- How We Touch*
A Common Touch
In the half fog of waking, Chrissie was hearing Julian softly singing. His palm hovered lightly over her nipples, hardly touching. He was gazing at her with a half-formed smile. It broke into fullness when he saw her eyes open all the way and reveal in them morning's brightness.
"Julian," Chrissie said as he kissed her. She shivered as a current of electricity trembled through her body and made her stretch.
"Good morning," Julian said, "my beloved sleepy head. I felt you kiss me in my sleep last night when you came to bed. I stirred but could not wake. It was as if in a dream that you were embracing me. I felt you come inside me and caress me afterwards. I love the way your body is warm in bed beside me when we sleep."
Chrissie wrapped her bare arms around Julian's neck and pulled him down to her and pressed his lips to hers. Their mouths opened and their tongues met in a long and silent lovers' discourse.
As they kissed she teased his nipple, rubbing it between her thumb and forefinger. She slid her lips away from his and blew warm breath up the side of his neck to made a path to his ear. She touched her tongue inside his ear and probed it. He shivered with delight.
"Do you love me, Julia?"
"Yes."
"Say it. Tell me that you love me."
"I love you,"
"Tell me that you are my obedient slave."
"I am your obedient slave."
"Tell me you are my girl."
"I am your girl."
"Finger me, Julia. Make love to me like a woman."
Julian felt himself to be a beautiful girl with lovely breasts, hips, long legs, and an oozing cunt. He pressed his snatch against Chrissie's and began to writhe with her. They kissed and orgasmic flashes burst within them until they lay saturated from exhaustion in each other's arms.
Snow had fallen all night long, and Chrissie had been delayed at the theater where adjustments were being made to the sets he had designed, and he had to stay around for consultations with the carpenters. The streets outside had not yet been plowed, and the taxi hesitated as it made its way, creeping south down Ninth Avenue; heavy pellets of snow were hurled against its windows by the storm.
Now, in the morning, Tenth Street was blanketed in undisturbed snow. In the fireplace in the music room, James had built a luscious fire. He was at the piano figuring out a fugue for the Paolo and Francesca episode of the Dante Cantata he was composing. It was a commission from the Interlex Foundation, and Gustavo Dudamel had seen some of it already and had scheduled it for next season in Los Angeles. In his head James was listening to Julian's voice sing the passages he was writing for Francesca.
"Chris, Julian," James greeted them when they staggered into the music room, looking up from going over the score. "Good morning." They were balancing cups of coffee and croissants.
"Good morning," James. "You are up early."
He smiled. "I've got a deadline," he said, and with eager anticipation, looked at Julian and said, "Julian, I think this works." He held out a sheet of the score for him to take.
Julian put the things he was carrying down on a marble-top side table and took the score that James was holding out to him. He was wearing a long forest green robe of raw silk with gold piping on the cuffs and lapels. It accidentally fell open when he took the music from James. Underneath he had on silk fuchsia bikini panties. Julian fastened the belt to his robe. "Excuse me," he said.
"No need for excuses," James said, smiling. "What do you think?" James said, pointing to the sheet music. "I think you can do it."
Julian looked at the music. "You want me to sing it now?"
"If you feel awake enough."
Julian nodded, and James began to play a wistful phrase whose melancholy flirted with rapture, turned to agitation, and found its resolution in heartbreakingly bitter resignation. Julian listened as if lost inside the melody, and when it was his to do, he sang Francesca's lament as James raveled the piano accompaniment around his words:
Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona,
- mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona.*
James modulated back to the original material once the vocal section ended, but as he developed it, within its painful melancholy he wove a phrase more hopeful, a hint of the celestial theme that Francesca does not sing, cannot sing, the song of a mystery that she cannot know or experience, that she can only long for without having any sense of what it would sound like, but that Beatrice will sing, and with it flood the heavens with radiance, in the final section of the cantata.
- December 24th: all day the four prepared for the evening. It was a tradition that Todd and James began the year that they bought the house and started living together. They brought, each year, everyone they knew together on Christmas Eve, friends and acquaintances, co-workers and colleagues. It became an event no one would miss. In the morning they brought home and installed in the living room a grand evergreen. They strung it with lights, and ropes of gold and silver. It *rose above a village with cotton snow and pebbles covering a plywood ground and a mirror lake upon which frolicked skating figurines. A winding expanse of railroad track dotted with towers, tunnels, and platforms snaked through the busy terrain of pine trees, oaks, and maples, utility poles, general stores, houses, farms, and workshops. Upon this track a locomotive pulled passenger cars, boxcars, and a red caboose. A lone horse stood in a field near a stable.
After noon and a makeshift lunch, a succession of deliveries began. >From the bakery came still-warm loaves of grainy breads, brioches, English fruitcakes, and over-rich chocolate fudge cakes, and a large shiny Opera. >From the Russian specialty store several salmon and sturgeon coulibiacs. >From the butcher, a lamb gigot, a roast beef, and a juicy, glazed ham. From the greengrocer, baskets of fruit and nuts. From the liquor store, cartons of vodka, scotch, quinine, soda water, and champagne.
"I've never seen so much food," Chrissie said.
"Well, look at it now, because by the end of the night there'll be nothing to see," James said.
Late afternoon, everything was set and it was possible to take a nap, but no one wanted to. Instead they stripped and all four went into the master shower outside the sauna in the basement.
Julian and Chrissie were like schoolgirls with crushes when they gazed upon Todd's and James' lithely muscular bodies and handsome faces, and Todd and James, laughing happily, delighted in the twinks, the beautiful and feminine boys, with their soft cocks, so sweet of spirit and beautiful of flesh, who adored them.
James took Julian gently in his arms, pressed his soft body to his hard body and soaped him all over, as Todd did with Chrissie, paying special attention to anal slits and genitals and their boy nipples. Julian touched James' masculine cock with awe, Chrissie held Todd's in his palm with reverence.
"Go ahead," the young men said, sensing their desire.
The boys knelt under the warm spray and kissed the masculinity that made them tremble. They took into their mouths with eager desire those cocks and worshipped them until they gushed and spurted, and they swallowed that essence, and gathered strength from it. Nor had the young men stopped playing with the boys' clitty-cocks, and fingering them inside. Chrissie and Julian vibrated like violin strings and came in unison.
Afterwards, they dried each other, and wrapped themselves in soft and snow-white terry robes; each couple went to their dressing rooms to prepare themselves for the fete. There they donned their gay apparel. Let us follow them to their closets.
-
Julian wore a floor-length, long-sleeve, scoop-neck, low-back, red velvet gown, belted at the waist, fitted on the hips, beginning just above the knees to fan out; with a long slit along the leg to mid thigh. He wore black translucent paisley stockings – a green lace garter circling his thigh -- and jade green ankle straps; around his neck, a silver choker in which jade green stones were set.*
- Chrissie wore the same thing, but his gown was green, his stockings red, his heels, yellow, his garter, black, his choker bronze inlaid with rubies.*
- Their make up was light: lipstick, eyeliner, silver eye shadow. Their perfume was delicate, Chamade.*
- On the floor below, James sorted his way through his closet until he found the cardinal red tuxedo with round satin lapels and satin stripes up the sides of the trousers. Like Todd, who was rummaging through the hangers, too, he only had on a pair of black bikinis.*
- "Have I told you lately that I love you?" Todd crooned, taking James in an embrace and kissing him.*
- James turned without taking the tuxedo down. "Tell me again," James said.*
- "I love you."*
- James held him close and looked into his eyes. "You are my life. You are the vital part of me."*
- Once they had begun to kiss, they could not tear themselves apart. They tumbled onto the divan and Todd pulled James' bikini down and shucked off his own. He took James hardening cock in his palm and whispered, "Fuck me."*
- James took hold of his shoulders and lowered him to the couch. Todd opened his legs and raised them in a V; James lifted them to his shoulders and, bending down, tongued him, and when Todd was drenched with desire, James entered him and slowly took him, gathering more and more of him until Todd completely belonged to him.*
- Afterwards, they shaved, and showered together, and put on cologne.*
- That night they wore tuxedos; James, cardinal red, with a blue-grey cashmere turtleneck; Todd, forest green, with a bronze-colored raw silk shirt and a red bow tie. Their soft leather boots were black, and hugged their calves. *