Little Flaws

One of the things to which I’m still unused, after living for six weeks in my new home, is crossing the state line on a regular basis. But I live in a place in which, if I turn the wrong way in the middle of the night during a groggy pee run to my bathroom, I can accidentally find myself stepping from Connecticut to New York without knowing it. I’m just not accustomed to it. In Michigan and in Virginia, or even in my very distant childhood homes in Georgia and North Carolina, we had to drive for a good hour or more to reach a border. It was an accomplishment—not something that sometime happened accidentally when trying to find that little Mexican restaurant on that street by the river.

(Admittedly, in Detroit, it was possible to travel ten minutes south and head into an entirely different country, which is even more of an accomplishment. But I rarely did it because the border crossings made me stressed.)

It’s a lot easier to head for the Home Depot over the border than it is to the one closest in the state; if we head out to the movies, I have to remember to check times in the Port Chester and White Plains theaters. Likewise, when I’m cruising online I keep forgetting that in addition to the fifty-or-so-mile sprawl I consider to my east, I need to look even a couple of miles over the border to the west as well.

So I was a little surprised, that Sunday morning, to find myself in the hills along the Hudson river, knocking on the door of a ramshackle, but quaint, home in the middle of a mountain town thronged by cyclists from Manhattan, looking for local color and cool canopies of greenery the city couldn’t afford them. When the door open, a shirtless man greeted me and pulled me inside. While his enormous dog sniffed and beat its tail against my thighs, the man pushed me roughly against an old wall stripped down to its original horsehair insulation and kissed me, deeply.

His lips were soft, and warm. His tongue probed deep into my mouth, and I found myself surrendering to him. We hadn’t spoken a word yet. We’d talked enough online, over the course of the previous week. He’d told me all the things he was into, and all the nasty things he wanted to do with me. The guy was a cock-oriented service pig, he told me, but at the same time, very aggressive in his approach.

I was good with that.

I let the guy manhandle me in the middle of his hallway. The entire first floor, as far as I could tell, had been torn down to the studs in preparation for some major renovation. There were entire floorboards missing, so that I could see straight down into the basement. The house had the elegant bones and charm to spare of a Depression-era construction, but seemed a little difficult to maneuver around.

My new buddy finally pulled away from our long and passionate kiss. He was a good looking fellow—older than I, goateed, gray-haired, spectacled. The sort of man who could go very easily from a sharp suit to a pair of jeans and a tank top. “You’re really handsome,” I remarked.

He met my gaze square on, and in a dreamy, romantic sort of voice, said, “You’ve got a lazy eyelid.”
The remark lifted me right out of whatever sexual reverie I might’ve fallen. It’s true; one of my eyelids hangs ever so slightly lower than the other, something of which I’ve been particularly conscious since one of my optometrists asked me, “Have you suffered a stroke?” NO I HAVEN’T. Jeez. It’s not like I walk around with one lid wide open and the lashes of the other scraping. It’s a difference of a fucking millimeter.

“Really?” I asked, not all that happy. “That’s what you’re leading with?”

He made some kind of lame apology and laughed it off, to the point at which my irritation at being made so self-conscious faded a little. I followed him upstairs, where we stripped down in the steamy bedroom and started to make out some more. The dog, in the meantime, followed; he hopped up on the king-sized bed. Once it was obvious he wasn’t planning to get down, we let him recline and snooze at its foot.

“You’re a really good kisser,” I said, after a while.

He stared squarely over my eyes. I thought he was going to thank me. “You know,” he said at last, “right before you came over, I had one of those crazy eyebrow hairs that was super-long, too. I trimmed it.”

“Fuck,” I said aloud, sitting up and grabbing for my left eyebrow. I started to scoot off the bed.

“I’m not saying you have a crazy eyebrow hair,” he protested, too mildly.

Yet somehow I knew he was. By then I’d reached the guy’s dresser mirror. I didn’t have a crazy long eyebrow hair. I did, however, have a single eyebrow hair that sometime while we’d been grappling against the wall, had become pointed slightly down instead of to the left. That was it. “You’re driving me nuts,” I told the guy. “Any more physical defects you want to comment on? Get ‘em out of the way, maybe, all at once? Thinning spot? Pasty white skin? ”

He thought I was joking, and laughed. “I didn’t say they were bad things.”

Whatever.

Maybe I was just grumpy from having tiny flaws spoken aloud (you didn’t see me saying anything about his big belly, after all), but I didn’t have much fun for the rest of the morning. I’d gone in expecting a lot of cock-oriented service—his speciality, supposedly—and didn’t get a damned thing. He didn’t suck my cock. He didn’t eat my hole or work on my balls. We made out. I ate his butt and stuck my dick insider, and then was treated to him telling me not to shoot (“Why trade all this pleasure for five seconds of orgasm?”) . . . until he shot without warning me, and then hopped off. “Sorry, dude, but once I’ve shot, I’m done,” he apologized.

Yeah, I was decidedly grumpy.

I was lying face down on the mattress, checking my phone, when I felt a tongue between my butt cheeks. I relaxed a little as it licked with determination, enjoying the sensation of its warmth against my hole. Then, with a start, I realized it was the dog.

What’s it say about an encounter when I had more pleasure from the guy’s mutt?