Magical Thinking

I don’t think there’s a single person alive who, when a kid, didn’t hope he could affect the world with his thinking. Coincidence happens when the paths between the wished-for and the actual cross, and little kid brains become convinced some mystical assertion of will is the cause. Is there anyone who hasn’t clenched his juvenile fists and closed his eyes and tried to move mountains with one desperate, silent wish? I doubt it.

Last week I was playing bingo at the local watering hole, and when the bartender wandered over to look at my card, he asked what numbers I was looking for. “I need two,” I replied, trying not to stare at the guy’s biceps, “G-55, for one.”

Then right at that moment, the drag queen pulling the bingo balls yelled out, “G-55!”

I felt a momentary rush of imaginary power over the world for a moment. The bartender fist-pumped the air. I just grinned, shook my head, and chalked it up to the persuasive power of coincidence. But that didn’t stop me from concentrating really hard for the rest of the game and thinking, B-9. B-9. B-9!!!

Just in case.

This story I’m about to tell took place on Tuesday. I’m in the city, walking across 48th Street. It’s a beautiful day out—sunny, temperature hovering around seventy-two. The kind of spring afternoon on which anything seems possible. I’m running errands, but I’m in no particular hurry to get them done because of the balmy weather. So I’m passing the uptown stop for the B train and for some reason remembering that bingo game from the week before. And I’m mentally shaking my head at my silliness and thinking, I just WISH I could get what I want by thinking it. Then my eyes light on a guy stepping up onto the sidewalk from the subway station steps.

He’s handsome. Oh my god, so handsome. The guy looks like Gerard Butler’s beefy, impossibly hard-bodied animated character from 300 has stepped off the screen and into business casual. He wears a lilac-colored pressed dress shirt that hugs every muscle in his considerable chest. His slacks, dark and fine-woven, cling to his hard ass. His face is rugged, his hair thick and wavy. I don’t usually notice eye colors right off, but it’s impossible to miss the sapphire blue of his. When I pass the guy, we’re no more than three feet apart. I take in the tight shirt, the beefy body, those glittering gemstones of eyes, and think to myself, If I could make stuff happen just by thinking it . . . Fuck.

That’s when our eyes meet.

I feel that shock that sparks when two men lock stares. The pop of electricity that leaves me startled and breathless. He isn’t just looking at me. He actually stops still at the top of the stairs. His eyes only break from mine to flick down the rest of my body. I’m wearing a dark gray sport shirt and a pair of dress jeans—nothing special, but I’d found the outfit flattering when earlier I’d left home. Then our eyes fasten back on each other.

And I walk on, while my brain wildly thinks, Holy crap! Did I make THAT happen?

It’s tough to justify why I don’t stop walking. It’s a Manhattan thing. We have places to go. Things to do. Strolling is for tourists, people. Our little legs keep moving in the direction we’re pointed. It’s not until I’m a few steps past that I’m thinking, God damn, I wish I’d stopped. Or that I even realize that stopping is an option. By the time I do, only three seconds have passed. He’s still standing there by the subway stairs, looking after me.

So I pause, then turn and walk back to him.

I don’t know how to talk to beautiful men, generally. Built fuckers in their thirties whom I’m half-convinced and half-afraid are only staring at me because I’ve stunned them in the tracks using solely the power of my brain waves? That’s even tougher. But I fake it. “Hey,” I say, trying to sound confident.

“Hi,” he replies, staring at me like I’m the answer to his god-damned prayer, and not the other way around.

“I—“ I start to stammer.

At the same time, he says, “You—“, then trails off.

We both laugh a little. That ice is broken. “Are you hung?” he blurts out. “You kinda look like you’d be hung.” I nodded and reply that yes, I am. “Top?” he ask.

“Yes again.”

He looks at my crotch, then looks into the steady stream of people meandering by. “Listen, I don’t usually do this,” he says, using the preamble that men use right before they do something they’ve done many times more than once. “But I’m horny as shit. Do you wanna come home with me for a little bit? I’ve gotta stop off at my office real quick, but . . . maybe you’ve got something you need to do, right?”

“I don’t usually do this either,” I fib. “But yeah. I’ll go with you,” I say. In the back of my head, that little part of me begins to nag. It’s the part that always pipes up I’m not worthy, that he’ll laugh at me when I got my clothes off, that I’m being set up for some massive Carrie prom night-scaled disaster. I switch that obnoxious twat right off. There’s no earthly reason I don’t deserve to be with this man. I swallow, then say with more assurance, “Yeah. Let’s go.”

The stop-off he has to make was on 50th; I sit in the lobby under the watchful eye of a security guard while he dashes up to his office and back again in the space of ten minutes. Then we’re off again to push through the crowds on the way to his place on Ninth. We don’t speak much beyond pleasantries. But I can’t help but notice, on the way over, how both women and men glance at him with appraisal as we pass. Nor can I help from inwardly crowing, Yeah, but I’m the one who stopped him in his tracks with my magical thinking.

He starts to shed his clothing the minute we’re through the much-varnished door of his Hell’s Kitchen flat. He kicks off his tasseled loafers on the mat, flips open his cuffs and shirt buttons as we pass the efficiency kitchen, drops the shirt at the entry to the living room. The belt hits the floor by his flatscreen. The pants he tosses on the armchair. He peels first his black dress socks from his feet and then the tank from his chest as if they’re layers of onion skin, and lets them fall so that he’s standing there in nothing but his underwear. Andrew Christian, they are.

Designer underwear baffles me for the most part; it seems as if most men buy and fetishize it as if they believe pulling up a pair of overpriced briefs over their knees and thighs will magically transform their bodies into those of the sleek and muscular models on the boxes. It never does. With this guy, though. Fuck. That underwear probably fantasized that it’d be lucky enough to find someone like this piece of work to wear them. That underwear probably prayed that could ever be cozying the junk of a guy like this.

Now I’m stunned. I drop my shoulder bag onto the floor and stand there, hands at my side, and stare as the musclebound god faces me.

He correctly assumes I’m admiring his physique. He’s incorrect to think that I wanted to see him pose, though. He makes a stupid duck face and curls his arm to show off his guns, then hunches over to flex his chest. I find that crap phony and off-putting, so I hold up a hand and twirled an index finger at the ceiling. “Turn around,” I tell him. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, it’s the same finger and motion one uses to signify Big whoop.

He turns. He puts a leg out, shifts his weight. He looks to the side, his eyes sidling back to mine. He’s posing again. His thumbs hook into his underwear, and he teases me by pulling down the waistband. I haven’t taken off a thing until this point, but as he puls his undies up and down over the round perfection of his ass, I unbutton my shirt. I slide loose my belt buckle, unbutton my jeans and let them fall to my ankles. My own underwear—five bucks a pair, Uniqlo with a Keith Haring print—fall into them. I cup my dick in my hand and point it at him. All the phoniness of his poses evaporates.

“Fuck, you are hung,” he says.

“I don’t lie,” I say. “Not about that.”

He licks his lips. We stare at each other again, eyes locked as firmly as they had been on the street. “I want it in me,” he admits in a half-whisper. I nod, once, in the direction of the sofa. He grabs the back with his hands, and settles his knees on the seat. I kneel down behind him. “I don’t know if I’m real fresh,” he says from over his shoulder. “I’m clean to fuck. But I don’t know about rimming. Sorry, dude.”

“Okay,” I say, standing up. He’s got a bottle of lube and some poppers on the glass table behind the sofa. He takes the lube, squirts some on his hand, and rubs it on his hole. Then he reaches back to grab my cock. It’s the first time he’s felt it. He gives it a good squeeze, tests the heft, feels the length. Then he clasps the lube and poppers in his hands like talismans and nods over his shoulder at me.

This isn’t a romance. We haven’t kissed. We’ve barely talked. He hasn’t made a move to suck my dick or get my number. This is a fuck, raw and simple. My dick’s hard and already dripping, anticipating pushing its way into that muscle ass and owning it for a few minutes. He’s not easy to get into, either. I can’t tell whether he’s bearing down against me, or trying some exotic technique to make himself appear tighter than he actually is, but getting the head past his outer ring takes effort and a minute of battering my dick against him. But once I’m in, I’m in. All the way to the base.

And it feels good.

He’s clamping down on the last inch of meat where my dick meets my pelvis, waggling his butt around and refusing to let me out. “Dude,” he’s gasping out. “That feels amazing. That’s a real top’s dick. I knew you were going to be hung. I don’t know why. I just knew when I saw you.”

“You feel gooooood,” I drawl, beginning to get into the fuck. I slide in and out, watching my cock thicken and swell with just a single sweet stroke.

When he huffs deeply from the bottle of poppers, his hole deepens even more. I feel the warm flesh soften and blossom around my stem. His arms cross his chest. With the poppers in his right hand and the lube in his left, he reminds me of a pharaoh posed and carved onto an ancient Egyptian mastaba.

From the waist up, anyway. From the waist down, he’s all slut. His cunt makes soft squelching sounds as I push in and out. He moans in time with my fucking, and raises his hips to push back against me. Forty minutes before we’d been strangers passing on the street. Now we’re tied in copulation like two dogs going at each other, and I’m not pulling out the knot of my dick until I’m done.

I fuck him on the sofa for several minutes until he begs to switch positions; with admirable athleticism he flips himself onto his back, raises his butt to the level of my hips, and begs for me to drive it in. He hangs onto his own ankles as I plow deep. A couple of minutes more and he’s oozing lube from the bottle over his cock and balls. Some of it drips down onto my feverish dick and slides into his already-wet ass. Then he starts to jack.

I can tell by the way he’s playing with himself that he’s going to shoot quickly, whether he wants to or not. I don’t intend to find out whether he’s one of those bottoms who’ll let me continue fucking after he comes, or whether he’ll start complaining and twisting to get me out of him the minute he’s shot. I intend to get my orgasm, too. And it’s close enough that all I have to do is pick up the pace a little, grind into him a little more aggressively, and let my nuts do the work.

Our orgasms are close. He shoots first, loosing a blast of semen that slops across his chest and nipples and forms a rope of pearls across his sternum. I’m there with him, seconds later, painting his guts in a climax so overwhelming that I clench my face in what has to look like pain. I feel his legs swing down; my cock pops out. I’ve barely got my vision back than he’s wiping my dick down with a hand towel and chattering about how he’s got to get to the gym before five.

Doesn’t matter. I get the message. We did what we were meant to do, and now it’s done, past tense. I pull up my pants, button my shirt, make sure I look respectable in the mirror, and I’m on my way. He pats my ass on the way out, says we should do it again sometime. Sure thing, boss.

Whether or not we will, I don’t really know. Probably not.

But that’s okay. I’m not mournful when I leave. I don’t know the guy’s name. I don’t have his number, didn’t ask for his email. I’m looking at it this way: if the universe hadn’t wanted us to meet, it would’ve sent me down 49th instead of 48th. It would’ve distracted me with some kind of fucking Elmo or Statue of Liberty performer in my path closer to Times Square, or held me back at a traffic light so that by the time this guy emerged from the bowels of the B train station, my legs would’ve carried me in another direction.

But the universe, or coincidence, let this encounter happen. If it’s meant to happen again, it’ll push this guy in my path at some future point. I don’t care. I’ve had fun. The whole thing was kind of fucking crazy, right? And besides, I’m leaving his place feeling good. I’m feeling incredible, in fact. I’m cock of the walk, the proudest fucking top in the whole damned city. I’m grinning like a god-damned fool.

And why? Here’s where I want to write, Because things like amazing-looking studs stopping in the street to check me out just don’t happen to me. But it’d be a lie. Things like that do happen to me, now and again. However, they don’t drop into my lap because of anything I’ve thought, or some magic brain-wave I transmit that stops hot men dead in their tracks. I don’t believe my brain has magical powers.

My preferred form of magical thinking is more a way of looking for the magic in the world around me, for noticing opportunities. It takes more than wishing to make magic happen.

So I look handsome men in the eye. I stop my legs from walking and turn them in the other direction, on whim. I say hello to strangers.

I keep my sails unfurled for adventure, and sometimes let unknown winds steer me where they may. An alchemy of good luck and an openness to taking chances—that’s all real magic often is.