Summer Dip

The man I see the most is the man I write about the least.

Once a week, twice, sometimes three times I meet Rock Star. I know the mile-long route to his home as well as I know my own street. I’ve spent more time tramping around his neighborhood, walking his dog with him, than I have my own. Six months, we‘ve seen each other. And yet I don’t write about him much, because I want to protect him. Maybe—more than a little—I want to protect my own self. My heart has been quick to ache since the Spencer days.

But I’m writing about him today.

Meet me for a dip? he asks on my phone, which lights up with his message. It’s a blistering hot early summer morning. Barely nine o’clock, and the sun’s already baked suburban landscapes to a blistered crisp. The air’s so humid that it already feels I’m swimming. A dip sounds like just the thing.

I pull into the circular drive in front of his home and park my car in the cool of the hundred-year maple shading the portico. I can feel the asphalt cooking beneath my feet as I pass by the house’s grand front porch, and duck under the hidden little archway built beneath an attached gazebo. I emerge in the back yard, one of the highest points in our hilly locale. Below, down the hill, a hundred years ago lay farmland. Today the old barns and outlying buildings have been converted into sweet little homes, the other parcels of land divided and built upon. There’s too much of a haze this morning, but if I peered hard enough on a clearer morning, I might be able to glimpse in the distance the Long Island Sound.

Beyond a circumference of ancient hedges I hear splashing. I round the stone pathway. There’s a swinging wooden half-door breaking the perimeter of hedge. It’s open. But I stand on the threshold for a moment, simply because he’s so beautiful.

Rock Star is in the pool. He looks like a study of Christ, deep beneath the water. His arms are outstretched, his feet together and pointed, his long hair streaming down to the middle of his vertebrae. The pool hasn’t been resurfaced in some years; the bottom is patched with gray spots. The paint has darkened so much that the water looks unclean, though I know it’s not. I can smell the chlorine from where I’m standing. He’s a Connecticut messiah in a pool of deep turquoise. When he emerges from the deep, hair plastered wetly to his skull, it’s with scarcely a ripple. He blows the water from his nose, and rubs his eyes. His hands reach up to the chrome bars of the ladder, and with strong arms he pulls himself out.

I still stand there, hands in my pockets, to admire his beauty. He hasn’t noticed me. Pool water is still cascading from his trunks as he reaches for his towel. It’s not until he’s pressing the terrycloth against his head, sponging liquid from his long hair, that he realizes I’m there. Though his eyes are large—almost outlandishly so—he always gives the impression of being half-lidded. At the sight of me, a shy smile blossoms across his lips, and those heavy lids droop to the three-quarter mark. “You startled me,” he says.

“I had to look,” I say simply.

It makes him smile even more. There are times I wonder why this young man bothers with me. When I first started seeing him, he made me so nervous that I couldn’t relax. I was afraid if I exhaled, if I let down my guard, I’d discover that he had a thing for ugly old geezers, or that I was a masochistic pity fuck. It wasn’t until the end of our second month that I realized I was making him nervous as well. I still do. He drapes the towel modestly across his nearly-naked body, as if I haven’t glimpsed it before. “I hope you like what you see,” he says.

He’s sweet. I crack a grin.

“Did you bring a swimsuit?” he asks.

“Of a sort.”

“Do we have to go shopping for you?” he half-scolds. We’ve been shopping before—weekend dates up and down 6th Avenue. He’s treated me like a Ken doll in H&M, and made me try on at Zara items I have no intention of buying.

“I’m good,” I say.

I move in to take him in my arms, but he’s too quick for me—and too slippery. He steps out of my grasp and propels himself into the pool in a perfect arc of a dive. When the tips of his fingers pierce the still water, the rest of his body follows like a greased needle. He sputters when he comes up, and looks at me. “What’s taking you so long?”

I raise my eyebrows. Kick off my sneakers. Remove my footies. I drop my camo shorts onto the grass, slip the T-shirt from my torso. I’m wearing a pair of elastic-y briefs that’ll do for a swimsuit. There’s spare underwear in the pocket of my shorts, for after. Not that I really need a suit. No one overlooks the pool. We could swim naked if we wanted. “How’s the water?” I ask.

“Glorious,” he says.

I kick at it tentatively with my foot. “Christ!” I swear. “Liar.”

“What?” he asks.

I sit down on the poolside concrete. Immediately my butt starts to burn. “It’s fucking cold.”

“It’s good once you get in,” he says, swimming over to where I sit.

“I hate cold water.” I have a whine in my voice, like a whimpering Scooby-Doo.

“It feels great,” he says.

I look at him. I’m dubious.

He reaches up and puts a cold, wet hand on my thigh. I flinch. “Trust me,” he says. “Just slip on in. Come on.” He holds both my hands in his, like I’m a child who doesn’t know how to swim. “I swear I’ll keep you warm.”

I do hate cold water. Every square inch of my skin recoils at the thought of having to submerge myself in that ice bath, even on a baking hot day like today. But I can’t refuse Rock Star. I claim my hands again and slide downward, lowering myself a few inches at a time. I have to hold my breath to get it done; it’s painful going. But there I am, finally, shoulders beneath the rippling surface of the waters. My teeth chatter.

“I’ll keep you warm,” he promises again.

He pushes me against the pool’s side, so that the concrete bites into my back. His mouth is on mine; his tongue invades my mouth. Rock Star is taller than I. His shoulders are broader. He’s lean, but he’s muscled. I feel like a tiny thing in his grasp, and for me it’s a novelty. His hands are on my shoulders, his body is pressing against mine as we make out.

And for a few moments, I forget about the cold.

His mouth tastes of chlorine. His kisses are simultaneously hot and cold. Water splashes into our mouths, wets our faces. I feel his arms encircle my waist. When he pushes off from the wall and pulls me with him, I have to tip back my head to keep from swallowing when I laugh as we glide across the pool’s width. “Don’t you like swimming?” he teases.

“I didn’t come here to swim,” I say into his ear. “I came here to see you.”

His dark eyes smolder. They burn into mine. “You turn me on so much,” he says.

“Show me,” I challenge.

We swim back to the ladder. He pulls himself out, helps me when I emerge. He loses his trunks by the diving board. My sopping wet underwear joins his on the concrete. The sun will dry them both before we’re done. We’re two naked boys walking nude outdoors in the sunshine. He leads me back to the path beneath the gazebo, where it’s cool beneath the stone arch supporting the porch above. There’s grass sticking to my feet, and a curious butterfly idling around us, but I stop noticing anything save him once we’re making out in the dark passage.

His hair sticks wetly to both our skin. I stand on tiptoe so that our mouths are level. He whimpers when, this time, I shove him against the wall. His hands reach for my hardening dick. I push them away. He tries again. I make sure my meat is out of his reach. “Turn around,” I tell him.

“Fuck me,” he begs over his shoulder. “Take me upstairs and lube me up and fuck me.”

“Shut up,” I tell him.

“I need you to fuck me. I need you to own me.”

“Shut up,” I repeat. I push his head and shoulders down; he braces himself against the stone wall. Then I part his legs roughly, spreading them. Water has tamped down the hairs in his ass crack. He yells loudly when I grab his cheeks, yank them apart, and taste his hole. His yell disturbs the mourning doves nesting nearby. I ignore their low, fluttery protests.

“Fuck,” he whispers. The side of his face is pressed into the sparkling local granite.

His ass is cold from the water; it tastes like the pool. I know how to work this hole. When I first started fucking it, it was tight, tight, tight. Now it responds to my mouth, opens on command. I slurp on that hole, knowing my mouth must feel like lava against that chilly surface. When it blossoms under my lips, I chew on it. I rake my teeth over it. I seize the rosebud between my incisors and suck on it. He stomps at the hard dirt with his heel, like an impatient stallion. I can see his own dick, heavy and engorged with blood, swinging between his legs directly in front of me. I squeeze it roughly, not caring when he yelps.

Then I swing back that sizable rod. I suck the swollen head, run my stubbly chin up the shaft from head to balls. I chew on his scrotum, make him twitch and cry out when I suck his nuts into my mouth. Then I’m back to his ass again. Licking, chewing, opening it with my tongue as surely as I intend to fuck it wide with my dick.

He’s beyond coherence. “Please please please please. . . .” he’s murmuring with closed eyes.

I stand up, press the knob of my dick against his hole. I pause to slick it up with spit. His eyes open, full of the fear of being stretched without lube. “Trust me,” I tell him. “I’ll fill you up.” Then I shove.

This time, the mourning doves in the gazebo eaves flap and flutter with a rush of wings at the sound of his animal howl. Their alarm covers his cries of joy and relief. For a long, still moment we both pause and watch them, a half-dozen or more, as they wing heavenward into the brilliant summer sky.

No, I don’t write much about Rock Star. But I don’t want this memory to slip away, this mingling of flesh and noise with the scents and sounds of a perfect summer morning. I don’t want to forget the perfection of it, the sweetness, the feel of his slippery flesh against mine.

And now I won’t.