For Him

For him.

Our bodies, twisted, serpentine, writhing across the sheets. A trail of cotton marks left behind, stretched and distressed from the weight of us together. My arms around his chest, grasping him from behind. His hands at the back of my head, as he sightlessly reaches up and around, armpits exposed and elbows pointing at the ceiling. Our sweat glues us, back to chest, shoulders to shoulders, hip to groin. My mouth on his. Our tongues twined together, the roots of two water-hungry trees, permanent and joined.

For him.

Connected. Flesh to flesh. Hardness to softness—hammer meeting heat. Together we’re creating sparks that seem to light up the pitch dark room. With every thrust, he cries out. Grasps at me. Pulls me in more deeply, craving more. Cum from his ass joins the sweat, adhering us more tightly. My pubes are soaked. The hair on his ass is matted and wet.

We shift. I rest on my back. His ass rises. He’s lying atop me now, still joined ass to cock, legs spread wide, hole open, lips swollen and puffy. He’ll sting for hours after this fuck, and think of me. My hands rappel down his ribcage. Fingertips tease his nipples. Nails dig into his legs. Every sensation makes him call out, howl to some invisible, personal moon in the bedroom skies. My fingers circle his meat, lightly, so lightly. He thrusts up and through the loose circle I make, cock angry, as swollen as mine.

He hates the teasing. My hand closes, grips him. Like a madman he thrusts, buckling and taking my dick along for the ride. This is for him, all for him, and I let him know as I whisper the words into his ear. I doubt he hears, doubt he can distinguish one sensation from another—word from touch, sound from thrust, or scent from blinding flash of pain and pleasure.

I whisper that I love him. Hot as lava, the eruption that soon follows. Off the Richter scale is the ferocious quaking of the floorboards. He seizes, and strains. He’s not breathing—he’s heaving, and huffing, and rasping for air. His eyes are open and sightless. Twin craters form where he digs in his heels, vast and bottomless.

I cannot tell where my self ends and his begins, but if I could be any deeper inside at this moment, I would.

I hear him telling me he loves me. It’s the last sound I hear for some time. I get my wish, and seem to grow an extra inch in size. I cement our reunion a second time, hearing nothing more than the rush of blood in my ears, feeling nothing more than pulse, and heartbeat, and the warm blanket of him covering me, surrounding me.

For him, I said it was. But for me, as well.

And the winner is. . . .

I had over 40 entries, both by comments on my contest post, and via email, for the spunked-up pair of shorts I was giving away in honor of passing four hundred blog followers. You guys have no shame.

And I love it.

And the winner of this spectacular pair of crusty briefs is . . . Dogstar!

Mr. Dogstar, contact me with your mailing information (my direct email's on the sidebar) so that I can get the winning prize to you as quickly as possible. And if we don't hear from Dogstar by Friday, we'll have another drawing until someone claims the darned things.

Be thinking of contests I might have to celebrate 500 followers. That should be something really special, right?

For Me

I leave the door open for Spencer these days. He’ll park his car, sit for a moment on the dark street in his car with the door ajar to give him enough light to wrap the earbuds around his iPod, and then he’ll shuffle up the driveway and through the side door into the house. Once inside, he’ll come find me, whether I’m in the den watching television, or reading a book on my bed, or cleaning up the kitchen.

The day I arrive back from my new year’s weekend trip, he doesn’t have to come find me. I’m waiting for him.

The landing is dark inside the side door when he steps indoors, unaware how close I am. From the shadows further down the stairs I watch his silhouette as he leans against the wall and kicks off his leather boots. His hands grab to remove the oversized wool cap he wears in chilly weather. He shakes his head to clear his ears of the cold.

I make myself known by shifting my weight. The stairs creaked a little; he whips around to see me against the darkness of my basement, hands at my side, staring at him. “Oh fuck,” he pants, and then lets out half a laugh. “You scared the shit out of me.”

I don’t really care. I take two steps up and close the distance between us. My right hand grips the back of his head, pulling him into a rough kiss. He melts immediately. His own ice-touched fingers rest weakly on my hips; I can feel the aching cold of them through my T-shirt. His chest, though, is warm where my left hand travels over it, beneath his sweater, shirt, and undershirt.

When I tweak his nipple, he groans involuntarily and slumps backward. His body hits the door with a thud, still glued to mine. His lips part to admit mine and his tongue helplessly succumbs to my probing. His head tilts back. When I withdraw slightly, his body protests. His hands grip me hard, pulling me back in, and then scramble to hold the sides of my face so tightly I feel as if I’m being squeezed for my juice. He’s hungry for me; he can’t have enough of me, or have me quickly enough.

He lets me know how aroused he is by thrusting his hard dick against my hip. Spencer never wears underwear. I can feel his heat and hardness through a single layer of denim. He’s gone from zero to eight inches in seconds flat; I can hear his heart pounding hard and fast beneath his skin.

I pull away and, in the dim landing’s light, look at him. His hands are still fixed to my cheek. My right hand chips his chin. “Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” he says back.

I’ve left the house dark. Hand in hand, I guide him through the familiar shades of black and slantwise shadows cast by the street lamps near the end of the block. When we reach the bedroom upstairs, he wants to kiss some more. His mouth quests for mine, hungry and needy, but I refuse to give him what he wants. Instead, I turn him around and wrap my arms tightly around him, gripping him so tightly he almost loses his breath.

My hands unbutton his jeans, and shuck them to the floor. He tries to step out of them, but I’m too greedy, too impatient; I shove him roughly down on the bed. His feet wriggle helplessly in the mess of denim surrounding them. He struggles to gain his balance, to adjust himself, but I’m already positioning him as I want him—butt high, knees spread, face down in the sheets. His three layers of shirts bunch in a wreath around his shoulders when I haul his ass into the air. He gasps the moment my tongue dives into the hole.

This is no lovemaking. It’s rimming at its most primal, its most necessary. I eat and bite at his hole like a hungry dog at his steak dinner, slopping it up and not caring if he likes it or not. I’m so riled, so in need of what he’s there to give me, that his pleasure is incidental. His loud cries could be of pain, but somehow I don’t think they are. They’re music to my ears, regardless.

I drool onto my dick and let the spit slick up the shaft. Then I’m in, pushing past what scant resistance he has to offer and deep into the depths, where it’s hot as a furnace and wet as a warm river. My dick swells. I can tell it’s releasing precum, just from the feel of it, and the way in which it seems twice as slippery after. I’ve not fucked for a week. I’ve been saving up for him, and this is where I intend to be.

Ordinarily I pride myself on my control when I fuck. I like to switch it up, vary the rhythms, keep the bottom guessing what will come next. Not today. Not now. My hips and my dick are in collusion against me. They have their own rough agenda and no intentions to hold back from it. I feel as if someone else is pushing my shaft in and out of his hole at top speed, slamming into him so hard that the bed is leaping from its feet and scudding back down onto the hardwood floor. He’s whimpering now, or crying—it’s difficult to tell which.

And to be honest, I don’t much care.

“This one’s for me,” I tell him. My voice issues deep from within my chest, husky, low, and full of command. “So just shut up and fucking take it.”

I’m not going to last, I know. I’ve been too long without, and my dick is already buzzing with the impending sensations of orgasm. My thumbs hook beneath the hems of his shirts and sweater, as my fingers reach beneath the necks; I’ve created a yoke that lets me pull and push his body onto my cock as I need. And I do need it, more and more urgently.

“Rape me,” he pleads, tears in his voice. “Fucking rape my hole. Please.”

When my orgasm arrives, it hits like a speeding train. I’ve known it was coming, and yet the sheer intensity of it is a shock that seems to blur and bleach my vision. My dick spews over and over again into him, filling him with seed that he begs for with every blast. I realize I haven’t been breathing. Exhaling is painful, and inhaling even more so in the moments that follow; every nerve ending inside me seems to jangle at the sensation of the cool bedroom air filling my lungs.

Still deep inside him, I pause. My fingers tickled around his hole where my dick meets his ass, where the two of us are one and inseparable, for now.

That one was for me.

The next one was for him.

Sunday Morning Questions: The Spencer Edition

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The Rest Stop at Dusk

I had an hour to go on the road, back to the home I hadn’t seen all weekend. It was dusk at the rest area, and the cars were gathering. I stuck my hands deep into my pockets not so much to hide the erection growing there as to adjust it so that it would be more visible. Then I stepped out of the car and walked past the parked vehicles and the staring eyes within them.

My visiting family was supposed to fly back home on the first day of the year. On new year’s eve, however, I discovered that instead of merely driving to the airport the next morning, I’d be making a twelve-hour trip to drive the family all the way to the east coast, then return again on my own. The trip out was miserable. The journey back, however, didn’t wear me down as much as I thought I would. So when I passed the rest area where occasionally I’ve been known to spread a little seed, I decided to stop.

At this time of day, during the rush hour home and after dark, almost every car held a single man in the driver’s seat. Some fiddled with their phones. Some pretended to be listening to their stereos. A few made no pretense why they were there. Their meaty hands rubbed over the bulges in their slacks as they cocked their heads and stared at me through the windshields. A couple I found unattractive; I avoided their glances as I passed. One kid caught my eye, though—a young guy with a pencil-thin mustache whose black knitted wool hat made his head look like a bullet. He leaned forward onto the steering wheel of his old Mustang to stare at me as I walked by. I held his glance for as long as was comfortable before I passed by his car and strolled up the sidewalk to the restroom.

The restroom urinals are right inside the men’s room door at this particular location, and the door’s always propped open. Anyone could poke a head around the corner from the waiting room and spy men peeing, if they really cared to. The outer doors protest loudly when they’re pulled open, however, and at this time of day there was very little foot traffic inside. The only person occupying the entire restroom was an older guy examining himself in the mirrors over the sinks, further into the washroom’s interior.

He was in his late fifties or early sixties, this guy, with a long braid of a dirty silver color hanging from beneath a distressed suede hat. His shirt was faded denim. That of his jeans was even more faded and worn. The boots he wore were pointy and so beaten that it was impossible to tell what color they once had been. He looked a little like Willie Nelson, in fact, though not as lean or likely to ask my assistance for FarmAid. He looked at me in the mirror, measuring me.

I stood at the innermost of the urinals and unzipped. It only took a few seconds for Willie Nelson to join me. He stood at the urinal next to mine, the tip of his booted foot nearly touching my black Converse. I didn’t even bother to pretend I was trying to pee. There was no need. Willie unzipped and pulled out a dick that made my eyes boggle. Soft, it had to be a good seven inches, and thicker than mine is hard; as it began to stiffen, I knew I was in for one of those rare massive dick sightings.

The thing was about ten inches when it finally stopped swelling and growing. He pulled back the hood from his monster and pointed it at me, giving me a broad, toothy grin. I nodded back, displaying my meat, as my eyes detected traces of yellow in his mustache and beard.

The outer doors swung. Willie and I took our places in front of the urinals, pushing our hips close to thrust our hard-ons into the shadows. Again, there was no need. The guy who joined us was the kid from the car, the one who’d stared at me on my trip in. He was wearing the Michigan white boy’s equivalent of hip-hop clothing—baggy pants with the waist hanging at the base of the ass, puffy winter coat, new sneakers with blinding white laces.

And he stared at me like he wanted to eat me alive.

Willie Nelson stepped back and displayed his dick again. He wasn’t exactly an attractive guy, but you don’t see dicks like his all that often. The kid’s eyes flicked from his massive erection to mine, and back again. He took a place next to Willie, his thumbs hooked into his pants pockets, the tips of his fingers rubbing the hard bulge they shrouded.

“You ever put out in a rig before?” Willie Nelson asked me. His voice was gruff. When he exhaled the words, he smelled of cigarettes and loneliness.

I nodded. I’d been fucked in a truck in a rest area the day I got my driver’s license.

“I bet you’d look real pretty in mine,” he said. The kid reached out and tried to wrap his right hand around the trucker’s dick. The fingers barely touched the base of his palm. His other hand reached out for mine and closed around it. His skin was ice cold. I reached out and cupped the kid’s crotch. I could feel his dick just beneath the denim of his baggy jeans, hard as metal and warm to the touch.

The trucker thrust his hand down the back of my jeans. His fingers snaked down my crack, probing for my hole. I was still clean from the morning’s shower; I let him do what he wanted. “Pretty little pink butthole on you, I bet. You want that, boy? You want this monster up in there?”

It was mentally tempting. And at my age, I don’t get called ‘boy’ very often. But it’s been too long since I was fucked, and I wasn’t going to be able to climb back on that bicycle with the trucker’s length and girth.

So I said nothing. I didn’t really need to. The trucker was stroking himself faster and faster, talking dirty to get himself off. “Legs spread, presenting that ass to me . . . shit. I bet you know what the fuck you’re doing, too. You know how to get a man like me off, huh?” The kid’s eyes glittered as they darted from me to the trucker. He ground his dick against my hand, but made no move to haul it out. “Yeah, sluttin’ your hole out to me, you fuckin’ whore, taking it like a bitch while I seed your little pucker, boy. You like that? You want that?”

The trucker used his free hand to squeeze his nipples through his shirt while he jacked himself rapidly, and then he jammed it back down my pants to connect with my hole again. My own dick was hard and wet at the tip, where a bead of precum had formed and attached itself to the kid’s wrist. The shiny filament connecting us glistened in the florescent light. The trucker’s head tilted back as he stared sightlessly at the ceiling. His finger shoved inside me slightly, but not very far. He grunted, and bucked.

When his load hit the back of the urinal, it did so with a hollow metallic collision, spraying out in one massive gush that immediately began to drip down the porcelain. A much smaller second dribble followed, barely making it out the tip. The pencil-mustached kid stared as if he couldn’t believe his eyes; almost immediately when it was done, he looked me in the eye, gave my dick one final squeeze, and scampered like a frightened bunny. Willie Nelson withdrew his hand from the back of my pants, zipped up looking vaguely embarrassed, and shuffled over to the sink to wash.

And I stuffed my erection down the right leg of my jeans, fastened and collected myself, and walked back to my car. Pair after pair of eyes followed me from the single men in their vehicles, parked in the shadows in the lot. I still felt them coming in my direction as I locked the doors and pulled out my phone.

I tapped out a text message to Spencer. I really need to engage in rambunctious sexual intercourse with you at your earliest opportunity, I wrote him.

You’re back in town? he wrote back immediately. What time? I told him to meet me at my place in ninety minutes.

And then I drove home with an erection that lasted until I saw him.

Notoriety

The very first bareback blog on which I kept an eye didn’t last long. Somewhere between seven and ten years ago I stumbled upon a journal kept by a top in Manhattan who recorded several of his sexual adventures in vivid detail. The guy was a good enough writer. He knew how to set the scene, and had a good notion of how to describe the sex quickly and thoroughly.

I had a couple of beefs with his journal, though. One was that the guy only had sex every few weeks, and therefore his updates were sporadic. The other was that he had a severely overinflated view of his notoriety.

I wish I could remember the name of the blog, but it’s eluding my memory. We’ll call it That Bareback Blog. After only a very few entries, the blogger started to write a number of posts in which he’d step out into public and overhear people talking about his blog, which pleased him so greatly that he’d make posts about it that out-detailed the sexual encounters.

I remember one entry in which the guy was sitting at an outdoor cafe when he overheard two gay men gossiping in hushed whispers about how shocking That Bareback Blog was. “Everyone’s talking about it,” said one guy.

“Oh, I know,” said the other. “Half of the city is worried they’re going to end up on its pages!”

For a while, according to the blog, everywhere its writer would go, there would be little circles of titillated blog readers discussing him. In the gay bars. In the straight bars. In the clubs. In cafes, in bookstores, in the New York Public Library. With every new alleged eavesdropped overhearing, my patience grew a little thinner.

I think I lost my cool completely after reading a post in which the blogger was supposedly listening to two Macy’s clerks discussing his blog outside a dressing room while the author was within, trying on some pants. “Did you read the last entry of That Bareback Blog?” said one clerk to another.

“Oh my god yes,” said the other. “I have always wondered what That Bareback Blogger must look like.”

“I am sure he is a stud of the highest magnitude,” said the first.

“He has to be, with all the ass he gets. I wish it was me he was fucking,” said the second, no doubt with a girlish sigh. "The thought of it sends shivers up my spine!"

There was more conversation about That Bareback Blog, while the blogger stayed inside the dressing room with his ear to the curtain and his heart filled with devilish glee. Then the first clerk wandered off, and That Bareback Blogger stepped out of the dressing room, sans pants, and avec erection. “Now you know what the bareback blogger looks like,” he leered. And of course, instead of clubbing the guy over the head with a mannequin and calling security like any other department store employee might, the clerk murmured something about all his dreams coming true and letting the blogger take him in the dressing room, right then and there. Bow-chicka-bow-wow!

As I said, I kind of stopped reading the blog after that—I don’t think it lasted very much longer, anyway. It was obviously pure fantasy; the guy was trying to turn himself into a figure of public notoriety solely by the repeated insistence that he was being talked about all over the city. I highly, highly doubt that there were well-placed squadrons of gay men whispering in hushed cabals about a blog that was updated infrequently, never had a single comment, and lurked in one of the seediest and most obscure corners of the internet. You can't will yourself to be famous, that way.

Stranger things have happened, but I highly doubted this was one of them. When I started posting my own sex entries to this blog, one of the things I thought to myself was, Oh man, if I ever get like That Bareback Blogger, please just someone shoot me.

Well, gentlemen, get ready your pistols, because I've had my first taste of notoriety.

During the week between Christmas and the new year, I spent a night out on the town at a local gay bar to chug water from a bottle and stare at my favorite shirtless bartender while my friends drank themselves blotto. They guys at my table had been playing Scrabble on someone’s iPad and using their iPhones as tile racks—I KNOW DUDES, IT WAS A WILD AND CRAZY NIGHT—and we’d just finished the game when I noticed a guy watching me from nearby.

He was an attractive fellow in his late forties, short and narrow of frame, with dark eyes and a neatly-clipped beard that made him look somehow European. I was sitting next to a railing on which my arm rested with my bottle of water; when the Scrabble party broke up (I’m sorry, I can’t even pretend it was Dirty Word Scrabble, since the filthiest it got was when someone tried to make PHAGINA out of his rack—okay, it was me), a few of the guys at my table got up and walked away either to get drinks or run to the bathroom after all the triple-word tension. That’s when the bearded guy made his move.

At first he kind of casually leaned against the rail, only a few feet away, pretending to listen to the music while he took deep sips of his whiskey. Some of my friends returned and settled at the table’s far end to debate the merits of starting a new game, leaving me fairly unoccupied at the rail.

The bearded guy turned to me. “Is your name. . . ?”

The ellipsis in that last paragraph wasn’t to elide my identity. His voice actually trailed off in a series of almost audible dots. I raised my eyebrows, grinned a little at the thought he was coming on to me, and said, “You wanna know my name?”

The man was clearly nervous. “It’s just that I thought it might be Rob,” he said. “I thought you might be . . . Rob.” My eyebrows rose in surprise at the sound of the familiar name.

“Why do you think that?” I asked, curious.

“There’s a guy on the internet—he writes this blog,” he man said. He slugged back another mouthful of alcohol for fortification. “His name is Rob.”

I looked askance to see if any of my friends were eavesdropping. “I think I know what blog you mean.”

I thought I’d said the words with the appropriate amount of import, but apparently not. “It’s a blog about sex.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “That’s the one I was thinking about.”

“His name is Rob,” said the man. “He writes the blog.”

“Yes,” I said, enunciating slowly and with the weight of significance. “I think we’re both talking about the same blog, and the same Rob.”

“It’s a bareback blog. About sex.”

“Yeah.” By this time I’d grown a little testy with the guy, who didn’t seem to be picking up on what I was trying to signal to him.

“Bareback sex he has with other guys. In a blog. About bareback sex.”

The guy was loud, but not loud enough, I think, to be heard over the music and general commotion of the bar and the wild-ass Scrabble players. Still, he’d been talking to me long enough by that point that the others were beginning to notice. There were really only so many more theme and variations of ‘bareback sex blog’ that I wanted them to overhear. I shot up and walked around to the railing’s other side, where I could talk more privately with the guy. “That’s me,” I told him in his ear.

He nodded, then showed his utter incomprehension by saying, “This guy Rob, I followed a link from his bareback sex blog to one of his profiles, then I found his profile on Manhunt. He looks like you.” Up close, I could tell that he was way more inebriated than I’d first thought.

As I've admitted before, I don’t have locked photos on my Manhunt profile—I have a mixture of face and dick photos there because I don’t really have any compelling or prudish reasons not to let the two mix. I’ve had local guys recognize me in public before from Manhunt, and have written about it here. This is the first time, though, that someone was recognizing me as One Of Those Bareback Bloggers. “That’s because it is me,” I told him, talking much as I might to a particularly slow child. “That is my blog. I am the Rob you mean.”

“The bareback sex blogger,” he slurred.

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s you?” Maybe light was beginning to dawn.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“You’re that Rob?”

“I’m that Rob.”

For a moment I thought I’d finally gotten through to him. Then he peered at me blearily and repeated, “Because this Rob guy, he keeps a bareback blog. On the internet.”

It was then that the guy with whom my bearded friend had come into the bar arrived to retrieve him. I clapped the guy on the back and wished him well, then slunk back to my seat. “Who was that?” asked my friend Matt.

“Oh, just some guy,” I lied.

“Was he coming on to you?”

Curious question, that. For response I settled on, “Of course.”

“Oh. So he was drunk?”

I turned my back on the wag and pretended not to have heard.

So, my bearded reader, if you’re out there and you remember what happened at the bar, yes, that was me.

And thus ran my first taste of public recognition from a total stranger about my blog. Oh, notoriety. How sweet you seem upon the branches of your tree! And yet how like vinegar you taste when you reach the lips.

Christmas Gifts

“Whore!” The word sounded less like an epithet than a wolf’s howl at the moon, a long, drawn-out baying of outrage and pure emotion. “Whoooooooooore!”

“Shut up and take it like a man,” I growled. My heels banged into the base of the sofa as I lunged forward. He was trying to squirm away, the little bastard.

“Fuck you!” grunted Spencer, glaring at me. “You just think because I’ve never done this before . . . stop slamming your ass on my face, fucker!”

“You like it,” I said with a cocky grin. “Look. I’m going to do it again.”

“Whooooooore!”

On the television, my little Super Mario did another butt-slam onto Toad’s round little head, forcing him into the boiling lava in the middle of the first castle. He was out of lives. And that’s when Spencer threw down the game controller, crossed his arms, and pouted like a little boy.

It was Christmas eve. I had my family flying into town the next afternoon. After some fairly intense weeks in which we’d steeped for long hours in each other’s company, I knew that at the end of the night, when I sent him home, I wouldn’t be seeing him for an entire week.

That’s why I’d asked Spencer to spend all of Christmas eve with me. The entire day—just the two of us. No work, no classes, no talk about the week’s hiatus. Just an enjoyable, giddy day of fun, before we had to part.

Raised as I was by two parents convinced that the world was full of people trying to take advantage of them, I try hard to have an optimistic view of things. Instead of moping about the upcoming absence of each other from our lives for the last week of the year, I wanted to focus on having as much fun as possible when we were together. In a broader sense, I try not to think of this relationship’s natural end—which is inevitable, when eventually I leave behind the state and Spencer in it. I concentrate on the sweetness of it, on my enjoyment of Spencer’s beauty and of his talents both in and out of the bed. I think more about all the positives we both receive from our time together, and try to trust that in the end, when it ends, we’ll part treasuring the time we shared.

It was to this end that I’d tried to make the day as fun as possible. We’d eaten at Spencer’s favorite Indian restaurant for lunch, and returned to my house for an afternoon of watching movies on Netflix. We’d laid in bed together talking. The shyer of my cats, who ordinarily won’t tolerate anyone outside the family, has warmed to him; she curled up on his lap and napped while we reclined with our arms around each other, following her example. Then we’d roused ourselves and spent a happy hour wrapping presents for Spencer’s family, made a dash for Thai takeout, and yelled and cursed at each other while playing games on the Wii.

A happily-spent day, indeed.

“I have something for you,” he told me, after the fifteen seconds of his pretend tantrum had passed. I raised my eyebrows and turned off the console. “Hang on,” he said.

He hopped up and padded into the dining room to retrieve his coat. From deep inside a pocket he retrieved a gift bag printed with a holiday motif. “I kind of got you a present,” he said, suddenly shy.

I grinned. “Oh, we’re doing that, are we?” I asked as I walked past him into the kitchen. From the refrigerator I pulled out a large Christmas stocking. “Good thing I prepared.”

After taking into consideration comments from my readers about good Christmas gifts for the boy, I had the inspiration one desperate shopping day to give Spencer several inexpensive tokens in a holiday stocking, rather than have to search for the one perfect gift that would sum up everything I wanted to say. The inspiration gave me the freedom to include gifts both goofy and useful—a small Moleskine containing maps of Manhattan for Spencer’s trips to New York City falling into the latter category, and the former represented by an enormous and tacky Aslan bookmark (we’d seen The Voyage of the Dawn Treader together a couple of days before). I’d included several cartons of his favorite chewing gum, a couple of movie passes, and a bunch of homemade edibles. Spencer has gluten intolerances that we have to work around when we eat together, so I’d spent the entire afternoon the day before baking holiday treats for him. I’d made brownies from ground almond meal and rice flour, used the rice flour and some spelt for a batch of molasses cookies, and had made some gluten-free candies to boot.

He seemed overwhelmed by all the work I’d done. “Oh my gosh,” was all he could say, over and over, pleased. At least, I’m hoping that it was pleased. He might have been thinking, Baked goods? Jeez, what a cheapass. “Open yours,” he suggested, after trying all the treats in turn.

I obeyed. He’d given me a glass paperweight, blown with a careful series of bubbles in a spiral pattern. It was really lovely. “If the sun catches it, the bubbles light up the room,” he explained, taking it from my fingers and twirling it beneath the lamp. “You’ll see it when it happens. It reminded me of you.”

I blinked several times to keep away the tears that sprung up at this handsome compliment. “You are sweet,” I said at last, over the lump in my throat.

“And you are handsome,” he replied. He sat up then, bringing his face close to mine.

I didn’t hesitate. I reached out and kissed him, holding onto the back of his neck with one hand and pulling him to me. Our lips remained tightly closed together while we fumbled for each other’s clothing. He’d brought a pair of sweats to lounge around in, that day, and I was dressed in sweats of my own; we didn’t even have to look in order to yank down each other’s elastic waistbands. He gasped as my hand probed for his hole. It was warm beneath my fingertips, and pulsed out as I tickled the skin.

Spencer has a talent for making me so rock hard that sometimes I can’t stand it. I wasn’t up to many preliminaries that evening. His hips were grinding against my stick prick with such relentless ferocity that it wasn’t very long before I pulled my mouth away from his and spat in my palm. When I’d slicked the head and the first few inches of my meat, he lifted himself up, then sat slowly down on me. My dick disappeared into the warm, quivering depths of his hole. We both groaned with need.

We fucked on the sofa for long, loud minutes. He came long before I, squirting his load on my chest and face. I scooped off what I could and slapped it onto my dick during one of his upstrokes, so that it made his chute doubly slick. He groaned at that, reveling in the unspoken nastiness of the extra lube. Although he’d just shot, his dick was still almost fully hard as I continued to fuck him. His fingers tweaked and flicked my nipples while his hole clenched and released my meat.

When I came, it was just as loudly. My hands clutched at his narrow waist so hard I later thought I must have left marks. He held my face as I shot in him, holding it motionless so he could watch my expression as the orgasm took over. We paused, and remained still for a moment or two before moving again. Then, with mutual unspoken consent, we slid down into the cushions and held each other for a long, silent time.

“So I’ll see you in a week, I guess,” he said a few minutes later in my back hallway, as he pulled on his coat and shoes.

“It’ll fly by,” I assured him. He looked up at me and smiled, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

Like I said, I try to be an optimist. It was only a week of separation. We’d enjoy each other’s company afterward. We could even see each other during the week for lunch or something, if we wanted. My mouth automatically opened to say something reassuring, but then something happened. Oh shit, I thought to myself. This hurts. This really hurts.

It felt like an icepick through the heart, that moment. I'm not exaggerating. I could feel the chill of it, and the ache of the edges where it had pierced. I wasn’t going to see Spencer for an entire week. He was clearly unhappy. I was on the edge of desolation. And here we were, trying to make the best of it without upsetting the other any more. “Yeah,” he said, swallowing and holding the stocking I’d given him. “Just a week.”

I found I couldn’t summon any words. Anything I might say felt like a bromide, patent insincerity stretched over a falsehood. It wasn’t going to be all right. It was going to be a long, long week. The knowledge hurt.

And I realized in that moment that Christmas eve was going to be nothing compared to how awful it would feel when eventually and finally I must move away and leave him behind. Positive as I try to be, all I could see at that moment when he gave me a last look was the vast chasm between us, already wide and widening by the second.

I sat down on the hallway stairs, stunned by the enormity of my sorrow. There I remained, slumped over and shaken, for several more minutes.

It wasn’t until I was straightening up the house on Christmas morning that I remembered the paperweight. I took it upstairs to my office and put it on the desk, where the weak December sunlight spilled through the blinds and across the wood. The rays caught the bubbles in the glass globe and sent light scattering across the walls, and the ceiling, even out into the hall—little specks of sheer brilliance that shimmered on every surface they touched. They lit up the room indeed.

But in that moment, and in the long week that followed, they didn’t at all remind me of myself.