I fought as they began to caress, to explore. I fought as they swept over his shoulders, down the front of him. I fought as my fingertips found the hairs that ringed his aureoles. I fought as they sought out his nipples, feeling their texture, their electric charge. I fought as my nose, now near the back of his neck, breathed in the crudeness of him. I fought, knowing the fight was in vain.
He took my left elbow in his right hand, and brought me around to the front of him. All he needed was the slightest downward pressure -- a mere suggestion of of a gesture -- to bring me to my knees before him. His smell roiled in my blood, his skin burned my hands, and his eyes -- his eyes. He looked down at me, and I became, again, lost. Here was his punishment for the affront of making him move. Here was his revenge for my attempt, feeble as it was, at independence.
He let go of my elbow, and spread his knees lazily before me. He hooked his thumb in the waistband of his sweats, and pulled them down, hefting out his cock and balls. But I did not see them, trapped as I was, in his eyes -- his eyes.
"You want these."
It was a statement, not a question. Still, it required a response. My mouth had gone Saharan dry, and, knowing I should not, could not, must not, I felt my head half nod.
The grin. The victory. The self-satisfaction. But it was not enough for him.
"Tell me," he commanded, sotto voice. I tried as fully as I tried not to. No sound came. It was not because I thought better of it -- I could not think. It was because I had not had the presence of mind to breathe.
He took my hand, and brought it up under his crotch. His dick, full and long though still soft, singed my palm. He curled my fingers around it. I knelt there, my own dick agonizingly hard and aching, and stared into the eyes that were staring into my soul. My hand felt the weight, the substance, the sovereignty of his cock. Soft, it was almost as large as mine was fully erect.
"Tell me," he said again, bringing his hand up under my chin. His semi-extended finger made contact with the skin there, and, applying the slightest pressure, he raised my head a fraction, increasing the directness and effectiveness of his gaze. His touch! So gentle but at the same time compelling -- it was a reward. It was a caress. He had touched me, and the touch was electrifying. My ego crumbled.
There were words uttered in an arid, breathless, hardly audible voice. I recognized the voice as mine, but not the words I was hearing. "I want it," they said.
"You want what?"
"I want you. I want to suck you. I need it," and seeing that he was still not satisfied with the answer, I heard the voice plead hoarsely, "please..."
I had no will. I had no power. In the presence of this man -- this animal -- I had no self. Captive in the prison that were his eyes, he held me immobile, incapable of any thought that was not a consuming, devastating hunger to submit to him, to serve him, to be possessed by him.
And he saw. He saw my will disintegrate. He saw my ego collapse. He saw my need, which is to say, he saw his complete and unqualified victory over me. He had expected it, he had engineered it, and because he wanted it -- solely because it was his desire -- it had come to pass.
"...please..."
His upper lip curled up in a mirthless grin. There was a sparkle in his eye, but it was not of delight -- it was unspeakable. It was cruel.
"No," he said coldly, and pushed me away.