Behind the Story: On the Block

The anthology, Hoboes, Hustlers, and Outlaws: Bad Boys and Macho Men is shipping! My newest novella, On the Block, appears within its pages. It’s a story set in 1979 about a twenty-one-year-old named Nicky, a street hustler from the armpit of Virginia, who’s trying to make a better life for himself, one trick at a time.

Today, I’d like to share a little about the story’s background.

My early sexuality blossomed in the nineteen-seventies in the little Southern city of Richmond, Virginia. It was a decade in which gay sex was still a criminal act. Being detected or caught destroyed families, careers, and lives. Even casting a stray, longing glance in the direction of an undercover cop could land a man in jail and his name in the newspapers.

The effects of Stonewall had not yet reached the South. My progressive parents had a number of friends who definitely were not straight, though no one would discuss or admit it. The confirmed bachelors who lived together in houses full of fussy antiques? Gay. The fashionable aging single men who ‘hadn’t yet settled down’ but would arrive to my folks’ dinner parties bearing a straw-wrapped bottle of red in one hand and in the other, several Blossom Dearie LPs? Incredibly gay. The burly female historian who shared an apartment and a pair of bulldogs with her ‘girl friend,’ who later sold me her gently-used Malibu as my first car? So gay. None of them identified as queer. They would have gone to their graves denying it.

Many did.

It was a decade in which men looking for sex with other men found themselves pushed to the margins; they were forced to seek each other in bars run by an unlawful element, or in parks closed after dark, or along dangerous city streets at night, where nice, normal people dared not venture. In these forbidden spaces, we all were outlaws. We consorted with other outlaws—criminals that the public viewed as menaces to society. If in these spaces we were arrested, or victimized, or beaten, or killed—well, criminals deserved what they got. Right?

Cruising these spaces was always dangerous. We always had to keep an eye and ear out for the approach of an outsider, or the gleam of a cop car in the distance. In the dark, more seasoned outlaws developed an almost supernatural ability to sense the the onset of trouble long before it arrived, so that we could warn our brothers and scamper to safety. It wasn’t an environment for the weak, the stupid, or the slow. Though we looked out for each other when and while we could, once those lights flashed and the sirens started to blare, it was every man for himself.

Most of those old cruising spots of mine still exist, forty-five years later. Open up Sniffies and you’ll see that Bryan Park is still one of Richmond’s most popular hookup spots, though its roads have been reconfigured and entryways changed since the days I would visit by dark. The walks by the James River where I accepted cash for quick trysts along the riverbanks—still active. Cruisers still haunt the shadier, more forested areas of both Maymont and Byrd Parks, where I used to wander provocatively after nightfall.

Despite an abundance of gay bars that certainly weren’t around during my teens and early twenties, despite the apps and the relative openness with which queer people circulate in my old hometown, men still hit up the traditional spots in the hope of finding random dick.

All the spots but one, that is: what used to be known as The Block. It’s the only of my old cruising locations that has its own Wikipedia page. It’s also the setting for my latest anthology story, On the Block, which you can order now at the link below.

The Block survived for forty years before me as a sometimes-migrating small section of Richmond’s downtown area known for male sex workers. In the late seventies, The Block had expanded. It started at the corner of the city’s then brand spanking new public library, two blocks west down Franklin Street to the YMCA, a block south to Main Street, then two blocks east back to the library. By day, the neighborhood was just a number of run-down, anonymous townhouses in an area of the city no one really visited.

After dark, though, the street transformed into the tiniest of gay villages. A handful of queer men rented rooms in the townhouses. Home from work, they’d open their windows and loudly blast disco hits on their turntables. Some hung cheerful holiday lights around their windows, or draped table lamps with scarves and fabric to bring color both to their habitats and to the street below. Men would perch their asses on the townhouse steps, both cruising and socializing in equal measure.

Then there were the hustlers. Summer nights, they’d prowl the streets in scores. Dozens of the most hardcore—or perhaps the hardest-pressed—would still turn out during the city’s mild winters. Down Franklin they would walk, then over to Main and back to the library, treading a rectangular circuit that all the while faced the streams of one-way traffic on those two streets. Every driver was a potential customer.

Who were these men behind the wheel? Mostly white guys from the wealthy West End of town or from out in the county. Some drove in from as far away as Ashland or Fredericksburg. Most sported wedding rings; many were professionals—lawyers, businessmen, physicians—with a little extra money to burn. Some would visit only every few months, when the itch for same-sex contact grew too unbearable. Others were such frequent and enthusiastic patrons that the hustlers would wave at their vehicles and shout their names, as if Norm walked into Cheers.

One of the more curious customs of The Block during my day is how the sex workers segregated themselves by skin color. White hustlers tended to walk the outer perimeter of the rectangle; Black men the inside. One could tell by which lane of the street a car drove what flavor a john, or customer, might prefer. The self-segregation didn’t extend to socializing. During the slower hours, men of both colors crossed over to laugh and joke, or to swap gossip and news about who’d moved on to a bigger city or who’d given up the business altogether, or who was out of commission for a couple of weeks after a visit to the free clinic. Once a pair of headlights pierced the dark, though, back they’d all scatter to their respective sides of the street.

I don’t recall the day I discovered The Block, but by around 1978, when I was fourteen, I was one of the white boys walking its circuits by cover of night. I’d tell my family after dinner I was heading to the downtown library with friends. If they assumed by the stack of books in my backpack that I’d be studying, well, that was my intent. I’d ditch the books in our back yard to be retrieved on my return, take the bus downtown from my leafy neighborhood, and walk The Block for a few hours until I arrived home by ten or ten-thirty with a pocketful of crumpled bills.

Hey, the library was always within sight, when I was stomping the pavement. And I did make new friends.

Afraid of attracting the wrong kind of attention at home, though, I never hit The Block more than once a week, and never stayed late. The action really picked up in the hours after midnight. Yet I was regular enough that I could expect to be greeted by guys from both sides of the street whenever I showed.

There was an essential difference between the other regulars and myself, though—and I’m not talking mere age. My teenaged sex work was an act of secret rebellion. I was the perfect little straight-A best little boy in the world who only took a stand for what he truly was in the city’s forbidden places, among my fellow outlaws. My family wasn’t wealthy and always seemed to be teetering on the brink of financial insecurity, god knows, but unlike every other man there, I didn’t have to support myself. For me, sex work wasn’t about making ends meet.

A lot of the men I knew during those years made their only money walking The Block. A few held down part-time or low-paying jobs during the day that The Block supplemented—there was one occasion when an older men from The Block’s inner circuit showed up as my substitute civics teacher, to our mutual surprise. Some sensed they were ill-suited to retail or office positions; hustling at night let them work when and how they pleased. Several talked big about earning just enough seed money to move on to a bigger city like D.C. or Philadelphia or NYC.

I don’t like generalizing about the sex workers I knew during that period of my life. Regardless of why these men sought or resorted to sex work, I was a mere dilettante. At the end of the night, I had a family who loved me and a warm home I could return to. I didn’t owe any bills. My earnings didn’t pay for groceries.

While my last anthologized story, Sleazy A, was a semi-autobiographical mashup of men I knew during my college years, On the Block is purely fictional, save for its setting. I didn’t base the big blond lunk Nicky (in the story, the poor guy aches to be known as ‘Snake Eyes’) on anyone in particular. I did know a muscly hustler on the edge of forty who always seemed to walk The Block in a tee with the sleeves ripped off, the better to display his bulging biceps; his hair was an amateurish bleached blond and he would bum cigarettes off the other working boys and mumble about how he was destined for better things. Perhaps if Nicky remained on The Block for another twenty years after this story, that’s who he might’ve turned into. I like to think he truly made something of himself in the end, though.

On the Block examines what happens when a stranger inserts himself into The Block’s established ecosystem to push it off-balance. At no point in my youth did I ever run up against a magazine reporter trying to liven up his resume with a seedy expose of sex workers. Every time I exchanged sex for currency, however, I would have to confront the prejudices men held against working boys. Clients would assume I was trash, or dumb as a rock, or that I sucked dick for money because I’d run away, or dropped out of school, or because someone had coerced me into the life. Some johns had dreams of saving me; they’d condescendingly assure me I wasn’t like the other scum on the street and dream of a future in which they would leave their wives and families for a happily ever after with a teen boy.

Thankfully, I was a smart enough to kid to recognize the bullshit for what it was. I learned very quickly that these transactions were rarely as simple as they should have been. Outsiders—whether they’re clients, observers, or enforcers of law—tend to project all kinds of fictional narratives onto the men they hire. To the client, sex workers were rarely people in their own right. They were dimwits who required education, or victims who needed to be saved. They were lost souls to convert, or perverts and deviants to arrest. 

My experience with the men of The Block was pretty much the same as anywhere else I’ve been employed, though. There were certain individuals I was always glad to see and with whom I was friendly, and others I wish stayed in their offices or some other section of the street. Some talked off my ear; others kept to themselves. Some had grand ambitions of advancement or even fame. Most, however, just wanted to get through their work, collect their paycheck, and head home at the end of their shift.

On the Block was a blast to write. The story gave me an opportunity to revisit an old stomping ground through new eyes and to capture its quirks and little beauties as I remember it in the late seventies. As I said earlier, The Block is just about the only old cruising spot of mine that no longer exists; I didn’t know it as a teen, but it had already been in decline before my arrival. The gay bars that had once operated there were only a legend when I first came on the scene. During the eighties and the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, johns stopped driving downtown and the rent boys began to vanish. The area was dead when I returned to Richmond in 1985. Today, the townhouses have been converted into genteel law firms and financial advisories and homes, the streets thoroughly gentrified. The buildings are still there, but The Block as I knew it is gone.

That’s what happens far too often with gay history and culture, however. As we are erased, our traditions and lore can too easily vanish. If sex work was my teen rebellion—my way of being seen for what I was—then perhaps this act of pornography is an old man’s insistence that some memories should not be lost.

There is a sweet side to even the seamiest of stories. And men will do a hell of a lot for a little sweetness, as Nicky discovers in On the Block.

***

Order your copy of Hoboes, Hustlers, and Outlaws from Amazon 

The Realest Real

February 2023

“Yes. Please. Like that.”

The kid skims along the twin mattress with serpentine motion, back arched, lean hips raised. Scant fuzz below his navel grazes the rumpled sheets. In this artificial twilight born of blackout shades and drapes drawn tight, his pale skin gives off its own faint luminescence, like foxfire on a summer’s evening. My outstretched fingers, long and thin, wrench apart the globes of his ass as I thrust inside. His hole is tight. So damned tight. It grips my shaft as I slide, back and forth.

“Make it swell, daddy.” I clamp down on my pelvic floor. The alteration in girth makes him groan. His head lolls back; a shaggy fringe of dark, straight hair tickles the top of his shoulders. Inside him I thrust deep. Another squeeze, to force more blood into the shaft. His chest collapses onto the bed, alarming the already creaking bedsprings. “Oh god.” The light tenor of his voice is muffled by pillows and bedclothes. “I’m gonna shoot, dad. Can I shoot? Please let me shoot, daddy.”

I reach down and swat away his greedy hand from his cock. This is dad’s job. Dad’s privilege, even. I spit in my hand and wrap it around the boy’s meat from behind. His shaved balls mount and surround my wrist as I spread the slick fluid up and down the shaft. His howls of pleasure redouble in the confines of the tiny room.

“I love you, dad.” As he convulses, his eyes open to look into mine. “I love you so much.” I nod at him, unblinking, connected by our locked stare. His face softens, overcome with emotion. “Oh god. I love you. I love you.” It doesn’t take long before he’s contorting at my grip. A few twists of the wrist, a few vigorous strokes, and he’s spraying his load. Anchored by my dick deep in his butt and my hand at the base of his spine, he buckles and thrashes as shot after shot of warm, sticky stuff cascades into my scooped fingers. The kid is loud. It’s a good thing no one else is home, or they’d be battering down the bedroom door.

At long last, he subsides. It seems a shame to wipe his semen onto the sheets, and more of a pity to let it go to waste. So I pull out and slap the goo onto my engorged cock. The sound echos with a wet smack. Then I shove it back in. He knows what I’m doing; his hips shove back to meet me as I drill his hole. I fuck like I’m holding a grudge, like I want to punish instead of praise. I fuck like I don’t care what bruises I raise upon either of us. It’s not long before I, too, fill his little room with a roar.

Afterward, we’re both drowsing in the dark, me on my back, him cuddled up and nuzzling my armpit, when he looks at his watch. “I’ve got class in a half hour.”

“I know,” I mumble. Three days we’ve met, now, during our lunchtimes. I’m well aware of his midday schedule.

“Mind if I shower?” He bounds up from the bed with sudden feline vitality, making me feel every single minute of the—god—four decades exactly that lie between us. All I have the energy to do is wave my hands and shoo him toward the little bathroom at one end of his untidy quarters. There’s a full-length mirror on the inside of the bathroom door; the kid doesn’t seem to know that from my angle on the bed, I can see everything he does inside. I watch as he cups, then slaps his round little butt so that the flesh jiggles. I see the mighty grin on his face when he probes his hole and discovers how wet are his fingertips, when he brings them away. I admire his slender body as he opens the shower stall and turns on the water.

While he waits for the hot water to arrive, he inspects his upper lip in the mirror over the sink, a scenario reflected once again for me upon the door, as he grooms the micro-mustache that grows there. Baby’s first facial hair. It’s really no more than the most featherweight trimming of dark peach fuzz, perilously clinging to the ridge above his lip, barely visible beyond arm’s length. I find endearing the care he takes in smoothing it down, though, after the wrangling our mouths have enjoyed. Pleased with what he sees, he backs away from the mirror and bounces on the balls of his feet, arms outstretched, bobbing and swaying as—left-right, left-right, left-right-left—he punches at the air. For a silent minute he boxes with an invisible opponent, eyes on himself in the sink mirror, his little cock springing up and down. Finally he grins in the glass, chucks himself softly on the chin, and disappears behind the shower door.

This is how I hope to remember the kid: lively and unselfconscious, happy with what he sees in himself.

In the bathroom, the sounds of water cease; there’s a near-silence once the kid turns off the overhead fan. That’s my cue to haul myself up to a sitting position and fumble for my clothing. I’m pulling on a sock when he he tackles me, his skin still damp, the sopping towel falling from his narrow waist onto the jumble of athletic footwear at the bed’s foot. “Don’t go,” he teases, butting his wet hair against my shoulder.

He’s so cute, this boy. I plant a kiss on the top of his head, and am rewarded by his shy smile. He crosses his skinny legs and leans into me. “Don’t go.”

“I have to go. You have to go.” I wrap my arms around him. “You’ve got class in…” I check my watch. “Twenty minutes.”

“I can be late.”

“You’re going,” I insist, returning to the sock that hangs halfway up my foot. “I’ve got to get back to my dad.”

I’ve met the kid three lunches in a row, now, ever since he hit me up on Grindr the day after my dad entered rehab. I consider it something of a miracle my dad’s in the rehab facility at all, when I consider the tantrums he threw at St. Mary’s. For two solid days, my father ranted and raved and cursed at the world, insisting to his doctors that he would never go to rehab and that instead, I would run through physical therapy exercises with him. I would shook my head and informed the same professionals that no, I would not. In the hospital, he made himself so unpleasant that I took to withdrawing from the room whenever I could, and lingering as long as possible in the cafeteria for my meals.

Logical appeals didn’t seem to sway him. The prospect of 24/7 medical supervision, or physical therapy close at hand, the proximity of the rehab facility to St. Mary’s in case of an emergency or another stroke—none of that matters. What seems to change his mind, over the long weekend, is when the hospitalist begins comparing a visit to a rehab hospital like a mini-vacation or a spa stay. He’d have his own room, larger than what he occupied on St. Mary’s neurology floor. He wouldn’t be hooked up to any machines. When he wasn’t in therapy, he could relax in his room and watch TV or listen to music or read or use his tablet. (“You mean I’d have to sit in a lounge around a single TV with a bunch of crazy old sick people,” my dad complained, ignoring the fact he was one of those crabby old sick people. “No,” said the hospitalist, baffled. “Why would you think that?”)

What turned the tide completely was when the doctor added, “The food there is much better than here.”

For some reason, my dad enjoys the hospital food. No, he fucking loves it. He thinks it’s top-notch, lip-smackin’, gourmet shit. Never mind that when I, a pretty great home cook, had whipped up many a delectable dinner for him back in 2020 during his radiation therapy, he’d turned up his nose at my hearty stews and delicious dinners. Pour some Campbell’s chicken noodle in a cup, give him a slice of institutional meatloaf with a watery gravy, throw some succotash on the plate, top it off with a sealed plastic tub of vanilla pudding and serve it on a tray with plastic utensil, though, and the man is in hog heaven. The St. Mary’s meals make my stomach turn, but when my dad hears that the rehab hospital’s meals—three a day plus snacks, delivered to his bed hot from the kitchen—are even better, well. He meekly, perhaps even avidly, accedes to a transfer the next day.

And I have to admit, the rehab is experience is incredibly more relaxing. The facility itself is a one-level sprawl shaded by old oaks that’s older, but cheerful and easy to navigate. My dad’s private room is bigger than my living room and kitchen combined, back home. The staff is uniformly upbeat, friendly, and professional. I commit to memory every single one of their names, so I can use it when thanking them. We spend the first afternoon engaging in an activity that my father will talk about with fond relish for weeks after: filling out a week’s worth of menu requests. For an hour and a half I read out the menu choices for each upcoming meal while my dad considers big-picture questions like, what juice would he prefer with his breakfast on Thursday, tomato, orange, grapefruit, or apple? What should accompany his chicken cutlet, that night, macaroni and cheese? Or mashed potatoes? He smacks his lips over each culinary decision while the nurses bring him applesauce.

He is living like a king.

It’s the second day of his tenure that I snort a little, sitting at his bedside. “What’s your on phone?” my dad asks.

“Your hot nurse is on Grindr,” I tell him. Said hot nurse is a mere 35 feet away.

“What’s Grindr?”

We’ve discussed Grindr before, but my dad’s brain has little retention for anything that isn’t interesting to him. “It’s an app gay men use for sexual partners. You fire it up and see who’s nearby.”

He peers at me. “Which hot nurse? Laura? Or the one who takes me to the bathroom?”

“Molly,” I remind him. “Why would Laura and Molly, both women, be on an app for gay men? No, it’s Lance, the blue-eyed one who runs the gym.”

“He’s hot?” My dad seems baffled at the idea.

“With those shoulders and pecs?” I whistle. “Good lord, yes.”

“You and I have very different definitions of hot,” he grumbles.

I flip through the photos. “His profile says he’s into cruising, edging, and group.”

“Hedging!” My dad snorts with derision. “Absolutely not. Find someone who’s more decisive.”

I peer over the top of my phone, trying to decide whether or not he’s shitting me. A message pops up. It is not, sadly, from the nurse with the pecs and shoulders. Looking, sir?

I don’t interact with blank profiles. It’s an exercise in diminishing returns. Mr. Looking, however, immediately provides a photo, taken in the full-length mirror on his bathroom door. He’s a young guy of 19 or 20, slender, his chicken legs speckled with sparse, wiry fur, his chest smooth, his face nearly covered by a mop of shoulder-length, dark, lank hair. Even though he’s nude in the shot, even though he’s turned sideways in the shot to show off the surprising roundness of his butt and the silhouette of his hanging dick, there’s something in the serious intent of his expression that makes him seem, well, shy. It’s a quality I find irresistible. He’s only five hundred feet away.

I’m looking for either lunchtimes or after 6, if you can host, I tell the kid.

Lunchtimes are great! he replies. My folks are home after 5:30 nights but you can come over today at lunch if you want.

I look over at my dad, who is holding his tablet up to his nose so that he can watch a noisy YouTube video of trains slowly traversing a crossing, somewhere in Nebraska. I definitely want. Send me an address.

A block and a half from the rehab hospital, the kid and I sit side by side on his twin bed, the room dark and quiet. His personal space is a contrast to the bright tidiness of the rooms I had to pass through to get here. His family living room looks blandly stylish, like an Ashley Furniture showcase. The kid’s bedroom, though, is plainly the space of someone who’s never had to look after himself. It’s not squalid. It doesn’t stink. Shoes lie in an unsorted pile at the foot of his bed, though, kicked off and tossed to lie where they tumble. The closet lies open; it’s difficult to tell where the hamper of dirty clothing ends and the piles of possibly clean garments begin. The walls are painted a deep blue and covered with posters, half with anime with which I’m unfamiliar, half with promotional posters for old Final Fantasy games. It’s definitely the quarters of an adolescent, or post-adolescent, boy.

He’s nervous, now that I’m here. Trembling, even. I’m aware I should be making the first move. Young men reach out to me because they assume a certain level of sexual mastery—they want a masculine dad type as a guide, one who know what to do and say, every step of the way. Normally, that’s a role I willingly play. With this skinny kid that I’ve just met, though, I’m less certain. He’s an attractive boy. I mean, that mop of messy hair is something that gets me every time, right in the gut and groin. Those pretty eyes, those big wide eyes, those serious eyes, as they stare sidelong my way. Shit. From the photo he sent I have an idea what lies beneath that oversized tee, beneath those baggy skater shorts. If he were sent to central casting right as he is now, he’d be starring as the sensitive and artistic best friend of some female college freshman no doubt played by a former Disney star. Or—and it unsettles me as I consider it—throw a hoodie over his head and paint circles beneath his eyes, as the tortured loner prodded into a school shooting.

No, don’t think about that. Fuckin’ Gen Z’ers. So difficult to work with, what with their puritanical views of sex. Even during the worst years of the AIDS crisis I’d never seen anyone as afraid of sex as these young whippersnappers. I’d lay a hand on him now, but he’s vibrating like a fawn that’s spotted a hunter, eyes wide, unsure which way to bolt. Fuck. Maybe this was a mistake.

His long, naked toes wriggle against the loop pile of his bedroom rug. I clear my throat and place a consoling palm in the middle of the kid’s back. “Look,” is all I say.

Then he lunges. His fingers encircle my skull; with hunger, he pulls my face to his and engulfs me in a kiss. His mouth tastes sweet, like bubble gum. Once he’s pulled me atop him, once he feels my weight pressing down upon his slender frame, he sighs happily as we kiss. His hands dive beneath my tee while his legs curl around my hips, locking me close.

All right then. Way to go, Gen Z.

We knock each other about to find comfortable positions on the narrow mattress. Piece by piece, our clothing arcs through the air and lands upon the mountain of sneakers on the floor. My beard abrades his skin, drawing satisfying gasps. His lips search for far-flung parts of my body while I poke and prod his soft flesh. “Please,” he breathes, when I clutch and squeeze one of his pert little buttocks. That breathing turns to rasps when I sit him squarely on my face.

I’m about to plunge inside him for the first time when he puts a hand on my chest to stop me. For a moment we remain still, captured in what must look like some advanced couples yoga posed with a name like The Wheelbarrow or The Farmer and His Plow. He looks up the slant of his body into my eyes, above him. “Let me say I love you, when you fuck me?” My lips part, surprised. “You don’t have to say it back,” he says in haste, afraid he’s gone too far. “I’m not gonna be a freak about it or anything. I won’t stalk you. I just…I just…”

My voice is level as I finish his sentence for him. “You just need to be able to say it to someone.”

He nods, almost ashamed I can read his mind. “Is it okay?” For answer, I keep my eyes upon his while I spit once more into my hand and rub it onto his already-slick hole. Then, slowly, gently, sweetly, I slide myself inside him, inch by inch. The kid’s lips part. His eyes become lidded once more. “I love you, dad,” he says in a tentative whisper, when I reach bottom.

“I didn’t hear you, son.”

He understands the permission I’m giving him. “I love you, sir.” Now his voice is louder, more confident. “I love you. I love you so much.”

I nod, understanding. It’s very okay. They’re words I need to hear.

This raggedy college kid couldn’t have chosen better. Not because I know how to lift those bony legs into the air and spread them wide as my eyes bore into his. Not because years of instinct tell me where to touch, where to kiss, the exact moment I need to reach down and brush the hair from his face, nor because I know when and how to speak, and when—as now—to stay silent. No, he’s selected well because this week, this trip, I am in need of kindness, no matter how cosmetic.

I have been so lonely, these last two weeks. I’m a bottomless well, echoing, dry, its stones on the verge of collapse. All my energy I’ve poured into hospital visits and doctor consultations and making certain my dad has what he needs, into getting his home ready for his eventual return. A couple of random one-time sexual encounters don’t balance the terrible desolation I feel, the unhappiness that keeps me awake at night.

It doesn’t help that all through this ordeal, from home to hospital to rehab, my father hasn’t once acknowledged all I’m doing. He takes my back-breaking efforts for granted. That alone is fine—he can, and should, assume I’ll be there when he needs. But fuck, would it ever be nice to hear a thank you from his lips. Thank you for helping me through this mess. Thank you for taking notes. Thank you for remembering and explaining my complex medical history to every new caregiver we encounter. Thank you for checking my wrinkly balls for yeast because I’m too shy to let a female nurse do it.

Loneliness has stretched me thin and made me unrecognizable, even to myself. An attractive boy saying he loves me during our most intimate moments is a temporary anodyne I welcome.

Day after day, lunch after lunch, he always smiles as I grow closer to letting loose inside him. His head on the pillow, his eyes looking up into mine. The sweat on our faces, stinging my eyes and gluing together our foreheads. He is so hungry as his legs pull me against him and his lips purse for more kisses. “I love you,” he tells me. I should say something in reply. I owe him that. Once I open my mouth, though, he shakes his head. “Nah. Don’t.”

“But you need to know…” I want to tell him how much it means, to feel a little less lonely. I want him to know how beautiful he is, and how much I enjoy our lunches together. I want to say…

“I know.” He prunes short my sentence with another kiss. “I wish it was real, though. I wish you didn’t have to go back home. I wish you could stay and…”

Whatever else he wishes I cut short with a thrust. His sweet-talk excites me. “Does this feel real?” I ask, jaw set.

He grunts from the impact. “Yes. Fuck, yes.”

“It is real.”

“Yeah.” Once again, he begins to smile. His eyes puddle with satisfaction “It’s the realest real.”

“Then enjoy it. Dad's orders.” I lean down to cover his mouth with my own.

We lock into a clinch that neither of us releases until I’ve emptied myself deep inside. Throughout, he whispers three words, over and over. They soothe me. They lull me into a post-coital drowsiness, into which we curl beneath his sheet, big and little spoon. My beard nuzzles his shoulder. “Just because something is temporary doesn’t mean it’s not real,” I whisper.

His ribcage rumbles, content. When he turns his head to look at me over his shoulder, his long hair flops into my face. “I love you, daddy,” he says, one final time, as he drifts into a brief nap. Soon, we both must return to our lives. For now, we have each other.

My fingers riffle through his long locks. Stroke his head. I pull him close. Dream on, I think with affection as I watch him slumber. Dream on, kid. Then I wrap my arms around his chest to protect him, as I lie awake before colossal shadows.

Room 208

February 2023

Since my arrival in Virginia, I’ve been averaging about five hours a night of slumber. I know because I wear my watch as a sleep tracker. Mornings, my ears ringing from birds screeching before the light of dawn, I’ll blearily look at the tally of my nighttime hours, then groan. I’m used to much more rest than this. Back home, it’s eight hours or I’m a grumpy boy.

When I visit Richmond for non-emergencies, I stay at a hotel rather than my dad’s. He doesn’t understand why I pay good money for a room than sleep for free at his house. A modicum of comfort is worth the cost, I tell him. Since I’m here indefinitely, though, the price of an extended hotel stay would be prohibitive. Plus after my dad comes home from the hospital—he’ll have to come home eventually, right?—I know he’d be more comfortable with me close at hand. So here I lie in my little sister’s old room, where the only clear space is occupied by my open suitcase on the floor—there’s no closet or drawers I can use, and no room for anything, anywhere else.

Part of my sleeping problem is the bed. It’s a twin mattress, half a century old; it was my birthday gift when I was eight. It might have suited my smaller self. Now, my feet hang off the bottom. It’s lumpy. Over the decades, the springs have collapsed. They now droop down on one side, so I have to bolster myself against the wall to avoid rolling onto the floor. Then there’s the room itself, five feet wide by eight feet long. It’s too hot at night, and too cold in the morning; the only twin blankets and sheets my father has are threadbare and older than I.

I’ve been spending my days at the hospital, arriving after breakfast and lingering until past dinner. By the time I get back to my dad’s, it’s dark and I have his cats to feed. His house is in bad shape, so I’ve been tackling bite-sized projects as I can. But exhausted as I am by day’s end, after I turn off the light and wedge myself into a fetal position on a mattress older than either the song “American Pie” or the TV show All in the Family, god help me, all I can do, long past midnight, is toss and turn. My lower back aches in ways handfuls of ibuprofen can’t mend. My eyes won’t close. I masturbate, hoping it might exhaust me, but beating the meat doesn’t do the trick.

Self-pity eventually wears me down, but it never lasts. I’m awake with the birds, bleary, unhappy, worn thin.

This can’t go on forever.

Today has been particularly grueling. Ever since he’s been admitted to the hospital, my dad has been unusually caustic with everyone within earshot, including myself. It’s a change from his usual, laid-back self; I’ve never known my father to say an unkind word to anyone, much less treat someone trying to do their job with contempt and disrespect. But today he’s been argumentative with the nursing and technical staff and even the doctors themselves.

It’s mostly the fault of the cardiologist who visited in the morning. After pronouncing my dad’s heart in good condition, the specialist declared he didn’t need to see any more of him. What the cardiologist meant was that my dad’s two strokes had contributing factors other than his heart. My father decided that I don’t need to see you again means he’s being released.

All day, when the hospital staff visit to perform more tests or to check his vitals, he demands to go home. When friends phone, he tells them he’s being discharged, above my protests. When the hospitalist—the doctor in charge of his case, who receives reports from specialists and makes any final decision—arrives around dinnertime and strongly recommends my dad enter a rehab facility for an unspecified period immediately after the hospital stay, my dad throws an actual tantrum. He screams at the top of his lungs that ‘his doctor’ said he would be discharged. He raves at length about ‘the comforts of home.’ At one point, he looks like he’s searching for something to throw.

After the hospitalist departs, I launch into action. I give my father a hissed, angry lecture about how he is never to speak to another member of the hospital staff in such a manner ever again. He’s behaving like a child. No, in fact, children behave much better than he. I remind him that I’ve been forsaking the comforts of my home in order to see him back to health, so the very least he can do is cooperate, participate in his own recovery, and listen more than he speaks.

I’m so angry that I’m sure sparks are flying from my skin. Once I’m done with my scold, I cool off in the lounge down the hallway, where I call my next-door neighbor back home. She’s a physical therapist who gives me a detailed list of all the ways rehab is more productive than any therapy my dad might do at home.

When I return, list in hand, calmer and ready to discuss with him the prospect of rehab, my father nastily accuses me of sneaking out of the room to conspire with the doctor—to send him away for good, he snaps.

I need a fucking break.

So I’ve rented a hotel room. Just for a night. Just so I can sleep on a mattress that’s not tilting like the Titanic, post-iceberg, or doesn’t feel as if it’s been stuffed with garden trowels. I don’t care that I’m going to be spending less than twelve hours there. I need to sleep. No, I need a good night’s sleep, on a real bed, between sheets with a thread count higher than twenty-five. I want a thermostat that I can control, set at a temperature I choose. I want a room that’s dark and hermetically sealed against the sound of squawking birds at four-thirty in the morning. Going a little out of pocket for a night’s comfort is an indulgence I’ll allow myself. I deserve it.

When I check in, the imperious, effeminate clerk looks at my out-of-state license, then gives my rumpled clothing the once-over before inquiring, in a vaguely Teutonic accent, “Long drive?” It’s a shady comment, as the hotel is only ten minutes from the hospital, but I smile blandly and accept the twin room cards he passes over. To the elevator I stumble, then up to my third-floor room. Inside, in the living room portion of the suite, the TV immediately blinks on. A message welcomes me by name and hopes I enjoy my stay, triggered by either the door or the first-time presence of my room key nearby. I fumble for the remote and switch it off, toss my knapsack onto the sofa, and drag my weary feet to the king-sized bed in the room beyond.

Oh god. This bed is perfect. It’s clean. It’s flat. The pillows aren’t the thickness of pancakes. I fall back onto it with my arms outstretched, breathing a sigh of relief. The room itself smells like nothing. Not like the litter box for my dad’s cats, which for some reason sits directly outside the door of my sister’s bedroom. Not the staleness of a house sealed against outside air like an ancient pharaoh’s tomb. Just simple, air-conditioned neutrality, with only a phantom of disinfectant haunting the darkened bathroom. I arch my back and stretch, eyes closed, blissful, happy for the little luxuries of corporate impersonality.

Then I flick on my phone and open Grindr. Out of curiosity, I tell myself. Despite my weariness, though, I feel something stirring within. Seeking a hookup hadn’t been on my agenda for tonight—but I am what I am, and tonight I have a clean hotel room all to myself. There’s no harm in looking. I’m not surprised, when I check out the app’s grid, to see the desk clerk from downstairs staring back at me. I’d been pretty sure I’d clocked him, checking in. However, his profile very prominently proclaims, NO MEN OVER 40 EVER!! To which I roll my eyes, as that clerk will be hitting forty himself in a couple of years, and that kind of sexual karma has a way of hitting hard. More of immediate interest is the fellow to the left, only 15 feet away. The photo is of a torso, dark and blurry. I’m a little surprised when my phone vibrates and a number appears in the profile’s corner. He’s messaging me.

Looks like you’re real close, he says. You at the Fairfield?

Sure am, I reply.

Looking for…?

I think. I hadn’t really been looking at all. Honestly, though, would I still be looking at this screen, pondering how to reply, if I weren’t interested? But ugh. I’m so tired. Mentally, I’m wiped. Do I really have the sexual wherewithal to spare for a random stranger? What is it I want, here?

I take a moment, then decide to be candid. My thumbs busily type back, I need to suck some cock. I want someone who needs his dick serviced for as long as it takes. I want to be fed. That’s exactly all I’m fit for, this evening. I don’t want to have to plan some elaborate scenario for a guy who needs me to be his daddy, or his controlling but understanding top man. I don’t have the perception or patience to navigate the tricky stepping stones across a river of consensual non-consent.

I just want to suck. I want a cock in my face and saliva enough to keep it wet and happy. I want a job to do, and a hard dick ready to make me go through with it. I don’t care what the guy looks like, or what he’s packing. My hands tremble as I wait for the guy’s reply.

Now? He asks.

Now, I say.

Again, I have to wait for a reply. Finally it comes. Room 208.

I don’t need more invitation than that. I bound up, spry and alert, as if I’ve already had that fantastic night’s sleep. All my aches and pains evaporate. I shove my room key into my shorts pocket, give my pits a quick sniff—they’ll do—and sprint out the door, down the hall, and to the elevator. Once I’m outside the stranger’s room, I check Grindr to ensure he hasn’t changed his mind. Then I knock.

When the door opens, I’m a little taken aback to face a good-looking Black man wearing nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants. He’s neither tall nor young; I’d guess him to be in his late thirties and barely five-foot-five. I stare at the bare torso that had been dark and blurry in his Grindr photo—well, at least now I understand why it had been so dark. However, I’m baffled why he’s settling for a shot that more resembles a blurry smudge than the lean and sexy man before me. He’s holding his left arm akimbo; I instantly spy a wedding ring glinting above his hip. His right arm is raised high to hold the door open, giving me a moment to blink at his surprisingly hairy armpit, the inky, tight coils that cover his chest, then finally the light beard on his face. His dome is completely shaved.

He’s checking me out as well, looking me up and down, not missing the obvious protrusion beneath the cotton fleece of my shorts. After a moment he grins, drops his arm, and steps aside. “Come on in.”

His room is identical to mine, though in the sitting area, his TV softly plays a repeat of a sitcom I don’t watch. We’re not here for television, though; he leads me to the bed at the suite’s far end. Bedside, he makes a leap into the air, sleek as any cat, to land on the mattress with a bounce on his butt. His lean legs open.

I seize one of his bare feet as I move between them onto the mattress. My other fingers dance up his thigh; before I can lay claim to my prize, though, he takes my right hand between both of his, then presses the palm to his abdomen. Without a word, he slides it upward, toward one of his broad and flat nipples. I squeeze it gently, then harder, judging his reaction by the satisfied slits of his lids. He nods as I move close; when my lips meet the raised circle, darker even than the skin surrounding it, a sigh escapes his lips.

While I gnaw gently at his nipple, I can feel him lifting his hips to lower his sweats. He cups my head to keep my mouth attached to his tit, but his other hand wraps my fingers around his hard cock. It’s firecracker hot to the touch. His clutch tightens around mine, showing me how firmly to squeeze.

I keep up the pressure while he disattatches me from his nipple. Hands on either side of my face, he looks me in the eye. “You a good cocksucker?” His voice is little more than an animal’s growl.

“Yes, sir.” The ferocity of his stare is everything to me. Those dark pools of carnality hypnotize me. My only immediate concern, in this moment, is a need to please the naked stranger. To prove to him that I’m worthy of the pulsing inches in my grasp.

“You want this?”

It’s a rhetorical question. We both know it. I swallow hard to clear my throat, so anxious I am to speak. “Yeah. I want that dick. Please.”

Still he holds my skull between his palms while his eyes bore into mine. “Suck it.” He spits the syllables at me like buckshot. “Suck it good.”

There’s a moment’s mad scramble as he kicks off the sweats from around his ankles and I, still holding onto his meat, press my chest into the mattress between his legs. This is my one chance really to examine what his piece looks like: I study what’s about to occupy my attention for the next few minutes. To memory I commit the image of that thick five and a half inches and the heavy, shaved balls hanging below them. I admire the dark sheath, smooth at the base and wrinkled where he’s pulled back the foreskin. The pinker, tapering head that’s smaller around than the shaft. I don’t care that his dick isn’t as big as my own. Screw that. It belongs to this good-looking stranger, and I’ve volunteered to satisfy. That dick could be a mere three inches and ugly as sin, and I’d still worship it like the prize-winning fuckstick it deserves to be.

His legs spread as I dive down. He’s groaning the moment he feels my hot breath on his balls. I feel warmth both on the back of my head and circling my neck; his hands are pressing me onto that thick, pulsing saber until my lips hit the base. “Fuck yeah,” he says, as I buckle and suppress my gag reflex. “That’s what I need.”

I grunt, eyes watering, as he drives himself deep into my throat. With that kind of determination to penetrate my gullet, it’s a good thing he’s not super long, and even better that his head is smaller in diameter than the rest. It tickles my tonsils as the column of flesh beyond attempts to force open my gorge. His hands push me more deeply onto his concrete firmness and hold me there as he grinds and thrusts.

When at long last he releases his grip and allows me to come up for air, I gasp and open my eyes, staring up at him through my tears with blind adoration. I feel his fingers run through my beard, against the grain, messing it up before he smooths it down again. “Suck that dick,” he orders.

My eyes close once more and I go to work. My thumb and forefinger angle the fat tool to match the trajectory of my lips as they glide back and forth along his length, lingering at both the tip and the base. The rest of my fingers cradle the man’s fat nuts and stroke the smooth skin. I’m glad I memorized the fat cock before I set to work; I can relax and let my mouth and tongue flick and linger over spots I hope he enjoys: the valley between his balls where sac meets shaft, the crevice from which leaks a constant supply of his precum, the tender spots covered by foreskin.

He doles out my reward—all the reward I need—in grunts and groans. Every time he lets out some new feral whimper of pleasure, my own cock hardens. I grind myself against the bed’s corner, feeling my shorts grow even more damp as I self-lubricate. It’s his pleasure that’s my priority. Not my own. I revel in his gasps, in the rumblings deep in his chest, at the air whistling through his nostrils when I do something he particularly likes. My jaw is sore and I’ve lost all sense of time—all consciousness of anything beyond the inches pistoning my stretched lips and aching throat. But this is what I wanted. I’m happy to lose myself in the bliss of service.

It’s a shock when, after how long I don’t know, his palms pry me from his fat dick and pivot my focus to his face. Into my eyes he stares, his pupils flared to their widest. “Sexy white daddy,” he whispers. I don’t know how sexy I can look, in that moment, mesmerized by his tool as I am, slobber all over my beard, lips puffy and wanting more. “Sexy white daddy, suckin’ my dick. You like it?”

“I love it.” I reply without hesitation. Pride and desire battle for precedence in my scratchy voice. “I love your big dick, sir.”

“Damn right you do.” I wish he would let me get back to my work, but he continues searching my eyes. For what, I don’t know. Then, without warning, he pulls me to him and covers my lips with his own. The kiss is shocking in its passion; I haven’t been kissed like this in far too long. His tongue invades my mouth as if he’s trying to root out my very soul; his arms hold me close to his chest as his palm cups the back of my skull. I’m helpless as he turns us over and introduces my back to the mattress. Still he kisses me, his cock driving into my stomach as his hands tug at my waistband. When the kiss ends, I open my lids to see him staring at me again. He rubs his nose against mine. “You’re a pretty man.”

Before I can thank him for the compliment, he’s sat up to complete the job he started. The man rips off my shorts. My phone flops out of my pocket, but he picks it up from the hotel carpet, folds my shorn clothing, and places both it and the device atop the desk at the bed’s foot.

“Shit,” he says, moving back to stand by the bed. “You a big boy.” He seems surprised that I surpass him in the cock department; I’m definitely surprised when he lifts a foot to press against me. The heel connects to my dick’s base, while the sole digs against my shaft. His long toes wriggle against my head, eliciting a snarl of pleasure. “You like that, huh.” I can only nod. He rewards me with another firm shove of his foot against my meat, then stands upright and strides around.

I’m horizontal across the mattress, at this point. From next to the air conditioning unit, he grabs my arms and drags me until my shoulders lie at the bedding’s sharp edge. My head dangles over the edge. I see his plan, now; after he points his hard dick down, my mouth is ready for the re-entry of his cock down my throat. He begins slowly, at first, elbows raised and out and his fingers interlaced at the back of his neck. Then he picks up the pace, leans down and braces himself against the bed to give himself more traction. I aid my own violation by grabbing his ass from below and pulling him into me. I want to be used like this. Use is my purpose, tonight.

He fucks my mouth like pussy, sometimes with such force that I feel sure my chin might bruise. The violence is worth it. All I care about is providing the wettest, softest, most accepting hole for his beautiful uncut dick. I’m sprawled across this stranger’s bed wearing nothing but a t-shirt and sneakers, my dick straining to the ceiling and leaking on my belly, but I don’t give a damn about what it might want in the moment. I can and will take care of myself later. My eyes water so freely that I have to keep my eyes clamped shut out of fear my contacts might float away. Saliva spills from the corners of my lips and runs up my face. My mustache keeps some of it from entering my nostrils, but not all. I scarcely notice my own discomfort, though. So long as the man keeps ramrodding my throat, using my mouth—so long as he’s relishing the sensation of my tongue sliding and clinging to the top side of his beautiful, magical tool—I’ll lie there and provide this man the pleasure he needs.

The pleasure he deserves.

I can tell he’s close when he changes position. Instead of balancing himself on the mattress with his palms, he grabs the sides of my skull to hold it still while plunging in and out. It’s enough to make me choke, but I defer my distress. Now’s not the time to distract him. He plugs my throat once. Twice. A third time. Than a few rabbit-like thrusts. His palms cover my ears, muffling his stream of curses, but I both hear and feel his body-rumbling groan as he unleashes glob after glob of semen into my throat. It burns when he withdraws, slowly, leaving a trail of his cock slime on the roof of my mouth. I get a brief taste of its strong, brackish saltiness before my throat begins to react from the abuse it’s endured these last several minutes. Much as I try to subdue my choking, he’s left the passage raw. I keep it as quiet as possible, but I need a moment to recuperate.

I try to wave him away, but he’s solicitous in his response. Though I’m taller and bigger by far, I find myself scooped up in his arms, then a pillow thrust beneath my head. He curls himself to become my big spoon and pulls me closer. That beautiful dick, now soft and still wet from my mouth, presses against the base of my spine. Soft lips pepper kisses on my neck; one arm holds me tightly while the other squeezes my dick to see if it’s still hard—it is—before roaming over my chest and belly. “That was so gooooood,” he whispers in my ear. “Thank you, baby.”

I sigh and smile, content. His tenderness is an unexpected bonus and I feel selfish for accepting it, but for a while, he shows no signs of stopping. I shiver as his hand travels from hip to shoulder, from beard to nipples, from the mountains of my buttocks to the bristly forest of my head. He hums with contentment as he grinds into me. It doesn’t take long, though, for his motions to slow, then cease altogether. His grip slackens. His breathing becomes slower.

The stranger has fallen asleep.

The only sounds in his dark room are the hum of the air conditioner and the quiet canned laughter on the TV in the other room. It’s with reluctance that I disentangle myself from his grasp. I’m not needed any longer. Across the mattress I slide, careful not to wake the man with any sudden or loud movements. I tug my shorts over my sneakers and shove my phone back into my pocket. With a last glance back at the sleeper, I pad quietly from room 208 with my hands plunged deep in my pockets to conceal the erection that’s been plaguing me for the last—whoa—hour.

Not until I’m back in my own room upstairs do I unleash the beast and pleasure myself. From time to time I’ll wrinkle my lips upward to take deep whiffs of the man’s scent from my mustache; the musk of him is as potent as any poppers. My orgasm, when it arrives, wracks my body and leaves it feeling spent. Covered with sweat and juices, only some of which is my own, I lie in the cool air and allow my lids to sink.

Now, finally, I can sleep.

Traveling Man

February 2023

A block and a half from my dad’s house, on the very street where I grew up, a man waits on his knees almost naked, clad only in a well-worn jock.

For decades, my dad and his next-door neighbors boasted the longest occupancy of anyone in the neighborhood. The elderly sisters who lived in the house adjacent to his, both professors at the HBCU down the street, passed away a decade ago, though, leaving my dad the area’s oldest and most enduring resident. Both he and I still refer to the houses by the names of the owners we knew when we moved there in 1971. I recite them as I walk down the block. The Alexanders lived here, the Duffys beyond, the Beckstoffers further down. It’s been an unusually warm early February, with temperatures in the seventies. With every step, with every bounce of my half-aroused dick in my shorts, I look through the windows of the homes I used to know well. The people living within seem like happy, ordinary families. They’re just not families I know, anymore.

I’m in Virginia on an emergency visit. The day of my birthday, I’d called my father before going out for the evening. He’d sounded strange, weak—disoriented and as if unsure of where or who he was. He’d been on a heavy four-day course of steroids, he gradually told me, prescribed by his physician prior to a couple of hormone-suppressing injections that were to lead up to his second round of radiation therapy for a return of his prostate cancer. He sounded out of it, and never once acknowledged my birthday. He’d been so unable to choose words or complete his sentences that my alarm bells began ringing. I asked him if he could manage for the evening by himself or whether he needed me to call someone. Eventually, he assured me he’d go to bed and lie down, and that he’d call if he needed me.

The next morning, he’d phoned. “I need help,” is all he’d said. I’d packed a week’s worth of things and had been on the road to Virginia within the hour. I’d found him weak, almost unable to stand; during my six-hour drive, he’d revisited his primary care physician, who’d suggested he was dehydrated.

When he wasn’t any better after two days of bed rest and many tumblers of water, I suggested we take him to an urgent care facility for a second opinion. The caregivers there had wanted him to visit an emergency room immediately, to rule out a stroke. After a thirteen-hour stint in St. Mary’s ER, during which various doctors kept saying they didn’t think his symptoms indicated any kind of neurological event, after a very late night MRI, a doctor arrived with results that indicated my dad had suffered two strokes a week before, both in the posterior region. St. Mary’s admitted him at two a.m. the following morning, and here I’ve been, stuck in Virginia for the indefinite future.

Enough of the hospital. My butt has been numbed by hospital chairs for days. If I’m not at the hospital, I’m thinking about the hospital, or about what I’ll have to do for my dad after he gets out of the hospital. I’ve been ungrudging with my care for a week, now. It’s time to be selfish. And right now, all I want to think about is my dick.

I pause to cross the street. One thing about my old neighborhood that’s changed since my childhood: it sure harbors a lot more homosexuals than it used to. The guy I’m heading to visit is a mere eight hundred feet away, but he’s not even the closest man hunting for sex on the apps. There’s HUNGTOP9 somewhere within a five-hundred-foot radius of my dad’s home, and a couple that only plays together who are looking for young and hung, that’s even closer. On Sniffies, I see a dozen shadowy outlines of cocks on avenues where I learned to ride my bike, or photos of pert, upturned asses splayed along streets I’d walk to my piano lessons. I don’t know how long this—what’s the gay counterpart to gentrification?—has been going on, but I’m entirely in favor.

There’s a vibration against my side. My pulse quickens as I read the message on my phone. Bedroom’s at the top of the stairs. I’m ass up for you, Sir. I’m already half-erect in these terrycloth shorts; I’m going to have to spend the rest of the short walk with my hands thrust in my pockets, if I get any harder. Before I darken the screen, another message pops up, punctuated by a devil emoji Just saw your message about the ball gag.

My what, now? I break stride, confused for a split-second. Oh, I think. He’s joking. The dude is pretending I’d sent him such a text, so that when I show up and find him kneeling on the mattress, legs spread, I won’t be surprised to see him chomping on the ball gag he rarely gets to bring out. The sexual prop that makes him feel extra slutty. Okay. I can play along.

Good thing I definitely sent that, I tap back, one hundred percent sure we’re both on the same page when it comes to playfulness.

My erection—by now at three-quarters mast—is protruding enough to be seen by any cars passing on my dad’s sleepy boulevard, but my phone is vibrating again. I shove my right hand in my pocket and use my fingers to tamp it down, while with the left I navigate my messages. Now that I know what a kinky fucker you are we can have some real fun, it reads. Then, immediately after, I’ve set up a scenario you might like. You’ll see when you get here.

So far, I’m pleased with this guy. We’ve never discussed anything kinky. Not as far as I remember. Back in 2020, when I was down here for my dad’s radiation treatments at the pandemic’s scariest period, we’d exchanged a couple of mild messages about how it would’ve been nice to connect, if either of us had been hooking up. Which we weren’t. Periodically since, we’ve exchanged a couple of hellos. But today is the first time we’d both agreed we were mutually horny and available. At the same time, though, I’m intrigued. I like scenarios. Judging by the way it’s attempting to escape the temporary prison of my fingers, my dick seems to like the prospect of a scenario, too.

I look both ways and cross the final street. His house is a two-story colonial on the corner. The yard’s neatly kept, the gardens prepped for spring. Heart thumping, I tread the walkway. When my feet hit the stoop, I see the front door slightly ajar. One key sits in the lock; several others dangle on a ring beneath.

I grin. So this is his big scenario. It’s not the first time I’ve encountered men craving a home intruder fantasy. When I pull open the door and step over the threshold, for a moment I’m apprehensive—there’s a big difference between an intruder role-play fantasy versus walking into the wrong home and being mistaken for an actual burglar by a gun-wielding homeowner.

But the layout of his home is just as he said, with carpeted stairs on the left and a sound of stirring beyond the top step. I set the keys onto the glass-topped table, just inside the door, which I shut behind me. He’s left a trail to follow, too. Not breadcrumbs, but pieces of clothing strewn in a path, beginning with shoes and socks, his tie, then a shirt, and ending with a pair of dress trousers tossed in a heap by the bedroom door.

Now that I’ve entered the stranger’s house, I allow my dick to leap free; it’s tenting my shorts at the sight of the man on his bed, face down, ass up, sprawled with his legs wide and a pillow tucked under his head. It’s a super-casual pose that I deduce is supposed to connote, Oh golly, I was so tired from work that I had to shuck off all my clothes except this jockstrap I happened to be wearing and then I just collapsed here on the bed for a quick nap in this super-awkward position that exposes my butthole.

It’s a good scenario, all right.

“Well, lookee here,” I say aloud, halfway between a whisper and a snarl. My hands rub together in greedy expectation. “Thought this big ol’ house was empty. You made a mistake, mister, leavin’ those keys in the door so some stranger could come walkin’ right in.” Whenever I’m in Virginia, my Southern drawl tends to creep back; in this situation, it floods loose, loud and confident, making me sound like a bit player from Smokey and the Bandit. I kick off my sneakers. My shorts drop to the floor. “Guess I’ll be takin’ whatever I want.”

My words have the desired effect. The man’s hole gapes and twitches.“What do you want?” he says in a low tone, playing along. The homeowner is a handsome older man. I knew that from the photos on Scruff. He’s one of those fellows for whom photos don’t really do justice, though; the serious mug shot he’s posted on the app doesn’t show the heft of his muscles, nor the ass made round and full by countless squats over the years. Of course, I say he’s older, but I’m his senior by half a decade. He’s the one with the silver hair, though. He’s the one with his ass in the air.

I slap it, causing him to groan with pleasure. “Maybe this is what I want. For starters. Then that pretty mouth of yours.”

It’s not until I’m kneeling on the floor and shoving my face between his cheeks that I remember: didn’t the dude imply he’d be wearing a ball gag? Because I certainly didn’t see one. I’m gnawing at his hole while mentally reviewing my view from just moments before. Jock: yup. Other garments: nope. Ball gag: nuh-uh. Well, I’m not here to fuss about little details. Obviously I’m giving the guy what he wants, judging by the sighs and unsubtle gyrations of his hips. I use my fingernails to scratch ten pink trails down the surface of his ass cheeks, then dig in to pry them further apart.

The man’s hole tastes good. Clean. Ready. When I slide in a thumb, there’s no resistance; his ass is going to spread so easily. I like a loose gape. “Lookit you,” I say with contempt. “You some kind of cocksucker or something? You sure like that fine hole fingered.” Instinctively the man’s broad shoulder push themselves into the mattress. His ass rises; the small of his back curves in a submissive arch. My cock is engorged, by this point. It’s leaking precum like crazy. I could probably just shove it right on in and glide to the base without a drop of extra lube, but I’m enjoying putting this man in his place, first. “I asked you a question, faggot.”

“Fuck that hole, sir,” he says into the pillow. His voice sounds strained and anxious, as if he’s gone without filling for far too long. “If you need to fuck it, fuck it.”

“Dunno if I need to fuck it.” Since moving away, my vowels have rarely sounded so honeyed. I suck on two of my fingers, while I let the tip of my cock brush against the extremities of his cheeks. He tries to move back, to feel its kiss once more, but I’m too much of a tease to allow such a thing. “Looks like pussy.” I shove both fingers inside the loose hole. “Sure feels like pussy.” I twist in my digits until I hit the knuckles. “Maybe it fucks like pussy.”

“Please.” He snuffles the syllable into the pillow. It sounds again, but this time as a long, agonized supplication. “Please.”

The last sibilant hasn’t even crossed his lips than he rears his head and lets out a mighty roar. I’ve plunged inside, lubed with nothing more than spit and brazen desire. His hole feels good—hot and welcoming, the cozy refuge I’ve craved all week. I’ve got some aggression to work out, too, after long days of dealing with medical staff and one unusually crabby old man. This ass is what I’ve chosen to make suffer.

Not that he’s in pain, mind you. With grunts and growls he meets my assault, lifting his hips higher and spreading his own cheeks open so I might plunder him even more deeply. When he swings his head from side to side, trying to clear either his brain or his vision, or both, sweat flies in every direction. He’s like a wet dog shaking bathwater from his fur. I give his meaty ass another slap, and let loose with profanities that I know will excite him further.

“I should fuckin’ tie you up and call every thievin’ motherfucker I know to come dump a load in this slutty, wet hole. Feels so damn good.” Another slap, and he plants his face in the pillow once more with a grunt. “You’d probably like that too, huh, cocksucker?” When he doesn’t answer, I pull out all the way and wait, my scarlet inches wet and throbbing. “I asked you a question, son.”

“Yes sir,” he aspirates. He’s barely able to weave vowels to the consonants. “Whore me out. You own this hole.”

“Fuuuuuck.” I extend to word as long as it’ll go. “Damn right I do. You want more?”

“Yes sir. Please don’t stop, sir.”

I immerse myself inside him as far as I’ll go, and make myself swell. “You mean, like that?”

“Yes sir. Just like that.”

“Then what do I do? I dunno what you gay boys like,” I snarl.

“Go in and out. Just…please fuck me, sir.” His deep voice strains with desperation. “Use it. Breed this fag ass. Whore it out to your buddies.”

“In and out, huh? Hungry-ass li’l pig,” I growl, as I get back into the rhythm I’d established before. “Takin’ strange dick from any motherfucker who sees that open door. Damn, that’s sick.”

“Yes sir.” His breathing is becoming more labored.

“You’re a nasty boy, huh.”

“Yes sir, a real nasty boy.”

“Cum-guzzlin’, fuck-takin’, butt-hungry white-collar businessman with a hankerin’ for redneck meat…” I don’t even have time to reflect on how the verb to hanker never, ever makes an appearance in my vocabulary; his body begins to shake and spasm. I see his hand grab for his dick. With a mighty roar, he directs it in my direction, between his legs, so that it points back between his legs to the floor. Semen jets from the flared tip and lands on the wood with an audible splat. Another jet. Still another. It’s icing my black footie socks and oozing between the floorboards by the time he’s finished.

But just because he’s done doesn’t mean I am. “Shiiiiiiiit,” I drawl. “Must’ve really like my big ol’ dick. Fuckin’ cocksucker.” I grab a hip with one hand, and wrap the elastic of his jock around the back of the other, pulling him toward me. He’s compliant fuckmeat, now, and keeps his hole loose and open for me as I finish inside. “Get that pussy open for me, yeah, like that,” I growl. “Like that. Just like that. Just like…”

My own climax is deafening, when it arrives. I haven’t even so much as jerked off, this last week. My load floods his cunt. Over the roar of fire in my veins, I hear him grunt with surprise. Maybe it’s at the molten warmth of my load. Maybe it’s at the sheer volume of my wordless cries. He’s leaking now, so much that my nuts are soaked. “Now that’s the way you do it,” I say as my convulsions subside. I slap his ass before I pull out.

Now I’m sitting on a chair at the bedroom’s edge, a bit off-balance in my post-coital haze. A quick getaway is what I expect to make—since I’m a home intruder and all—but while I’m groping for my clothing, the man I’ve been fucking flips around to face me. Actually, it’s more as if he slides from the mattress and oozes onto the floor, like a boneless sludge, to assume a kneeling posture before me. “Holy fuck,” he pants.

I crack a grin as I put one leg through my shorts, then the other. “No kidding,” I say in my regular voice, now that the spell is broken.

He slumps against the bed frame and runs his hands through his short gray hair. “Holy fuck,” he says once more, shaking off the perspiration he’s collected. “You didn’t want the ball gag, though?”

I mean, he’d been the one suggesting he should wear the damn thing, then chose not to. “You tell me.” I shrug.

He watches as I pull back on my t-shirt. “So, I’ve gotta ask. You always travel with a collection of paddles?”

“What?” I say, taken aback. The question is so bizarre that I automatically laugh. I try to make a joke out of it. “No, not always.”

“How about that tens machine?” I know what a tens machine is. I’ve been around the block a few times, you know. But I can’t imagine why in the world he thinks I have one. I just stare, while he begins rattling off a list of gear. “I mean, it’s kind of crazy to think you pack a suitcase with those and the sounds, and a whole set of restraints. What kind of portable gloryhole do you have? Did you make it? Or buy one online?”

There’s more, but as he peppers me with questions, I’m felling unsettled feeling. It’s not dissimilar from looking at an illustration of a rabbit and then discovering that someone else is viewing the same thing and thinks it’s a duck—or that stupid controversy a few years back when people were arguing whether a single dress was black and blue, when it was obviously gold and white. I’ve been so certain that my view of the encounter had been one thing. Suddenly I’m being challenged to think that it’s perhaps something else.

The realization is not comfortable.

It’s not helped when I clear my throat and attempt to distance myself from his line of questioning with, “Oh, I put your keys on that table next to the front door.”

“Keys?” He sounds as flabbergasted by my non-sequitur as I’d been by his interrogation.

“Your house keys,” I say. Maybe the sexual haze hasn’t quite cleared from his brain. “I put them on the glass table?”

“Where’d you get my keys?”

“They were in your door?” I’m thinking, the whole home intruder scenario you set up? Remember?

But he looks blank. “Oh, did I leave my keys in the door? Really?”

“Wait.” He’s totally taken me aback. “You said you’d set up a hot scenario for me. Wasn’t it…?”

He tilts his head, not understanding. “I left clothes for you to follow. Didn’t you see them?”

I stand, laughing. This encounter has navigated a hairpin curve from hot to bizarre in a record timeline. “I’ll see you later,” I say, ruffling the guy’s hair and making a swift beeline for the stairs.

“Hit me up again sometime,” he calls to my back. “We’re so close.”

All the short walk home I can’t get one thought out of my head. This guy thought I was someone else. He’d mixed me up with another Scruff dude he’d been texting, some hot dom in leather who travels with a trunk full of gear and a portable glory hole. Here I’d arrived in Richmond with no more than a cock ring, a dirty mind, and a grin on my bearded face, while he’d been fantasizing about a rough ol’ top who’d show up with spiked paddles and electrical hookups and a freakin’ ball gag. I mean, I guess he’d seemed satisfied, but was he sitting at home right now thinking to himself, That guy was pretty tame for a sick fuck with a Saint Andrew's cross and a collection of dildos shaped like horse dicks?

And—oh, god. How badly had I misread the whole home invasion role-play thing? Here I’d thought we both were being impish, mischievous little devils spicing up an encounter, when all along he’d only forgotten and left his keys in the door in his haste to be butt-up for some fucker who wasn’t me. Holy fuck, could I be more dim? Stupid, stupid, stupid…

I interrupt my mental self-flagellation and roll over on the uncomfortable twin mattress that’s my bed for the foreseeable future. My phone’s buzzing. That’s the hottest fuck I’ve had in years, the guy a block and a half away has texted. Thank you, sir. My hole is yours anytime you need it.

I roll back over again. All right, I think, as my anxieties ebb and my usual sexual cockiness flows in its place. Maybe I hadn’t done so badly, after all. Even without a trunk full of sex toys. After a review like that, I’m more inclined to see the guy again, sometime in the future.

Providing he understands who I am, of course.

Pool Boy

I’m horny and I’m angry. I don’t like it.

I’m horny enough that my dick’s had a mind of its own all morning. It’s the last full day of my visit with my father, and offers on Grindr and Scruff have been flooding in. I’ve put off all the men by explaining I’ve got some chores to do before I’m free. Then, while I pound nails into the fallen trim on my dad's screened porch, I fantasize about which little twink or otter I’ll be pounding later in the afternoon. While I’m insulating some of the pipes in his basement, my own pipe is tenting my shorts, ready to spurt.

I don’t know what it is that’s making me so crazy. I’ve had two nights of a stranger rimming me relentlessly in my hotel room, followed by an afternoon plowing one of the hottest muscle twinks I’ve ever had. Perhaps the novelty of being the new meat in town is going straight to my littler head. When I order lunch through a sandwich shop app and drive out to pick it up, I’m basically violating with my eyes, over my mask, the cute guy behind the counter; he responds with a smile of regret that lets me know he registers and even welcomes my notice. His shift probably isn’t over for hours, though. When I pump gas for the trip back home tomorrow morning, the mere action of shoving the nozzle into the gas tank evokes in my gut a grunt that’s purely sexual.

By mid-afternoon I’m back at my hotel room. I’ve told my dad I’m taking the rest of the day for myself, and that I’ll stop off in the morning before I make the seven-hour drive home. After a quick shower, I flop onto the hotel mattress with my phone, ready to hook up. I’ve already made my choice. For a couple of years now, I’ve always wanted to get together with this guy who lives in the Fan. We’d originally talked on BBRT on one of my previous trips, and I dig his looks—mid-thirties, lean, long wavy hair, big soulful eyes. I have a couple of types that get my immediate attention, and this dude nestles snugly into one of them.

On this trip, he’s hit me up on Sniffies, so that’s the site I use to shoot him a message. I’m in my hotel room for a couple of hours. Want to come by?

I only have to wait a couple of minutes for his reply. I sure do. I’m showered and free now if you want me to come.

I want you to come, I tell him.

He asks for the address. I send it. Leaving now. I’ll be there in 15, he assures. Can’t wait.

Mission accomplished. My dick is raging already. When I review photos of the guy’s firm little ass, I lick my chops over how it points unflinchingly at the camera, ready to be impaled. The Virginia afternoon is hot as fuck, so I’ve turned up the rattly old air conditioning unit to fill the room with its chilly blast. Meanwhile, as a few more offers trickle in on the apps, I send some polite regrets. Sorry. I’m meeting someone in a few. Maybe later?

Fifteen minutes pass. Twenty. Twenty-five. For long minutes I anticipate a nervous knock at the door. My dick has wilted some time ago. I try to tamp down my disappointment. The interstate could be busy. There might’ve been an accident. So I attempt patience, and wait some more.

After forty-five minutes, the horniness hasn’t abated, but the anger has kicked in. I’m being stood up. Every time I look at Sniffies, there’s a little blue dot on the dude’s profile to show me he’s online, but his location hasn’t changed at all. Onscreen he’s an inch away to the right—which means in real life, he’s a mile away in the Fan, not moving any closer.

Motherfucker.

When I fire up other apps, I’m annoyed to see that he’s checked me out on them since we made our assignation. In fact, I can construct an entire timeline of what’s happened since I gave him the hotel’s address. Fifteen minutes passed, then he visited my profile on BBRT at roughly the time he told me he’d be knocking on my door. Ten minutes after that, his Grindr profile looked at mine. Then, ‘just now,’ he’s looked at me on Scruff.

What kind of fuckery is this?

An hour and a half has passed since he told me he couldn’t wait. I send the guy a message on Sniffies, since that’s where we made the date. Okay. I get the message that you’re not coming over. A pity, since I’ve wanted to meet you for a while now.

As I expect, I get no reply. I’m horny, I’m furious, and I don’t like it. But I know sitting in my hotel room, stabbing at the screen with my index finger trying to find a quick replacement, will prove a recipe for regret. So I recalibrate.

My favorite barbecue joint is across town from where I’m staying. It’s worth the drive just to clear my head. My dad has accompanied me to barbecue spots across the city, but none of the chains he prefers compare, I think, to this locally-owned spot where I can order hush puppies and a side of corn pudding to accompany the generous helping of pulled pork the chef has slapped onto a rectangle of kraft paper on my tray. As I devour the spread, I flip between various apps on my phone—browsing the news headlines, looking at the subreddits I follow, and checking out the local grid on Grindr.

I’ve nearly spooned out the last of the corn pudding when I get a message on the latter. Hi Sir. It’s from a profile with no photo and very little information—a 23-year-old who’s less than a mile away, is all I know. I rarely respond to profiles that are blank or close to it. Just as I’m about to close the app, though, the kid sends a few more photos. The first is of him reclining on his bed, head tilted on his pillow. He wears a t-shirt of primary red; his hand rests just out of the camera’s view, between his legs. A good-looking kid. Clean cut. Well groomed. Whether from his natural, fair-skinned coloration or an acute case of sunburn, his nose is a bright red. The photo has a caption. Rudolph, it says.

All right. I like a little bit of self-deprecating humor.

The remaining pics are less boy-next-door than they are hungry-hole-down-the-street. There’s a shot of him bent over a bare mattress, knees spread wide and white ass in the air, taking a spit-slick Black cock. Then there’s a blurry shot of him on his knees, eyes unfocused and glazed, mouth agape, beneath a stubby dick that’s already left a spurt of jizz across his forehead. Finally, there’s a shot he’s managed to take of himself on his bed again. This one is both blurry and dark; he’s got his legs in the air and fingers probing a pink little hole.

Hey, I think this trio of photos deserves as reply. Nice pics, son.

I bet you have a big cock, Sir. I can’t help it: my dick twitches at this form of address. In lieu of a written reply, I send him a shot of my meat hanging between my legs, thick and engorged. Fuck yeah. I knew it, dad. Are you looking?

To myself I think: why not? I’m done with dinner. I’d left the hotel feeling nettled, in order to avoid fruitless hours of hunting for—and not finding—sex. And see? Here’s a pretty boy, throwing himself in my lap.

Yeah, I reply. I’m looking.

Already I’m thinking of the kid as Rudolph, though I know it was a joke and unlikely to be his name. My car’s in the shop, he tells me. Can you come get me?

You know someplace we can go? I could easily take Rudolph back to my hotel, but it’s a little bit of a haul by Richmond standards. Part of me, I admit, intends the question to see how serious this kid is. On my last pre-pandemic trip down here, I’d wasted an entire evening on some asshole without a car who’d expected to treat me like his personal Uber driver while he ran errands. When the kid responds in the affirmative, I have only one more question. How soon can you be ready? Because if it’s going to be an hour or more, I’m going to have to pass.

Now. Come get me, Sir. I want you inside me.

Now is good. I like now.

Ten minutes later and I’m pulling up to the address he’s given me—a squat Henrico bungalow boasting a rusted carport at the driveway’s end. I’ve scarcely pulled up in front than Rudolph flies out the side door. He’s shorter and smaller than I expected—no more than five-five or so—but his legs propel him down the driveway and into my front seat. Once the passenger door shuts, he points down the county road ahead. “Go straight. I’ll tell you where to turn,” is his greeting.

He sounds like he’s escaping from something. Probably still lives at home, I think to myself. I say nothing and pull away from the curb in the direction he’s indicated. It’s not until we’re away from the house and at a stop sign that I feel his hand on my leg. His fingers probe at my crotch. When I divert my attention from the road, he’s looking at me with liquid eyes, full of desire. “You’re hot, Sir.”

Under his fingers, my dick balloons. The kid’s pics hadn’t done him justice. There’s a redness to his face that I see often in the local men here, but only the very tip of his bulbous nose carries a touch of sunburn. He’s small for a twenty-three-year-old; I could almost carry him around by the scruff of the neck without much exertion. Cute. Definitely into me, from the way he keeps drinking me in. The boy exudes a puppy dog urgency as he paws at my parts and runs a hand over my chest. It’s all I can do to keep from swerving.

Eventually we reach his destination. Out here in the county, where the little ranch houses hold each other at arm’s distance, there are still stretches of undeveloped plots. At Rudolph’s prompting, I turn onto one of them, along a twisting gravel road that leads through thickets of wild saplings. Hidden beyond is a fenced-in property, overgrown with waist-high weeds. Its dirt parking lot, which could easily hold twenty or more cars, is almost completely invisible from the road. “Come on,” he tells me, letting his smooth little hands slide from mine once I turn off the ignition. “Nobody comes here.”

I swing my legs onto the dirt and click the remote to lock my car doors. The place must once have been a neighborhood pool; through the broken privacy slats in the chain link fence I can spy a rough slab of patio around a kidney-shaped outline. The pool itself has been filled with concrete long before, to prevent both liability and mosquitos. It’s eerily quiet back here. If anyone were to walk or drive down the only road in, we’d be sure to hear the crunch of gravel well in advance. I approve.

“Over here.” The kid beckons me to a large shed around one side of the property. Beyond the high grasses, there’s a padlocked chain, much distressed, linking the door’s handles. The kid retrieves an artificial rock stashed among several real stones in the weeds nearby, though, and flips it over to reveal a hidden compartment. He slides open a little door to produce a key. A few moments later and we're in the shed’s interior.

There’s not much in here. A few old empty plastic tubs that used to hold pool chemicals, but that’s not the smell that’s making my nose twitch. A pair of long-handled nets, neither of which retains any webbing. A stack of cardboard boxes lurks in a corner, slumping from gravity and damp. Two webbed folding recliners occupy most of the room’s length, set side by side. Rudolph positions me between them and pulls down on my neck. He stands on tiptoe so that my mouth can completely engulf his own.

We’re a contrast in sizes, he and I. I’m reminded of those porn sites that pair pint-sized boys with much bigger, older men. He seems to love the contrast, too. When I try to stand straight after our first, deep kiss, he jumps up and into my arms. When I catch him—barely, surprised—he wraps his legs around me. We kiss again. His mouth is hungry, wet and deep.

I can’t hold him off the ground indefinitely, so I try to let him down as gracefully as possible. “You’re so hot,” he says, reaching for my beard. “Do you like me?”

I remember the insecurity of that age. “You’re a sexy boy.” I look around the deserted shed. “You’ve brought men here before?” My question abashes him, I can tell. “You can say.”

“Yeah.” His eyes flicker from mine to the floor.

“Yes, Sir,” I correct.

“Yes, Sir.”

“So you just…pick up strange men online and lure them there, huh.” He’s wearing a pair of denim shorts faded almost to white, save at the seams, and a loose-hanging shirt made of something approximating linen. While I talk, I begin running my fingers up its placket, loosening the fastenings one by one. At some point, perhaps in his haste to escape his house, he’d mismatched the buttons to their holes. It gives him a lopsided look.

I watch as he licks his lips. “Yes, Sir. Is that bad?”

I neither nod, nor shake my head, reserving judgment. My hands move up, knuckles grazing his smooth stomach. “So you bring them out here. Where anything could happen.” His heart thuds so strongly that each beat stirs hairs on the back of my hand. He nods. “Yes, Sir,” I prompt again.

“Yes, Sir.”

The size difference between us is making my cock rigid. It demands to be shoved in the young man’s holes, but for now I keep it from asserting itself. The exertion of willpower hones my voice to a steel-hard edge. “You’ve been doing this a long time, I bet.”

“Yes, Sir.”

I’m at the last button. My fingers tweak it loose, so that the fabric falls to reveal his skin, opalescent in the indirect light. I turn him around and relieve him of the garment, then spin him once more so he faces me, gently as a father might get his kid ready for bed. “How long?”

“A long time.” His response is breathy, excited.

“Months?” He nods. “Years?” There’s a hesitation, but at last he nods. “I figured. A boy like you can’t do without cock, right?”

“Yes, Sir. I mean, no, Sir.” He barely aspirates the confession.

I unbutton his shorts. Slowly, deliberately, I pull down their zipper. The boy has a tiny waist. My long fingers might be able to encircle him if I tried, it almost seems. I turn him around again and draw him close, allowing myself to run my fingers over his skin before hooking my thumbs under the waistbands of both the denim and his shorts. “Then you bring them to this godforsaken place and make them do things to you.” His head falls back against my chest. His eyes are closed, his jaw slack. Down fall his shorts around his ankles; the boy’s cock, thin and short, pokes out like a flagpole. “Bad things.”

“Yeah,” he breathes.

“Yes, Sir.”

“Yes, Sir.” As my hands move over his body, his cock, his lightly hairy balls, he shivers. “Real bad things.”

I let go of him. He drifts forward, eyes still closed, his naked body twirling, slow motion, in the shed’s twilight, until he’s facing me again. “Like what?” I direct his hands to my own shorts, where my cock demands attention. “Do they make you…suck their big cocks?”

“Yes, Sir. They make me suck their cocks.” His eyes open, seeking permission. I nod, giving it.

Down on his knees he goes. My shorts have no zipper. He yanks down the elastic waist to my knees. As my eight inches flop upward, his mouth opens; his tongue darts out. His hand clasps the lower half, seizing his prize. I feel the kid’s hot breath before I plunge between those pretty lips.

My own heart thuds in its cage as the boy goes to town on my meat. I lean back so I can have a clear view of him in action. He’s no dabbler; he knows what he’s doing. I watch his own skinny dick jerk and throb unattended, nearly slapping against the shed’s concrete floor. Already he’s leaking precum.

“Cocksucker,” I spit out, letting the word swing, pendulum-like, somewhere between praise and epithet.

He opens his eyes at the word and allows my dick to slip from his mouth. “Yes, Sir.” His words are sibilant and indistinct with the spit dripping from his lips. “Just a cocksucker, Sir.”

His address makes me harder. Redder. Thicker. I grab the back of his skull and hold it while I shove my cock as far as it will go. Though he can’t quite manage the last couple of inches, his lips greedily reach for the base, trying to make a show of engulfing the whole thing. I give him credit for trying.

“Your folks know what a dirty little faggot cocksucker they’re raising?” I ask. Through a mouthful of dick, he shakes his head. “But you go back home from here with a gut full of seed to lie to mommy and daddy about where you’ve been, huh.” It’s a shot in the dark, but he nods, his eyes gazing up at me with sheer adoration. “You don’t even know my name. Getting anonymous dick in some—“ I look around at our surroundings. “—skanky-ass lean-to.” He grunts, agreeing. “You let strangers fuck you too, don’t you.”

“Yeth Thir,” he attempts to say, but I don’t let him off my dick. Not yet.

“Figured.” I curl my upper lip in a show of contempt. “Little faggot boy, going ass up for who the fuck knows who.” I grab a handful of the kid’s sandy hair and thrust my hips in and out of his mouth, feeling his saliva on my balls. “Letting strange men sodomize that boyhole.”

When I withdraw most of the way, he raises his glance to me again and grunts. “That’s what my holes are made for, Sir. Faggot holes for men like you.”

“Someone trained you right,” I comment. He digs that, responding with grunts and an instinctive arch to his back. When I pull out from between his greedy lips, he responds with a whine of outrage, like a toddler deprived of a favorite toy. “Up,” I order. Then, “Around.” Once he’s obeyed, I turn him so that his hands are planted on the webbing of one of the recliners. “Well, well. Look at that ass,” I hiss, when it’s on display. "No wonder men like me want to fuck it." Automatically he spreads his legs, widening his stance.

The boy’s butt is compact. He’s still young enough that he still carries a slight layer of baby fat, which bounces when I slap it hard. “Ow,” he says—from instinct, not actual pain.

“Come on,” I growl, slapping it again, this time harder. The sound fills our tiny space. “Don’t try to tell me that ass hasn’t been smacked before.”

“It’s yours, Si—“ I interrupt his obeisance with another hard whack. His head flies up; his eyes widen. If I thought Rudolph loved me when he was sucking my dick, that was nothing to the look of sheer veneration he’s giving me now. “Fuck.”

“Damn right I will,” I say, deliberately misinterpreting the four-letter word as permission, or invitation. My fingers probe at his exposed, pink, hairless hole. “Jesus Christ, son,” I exclaim, as if my slippery fingers have discovered something foul. “You’re already fucking lubed up!” Rudolph can’t stand any longer. He tumbles forward onto the ancient lawn chair so that his face and knees dig into the woven fabric. He’s light, but I don’t trust the chair to support both our weights, so I remain standing as I finger his pucker. “You just checked out my profile, thought to yourself, This dude looks like the kind of man who fucks little faggots like me, and shoved a bottle’s worth of lube up your shitter before I picked you up, huh?”

“Please fuck me,” he begs.

“Please fuck me, Sir.”

“Please fuck me, Sir.”

I hesitate, as if unsure. “I don’t know. There’s no telling how many men have been up this boyhole before.” I’ve got three fingers in, now. Plus the tip of the fourth. He’s wide open and obviously well-used. It’s a hole that begs to be stretched even more.

“Fuck me, Sir. Please fuck me. Sir, please fuck me.”

He repeats the words over and over while I pretend to consider my option. At long last, as he squirms his hips and repeats his litany, I spit on my fingers and spread the fluid on my enraged inches. Then I shove it in, at long last.

He seizes up almost immediately, then relaxes as I force him back down onto the lawn chair. I slide to the base with little resistance. The kid has been fucked before, and probably often. That smell I’d wondered about earlier, the one tickling my nostrils—it’s not damp or chlorine. It’s probably the scent of dried sweat and semen from all the hookups little Rudolph has lured here over his sexual career. Thinking about the boy using this abandoned shed to collect seed makes me more aggressive.

“This what you wanted?” I ask. “Is this what you want, cocksucker?” I don’t need to hear his answer. I’m being rhetorical. The chair’s aluminum frame grates across the concrete as savagely I stab into the boy’s guts.

He’s the happiest little pup around, though. “Yes, Sir!” he carols, holding onto the armrests for dear life. “Fuck it, Sir. Fuck that hole.”

“Oh, I’m fuckin’ it, all right,” I snarl.

The chair’s top half comes to rest against the shed wall; Rudolph grabs onto a support beam to raise himself up and look back at me. “You can fuck harder, Sir,” he promises. “Get in there with that rape stick, Sir.”

Little turns me on more than a boy complicit in the abuse of his own hole. I seize the kid’s neck and hold it while I savage his rectum, one searing thrust at a time. “A man could do anything to a boy like you back here,” I growl in his ear. He nods, agreeing. “No one would ever know.”

“Yes…Sir.” The words are an effort for him. I tweak his nipples hard, making him cry out. “Right there,” he sobs. “Right there. Right there. Right there. Yes.”

I know I’m hitting the perfect spot. I can feel his little button jamming against my thick cock head. Again and again I stab at it, making him cry out each time. His tiny prostate has probably never been hammered so hard.

“Oh, fuck,” he at last says. He sounds shocked, and looks down at his dick. I thrust down onto the button and hold it, while I feel his ass convulse around my thick meat. Cum shoots out of his dick. One long strand hits the shed wall. Then a second. A third flies lower, onto the beam. Then a fourth, onto the lawn chair. While I hold him still, his body shivers and thrashes as cum continues to fly from the tip. “I’ve never—“

“Shut up, cocksucker,” I growl, as I pin him against the exposed wood. “Daddy’s turn.”

I don’t drop Rudolph back at home until after dusk. By the time I reach my hotel, the sky’s dark and I’m two loads lighter. It’s close to nine-thirty by the time I’ve showered the boy’s scents from my skin and flopped down on my bed. I fire up my phone, intending to catch up on any messages I might’ve missed while I was out pounding.

Sniffies is still open on my phone’s browser. I’ve got a couple of the usual ‘Hi’ messages from anonymous profiles that I can easily disregard. A couple of interesting offers that I might’ve contemplated, if Rudolph hadn’t hit me up. And then, at the top, a message from the wavy-haired fellow from the Fan who’d stood me up earlier. It’s time-stamped from only ten minutes before, while I was washing up.

Hey, says the message. Still looking? Lost track of time when my mom called.

I mean, there’s not even an apology attached. Apparently I’m supposed to swallow whole the belief that after he told me he’d be arriving in fifteen minutes, his mother called, and that he’d then engaged in conversation with her for six and a half hours. And that during those six and a half hours—particularly during the crucial first ninety minutes or so in which I was stomping around my hotel room, certain I was being stood up—he wasn’t able to to use his phone or any other device to send me a quick message to say Hey, I’m being delayed, but I’m still intending to be there when I can. Although over the course of an hour he was able to, you know, check out my profile on three other apps.

Right. No, I’m not buying it. Once again I feel that tide of anger rising.

But you know what? It’s not worth it. I roll my eyes, shake my head, and block the guy on Sniffies. I block him on Scruff. I block him on Grindr. And finally, I block him on BBRT. I don’t need to engage with that kind of gaslighting. And besides, my loads had found a better home.