That Hat

So let me review what he looked like, when he stepped into my living room.

The top of his head came up only to my chin, but what he lacked in height, he made up in bulk. The man was built of sheer muscle. He wore a tight black tank top beneath the puffy cold-weather jacket that he dropped behind him at the front door. It made his carmel-colored skin glow. When he strutted forward, walking slightly bow-legged, he curved his arms as if posing. His shoulders were round and full, his biceps bulging, his forearms ropy and taut. The narrowest part of him was the waist. Above it, his chest bloomed into hard and enviable masculine form; below, I could see how huge his thighs were beneath the ballooning fabric of his gray sweatpants.

He kicked off his chunky sneakers, stuck his thumbs in his elastic waistband, and looked at me. His dark eyes stared into mine, glanced down, then danced back up again.

“‘Sup,” he said in a deep voice, glancing me over.

Seeing someone for the first time is always a little bit of a jolt. It’s the prick of a static shock on the back of a hand, on a cold winter’s day, when your eyes meet his for the first time in person—it’s an electric instant in which the brain compares his appearance to every photo he’s ever sent, to every stat he’s thrown your way, to see if any of it sticks. This guy stuck. He looked exactly like his too-good-to-be-true photos, those sunlit shots taken at some impossibly sunny beach, as if he’d been a model for a swimsuit brand, or a spokesperson for an Atlantis cruise. This was the kind of guy who, during that pinprick of recognition and assessment, makes me feel unworthy of him. My knee-jerk reaction to his kind of beauty is always going to be, for a fleeting instant, that I’m not hot enough, not pretty enough, not muscular enough. Just not enough. I’ve learned to make those thoughts disappear, though. And I did so that night, because he was looking at me on the sofa where I sat with my pants down and my legs spread, and looking at my fingers wrapped around my stiff, beet-red cock, and licking his lips unconsciously, and looking worried.

Worried that I might be the one not into him. I could see it in the furrow of his eyebrows as he worked his lips wordlessly, those Frida Kahlo smudges of thick, square blackness above his staring eyes. “That looks real good,” he told me, as he took a step in. His hand caressed the flat planes of his stomach.

I looked up from my masturbation. I’d squeezed a diamond drop of precum from the tip of my dick, and pointed it in his direction. “Take off your clothes,” I told him. Before he could shuck anything, I added, “Put on a show. Make me want it.”

He nodded. To some internal rhythm, he started swaying back and forth. His hips bounced as he tucked his thumbs into his waistband again and pulled it down, slowly. He wasn’t so smooth as he nearly fell over, removing his legs. Beneath the sweatpants he wore a pair of basketball shorts. He pulled those down, and stood there in a boy-like pair of ankle socks, a pair of designer briefs, that tight, tight tank top. And one other thing that I’ll get to in a moment. But my dick and I, we were too entranced by the guy’s bulging muscles much to care about his sartorial sense, right at that moment. “Turn around,” I told him. He obeyed, shyly rotating so that I could get a look at his perfect, round ass.

“Socks,” I told him.

He stood on a foot at a time so he could hook them off with a curled finger.

“Strip off the rest,” I said. The man shimmied out of it, giving me a look first at his flat abs, then the deep muscles of his chest, outlined with a light coating of fur. He crossed his arms and held his shoulders with his hands, as if cold. He wasn’t cold. He was simply shy. Then, with a self-conscious grin on his full lips, he dropped his briefs to the floor and kicked them. They skimmed the wood to land beneath my entertainment center. His cock was a fat sausage, thicker in the middle than it was at both ends, three-quarters excited, still sheathed in a thick layer of foreskin. It lolled to the side, rising up with excitement.

He took a step forward, and spread his legs. “You like, papi?”

“I like a lot,” I told him. I looked up at his face, and instantly got distracted. Because he wasn’t completely undressed. He still had on that hat.

That hat. How can I describe that hat? He’d entered the house with it on, and apparently hadn’t given it a thought sense. It was not a baseball cap, or a knitted beanie, or any of the types of headgear that drive certain gay men crazy. No one in his right man would fetishize the fleece creation on this man’s head. It had more colors than Joseph’s dreamcoat, and seemingly more points than a cactus. It resembled a jester’s headdress, minus the jingling bells. I vaguely remembered the style being popular maybe a decade and a half ago, among the ski set and those who pretended to be a part of them. No one was going to fetishize that abomination of a hat.

“Am I good enough?” he asked. The words weren’t ironic, or arrogant. He honestly wanted to know.
I didn’t know quite what to say. He was more than good enough. He was a hot fucker. He was damned fine.

But that hat.

A couple of its fuzzy points flopped down over his forehead as he dropped to his knees. His mouth opened; I could feel the heat around my shaft as he lowered his mouth onto it. He waited until he reached the bottom before letting his lips wrap around the base. I could feel the hot wetness of his cheeks, his tongue, the gentle pressure of his teeth, as he eased himself up and down on it. I reached up to grab his hat, though. I wanted it gone. No sooner had I gotten my hand on it, though, that he decided for himself what I was doing up there. “Yeah,” he sputtered, around a mouthful of my dick. He put his own hand around the back of his head and clamped my hand down on his skull. “Make me suck it. Make me suck that big dick, daddy.”

Okay, I thought to myself. I’m not going to get that fucking hat off that way.

I let him slurp up and down my pole for a little while. I confess I was a little distracted. I liked the sensations and wanted to enjoy them. But every time I looked down, I was seeing a child’s fuzzy pajama fabric flopping around like a furry squid between my legs. No, strike that. A kid would’ve turned down that fabric pattern as excessively juvenile.

“Oh, papi,” he said, coming up for air. “You got the big dick I like. You really do. I’m gonna want this dick every damn day, man.” His eyes were glistening with tears and effort and sincerity. But all I could do is both stare at that hat, and think to myself, you have to look anywhere but that hat. “Do you like it?” he asked. “Do you like what I do?”

Maybe a non-verbal cue would do. “Hey,” I said, to catch his attention. I allowed myself to look at that hat, and then I jerked my head back in a way that I hoped would convey, Why don’t you take off that godawful chapeau?

His face lit up. He leaned forward, balancing his muscular torso by gripping the sofa’s edge. His lips met mine. Kissing me is not what I’d had in mind, though admittedly I didn’t mind it much. He wasn’t too great a kisser—his lips were tense, his tongue too spear-like. That can be trained out of a guy, though, with time.

A pity you can’t train them to take off the hat.

“Let me show off for you,” he said, after we’d made out for a few moments. He stood up and turned around, then bent over. “You like that ass?” he asked between his open legs, looking back at me. All the points of that damned hat hung down to the floor. When he spanked himself, they wiggled obscenely. “You want that ass, huh?’

“I do. . . .” I growled.

He stood up and grabbed the top of my sturdy TV cabinet. Once more he spread his legs and showed off his ass. This time he held his head back and stared at the ceiling. The hat’s tendril’s splayed down his back. “Oh yeah,” he grunted, as he ground his hips into the air. It would’ve been a sexy dance, if he didn’t have a jester’s hat flopping around comically atop his head. One of my cats entered the room, took a look at that hat, and walked away disdainfully.

My new friend had just squatted down on the floor and begun to finger his hole with that hat dangling down and obstructing my view, when I’d had enough. I rubbed the bridge of my nose as if I had a headache. “Hey,” I said in a totally normal voice, the kind that destroys any kind of sexual mood.

“What?” he asked, looking up. Several folds of the hat fell in his face.

“Take off that fucking hat.”

He blinked at me, then looked up. His face wore the most sheepish grin. “Oh my loooord,” he drawled, letting out a feminine giggle. “I forgot I had it on.” He whipped it off and tossed it with the rest of his clothes, snickering the entire time. “I bet I looked like a damn fool.”

“Pretty much,” I agreed, grinning to let him know I didn’t really mean it.

He knelt down prayerfully in front of me. “Do I look like a fool now, papi?” he asked.

My dick hardened again. “No,” I decided. “You most certainly do not.”

Then I reached for the back of his head, to direct him down on my cock. It was time for him to finish what he’d started.