The Demon Lover

(Since I'm out of town visiting my future home state, I'm posting an older entry from my journal so that you guys won't miss me. This entry is from 2005.)

Out of nowhere I remembered him last night, surname first, a tickle in the back of my mind while I was having an unrelated conversation with someone. Didn’t you used to know someone with a German last name? my brain wanted to know. A few seconds later, it returned its own answer. Yes, you did. His name was Dennis.

God, I hadn’t thought about Dennis in years and years. Why was he popping into my head?

I’d met him in 1989, when he walked by a bench on campus where I’d been sitting with a book. At the time he was one of the most striking-looking men I’d ever seen; his most prominent feature was his enormous mane of hair, long and blond with darker streaks near his temples. It hung down his shoulders and nearly to his waist, framing a bony, masculine face with two of the smallest eyes I’ve ever seen. They were like slits, those eyes, dark and glistening like a snake’s. Despite the length of his hair, there wasn’t anything feminine about him. With his narrow waist and deep chest, his round and firm shoulders and the way he stomped down the sidewalk by the classroom building where I taught my literature classes, he struck me more as what a demon might look like had he taken form out from thin air. I half-expected to see horns growing from his head.

I couldn’t help myself. I had to stare at him. His eyes met mine as he past, the sun glinting from their obsidian-like hardness, almost frightening me enough to look away . . . but not quite. Though he kept walking, neither of us broke eye contact until he was a dozen feet away. Only then did I remember to breathe. Yet when he turned around near the door of the classroom building to look at me once more, I felt as if I was choking. He jerked his head, indicating for me to follow. Not knowing why—or maybe knowing all too well—I gathered my books and stood to my feet, shaky as a new-born colt.

I followed him down the hallway and up the stairs, thrilling every time he’d glance back to see if I still trailed behind. At the end of an empty hall he veered and disappeared into a little-used men’s room. Barely had I entered when he grabbed my arm and pulled me into the center stall. My books tumbled onto the floor. I didn’t stop to see where they lay.

His mouth was on mine almost immediately. Even today I can remember that the rough stubble on his face scratched against my skin almost painfully, and that he smelled sharp and almost wild, like a bed of pine needles after a rainfall. His hands flew down the front of his shirt, snapping buttons through their holes until his shirt flew off and over the back of the john, then releasing the buttons of his jeans until they fell around his ankles. He was unclothed even before I’d had a chance to take in what was happening—and he was so, so beautiful. He looked as if he’d been created to be seen naked. I could have circled my hands around his narrow waist and the fingers might have touched. Everything was perfect. His butt, perfect. The light muscles of his shoulders and the dark blond fur on his chest, perfect. “So hot,” he whispered in my ear before he devoured it. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about me or himself. “So hot!”

He managed to free me of my clothes and we stood there naked in the men’s room stall. I wasn’t even aware of my surroundings. We groped and pawed and licked and sucked each other for several minutes. His hair was everywhere, blanketing us from time and the world and good common sense. I remember that at one point he lifted himself up using the partitions as parallel bars and in a particularly athletic move, face-fucked me with a cock that made mine seem like a wee, tiny thing, while wrapping both his legs around my back. Mostly, though, he would slam me against the steel walls of our cubicle and whisper things to me. How beautiful he found me. What he wanted me to do. How deep he wanted me inside him. “I wish we were in a bed together,” he groaned. “A real bed. Right now.”

I managed to gasp out that I lived only a three-minute walk away.

I don’t remember how our clothes managed to find their way back on, or how I collected my books, but scarcely a minute later we were sprint across campus. He told me his name, Dennis. “You probably saw me as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet this year,” he said, swaggering. “My reviews were superb.” Oh, I thought to myself, with a touch of understanding for his overblown flattery. An actor.

In the apartment he acted as if he’d been there before. Somewhere in the dimly-remembered trip between the front door and the bed, I thought maybe he had, sometime in my dreams. How else could I account for the way he knew exactly what buttons to push, where to touch to make me groan, exactly what to say to leave me speechless? “I want you inside me,” he insisted, spitting on his fingers and letting his hands guiding my cock to his hole. “You have to fuck me. I want you to fuck me.”

“I don’t have any con—” He didn’t care. He yanked at my hips and pulled me inside him, thrashing as I entered with one surprised stroke. Neither of us lasted very long, after that. I don’t remember my own orgasm. I do remember his: several sprays of fluid shot in a long arc over his body and head, landing with a splatter against the wall over my headboard.

I didn’t even know that was possible, before then.

“We have to see each other again. We can’t just let this slip away,” Dennis murmured to me over and over again as I lay there, dazed. When I came to, I wrote down my phone number and name on a slip of paper for him. He kissed me long and hard against my apartment door, promising over and over that we’d become good friends and lovers.

And of course, it never turned out that way. I didn’t hear from him at all, no matter how much I willed the phone to ring. My thoughts of Dennis faded—a good memory of a nearly-perfect afternoon with a stranger who’d vanished as suddenly as he’d come into my life. Sixteen years later, I could barely remember his name.

I googled him, of course. I found his resume and headshot listed in a west coast theater company. His face after a decade and a half was unfamiliar, though I recognized his eyes, small and gleaming. He had no hair at all. Male pattern baldness had taken that from him, and not even his close-cropped buzz could conceal it. He was handsome. Settled. Successful, even. Yet he wasn’t the Dennis I remembered.

I closed off the browser with a little bit of sadness. I preferred the hungry, almost other-worldly Dennis that sometimes I'd imagined I’d conjured for myself. I preferred the demon lover with the wild and unruly hair with whom, as we’d come close, I had mutually whipped up a small whirlwind of passion and lust.