A Farewell to the Decorator

One of the things I’ve been noticing, this last busy week in the state where I’ve lived for the past twenty-five years, is how all my friends and casual acquaintances have started to crawl out of the woodwork, demanding I drop everything to accommodate them. The friends who’ve been aware of the fact I’ve been on my own without my family and not a whole lot of social activities, these last nine months, apparently suddenly think to themselves, Oh yeah, he’s leaving or something, isn’t he? So they call me up on the spur of the moment and we have conversations like the following:

ME: Hello?
THEM: Hi! I know you’re moving this week so I figured you probably weren’t doing anything right now and might want to go out to an impromptu lunch with me.
ME: It’s two-thirty.
THEM: That’s why I said impromptu.
ME: I ate lunch two hours ago. And I’m actually extremely busy, packing.
THEM: It’d be a shame if I didn’t get to have lunch with you before you go.
ME: Well, you could’ve asked me anytime since last October, if you’d really wanted to see me. But I can’t this week, sorry. [Silence.] Hello?
THEM: I was just trying to do you a favor.

People want to do me strange favors, this week. Last weekend I cleaned out the garage—the big, messy project I’ve been dreading since I learned we were moving. I assembled a bunch of garden tools and accessories in good shape that I didn’t particularly want to cart with us, but which I also didn’t want to throw away. Then I wrote a mass email to friends asking if anybody wanted any of the stuff.

One of my friends said he’d be happy to take a bunch of the stuff off my hands. He’d be over Monday in his truck, he told me, to pick the stuff up. Monday came and went, and he put it off until Tuesday. But Tuesday was too wet, and Wednesday too cold, and on Thursday he was just too tired. Friday and Saturday passed without his visit. Sunday, however, was both warm and sunny. I texted the guy and pointed out how good the weather was, and asked when I could expect him.

I’m out of town for the long weekend. Hey, I’ve got an idea, he texted back. Why not just take it to my place and leave it in the back yard?


Ah, yes. That’s exactly what I wanted to do, with only four days until the movers arrived. Drive forty miles all the way across the metropolitan area to deliver three hundred dollars’ worth of garden implements that I was giving to him, gratis. Because for some crazy reason I thought for a moment there that I was the one doing him the favor. Blind, I was. Blind.

It’s weird, though, the thoughtless little impositions people want to have on my time when I haven’t heard from them for months and months. I say thoughtless not because they’re being deliberately rude, but merely because they don’t realize exactly how hectic everything has been for me this month as I try to clean out the trash I don’t intend to move to the east coast, and ready everything for the movers. They want a last chance to see me. I get that. But at this point it’s not really all that feasible.
Unless they’re a fuckbuddy, of course. And of all my regular fuckbuddies, no one has been taken advantage of these last few weeks like my friend, The Decorator.

By rights I should’ve dedicated a good six or seven entries to The Decorator in the last month. Ever since he paid attention to my Manhunt profile warning the locals of my impending departure, he’s been texting and emailing me weekly, and sometimes two or three times a week, to visit him. And since he contacts me later in the evening, after I’ve done all my chores and am lying exhausted on my bed, I’ve got no obstacles in my way save for my aching muscles—which always feel curiously energized when I hear from him.

One night he invited me over on what had been the hottest evening of the year to date, and we fucked on his multi-hundred-count sheets until they were drenched with dark ovals of sweat and cum. His air conditioning was attempting to cool down the place, but the friction of our bodies was outpacing it in producing heat. By the end of the third fuck, his face was a mottled red and he wheezed like he’d been running a marathon, but he still clung to me, mouth to mouth, as if my kisses and my breath into his lungs were the only things keeping him alive. I had sweat making my head look like an entry in a particularly insane conceptual hair show. The droplets stung my eyes so badly that by that third fuck, which he spent riding me, I couldn’t keep them open. By the time I stumbled out into the night air and back to my car, I felt as if I’d been trapped in a crowded New York City subway car on a summer’s day during a power outage.

He messaged me the next night, which was equally as hot. Repeat performance? he wanted to know.
I need some oral service tonight, if you’re up for it, I texted back. Slow and sloppy.


He met me at the front door of his house and led me through the immaculate dining room and back into the kitchen, which looked like a spread (for all I know, it could have been) from Architectural Digest. There wasn’t a crumb in sight; not a cereal box, or olive jar top lying forgotten on the counter, or anything more personal than a wire bowl of perfectly ripe and round oranges in the center of the granite counter. We kissed for a few moments beneath the dimmed canister lighting from the ceiling. “I thought we’d go downstairs where it’s cooler tonight,” he said. Holding my index and middle fingers like a little boy might with his father, he led me down the steps into his cellar.

I say cellar because I was hoping for something that was anything less than perfection—an uneven concrete floor, an old spindly cabinet from a previous owner, anything. But no, it was a symphony of leather sofas and hardwood flooring and faux-Italianate walls and a ginormous HDTV hanging from the ceiling. He pushed me down onto the sofa and straddled me, kissing me with just as much fervor as the night previous. When I was relaxed, and sighing softly at his gentle kisses, he pulled down my shorts and spent a good twenty minutes on his hands and knees between my legs, sweetly sucking my knob while I lay there with my hands over my head, enjoying.

Eventually he climbed atop me and rode me like he had the night before, digging his heels into the leather cushions and rising and falling with expert control. The entire time we fucked, he stared into my eyes through the slits of his lids. Sometimes he would reach out and cup my chin in his hand, and cock his head. Almost as if he was trying to remember the moment, I thought to myself at the time. Maybe he was.

After he captured a load from me in that position, I flipped him onto his knees and fucked him roughly from behind. The second fuck was longer, and harder, and I had enough time to look around the enviably perfect basement for something, anything, that didn’t make the place look like it had belonged in the pages of the Horchow Collection catalog. Finally I found it, tucked beneath some of glossy magazines fanned out in the middle of the coffee table: a dog-eared copy of a Ratchet and Clank video game guide. Whew. He was human, after all.

Over the last month we’ve fucked in his basement, in his bedroom, in the spare bedroom, and once on the living room sofa, but every single time there’s been one common thing: I’ve always seen the pair of wooden clothespins he loves, lying casually nearby. And every time, at some point in the evening, I applied them to his nipples. Not during the first fuck. That one was all mine. Usually when I’d go in him for a second time and feel my cum swirl around my dick and dribble down the shaft, I’d clamp them down onto his eraser-stub nipples.

I applied them differently on each; for one nipple, I’d pull it out, squeeze on the clothespin, and let the larger of the two holes close around the pink and sensitive flesh. The other I’d apply horizontally, so that the jaws pinched it directly. The sensations were different for each pin—one was pure sensation, while the other would twist and pull with gravity as it extended the nipple down and out. While I’d fuck, I’d manipulate the pins with greater and lesser intensity, squeezing them harder, releasing them slightly. I’d rub the tips of the flaming red nipples with my fingertips; he could feel almost every ridge and whorl of the prints upon them.

He’d always shoot when I’d treat his nipples roughly. Sometimes he wouldn’t even touch himself, or need me to stroke him to climax while I pounded him. He’d just shoot, spurting rope after rope of his semen over the bedsheets or the pillows or the throw he’d tossed over the leather cushions; every thrust I’d made into his hole would force out another large glob of the stuff, and elicit a groan from deep inside his convulsing chest.

I can’t say I got to know The Decorator very well as a person—that is, we didn’t chit-chat. I didn’t learn about his life or his family or his coming-out. What I knew about him, I learned from his love-making.

I knew him to be sweet, and gentle, and romantic at heart. I learned that he knew what he liked, and made it clear what he needed, even without words. I knew that he could be very giving and considerate, and that he loved when I’d hold him close after lovemaking, and let him fall asleep in my arms.

That’s all I needed, really, to know him. The guy has a beautiful home, but even without talking, I can tell the man who arranged and decorated it is even more beautiful inside.