Our Secret

I’ve known something is up. He’s asked to see me four times in the last month—three times during Thanksgiving week. Meet me, he texted on Monday. Then, on Tuesday, Free tonight?

I had to put him off both times.

Dude, I’ve gotta see that dick again, he messaged on Thanksgiving day itself. Can you get away today?

It’s Thanksgiving, I texted him back. I’m surrounded by people.

Sneak out late tonight, lol.

I relented. Hit me up Friday, I told him. I’m not planning on doing any shopping.

Yesssss, he sent back. Let the wives do the shopping while the husbands do their thing.

Over the course of the last year, The Landscaper has contacted me roughly once a month. His interest in mansex seems to ebb and flow over a three-and-a-half-week cycle. He’ll hit me up over a weekend, typically, and we’ll set a date to connect sometime during that week. We’ll meet in a local parking lot somewhere, and I’ll climb into his van. Then I’ll masturbate for him. My pants never descend below my ankles, my shoes rarely come off, my shirt stays on. He’s still under the illusion that I’m one-hundred-percent straight trade that can be bought with his cash.

I don’t disabuse him of the notion. I say precious little to him, in fact, and let him construct his own fantasies around me. When we meet, I wear my most beat-up athletic shoes, my most faded Levis, a baseball cap. I let him watch me jack. I pretend not to notice when he laps at my nuts as I get closer to orgasm. But I don’t do any of that so-called gay shit with him. Nuh-uh. No way, dude.

Our meetings top out at a half hour at most. When we’re done, he’s satisfied for a while. I might get a rushed thanks later that day or the next, but then it’ll be radio silence. I release the internal sexual pressure for him for the better part of a month. Then the steam and the fantasy builds up and he’s texting me again for a meeting.

But three times during Thanksgiving week? Unheard of, from him. Particularly since we’d just met for a session two weeks before.

So we’re in his van after lunch, Friday, parked in a strip mall lot. It’s chilly outside, but he’s blasted the heaters until I arrived, so that the residual warmth lingers. I unbutton the plaid jacket I’m wearing, sit on it. Spread my legs. Kind of rest my hand on my crotch. I don’t like to seem too eager to get going. He likes to think he’s talking me into it. “How you been? You good?” he asks, in that verbless way men do when they’re trying to be bluff and butch with each other.

I nod. Look at him. Look away. He gets more excited when he thinks I don’t entirely want to be there.

Usually at this point he says something sexual. Asks how my big dick has been doing. Asks if I’ve fucked any pussy lately. This time, though, he just blurts out, “You ever . . . talk to a guy?”

The question catches me off-guard, a little. We don’t usually go off-script like this. “I talk to guys all the time,” I say.

“I mean . . . would you ever consider just talking to me a little?”

I look him in the eyes. There’s hope there. He’s more nervous than usual. I’m wondering what’s up. “What about,” I say. The words come out flat, incurious.

“Stuff.”

“Stuff like . . . ?”

“Close your eyes,” he says. I look at him, eyes wide open. “Please? It’ll be easier to talk if your eyes are shut. I won’t do anything weird. I promise.”

I hesitate, then shut my eyes. “Stuff like what,” I want to know.

“Do you kiss your wife?” he asks.

I’m sitting there with my back against the driver’s seat, knees up, forearms resting there. I feel him shift to a spot beside me. “Sure,” I say.

“She’s a hot little bitch? Your wife?” The Landscaper has a vision of my home life in his head that he’s generated out of my wedding band and precious little input from me. I let him have his fantasy. “You make out with her?”

“Sometimes, yeah.” I shrug.

He clears his throat. “You ever made out with a guy?”

“No.” I try not to sound too scornful.

“You like to kiss though?”

“Yeah, sure.” I want to open my eyes and see what he’s doing, how he’s reacting. This corner of the parking lot is quiet, though, and the van is cooling. I’m comfortable where I am. I like the sensation I’m getting up and down my left side, where he sits, as if his proximity is setting the nerves to tingling. So I keep my eyes shut. “It’s cool to make out during a hot fuck. Feels good.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. He pauses for a moment. “My wife says I was a lousy kisser when I met her. She says she taught me everything.” I hear him laugh. “Funny that I didn’t get any complaints before I knew her though.” I don’t say anything. I don’t really know where this is going. “But you never kissed a guy before?”

“Fuck no.”

“Me neither,” he says. “I mean, my dad or an uncle or something, but not. . . .”

I believe him. There’s a note in his voice, though, that clues me in. “Why are you asking me this,” I growl. But I keep my eyes closed.

“You don’t gotta say yes,” he says, shifting his weight beside me. I can feel his sweatshirt against the back of my arm. “I thought maybe . . . .”

There’s such a long silence that it grows awkward. I’m not going to help him out by finishing that sentence, though. It’s a long moment before he continues. “If you thought about your hot wife, or thought about my wife, if you’d let me. . . . You can pretend. . . .”

I sit there motionless. Maybe he thinks I’m considering it. Maybe he thinks I’m stunned. Either way, I’m not too surprised when I feel his warm breath on my skin, and the lightest of touches on my neck. It’s a butterfly of a kiss, the merest graze. In fact, for a moment I’m not even entirely sure it really happened.

Only I am. There’s another light touch, a little higher. Then I feel his lips and breath against my jawline. I want to sink into it. I want to connect to him eagerly, to let our mouths wander where they will. But instead, I turn my head so that my mouth is facing away from him, forcing him to breathe a trail to my ear.”I bet she’s real sexy in bed,” he whispers. “You thinking about her? Thinking about her kissing you?”

Then I feel his nose, his cheek, against my beard. He’s resting his face there. I feel one of his hands between my thighs, where he’s balancing himself. It’s trembling hard. He’s shaking like a leaf. This is the closest we’ve ever been to each other. He might have his own landscaping company, might cultivate a Mike Rowe kind of image, but he smells expensive. Groomed. “Dude,” I say, protesting weakly. “I can’t. . . .”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says. I’m surprised that he’s the one reassuring me. “Nothing freaky’s going to happen.”

Nothing freaky does. By my usual sexual adventuring standards, what he does for the next couple of minutes is damned tame. He pushes down my leg so that he can straddle it. I keep my face turned away from his, but I let his lips travel up and down along the length of my jaw, from one side to another. He plants kiss after delicate kiss along the bone. They’re sweet kisses. Surprisingly gentle. Surprisingly soft. For a couple of minutes I simply enjoy the pleasure of him touching me with his warm lips, the sensation of them lingering on my skin, the shiver he elicits as his nostrils breathe in and out and create goosebumps. I let him maneuver my head back and forth. I let him touch my own lips with his thumb.

The ball of that digit rests there for a moment. If I wanted, I could lick out and taste its saltiness.

By my standards, it’s nothing. By his . . . it’s a stretch that means everything, then a whole mile more.

“You’re hard?” he asks. I feel him poke with a fingertip at the bulge in my denim.

After a moment, I shrug. Yeah. I’m rock hard.

He moves off me. I open my eyes, look at him. His own jeans are practically tenting. “Show me?” he suggests.

I avoid looking at him as I shuck down the denim, pull down the shorts. I’m sticky and drooling, though. I can’t hide that excitement. I wrap my hand around my meat and beat at it.

“Wasn’t so bad, was it,” he says to me as he watches me stroke. “Letting a dude kiss you. I mean, it wasn't real kisses, not really.”

I say nothing. I beat harder. I’m close to shooting.

“I liked it,” he breathes. “My first time, seriously. Fuck, that dick is amazing, dude. That’s a porn star dick. You should be in porn. You don’t know how amazing that dick is.”

I shrug like I don’t care. But I know.

“You gonna cum for me?” he asks. I can hear the need in his voice.

Yeah. I am gonna cum. It oozes out of the slit and down my dick’s underside, cascades over my clenched fingers, drips from the knuckles to the floor. It’s a fat gush of fluid, a flood of sperm that baptizes his van’s carpet.

“Fuck,” he whispers as I shake and shudder. “Fuuuuuck. So fucking hot. Looks like you needed that, buddy.”

I sit there for a minute, letting my head clear. Then I shake the cum from my hand. It flops onto the carpet. I wipe the rest on my jeans. “Shit,” I say. “I’d better go.”

“Can I do that again?” he already wants to know. “Next time? Can I do it again?” When I don’t answer, and yank up my jeans around my hips, he hastens to assure me, “I won’t tell anyone. It’s our secret, dude. Nobody’s got to know.”

“I don’t know,” I say. But I do. Yeah. I’ll be letting him plant those little-boy butterfly kisses on me again.

I think he knows it too. He watches as I gather my jacket, check for my keys and wallet and phone, my cash. “It’s okay. I’ll text you soon buddy,” he says. When he speaks the words, it’s not in the intimate, soft voice he’s been using for the previous few minutes. It’s not in his sex voice, that voice of need and yearning and intimacy. It’s in the bluff, masculine, hearty way that dudes speak to dudes. Impersonal. Clipped. The voice men use between themselves when they know someone might overhear. Then, in a lower voice, closer to the one he’d been using during our time together, he adds, “If you want.”

I think he’s almost expecting me to disappoint him. I turn in his direction after I’ve climbed between the seats into the front, my knee deep in the passenger-side cushion as I look at him over the headrest.

“When?” I ask.

It only takes one word to make his face light up.

His voice is hoarse with surprise. “Soon,” he promises.

There’s something in the way he says the word that connects with me. I’ve given him a lifeline to cling onto.

For the next three and a half weeks, anyway.