Interlude
Primary Colors
Previously on “Because”
Mom’s shower is huge. Literally. Room enough for four at least, maybe five. The spigot, directly overhead, sprays water down liberally over the whole area. I stood there under the stream, eyes closed, trying to relax. Whatever happened with Sam, I had an open invitation to Chad’s hole tonight, and if I had to do pizza and movie with my brother, I could easily go over later. My cock stirred as I imagined the delights we’d surely share.
So lost in the tranquility and heat and lustful imaginings was I that I did not hear the shower door click open and then closed. I did not sense the presence of another body until I felt a touch on my arm. Startled, I let out a Janet Leigh-like squawk of surprise and blasted open my eyes.
Sam, my little brother, his glasses missing and making him appear even younger than his tender years, stood next to me there under the spray. He was, needless to say, naked. “Is this what you wanted to see when you stared me down, Damien?” he asked, his hands sweeping up and down his skinny, completely hairless body. As I stared at him, quite possibly more astounded than I have ever been in my life, even counting the surprises of last night and this morning, Sam dropped to his knees and looked up at me, heedless of the water showering down upon his upturned face, and then he leaned forward and lightly kissed the head of my cock. “And is this what you wanted me to do, sir?” He bent his head, staring at the tiled floor, and waited for my answer.
Guess what I replied?
“Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes.”
At my words, Sam raised his face and said, with a sly but amiable smile on his lips, “I thought you’d say that.”
For a split second I wondered if I’d been gooked, although a cock kiss seemed pretty extreme for a practical joke. “Uh, well, I mean–”
He stood and reached up and laid a finger on my lips. “And that too. Sir.” He hesitated, then said, “Ssh, sir, let me do this. Please.” I watched, bemused, as he lathered his hands with shampoo, and, at his silent request, I lowered my head and bent my knees and let him wash my hair. His small but strong fingers massaged the shampoo into my scalp, and cold shivers made even more pointed by the hot water telegraphed ecstasy all the way down to my toes. My cock, already semi-erect from my idle imaginings of the night to come, stiffened to a halfie, and I sneaked a peek at Sam, but if he noticed he said nothing about it. His own penis hung flaccid, small and shy in seeming timidity, over those monster-sized testicles and under a smooth lower abdomen. Surely he was old enough for crotch hair, I thought, I’d had mine for a couple years by that age.
“I shave, sir,” Sam murmured without looking at me, “down there, I mean.”
“Why?” I asked.
He answered, “My pubic hair is . . . untidy.” A shiver of revulsion in his tone. He traded the shampoo for the cucumber-melon body wash I favor (don’t be a h8r; it makes me feel pretty) and soaped a cloth, which he rubbed, in gently sweet circular motions, over my face and neck and shoulders, down across my chest. My dick had drooped back to normal during my introspection, but that cloth across my nips nudged it back up. This time Sam noticed. He hesitated for the briefest possible fraction of a second, and his eyes flickered that way. The attention caused a further stiffening. Then Sam moved his eyes back up, refocusing on the cloth and my chest. The deliberate indifference boned me up to full. Sam ignored it, but he resolutely washed lower, across my belly, and lower still, until the cloth brushed untidy pubes. I hissed, anticipating his touch on my erection; alas, he veered off and scrubbed, one at a time, my flanks and legs and feet. At one point, as he knelt in front of me and soaped between my toes, my rager brushed against his forehead. No reaction from him whatsoever, although it sure sent a tingle through me. After finishing my front (and he was one thorough sonofabee) he stood and slid around behind me (his own penis still flaccid, though hanging lower from the heat) and started on my back side. He washed all the way down my spine and lower back, lingering a little long (in my mind, at least) on the cheeks of my ass. He didn’t scrub the crack, as yet; he circled back around and grasped my penis with an almost clinical detachment, and I let slip a moan at the disinterested, impersonal touch of his soapy, cloth-covered fingers. He didn’t linger there long; he dropped me with unseemly haste and attacked my hangers, savagely enough that I hissed again, this time in discomfort, and he eased the unnecessary roughness, glancing up at me apologetically. Then he squatted again, still ignoring my rager, and, nudging my legs apart, he worked the cloth across my taint and on up into my crack, digging into my hole so deep that I pulled a Chad and came up on tiptoe, almost blacking Sam’s eye. After he finished lathering, he stood, tossed the washrag away, and rotated me slowly around to rinse, using his fingers to sluice away the soap. When he judged me squeaky clean enough, he grabbed the wash again, this time for personal use. He scrubbed himself quickly and thoroughly, while I watched, both confounded and fascinated. His cock remained monumentally unimpressed with any of the proceedings; my own remained enraptured. After he rinsed, he stepped back up to me, started to kneel before me again, and even though I had an intuition regarding his next move, I grabbed him by the arm and arrested the movement.
“Sam.” When he raised his eyes to mine, I asked, softly, as soft and warm as the water raining down on us, “Why are you doing this?”
Sam blinked at me. “Later, sir,” he said, and on his face he wore a strange, enigmatic expression that I couldn’t interpret. It mixed in determination, nervousness, and a sublime plea for my tolerance. “Mom will be –”
I tightened my grip on his arm. “No, now,” I insisted.
He pursed his lips. “It’s something I have to do.” A slight hesitation, then he corrected himself. “Something I have to see if I can do.”
“But why?” I let go his elbow and pointed at his limpness. “This isn’t turning you on even half as much as it is me.” I wavered my index finger between our two cocks. “See the difference?”
He appeared startled at my blunt inquisitiveness. “But, Damien, uh, sir, this isn’t about me. Well, not totally. It’s about you, sir, you and your pleasure.”
“My pleasure,” I said flatly. Sam nodded. “Okay, it would please me very much to see you as aroused as me.”
“Sir?” If his eyelids widened any further we’d be chasing the orbs all over the shower.
“Get hard.”
“Whuh –”
“I said to get hard. Now.” I crossed my arms; my cock pointed at him, emphasizing my order. Rudy would be proud. “I’m curious about something.”
“But I . . . uh . . . yes sir.” He reached down and grasped his penis between thumb and forefinger, began frigging on it halfheartedly.
“Oh for shit’s sake,” I said, pushing him back against the wall, out of the spray of water; his head smacked against the tile with a thump, and he cried out, but I hurried away from the scene of the accident, uncaring. I grabbed the cucumber-melon from the rack and poured a liberal amount in my palm, then, knocking his hand away, I grabbed his peter myself and stroked on it. He gasped at my touch, gasped more from astonishment than sensation. “Get hard!” I demanded again, wanking relentlessly at him, and, more quickly than I would have believed, I felt it stir and come alive under my touch. Sam whimpered, his eyes closed and his head thrown back, and when I, on a hunch, cruelly pinched his right nipple, he groaned and boned up completely. I stopped stroking and pressed close to him, spreading my stance and bending my knees until our crotches were roughly level, and grasped our cocks together, the way I’d done with Rudy the previous night. Mine was a couple inches longer, and maybe an inch or so thicker, but, as I’d suspected, our shafts curved together smoothly at exactly the same angle, mine outward, his inward, towards his belly; we touched skin to skin all the way down.
“That,” I said to myself as well as to Sam, “is so fucking cool.”
Sam, much less impressed than I, frowned up at me. “Damien, sir,” he said, a bit forcefully, “sir, may I please –”
Satisfied, I let go our ragers, spread my hands benevolently. “By all means,” I said with just a soupcon of sarcasm.
He not-very-gently pushed me back, giving himself room to work. “I have to see if I –” he muttered as he knelt in front of me; the rest of his words got shoved back into his throat as I grabbed his ears and yanked him down. He spluttered around my cock for a few seconds, and I shuddered at the frissons of his irritated surprise. I gave him a beat or three to acclimate, then I started fucking his face, hard, sinking deeper into his heat every stroke. He brought his hands up and lay the palms on my upper thighs, but he let them rest there, lightly, not resisting as I picked up the pace and ear-tugged him up and down on my cock, corkscrewing his head so his lips spiraled in irregular circles around my shaft. At first he sat there passively, accepting my direction, but at last he swallowed some of my manic energy and cooperated with me, seeming to read my instructions a split second before my hands moved him. His tongue wiggled and jiggled and giggled against me, clumsy but eager, and he kept his teeth well-sheathed. He opened his throat to me, gagging some as I slid in but not at all complaining, just working to coordinate his breathing and my thrusting, and at last my entire bone rested in his wet fire. I looked down at him, relishing the sight of his skinny nose buried in my soggy upside-down mustache, and he looked back up at me, his black eyes fathomless and bottomless, and we stayed frozen in that pose long enough to forge the baseline of the bond I burned to build between us, until he began to choke in earnest and pushed his palms against my upper thighs, begging me to release him. I let go his ears and he came up off me with a gasp, his face a very light shade of blue. He didn’t back away from me though; I didn’t scare him; as a matter of fact he looked up at me with both a challenge and a plea in his gaze. “Turn around, Damien. Turn around, sir!”
“What?”
Sam snorted and said, echoing me, “Oh for shit’s sake!” and he grabbed my hips and physically spun me around until he had a face full of ass. “Bend over. Sir,” he said, nudging my legs apart, and almost before I could move, he dive-bombed his tongue into my crack, zeroed in on my unsuspecting hole, dug into with a hunger and ferocity that, had it a touch more desperation in it, would have reminded me of Chad. I braced myself against the wall, grinding my ass back against the gyrations of his madly fluttering tongue-fuck, lost in the head-buzz of having my younger brother service me.
And then I bumped and ground my ass against shower-misted air.
I turned around, expecting to slide my cock back into his mouth, but he’d moved away. Now he stood with his back against the opposite wall, chest heaving, a satisfied gleam in his eye and on his lips. His cock, still erect from my earlier ministrations, poked up out of his crotch like an exclamation mark to the declarative statement of his posture.
“What the hell?” I demanded. Pointing the index fingers of both hands at my angry, abandoned tumescence, I continued, “Come finish what you started!”
Sam shook his head, said one word. “Mom.” Then he snatched the towel I’d thrown over the door for my own convenience and bolted from the stall.
“Dammit, Sam!” I hollered, shutting off the shower and following him out. I was just in time to see his narrow, towel-draped ass disappear around the corner into Mom’s bedroom, heading for the hall. At the same moment I heard the garage door clanking up and the toot-toot blast of the Saturn’s horn, Mom’s signal to come help bring in groceries. Cursing, I dripped and bobbled my way across the floor to the linen closet and pulled a fresh towel out, hurriedly dried myself and wiped our spoor from the tile, then loped to my room and threw on some clothes, including a long-sleeve pullover sweater; its hem fell well below my crotch area. All I needed was for Mom to clock the rager that my dear soon-to-be-departed brother left me wielding. Not that she would say anything. She’d be just as embarrassed as me, and Sam would be laughing his ass off at both of us.
Sam and Mom had most of the groceries and sundry other packages unloaded by the time I appeared downstairs. I helped with the last of it, slamming the trunk and then the kitchen door behind me and almost dropping the bags as I tried to shove them onto the counter with everything else.
“Nice timing, Damien,” Mom said dryly, leaning against the counter. Sam had settled onto one of the cane-back kitchen chairs. He refused to meet my eye.
“I was in the shower!” I protested. “If you’d waited–”
“If I’d waited the ice cream would’ve melted into sugar soup,” she said. She pushed off from the counter, reached into one of the bags.
I shooed her away. “Don’t, Mom,” I told her. “I’ll do it. You unloaded, I’ll put them away.”
“My hero.” She popped up on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek. “Yum, cucumber-melon,” she said, inhaling my fresh scent.
“You going to let me put up the groceries,” I complained, “or you want to sit and smell me all day?”
“I used to sit and smell you all day,” she told me, to my horror. “When you were a baby you smelled better than a new car. Well, when you didn’t have a loaded diaper, anyway.”
“Hey, Sam,” I called out, “you want sugar soup for supper?”
He smiled at me, tight-lipped, but didn’t answer.
“Fine, then, I know when I’m not wanted,” Mom said. “I’ll remove myself and my undying maternal affection and free you to put up the groceries in blessed peace.”
“That’d be great, Mom, thanks.”
“Except for these,” she said, gathering several of the packages, “I’ll take care of these myself, so you won’t be struck blind. See how much I love you?” She exited the kitchen, laden down with enough loot to found a small lesbian boutique, and within seconds I heard her slow, careful steps going up the stairs.
As soon as I was relatively sure she was out of earshot, I turned and hissed at Sam, “What the fuck, bro?” I flipped up the hem of my shirt; my erection had abated some but still impressed a distinct outline in the crotch of my jeans.
He shook his head, his face just as tortured as my blue blue balls. “Later, Damien,” he hissed back. “We’ll talk it about later, I promise!”
I started to say something else, but his imploring expression caused me to snap my mouth shut hard enough to click my teeth together. I busied myself emptying the bags and storing everything away. As I folded the cloth bags and tossed them into their bottom drawer home, I heard Mom’s footsteps descending the stairs. She came back into the kitchen, and, looking around critically, said, “Good job, guys. House looks awesome.” If she noticed the brick thick tension between Sam and me, she didn’t say anything.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“We want everything to look good for Diana too, Mom.” Sam all happy to have something to talk about.
“I’ll be sure to tell her who sparkled the place up for her.”
“What are you cooking?”
“I’m doing Mexican tonight. Carne Asada with a chimichurri sauce and caramelized onions.”
“How are you preparing it?” And they were off into a culinary discussion that I had no interest in. Sam is actually a damn good cook, as long as he has a recipe. His need to experiment often proves his undoing. While he and Mom debated the proper temperature to serve flank steak, I wandered over to the cabinet, grabbed a glass (one from the Q’s cupboard, natch), and padded to the fridge, from which I pulled the new gallon jug of sweet tea. Performing these actions on automatic. I did, after all, have other things on my mind. So lost in thought was I that I failed to hear Sam the first time he said my name.
“Damien!”
“What?” I snapped, rather more harshly than I’d intended. Sam raised an eyebrow, and Mom’s mouth pursed, though she did not vocally reproach me. I softened my tone. “Sorry, bro. I was zoning and you startled me.”
“You’re fine,” he said, but that one eyebrow remained cocked. (I can’t do that. I hate him because he can. And he knows it. And he knows how to use it to annoy me.) “I was just gonna suggest you drink some water instead of tea. You could use it.”
“Amen, Sam,” Mom applauded. “We all could use more water.” She watched me until I put the tea up and grabbed the gallon jug of charcoal-filtered tap water (Mom refuses to buy bottles) from the back of the fridge, then she turned to start pulling from the pantry items I’d just put away. As soon as she diverted her attention to that I shot a murderous glare at Sam. He raised that eyebrow again and bugged out his eyes, being a brat.
Or maybe not. “Don’t you remember, Damien?” he asked me, that eyebrow threatening to become a tiara. “I’m pretty sure Chad told me you two had discussed the benefits of drinking more water?”
Chad? When did he talk to Chad? Then I flashed on the forty-eleven incoming texts Sam had received this afternoon. Of course. What had the convivial cracker (puppeted by Rudy, you can be sure) told my brother? Then my mind flashed even further back, to the very first (articulate) thing Chad had said to me this morning.
Was Sam serious? For that matter, was I?
“Oh, yeah,” I said to Sam, my tone of voice a whole lot milder than my gaze. “I remember that.” And, picking up the glass, drank the whole thing down, staring steadily at Sam the entire time. Finished, I poured another full glass. Held it up to him in a toast.
He looked a little green.
“So what’s on the agenda for you guys?” Mom asked, dumping a mess of spices and cans and whatnot all over the counter I’d just cleared. “Still planning to spend the night at Rudy and Chad’s house?”
Too busy guzzling water to answer, I raised both eyebrows at Sam. Let him field that one, he’s so smart and informed.
“We’re not sure yet,” he answered smoothly, though his eyes still measured my liquid intake. “We thought we’d discuss it over pizza. Can we let you know after?”
“That’ll be fine,” Mom said. “I’d prefer you spent the night at the Q’s, though. That way I’m not worrying about you and can concentrate on Diana.”
Several remarks suggested themselves to me, but some would get me grounded and all would get me slapped, so I merely said, “I’d prefer to crash over there too. You deserve a night without us in your hair.” Unable to resist, I winked at her and sang a bit of the “boom-chick a-wow-wow” tune.
“We probably will go over there, Mom,” Sam said, ignoring that as thoroughly as Mom. Honestly, are all comedic geniuses so completely unappreciated by their families? “We just have some things to discuss first.”
“Oh? What sort of things?”
“You know, brother stuff.” ‘Twas amusing to watch his cheeks turn pink. Mom had her nose in a cookbook and didn’t notice. Thank God. No way he’d stand up to the pressure if Mom sensed something amiss.
“Cease-fires, peace treaties,” I broke in breezily; I’m much better at prevarication and diversionary tactics than Sam is. “That sort of thing.”
“Okay,” Mom said, apparently not caring. She’d tuned out at “brother stuff”. But now she turned her attention from the cookbook to me, personally. “It’s cold and it looks rainy out there tonight, and I’ve got too much going on to play chauffeur, so you can drive the Saturn, but –”
“Really? Cool!”
“– BUT you are to go nowhere except the Pizza Joint and then either to the movies or to the Q’s, then straight back here. Understood?”
“Got it,” I nodded. “Pizza Joint, liquor store, either the movies or the Q’s, home again home again, jiggety-jig.”
Now it was Mom’s turn to raise an eyebrow. God, I hate them both.
To my surprise, and to his own, too, I think, Sam said, “Pizza Joint, liquor store, bus station, then the movies or the Q’s, then home.”
Mom turned the eyebrow on him.
“Why the bus station, Sam?” I asked him, dreading the answer.
“To pick up transient hookers!” he said, and broke into a roar of hilarity, tickled at his own wit.
“Oh, dear,” Mom said.
“He needs a raise in his allowance,” I told her.
“So he can afford a real sense of humor?” Mom asked. She totally gets me. “But I’m worried he’d never find one that fits.” We turned our backs on Sam, humanely ignoring him while he laughed himself out. She reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a debit card. “There’s sixty on this,” she said, handing it to me; even parental pizza-and-movie money has gone hi-tech. “I want a receipt for every penny spent.”
“Moe, the guy at the liquor store, never gives me a receipt,” I said, pocketing the card. “Says that way nobody can prove he’s the one sold to me.”
“You tell Moe that this time you need it for me. He has a mother of his own, I’m sure. He’ll understand.”
“Yo, Sammy-boy!” He hates to be called Sammy. I turned back to find him wiping tears of mirth off his cheeks, holding his glasses in his other hand. Weird kid. “Train leaves the station in five minutes. I’m hungry!” And, very deliberately, drank off a third glass of water, even smacked my lips.
He pretended not to notice, just wrapped his wire frames back onto his face, and, hiccuping slightly, said, “Okay, I, uh, I’ll be ready.” Still repeating the punchline “transient hookers” under his breath and snickering like it was actually funny, he hopped up and jogged out of the room, across the foyer, and up the stairs, slamming his door when he got to the top.
“That kid has the oddest life outlook I’ve ever been baffled by,” I commented, shaking my head, “and I’m speaking as Rudy Q’s best friend, which means I know whereof I speak.”
“Sam is an odd one, all right,” Mom agreed, but her voice held no disparagement or worry. “And I wouldn’t have him any other way. Now, hand me my purse from the table over there?” Along with the keys to the Saturn, she gave me the standard lecture on caution and alertness. I barely paid attention, just nodded and “yes ma’am”-ed occasionally. She’d let me use the car a few times before, mainly to pick up Sam from some after-school thing or to run to the store for bread or whatever, but this was the first time she’d allowed me to retain possession overnight. Sure, the entire round trip might only be six or so miles, but I’d get to hold the keys for a good twelve hours.
How cool is that, huh?
After Mom had repeated herself a few thousand times I broke away and trotted up the stairs myself, passing Sam as he descended. Neither of us looked at the other or said anything. Fine by me. I had a feeling there’d be a whole mess of looking and saying soon enough. Already regretting the ostentatious drinking display, I stopped by the john on the way to my room, and, anxious to avoid considering the whole compelled by water theory while I emptied my overflowing bladder, I called Rudy.
He answered after only two rings. “Dude, he messaged Chad first, I swear!”
“And you couldn’t send up a smoke signal or hang two lanterns in the window?”
“I didn’t find out until they’d been texting awhile,” Rudy confessed, “and by the time I did find out Chad had already promised not to tell you.”
“I don’t get why Sam would text Chad at all,” I said, still pissing. Jesus. “I didn’t know they were such close friends.”
“They’re not. Sam said something about you coming into his room with your zip down and looking all ready to rape him and –”
“What?” So shocked I nearly peed on my shoe.
“– and he wanted to know what I’d done to you. His words, dude, not mine. Hang on, let me find the text. Hey cracker! Gimme your –”
Beep. Blood boiling, I shoved my phone back into my pocket and, my yellow stream finally petering out, I did a half-ass job of shaking the last drops off and probably spotted the front of my jeans when I put my cock away. Okay, so maybe my zip had been down when I confronted Sam; I couldn’t remember either me or Mr Q raising it. But looking like I wanted to rape him? Was he fucking mental?
“Dude!” I flushed and pulled my phone back out.
Rudy: “dude ok?”
Damien: “yeah just tiny bit p.o.’d”
Rudy: “chill dude s just being drama queen”
Damien: “s being a putito today anyhow, we gonna have long talk over pizza”
Rudy: “pepperoni? haha”
Damien: “it won’t be anchovy”
Rudy: “LOL”
Rudy: “be careful”
Damien: “he shoulda thought of that earlier”
Rudy: “i smell a good story”
Damien: “don’t worry u’ll b there for hahaha climax”
Oh, yeah, I thought as I put away my phone and grabbed my wallet and jacket from my room, I’d get Sam over to the Q’s tonight if I had to drag him. Whatever game he played with me, I’d make him sorry for winning. And I’d make the turd-knocker like it, too.
I grinned a Rudy grin as his voice floated up the stairs. “You said five minutes, Damien! You’re not the only one hungry, you know!”
Shrugging on my jacket, all but leaping down the stairs, I called out, “Keep your pants on, turd-knocker!” For now, I thought.
“Damien!”
“Sorry, Mom!”
“Really, Damien,” said Mom as I entered the kitchen, “turd-knocker? Whatever happened to the classics, like douche-bag or butt-munch?” She didn’t look at me as she spoke, all her attention fixed on the mixing bowl in front of her. Sam had already gone out; the door opening out into the garage stood slightly ajar.
“I prefer a rougher, more baroque insult. You’re the one always challenging me to cultivate my own idiom.” I stopped on my way to the door, sniffed the air. “And what the heck is that stench? It smells like somebody vomited perfume all over the place.”
“Well, cultivate your idiom in a less unpleasantly graphic direction, would you? And that stench, as you so politely deemed it, is cilantro, and I think it smells lovely.”
“You would,” I muttered, softly enough for her to ignore if she so chose (and she did), and, zipping my jacket, said, louder, “Have a good time tonight, Mom, and –”
She interrupted me, her voice concerned enough to cause me to pause at the door and turn back to look at her. “Damien, is everything all right between you and Sam?” She’d forsaken the mixing bowl and instead gazed at me, her gaze troubled.
Willing myself to remain calm, because if she sensed that flutter in my stomach she’d be on it like a duck on a junebug, I said, “Uh, sure, Mom, we’re peachy, why?”
She frowned at me. “What’s all this about discussing ‘brother stuff’ over pizza? What’s ‘brother stuff’?” So she hadn’t been completely oblivious to Sam’s discomfort after all.
Easy, I thought. Delicate work here. “Sam has some . . . um . . . issues he wants to talk to me about.” I deliberately imagined these issues, in great detail, and let my cheeks color up, hoping the red worked for me. “Some, you know, personal issues.”
“Personal issues? What kind of personal issues?” Mom looked ready to jump on the phone and call for professional assistance.
“Chill, Mom, it’s nothing serious,” I said, and hesitated, feeling my face heat up even more, this time on its own dime. Saying the next sentence would be difficult, but it would also surely shut down her line of questioning. “He wants to talk about, you know,” and I whispered the word, “masturbation.”
Yup, that did it. “Oh!” Mom said, her own cheeks turning pink. “Oh.” She floundered for something to say. “Well, tell him its normal and natural and –“
“I’ll tell him,” I agreed, anxious to end the conversation. All I needed was a siren on my nose and my face could race to house fires.
“And tell him that you yourself –”
“MOTHER! I’ll handle it, all right?” Oh, God. I did NOT just say that. I turned to go before one of us turned into a pillar of salt.
“Damien,” she called after me, and I turned around again, only barely resisting the urge to roll my eyes.
“Ma’am?”
“Don’t take that tone,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you that I gathered up all the Q’s glasses and plates and put them in a box on the garage steps.”
“Thanks, Mom, can I go now? Before scandal-rag photographers show up to take pictures of the two starving children and their cilantro-swilling mother?”
“And you were such a sweet baby, too. Go, go!”
“Okay love ya buh-bye.”
“Be care–” I cut off the “-ful” with the door, closing it behind me. Free at last, free at last.
Sam stood beside Mom’s work truck, wearing a long, black, fake-leather duster that hung, on him, almost to the ankles. He’d found it in a thrift store a few weeks previous, and paid five bucks for it. It was worth almost every penny. He thought that it, along with his unkempt black hair, black eyes, and round, wire-frame spectacles, made him look like the hero of some obscure Japanese manga. I thought it made him look like an attendee of Professor Slughorn’s Christmas party in the Half-Blood Prince movie.
“I don’t get you,” I said. “When you should keep your yap closed, you go and try to be cute and evasive and end up broadcasting to the world that you have a secret, and when you should be spilling your guts, like any time in the last half day or so, you clamp down tighter than an altar-boy’s asshole on Easter Sunday.” With more than a little exasperation, I punched the button to raise the garage door and started down the steps and promptly tripped over something, nearly falling flat on my face. What the hell? What numb-nut left that box of glasses –
Oh. Never mind.
Sam regarded me gravely, his hands stuffed in the duster’s voluminous pockets. Not even watching me pinwheel for balance on the steps sparked a smile on his lips. When the clanking and rattling of the garage door ceased, he said, “This is isn’t easy for me, either, Damien.”
“Babyboi,” I said, trying to calm my racing heart while pretending to be unruffled, “ain’t nothing easy in this world but Inbred Wanda and Wheel Of Fortune, and you don’t got the scratch to appear on either one.” I bent over and rummaged through the box of dishes until I found the mug I’d “borrowed” from the Q’s that morning.
“What does that even mean?” I’d figured he’d bridle on being called Babyboi; he’d sure flinched at the words. But he said nothing about it. I filed that factoid away for later use. “And how exactly does it apply to this situation?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. Ask Rudy. It’s how he talked me down from the ledge over my algebra final.” Mug safe in hand, I jogged around to the driver’s side of the Saturn.
“Rudy is an idiot.”
“Yeah, true,” I said, opening the car door. “But he smells nice.” I considered. “Sometimes.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. Dude.”
“Will you get in the damn car? Standing there like that, you look like the one Hogwarts student forced to take auto-shop.”
“When are you going to lay off my cool duster?” he demanded, dropping into the passenger seat and slamming the door harder than strictly necessary.
“When you get one that’s actually cool,” I replied. “Seatbelt, please!” The Saturn fired right up, and Sam knew enough to shut up and let me concentrate while I backed out of the garage and driveway and into the street. The last rays of the sun sank behind the horizon as I put the transmission into drive, and a light rain began to fall. I turned on the windshield wipers and we drove in silence for a couple blocks, until I could stand it no more. “Sam –” I started, but he leaned forward and switched on the radio, interrupting me with a stream of country crap. I switched it back off, twisting so hard on the knob it fell off in my hand. “Dammit, Sam, I was just going to say I didn’t know you and Chad were such tight pals!”
“We’re not!”
“Then why the hell do you even have his number in your contacts?”
I could feel his measured gaze on the side of my face. “Because you and Rudy are tight pals, and sometimes its good to have advance notice of what you loose cannons are up to.”
Fair enough. “So that’s what that was? With all those texts flying back and forth? Advance noticing and shit?”
“No! Well, kind of,” he admitted, “but, Damien, I’ll explain all that at the Pizza Joint! Okay? If we ever get there,” he added. “You drive slower than Grandma after a glass of wine.”
“The speed-limit in residential neighborhoods is twenty-five miles per hour unless otherwise posted,” I informed him.
“Then why aren’t you going twenty-five?”
“Because its raining, smartass!” Exasperated with the whole conversation, I dropped the radio’s volume knob into his lap. “Here, fix that and turn on the radio. Maybe ol’ Hank is cryin’ about the time his hamster got drunk and left him.”
He fixed the radio but didn’t turn it on, and we rode the rest of the way to the restaurant listening to the sound of the windshield wipers and to the non-sound of brothers engaged in productive discussion. There aren’t, overall, many times I wish I were an only child, but I do have my moments.
The Pizza Joint’s parking lot held only a few cars, making it easy to snag a choice spot not too far from the front door. I stepped out into the cold wet night, zipping my jacket up to my throat and mentally castigating myself for forgetting my cap. With the appearance of rain and the disappearance of the sun, the temperature had dropped down into the lower regions of chilly. I shoved my hands in my pockets and took off to stride across the lot, but Sam’s voice stopped me.
“Damien?”
I turned to see him standing by the Saturn, a black smudge in the orange-y glow of streetlights. He held up a hand, and, squinting slightly against the wind, I made out that he clutched a blunt in his fingers.
“Want to smoke this before we go in?”
“In this drizzle?” I was cold, and slightly irritated, and my bladder had begun to intimate that it would shortly be requesting another drain. “Hell yeah. But we can’t burn in the car.”
“Well, duh,” he said. “Let’s go around the side of the building. All the employees get high out by the dumpster.” See? Observant as hell. If he’d only use his powers for good.
“I didn’t know you toked,” I said, falling into step beside him.
“Very rarely,” he replied. “I’ve had this for awhile. I’ve been saving it.”
“Occasions don’t get any more special than this.” I said. As we angled around the corner of the building, the drizzle died out, like the rain god himself approved this side trip. “Where’d you get it?”
“From Inbred Wanda.” We stepped into the plank-fenced area containing the dumpster. It smelled foul but we weren’t there to admire the olfactory scenery, as it were. At least the fence blocked the wind. Somewhat. “Same place you get yours.”
I passed over that as not worthy of comment. “So you’re fucking her too?” I asked, neglecting to mention that I’d never fucked her myself. I struck a light for him and he toked up, coughing slightly as he inhaled.
“No,” he admitted, passing the blunt to me. “Not her.” His face pinking from embarrassment (or maybe just the cold; who knows with that kid?) he continued, “I let her little brother suck me off sometimes.”
Whoa. That knocked me back and almost made me lose my toke. “Sloppy Joey? No shit?”
“Yeah.” Sam didn’t look very proud. “That’s where I got those porn magazines. His grandad was stationed in Germany in the seventies and brought back a huge box of them. Joey gives me a couple every time I let him do me.”
“I didn’t know he was queer,” I said thoughtfully, hitting the blunt a few extra times on my turn.
“Hey, don’t bogart,” Sam protested. “Is that what you call it? Bogarting?” I gave him back the blunt and nodded, noticing how glassy his eyes had become behind the spots of rain on his spectacles. “Not many people know Sloppy Joey is gay,” Sam said, his mouth quirking up. “Just me and most of the boys in my grade.” He giggled.
I giggled with him. Yeah, I remembered this strain of weed. Good shit. “So,” I said slyly, trying to trick him into admitting something, “you’re gay too, huh?”
“Oh hell no, Damien,” he said, almost too quickly. “Michelle Gorman is always good for second base, and Heather Simms gave me a handjob and let me finger her once.” He smiled, and I could see his cock twitching way up in his black, glassy eyes. “But Emily Crane is the best. She likes me to tie her up and call her a slut and dry hump through our clothes.”
Holy shit. Kid had pert near as good a track record as me at that age, if a bit more, uh, extreme. Who’d’a thunk it? “So I guess that makes you bi?” I had attained a righteous buzz by now, and, as my bladder had thoughtfully forewarned me, I needed to piss pretty bad. But I wanted to take advantage of Sam’s stoned ease, the first time all day he’d even been close to candid.
He thought about it carefully, trying to catch words as they floated through his consciousness. I discreetly pinched the blunt out and dropped it in my jacket pocket. Kid didn’t need anymore right now. “Not really,” he said at last, not noticing that I’d stopped passing. “I guess, if I had to put a label on myself, it would be . . .” he hesitated “ . . . heteroflexible?” Asking me, not telling me.
“Heteroflexible,” I mused aloud. “Okay, I can get behind that. Its got a good beat and you can dance to it.”
“What about you, Damien?” he asked, looking at me more alertly than one would have thought him capable. “Are you gay? Or bi?” His voice took on a teasing tone. “I don’t think you can honestly claim to be arrow-straight.”
I wondered if he referred to what we’d done in the shower or to what he may have learned in his text-fest with the cracker. Or both. “I suppose I’ll have to settle for heteroflexible too.”
Sam laughed at that, harder than the sally required, and I understood that he’d been sweating my response and that his laughter signaled relief. I waited patiently for him to quieten, stood there by the dumpster, nicely baked, but also cold and hungry and –
“I gotta piss,” I said, when he calmed some.
“Okay,” he said, still chuckling. “Let’s go in. I think I could eat an extra-large by myself.” He probably could; I’ve seen his skinny ass pack away even more than that. “Plus hummus.” He turned and walked off, all stoned and giggly. After he’d gone a few feet he noticed that he walked alone. He turned and goggled at me, surprised to see that I hadn’t moved. “You coming, Damien?”
“I gotta piss,” I reiterated, my feet nailed to the greasy asphalt, my hands stuffed into my jacket pockets.
“Oh, yuck, Damien, you’re not gonna pee by the dumpster are you? They have a perfectly good if slightly unsanitary restroom inside.” He sounded exactly like Mom.
My response?
“I gotta piss,” I said for the third time, this time adding, “babyboi.” Really drawing out that last syllable: bo-weeeeee.
Sam got it that time, and he didn’t particularly like it. He came back towards me a couple steps, his nose wrinkling. “Not now, Damien. Not now, please.”
“I didn’t drink all that water for nothing,” I pointed out. “Besides, you owe me. Say you don’t!”
“I know, I know I do,” he said, “but later, please, Damien, later!” His voice eerily Chad-like as he pleaded for clemency. As if in sympathy with Sam, the clouds started sprinkling rain again, and the wind picked up.
Unmoved, I stood there by the dumpster, my stance adamant. “I said that I gotta piss,” I repeated, again adding that endearment I meant for him to come to despise, “babyboi.”
It was a struggle of wills. And I won. “Yes, um, yes sir,” he muttered. Amazed, I struggled to maintain my impassivity as he trudged over and hitched up his dress robes and knelt in front of me. I pulled my hands from my jacket pockets and, widening my stance as per proper urination protocols (P.U.P. — look it up), unzipped and fished out my hose. With a sad, submissive sigh Sam inclined his face and closed his eyes and opened his mouth, and I delicately placed my cockhead on the edge of his lower lip.
And stood there.
And stood there some more.
Dammit. What was wrong with me? It’s so easy to piss the boy off; you’d think it would be cake to piss on him, too.
Nope.
My bladder bitched about needing to lose some weight but refused to release the gallons necessary to do so.
I stood there so long it began to be embarrassing.
Until Sam opened his black eyes, wondering, and looked up at me in the spillover of light from the Pizza Joint’s rooftop neon sign, and the primary colors of its square, multi-hued pie twinkled in the lenses of his glasses, red and yellow and green. He looked at me, and I looked at him, our gaze a wind of warmth that matched the warmth of the water that finally began to trickle out of me. It started out slow at first, and a good thing, too, a gusher might drown the kid. He wore no expression that I could see as he tasted those first drops; he merely swallowed them and patiently awaited the deluge. More urine spurted out, stronger this time, and he blinked, startled, but he held position and didn’t spill a drop. The spurt turned into a stream and the stream into a river. I held back as much as I could, but he never flinched, just swallowed what I pissed out, and I grew confident in his intake skills and let loose the dam, and his eyes widened, and his brows drew together, accepting the challenge, and he reached up and gently grasped me between thumb and forefinger and settled my head more firmly against his lip.
How did I feel?
Glad you asked.
I felt like the high priest of the water god, and it bathed me in cold rain as I led the worship. It had created me to not only carry itself from place to place but also from person to person. The awesome responsibility of transfer filled me with power. Not raw power, mind you, nor physical power, nor even sexual power. No, this was far from a sensual trip; ’twas ethereal. A power of vitality, if you will. A power of generosity. I gifted my brother the holy fluid, and he drank it in, drank me in, taking what I (we) gave and converting it into fuel to burn in his own fire. The river ebbed to stream which shrank to spurts and, at last, trickles. We watched each other until the last drop rolled down his throat, and he blinked.
All this takes longer to read than it took me to empty every milliliter of moisture my bladder could muster, you don’t have to tell me that. I write like I piss, I guess; spurting and spouting, meandering and measuring my words. Deal with it. The point is, I got an idea that moment is permanently graffitied into a prominent spot on my memory’s wall, like a vivid and impressionistic cave painting, the kind sure to bumfuzzle archeologists ten millenia hence. Oh, the colors. Oh, the spirals and lines.
It’s the moment immediately following that I’d like to forget.
As we posed there between the dumpster and the fence, on a taint of greasy wet asphalt, a shocked female voice exclaimed, “What the hell?” And with it returned the wind and the rain and the cold and the stench. The power of reality shattered our drowning pool. “What? The? Hell?”
Goddammit. Will somebody please tell where I can hire a surgeon to implant eyes on all sides of my skull? Because apparently I need them. We both snapped our heads to around to discover staring at us an obese teenage white girl wearing a Pizza Joint plastic apron and a wide-eyed moue of disbelief.
I was too stoned and too mellow from the trip I’d just taken with Sam to panic; I just reached up into the aether and channeled down Rudy. Slipping my unabashed pony back into the barn, and making sure to zip, I shrugged and said, “Kid’s own fault. He lost the bet.”
Her jaw dropped and it took her a second to speak. “Oh, wow, that’s harsh!”
I pulled Sam up off the asphalt by the elbow. “What can I say? He insisted on Ole Miss by ten.”
“Oh.” She nodded as if my remark made the slightest bit of sense. “Okay. I can see it. Sort of.” She glanced over at Sam and her nod changed to a shake. “Wow. Poor bastard.”
“Yeah,” I said, keeping a firm grip on Sam’s elbow with one hand and fiddling in my jacket pocket with the other. “Pobrecito. Come on, Chad.”
“Uh, sure, Rudy.” Right on cue.
I found what I’d been scrabbling for, and, pulling out the half-smoked blunt, slipped it into her grip, then eased us past her bulk and out the enclosure’s gate, where Sam promptly stumbled over one of the rolling trash cans she’d lined up like piglets to follow her out to the dumpster. Yanking him back into relatively proper balance, I grinned a Rudy grin in her general direction. “See ya. Uh. Y’all got awesome pizza here!”
She looked up from the blunt she’d just discovered in her hand, a delighted smile on her face. “Hey, thanks, good looking out!”
“Uh, yeah,” I called back, strolling casually away, gripping Sam’s elbow with enough force I wonder I didn’t bruise him. Good looking out, my ass. Sorry looking out. Stupid stupid stupid. I resolved to be more careful in future. If I get busted by anybody ever again in this chapter of the story of my life, then I’m going to just run naked down Main Street and scream that I’m a juicy perv. In other words, ain’t never gonna happen. Enough’s enough.
I swear.
Anyhow.
“Omigod, I am sooo mortified,” Sam muttered, as he we strolled away with fake insouciance. “Are you happy, Damien? I’m so embarrassed I could die.”
“Are you boned?” I asked, flashing on Chad.
“Huh? No! Why?”
“Just, uh, curious.”
“No, Damien, humiliation doesn’t turn me on.” He yanked his elbow from my grip and crossed his arms as he glared at me. “And then you gave her the blunt!”
“That, Babyboi, is called bribery. To keep her fat, nay, obese mouth shut. Besides, if there’s one thing we possess plenty of, it’s weed.”
“You know how much trouble we could get into, giving away pot like that?”
“Not nearly as much trouble as if she blabbed and the manager called the cops or, even worse, Mom.”
“Fair point,” he grumbled, conceding but not liking it.
I paused at the restaurant’s front door, my hand on the handle. “So, uh, Sam, how did it taste?”
He looked up at me, his rain-streaked face tight with intoxication and humiliation. “I don’t know. Like . . . like nothing. Salty water, maybe. Warm. Can we go in please? I’m cold and wet and ready to sink into the concrete with shame. And now I have to pee too.” He paused. “Unless you want to go back to the dumpster and taste it for yourself? Baby, uh, man.”
I snorted. “Go ahead and fantasize all you want to,” I told him, opening the door and bowing him inside, “then wipe off your belly and go to sleep.” A young pregnant couple passing by on their way out shot me a startled glance, and I summoned the grace to blush and mutter, “Sorry.”
“Smooth, bro.” Figures Sam would find my social faux-pas amusing. “I’m going to go pee. Get us a table somewhere isolated.” He grinned at me and he and his robes dripped off to the restroom. I watched him go, thinking about how well I knew him, how well and how feebly. I knew that he lined his paired socks up by color and his underwear by type and make in the drawer, but I didn’t know he smoked weed. I knew that he smuggled chocolate kisses into the house in his book-bag, right under Mom’s death-on-candy nose, but I’d no idea he’d experienced hand- and blow-jobs. I knew he jerked off, and I could probably even calculate the frequency, but the news that he harbored a kinky side blew me (so to speak) out of the water. I knew what Sam was, but not who. Hell, if you want to get right down to it, I thought, I know Rudy better than I do my own brother. It made we wonder if we ever really, really know anybody at all, know them deep down into the skin, when we can never really see anything beyond what we expect even in those closest to us.
Okay, yeah, I was stoned.
Finally a skinny, fortyish waitress showed up at the host stand, rescuing me from my maundering. There weren’t many other customers, five or six tables of twosomes all seated in a group at the front end of the dining room. I asked the waitress to seat us somewhere off to ourselves, and she nodded and led me to a table smack dab in the center of the thin crowd. I merely looked at her, drawing Mom’s thin-lipped smile on my mouth, and she huffed a little, barely hidden annoyance flashing in her brown eyes, but she took me, stiff-legged, to a booth in the rear corner. I thanked her very politely and took my seat, ordering two sweet teas, no lemon, and some hummus, please. She slammed the menus down on the table and flounced off.
While I waited for Sam I laid my phone on the table, shrugged out of my jacket and brushed a hand through my crew-cut, spraying drops of deity everywhere. Oops. I looked around at the other customers, realized that each of the five pairings of customers was male/female, spaced in age from late teens to middle-aged bordering on elderly. Of course, I thought. Saturday night is date night. It occurred to me that, in a very real sense, I was here on a date myself. Sam and I were just another couple, having a nice dinner before setting out on an activity designed to incite intimacy.
A pizza date with my own brother. The heteroflexible equivalent of taking your sister to prom.
The realization was disquieting, to say the least. It was also decidedly chuckle-icious. Instead of hitting a movie or a nightclub after dinner, we were (hopefully) going to get stoned and buttfuck our black little souls out. I wondered which of us couples would enjoy our evening more.
Sam apparated almost out of thin air, startling me out of my amused melancholy. He’d dried off his face and glasses and combed his damp hair into a close approximation of a tidy ‘do. “Whew. I may not look any better, but I sure as heck feel better,” he said, borrowing from me a joke that had originated – where else? – with Rudy. He climbed out of his duster and draped it neatly across a chair at a nearby vacant table and slid into the booth opposite me. “Did you order some hummus? And what did you ask for us to drink?”
“Sweet tea for both,” the waitress said, appearing with our drinks in hand. Setting them down, she continued, “Originally unsweetened, but I stirred my finger around in it.” She laughed what she thought a charming laugh. It wasn’t.
Gross, I thought to myself, and I know Sam did too, but we both chuckled dutifully, even as my kid brother shot a disappointed glare at me. “What?” I asked, knowing full damn well what. “You can drink as much tea as you want,” and his eyes widened and then narrowed as he hearkened to the full meaning of that, “and if it means that much to you I’ll go back to water when we get to Rudy’s. If we go to Rudy’s,” I added hastily as his eyebrow threatened to rise. “They have tons of it there. I just want tea with my dinner.”
“Tea goes good with pizza,” the waitress said (what the hell was she still doing here?), “the only thing goes better with pizza is draft beer.” She smiled at me hopefully.
Sam turned the eyebrow on her, clearly wondering if she were blind, but I gave her the benefit of both mine. “Thanks, uh, Hilda,” I said, peering at the nametag on her desiccated chest, “but I think I’ll stick with tea. Too much beer keeps me from studying for my SATs.”
The hopeful smile switched off. “Your hummus will be out soon, and I’ll get your pie order then,” she informed us, then stopped mid-flounce and said to Sam, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to move your robe into the booth with you. We may need the table.”
“It’s not a robe, its a duster,” he called to her retreating back, and when she didn’t respond, he muttered under his breath, “bitch.” But he retrieved the jacket and folded it carefully into the seat beside him. “And you shut the hell up too, Damien,” he said, although I’d not uttered a syllable, merely grinned at him. “It’s a duster, not a damned robe.”
“Such language,” I chided, smiling, but he gazed back at me with absolutely no repentance in his glittering black eyes. “You know,” I said, tactfully changing the subject, “if I didn’t have to take a receipt back to Mom I’d damn sure order a beer just to see if Hilda would really bring me one. Not that I’d drink it.”
“Maybe you should,” he replied, his mouth quirking up, “it might make your pee taste better.” And he burst into that uniquely Sam burst of laughter, which meant he enjoyed the joke on a level far above (or far below) the rest of us mere humans.
I gave a polite chuckle at the quip (which wasn’t bad, for Sam) and, when I could make myself heard over his amusement, I said, “Mom would absolutely explode if I gave her a receipt with a beer listed on it. Boom!” I illustrated the sound effect with the fingers of both hands. “Blond hair and Old Navy all over the kitchen.”
“And then her bloody exploded flesh would clump back together into a zombie golem and eat your brain,” Sam said, chortling so hard he had trouble speaking, “and then she’d eat mine for letting you order the beer!” Tears leaked from his eyes, so mightily amused was he, and I just goggled at him for a sec before joining him in laughter. I heartily approved this display of an imagination I’d not dreamed existed, even if the bent of it left me a little unsettled.
A platter containing a wealth of warm pita triangles and a generous scoop of the best hummus in the known world slammed down on the table between us. Surprised, we choked off our laughter and looked up. Hilda looked down at us, her expression one step shy of aghast. Without saying a word, and while eyeing us, and Sam in particular, as two especially odious specimens of the despised genus teenagerus-savagus, she pulled an order pad and pen from her apron pocket and waited expectantly.
When I could trust myself not to burst back into fits of giggles, I told her, “We’re not ready yet. Give us five minutes? Sorry to be such, uh, trouble.”
She flounce flounce flounced away.
“Her tip is dropping with every eye roll and flounce,” I observed to Sam, and he nodded back, all grave and shit, and that did it, I lost it again and almost fell out of the booth. I let it go and laughed heartily, delightfully surprised to discover how much fun I was having. More fun than I’d ever imagined a night spent baby-sitting my little brother could be.
“Damien. Damien!” Sam hissed at me urgently through his own set of giggles. “Everyone is looking at us!” And it was true; the couples at the other end of the room and a handful of employees, including Hilda and the obese dishwasher girl from the scene at the dumpster, all of them eyed us if wondering if a discreet call to the loony bin were in order. I didn’t care; there is enough of Rudy’s philosophy in me to not give two craps what the herd thinks of me; but I tried to rein it in for Sam’s sake. “The whole point of getting a booth away from everybody is so we can talk without anybody paying attention to us!” he said, his normally pale cheeks red with his own mirth, and I struggled upright and, for lack of anything better to shut up my braying laughter, I slathered hummus on a pita triangle and shoved it in my mouth.
Heaven. Sheer heaven.
Sam, still chuckling softly to himself, grabbed some hummus for himself and bent over the menu, and the two of us munched out happily for a minute, him studying the pizza descriptions and me studying him, until –
“Sam?”
“Hmm?”
“Sam!” He looked up, blinking at me, as if having difficulty focusing, and I wondered how dilated his pupils were; I couldn’t read it in the fathomless opacity of his irises. “Talking about Mom a minute ago reminded me.” I cleared my throat. “You do masturbate, don’t you?”
He blinked at me some more. “Have you ever heard the latin term ‘non-sequiter’?” he asked me, his tone reasonable, like you’d talk to a crazy person. “It means –”
“I know what non-sequiter means,” I interrupted, trying not to let him annoy me. “Humor me. Shoot me a straight answer for once in your weird life. Do you or do you not spank the monkey?”
“You know I do,” he said, and his cheeks, only so recently reddened with mirth, pinked up again. “Why?”
“How often?” I asked, overriding his query.
“Jeez, Damien, I don’t know! Couple times a day, maybe three or fuh-four if the mood strikes me.” His face color far surpassing the red it had been during his giggle-fest.
I drew a deep breath. “Well, your big brother is here to tell you that it’s normal, and natural, and that I myself have been known to partake of the activity, at the same frequency you yourself have described, and I can report that the experience has truly left me healthier, wealthier, and wiser, a much better person and, uh, a more respectful, dutiful son.” Sam stared at me in stoned consternation. “Plus, uh, studies have shown that rollin’ the bone relieves stress and may even enhance your immune system.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have smoked that blunt, Damien. You’re rambling.” Obvious concern in his gaze. “Maybe I kept the blunt too long and it molded up. I read on the internet that moldy marijuana can cause hallucinations.”
I waved that away. “You set off Mom’s early-warning system when you went on and on about needing to discuss ‘brother stuff’ over pizza –”
“I did not go and on!”
“– and she asked me what you wanted to talk about that was so delicate and the first thing I thought of was –”
“Was to tell her that I wanted to talk about . . . about . . . that?” Horrified that I’d spoken to our mother any sentence containing both his name and the word masturbation.
“Hey, it worked, it shut her down! It’s your own fault, anyhow, and that’s what I meant when I said you tried to be cute and evasive and blabbed to the world that you had a secret.”
“But –”
“So there, we’ve done it, discussed masturbation, in much greater detail than either of us were completely comfortable with, so that means at least one thing I said to Mom about tonight isn’t a bold-faced lie.”
“But you brought the subject up,” Sam pointed out, “not me.”
“I swear,” I said to him, my eyes squinting at him in bemused, benign irritation, “if you don’t grow up to be a lawyer I’ll shoot you myself.” He started to talk but I held up my hand, shushing him. “The judge has ruled, councilor. The defendant is not guilty on one count of gross mendacity.”
“Mendacity?” he asked, squinting back at me.
“Dude!”
Sam looked around wildly, a glaze of fearful expectation on his face, as if he expected Rudy to materialize out of the fake wood paneling of the walls. Chuckling, I held up my phone. “Just a text alert, bro.” Spotting Hilda bustling across the dining room towards our booth with her pad and pen already poised for battle, I said hastily, “I’ll read it in the restroom. I gotta piss again anyhow. You choose the pizza.”
“What do you want on it?”
“I don’t care,” I said. They don’t do halfsie pies at Pizza Joint, and Sam could be trusted to choose wisely. “You pick.” I slid out of the booth just as Hilda rolled up. “I’ll pick the movie.”
He glanced up me, ignoring Hilda’s smoldering impatience. “I hope it isn’t something with a lot of sex and violence.”
“Brother mine,” I said, gazing at him fondly, “even those, done right, are family friendly.”
Hilda snorted.
“I’ll be right back, bro,” I said, leaving him alone with the dragon lady, confident he could handle her. Truth be known, I pitied her a little. Get my brother’s back up and he’s more than a match for any snotty waitress the world might throw at him.
The restroom door’s lock read “occupied”, and while I waited I leaned against the wall, legs crossed, and cursed myself for allowing myself to be goaded into chugging those three huge glasses of water. I swear, I thought, I swear by Saint Bobo’s hairy foreskin I’ll think twice before letting Sam (or Rudy, for that matter) manipulate me ever again into stupidity. I didn’t swear by anything more serious than a fictitious saint’s foreskin because I figured I’d break the vow before too many hours passed, and I could do without an angry deity dogging me over a little harmless blasphemy.
Finally, right about the time I seriously started to consider storming the ladies room, the “occupied” tile clinked over to “vacant” and an ancient man wearing a horrible toupee and an assistant manager’s engraved plastic name-tag shuffled out, half-smiling at me in apology, and I gifted him with a tight smile as I slipped past into the restroom, wrinkling my nose at the incredibly foul smell of old man bowels. Trying to breath through my mouth (actually, trying not to breath at all) I had my hose hauled out and ready to spray almost before I flicked over the lock. Thank God the urinal hung beside the door, and thank God there was a urinal at all. I so did NOT want to have brave the toilet stall that old man had just vacated.
Oh what blessed relief! While I pissed I opened Rudy’s text.
Rudy: “status?”
Damien: “oh yeah it is SO on!!!!!”
Rudy: “lol so u guys got it all worked out?”
Damien: “not entirely but dude dude dude”
Rudy: “what what what”
My flow dripped and dribbled to only the occasional drop, but I let my hose hang free while I finished my conversation.
Damien: “filled babyboi w/ so much piss he squelches when he walks”
Rudy: “NO FUK’N WAY”
Rudy: “cracker wants to drink mine but isn’t it gross??”
Damien: “urine is sterile when it leaves the body”
I have no idea how I knew that. Weird the shit you pick up and don’t realize.
Rudy: “maybe”
Damien: “try it. gonna go eat now holler soon”
Rudy: “bring me some hummus”
I smiled and put my phone up, then my pecker. As I washed my hands, thinking how Sam had correctly described the room as perfectly good if slightly unsanitary, my pocketed phone chirped, “Dude!” and then “Dude!” again.
Rudy: “wait babyboi?”
Rudy: “BABYBOI????”
Damien: “u got a cracker i got a babyboi”
Rudy: “u coulda done better”
I flipped off the text before flipping shut my phone and putting it away and leaving the restroom. Could’ve done better, indeed. As I exited the short corridor leading back out to the dining room I spotted my kid brother hovering over the jukebox, punching buttons, and I just had to stop and shake my head and grin. Babyboi fit him at least as well as that damn duster did. Even when he wasn’t wearing it he seemed to exude it like an aura of . . . yeah, magic. I stood there in the archway to the service hall, just admiring him for a sec, until some forgettable pop tune burbled up from hidden speakers. I bit back a groan. Oh well, I thought, nobody’s perfect.
I made it back to the booth to find that Hilda had topped off our tea and that only two pita triangles and a pitiful half-smear of hummus remained on the platter. The grumpy waitress had also removed the menus and provided us with side plates and a handful of napkins. Despite her obvious disdain for us, and her excessive flouncing, she proved to give fast and efficient service. Too bad we can’t include ‘friendly’ in that description.
“Sorry,” Sam said, indicating the ransacked appetizer plate. “I was just hungry and didn’t realize . . .” His voice trailed off, and his black eyes, magnified slightly in his round lenses, held a true glimmer of remorse in them. “I’m sorry.”
He means it, I thought, oddly touched. Usually food is first come first served between the two of us, full speed ahead and damn the indigestion. “It’s okay, Babyboi,” I soothed, cleaning up the tattered remnants of our app. “I’m not that worried about it.” I smiled at him. “Besides, it gives me a reason to spank you later.” I popped the last of the hummus and pita into my mouth and winked at him.
He blinked at me, startled, and an embarrassed grin surfaced on his lips and in his eyes, wiping away the honest regret. He started to reply, something flirtatious, I surmised, but then he checked himself and went off in a totally different direction. “Maybe,” he said. “If . . . and that’s a big if . . . we –”
I laid both elbows on the table and peered across the booth at him. “There ain’t no ifs anymore, Babyboi,” I said, almost whispered, “and both us chickens recognize that fox.” Okay, so I’m not above a little plagiarism. Rudy wouldn’t mind. Probably. “This shindig hootenanny is gonna go down. Oh yeah, Babyboi. Oh yeah.”
Blink.
Blink.
Floundering for words, while the first forgettable pop song faded out and a second forgettable pop song took its place.
I grinned at my speechless brother and let him off the hook. “What’s with this shit on the jukebox? I raised you better than that.”
Sam found his voice. “I only wanted to put some music on. I put five bucks in and pretty much just picked the popular stuff.”
I groaned and melodramatically massaged the bridge of my nose with my fingers. “Crap. Justin Bieber –” Sam helpfully made the “ptui!” sound “– will be in there somewhere. Bet.”
“Jeez, Damien, sorry. Maybe you can give me a couple extra licks for it.” Grinning at me. Daring me. Cheeky little shit.
“Five extra licks for every time I have to hear him say ‘baby’,” I threatened, and both of us laughed.
“But seriously, Damien, I only put the music on so we could be sure nobody could overhear us.” He pursed his lips and settled his arms firmly on the table.
“Well?” I asked.
Sam blinked at me, startled. “You go first.”
“What?” I hissed, almost exploding.
He held up his hands defensively. “You go first,” he said again. “Start with what happened with Rudy and Chad last night, and then I’ll tell you why I’ve been acting like a total spaz all day.”
I fumed at him. Not even a lawyer yet and he already fenced with his first hostile witness.
He sighed. “It’s just easier to do this chronologically. It’s the safest way to navigate, I reckon.” He sounded so grown up, more mature than me even. “You do realize that this whole thing has a very great potential to blow up in our faces? That it might even ruin our relationship? For life?”
Well, when ya put it like that. I reached over and laid my hand, lightly, on his wrist. “We won’t let that happen.” The next bit came harder, even harder than when I’d launched the M-word into conversation with Mom, but if ever a time called for the sentiments, that time was now. “I love you, Sam, and all I really want is to express it. To bond with you, somehow.”
His expression softened. Whatever he’d expected me to say it wasn’t that. “I love you too, Damien, and you’re right, that does make me feel better. A little.” He hesitated, and his cheeks pinked up, and when he spoke next his tone carried a light, teasing touch that only reinforced my need of him. “But are you sure that’s all you want?”
I smiled at him. “Well, that, and to fuck your narrow ass until my spooge saturates every cell in your body and you are totally and completely my bitch.” All cocky, I leaned back against the booth seat and grinned and sparkled my brown eyes at him.
His face turned the brightest red shade of the evening, but he gave it right back to me. “That’s gonna take a lot of spooge, bro.”
“I always carry spares in case of an emergency.”
A delighted screech escaped from his lips, and he clamped a hand over them, mortified at making a sound like a tweenage girl. You’d think he’d never flirted before. Hell, maybe he hadn’t.
Then again, flirting with your brother does have its surreal side.
I leaned back in over the table. “But, okay, anyhow, fine, I’ll go first. Just realize that it’ll cost you later.” He’d just began to get himself under control, but that set him off again. I never knew somebody could be that tickled and that embarrassed at the same time. After a bit he did manage to get calmed down, and I started in on the whole laborious story. Figuring I owed him full disclosure, I began with Rudy telling me the story about busting Chad and concluded with the moment I’d tossed the porno mag back onto his own bed. I told of my fit of jealousy over Rudy’s and Chad’s intimacy. I even spoke of my thought processes when I caught him wanking, detailing the circumstances that led to my, shall we say, excited demeanor. We’d moved past the point of wary mistrust; we each possessed enough damning evidence of the other’s clandestine activities to force detente; we got MAD, baby, mutual assured destruction. He listened silently as the tale unfolded, nodded his head at various salient points, the whole time wearing an oddly smug look on his face, as if rather than hearing brand-new information he received confirmation of facts already supposed.
The pizza had arrived before I was too far along in my long, drawn out, Q-worthy story, and we devoured half of it while I finished talking. I’d been a little worried when Hilda set the pie on the table, but, as usual, Sam-the-gourmand had chosen well. He’d ordered a veggie pizza (which I inferred, correctly, would positively affect the flavor of my urine) with several different kinds of mushroom, caramelized onions, some sort of garlic-olive oil drizzle, and six different types of cheeses, all with a pesto-based sauce on a hand-tossed rosemary- and basil-infused crust (I hope I got that right; Sam had to tell me twice just now). After my first hesitant bite I dug in like I might never eat meat again.
“So I figured I’d blown any chance in hell I might have of doing something like that – like this – with you,” I wound up. “Though I must admit to being mighty intrigued with your choice of wank material.” I laughed.
He didn’t. “Yeah. About that. Over the last couple years I’ve discovered my sexual interests are a little . . . um . . . off the beaten path.”
I grinned at him through a mouthful of bliss. “You’re miles off even the unbeaten ones, Babyboi.”
“I’ve always been terrified of you or Mom finding out. I hide those magazines pretty well, I think, and, no, don’t bother looking for them, you won’t find them.”
My facial expression marked astonishment, reproach, and the tiniest smidgen of hurt that he should slight my moral integrity with the merest suggestion that I’d violate his sanctuary and rifle through his possessions.
His facial expression didn’t buy it, but he moved on. “I only get them out when I’m sure I’m going to be alone in the house. Like I thought I was going to be this morning.” He shot me an exaggerated frown.
I snorted. “Shoulda texted Chad for some advance notice.”
“So when you busted down my door and came bumbling in, and then didn’t immediately apologize and back out of the room, I almost had a heart-attack. Seriously. A heart attack.”
“You have one helluva poker face, bro,” I said. “Remind me not to play you for money.”
“Taking the offensive and bulling straight through the front line is usually the best strategy for dealing with you,” he said, then groaned and did the whole face/palm thing. “I should never have told you that. Dammit!”
“Don’t worry. You’ll come up with a new and improved strategy. I know you. Fuck-tard.”
“Dude!” Talk about timing.
I ostentatiously ignored the summons, fixing my glance firmly on my brother. I had a pretty good idea what the text said, anyway. “I’m listening.” I stuffed more pizza in my mouth, but I kept my eyes on Sam.
“But you just noticed me wanking, not what I wanked to. So I relaxed a little bit and settled into sparring with you, but I noticed right off that your heart didn’t really seem to be into it, like you were acting or something. Like you were flustered but covering. And the blackmail attempt? Come on, Damien. That was a douche move, even for you.”
I was saved the necessity of replying by the appearance of the lovely Hilda. While she refilled our teas, I looked around. The restaurant had filled while we’d been talking, although our corner remained virtually untouched with couples.
“Almost finished, are we?” Hilda asked, delighted to see only two pizza squares left. “Save room for dessert? We have a gorgeous apple/cranberry tart that makes a perfect topper for your meal.” Her tone suggested she rather thought our palates much too unsophisticated to appreciate such a treat, but she’d bring us one if we so demanded.
“Dude!”
Hilda glowered at my phone on the table, as if the phone had addressed her personally.
“No, thanks, Hilda,” Sam said, drawing her ire back onto himself. Because he didn’t want the bitch’s visage burning a hole in my otter-box, I guess. “Neither one of us has the room for it, and nothing on your menu could ever come close to matching your sweetness.” Perfectly sincere.
Her nostrils flared. “Why, thanks, hun,” she said, perfectly insincere. “I’ll bring your check around directly.” The concept made her so giddy she forgot to flounce as she walked away.
“Nice one,” I said, grabbing one of the two remaining pieces of the manna pie.
“There’s just something about her that would tick me off if I wanted to care,” Sam said, snatching the last square of pizza in case I had any designs on it, “which I don’t.”
“Dude!”
Continuing to ignore Rudy as best I could, although he skirted the edge of pissing me off, I said, “I only attempted the douche-y blackmail move because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and because I was under severe physical pressure at the time. I had Rudy’s story fresh on my mind, and I wanted so badly to, um, achieve the same result he had that I blurted that out without meaning to. I almost shit my pants in relief when you interrupted and shut me up. I told you that.”
“I said it was a douche move,” Sam said patiently, “not that I believed you meant it. And I broke in when I did because I had the strangest feeling that you were going to demand something much, uh, harsher than that I do your chores. If that’s all you wanted you wouldn’t resort to blackmail. You’d either bribe me or threaten to kick my ass. Bless your heart, bro, but if human skeletons had subtle bones, you’d have to be classified as an alien species, because you don’t have a single one.”
Bless my heart? Kiss my ass. “Thanks. Now I know what being damned with faint praise feels like.”
The eyebrow raised.
“I didn’t say you were wrong,” I said, feeling the blood throb in my temples. “I know my limitations.”
Satisfied with that, Sam returned to his narration. “Okay, so we played through the scene, and I started breathing again, and then you snatched up one of my magazines off the bed and fled with it before I could stop you.”
“Be glad I left when I did, no matter what I grabbed on my way out,” I said to him. “Be very glad.”
“I’ll take your word for it. All I know is that gave me my second almost-heart attack of the day. No way I could finish what I started when any minute I expected to hear you busting your gut laughing in the bathroom. So I got dressed and put up my magazines and sat down at the computer to play something, I don’t know what.”
“GTA,” I said.
“Maybe. All I know is died about a hundred times waiting for you to explode all over me. And then it got, I don’t know, weird.”
“Oh, then it got weird.”
“Well, weird-er, okay? Because I kept thinking about how you looked when you busted in my door. Your zipper down, your face red from the cold, your eyes flashing. You looked like you’d just had the most amazing sex ever and like you were getting ready to have amazing sex again, with whomever happened to be around. It was kind of scary.”
“Dude!”
I slipped my phone underneath my jacket on the seat next to me. “Mostly I just had to poop.”
“Shut up and take a compliment once in a while, Damien!”
“That was a compliment?”
He busied himself tidying the table, placing our empty plates and used napkins on the pizza platter and moving the set over to the edge of the table. “Yes, it was.” Blink blink blink. “Because it turned me on. Thinking back on it, if you’d said one word about it you could’ve screwed my brains out right then and there. I know you wanted to. The way your eyes crawled all over me told me so.”
Blink blink blink. Me this time. Ten million responses in my mind and I didn’t have a damn thing to say. Forgettable pop song number four hundred thirty two sprinkled down like dandruff in the silence between us.
As if the stacked plates had been a signal Hilda swooped in and snatched them up, slamming a copy of the bill down in their stead. “Payupfrontthankyouboysyouhaveagreatnightcomebackandseeus!” And then, poof! she was gone.
“But like I said only realized all that stuff later, when I also realized that the whole time we stood there sparring I stayed hard as a rock, and that I was still hard as a rock remembering it.” His blinking became as fast and furious as a hummingbirds wings, and his cheeks pinkened again. “There I was, waiting in agony for you to come back in and either laugh your ass off at me or call me sick and perverted and threaten to tell Mom, and yet I was so hard it hurt. The conflict –”
“Dude!” Though muffled by my jacket, the alert rang loud and clear in the air, and both of us jumped.
His mouth pursed in irritation, Sam said, “If you don’t answer that he’ll just keep annoying me.”
I laughed. “I know what he wants, but you’re right, if I don’t answer he’ll just keep annoying both of us.” I retrieved the phone and put it on the table in front of Sam. “’Dude!’ times five, right?”
“Yeah?”
I held up my hand and counted off the fingers, one to four. “Hummus, hummus, hummus, hummus.” And, holding up my thumb, “Please.”
His expression skeptical, he picked up the phone and opened the text app. “You’re wrong, Damien.” He turned the phone to let me read it.
Rudy: “hummus”
Rudy: “hummus”
Rudy: “hummus”
Rudy: “hummus”
Rudy: “hummus”
Sam said, “See? ‘hummus’ five times and no ple–”
“Dude!”
Sam read the new text, groaned, showed it to me.
Rudy: “pweeze??”
“How do you do that?” Sam demanded. “Do y’all really share one brain between the two of you, like Mom says?”
“Rudy, like most males, has basically two modes,” I explained, ignoring the one brain crack as old material. “Hungry, and horny. If he’s not naked, bring him some hummus.” I thought about that a sec. “Actually it would be a good idea to bring him some hummus anyway.” When Sam just blinked at my joke, I sighed and said, “He knows where we’re eating, and he’s stoned and got the munchies. Truly, it wasn’t a stretch to predict that.”
Sam reached the phone over the table toward me. “Well, answer him, would you? So we can finish this up and get on with the –” He blinked again, at himself this time. “Just tell him we’ll bring him some hummus, okay?”
I shook my head. “You tell him,” I said. “Pretend you’re me.”
His face brightened, and he took back the phone, and I watched him with a big grin on my face as his brow furrowed and he contemplated the proper response. I grinned because he looked so, yeah, adorable, in his concentration. Because I enjoyed his company tonight; he challenged me and stimulated me on levels Rudy didn’t ken were there to touch. Because, in agreeing to pick up some hummus for Rudy, he’d tacitly agreed to spend the night submitting to my lust. Not that there was ever any doubt. On either of our parts.
But I figured it was nice of me to let him think he was in charge.
Sam finished typing into the phone and held the response up for my approval.
Damien: “k. k. k. k. k. pweeze dis, douche-wad”
“Perfect,” I told Sam. “Hit send.” He did so, a delighted smile on his face, but, as he slid the phone back across the table at me, that smile slid off his lips, indicating a desire to return to serious conversation. Because, having already made the decision or not, he still needed to tell me why. And I needed to hear why, too. I may be a stupid teenager, but even I registered that the two of us trod very shaky ground, and, for us to come through this intact and with the bond that I craved solid between us, every action must be firm and above-board, with clearly stated terms and reasons. So I followed his lead and rearranged my own face into a more serious expression and said, “Sam, bro, I would never laugh at you, or call you names. Well, not over anything serious, anyhow. And I would never blab to Mom about anything that personal, even if your kink was ten times weirder. If I had any issue with you I’d discuss it with you myself.” Like we’re doing now, I thought but didn’t say.
“I get that. Now. Then all I could think about was being destroyed. And then you came back and tossed the magazine on my bed and didn’t say anything about the, uh, subject matter. But you weren’t embarrassed by it, either. You treated it like it was no big deal, like . . . well, you had almost a ‘been there done that’ look on your face. And . . . well . . . that just complicated things even more.”
“Like it wasn’t complicated enough.”
“Right? Because . . . that just made me hornier?”
“You’re asking me?”
He sat silently for a minute, breathing through his nose, concentrating on banishing his embarrassment, trying to toss it like a cloak that had become more hindrance than necessity in the heat. When he spoke again, his face wore its usual implacable paleness, and no shame danced in his eyes or colored his tone. “Yeah, Damien, it made me hornier, and I . . . I . . .” Not embarrassed, just searching for words. At last he settled for, “I couldn’t understand why. Damien, you know I’m interested in the rough stuff, the spanking, the ropes and chains and all that?”
“Yeah? So?”
He took a deep breath. “Well, until you came along and busted down my door, I always wanted to be the one doing the spanking and the roping, and mostly only doing it to girls, at that! I’m into dominance, not submission.”
I burst out laughing, despite his obvious sincerity. He closed his mouth with a click and the first returning tendrils of shame began to bloom on his cheeks. I cut off my laughter instantly. “No no no, Sam, I’m not laughing at you! I swear I’m not! You just surprised me, that’s all. I believe you.” He looked at me through narrowed eyes, wanting to trust me. “Okay, maybe I am laughing at you, but only a little bit, and not because I have a problem with whatever position you want to assume during sex. No,” I continued, unable to avoid a bit of a smile curling up my lips, “I just brayed out like a jackass because I thought, ‘that explains so much’!”
The tendrils of shame curled up and died as the glow of Sam’s more usual irritation fired up his eyes. “Explain it to me, then!”
“No offense, bro, and bless your pea-pickin’ lil ol’ heart, but you can be a bossy sumbitch. I can’t picture you being submissive to anybody.” I winked at him. “Anybody but me, that is.”
“I’m not usually submissive at all. Anybody thinks I’ll kiss their butt can kiss mine.”
I brayed out laughter again, and, after a startled sec, he joined me. “So maybe you can see why I was freaking out,” he continued when we’d calmed. “You bust down my door like a sex superhero and suddenly I’m thinking about turning bottom!”
Remembering my discussion with Mr Q, I said, “Maybe that’s what you really want, way down deep inside.” Trying to keep my voice neutral. “A bossy, uh, take-charge attitude often hides a need to be controlled.”
“Thank you, Dr Freud,” Sam said. “And no, trust me.”
“I trust you,” I said. “And I believe you, trust me. So why the one-eighty?”
“I didn’t know that either, then,” he said. “Later on, when we were doing our chores, and I’d about fried my mind trying to figure it out, something else occurred to me. I started thinking about how you’d positively reeked of sex, and I wondered where you got it. Mr Q had called Mom earlier, so I knew you’d spent the night over there, and whatever their faults I couldn’t imagine them letting you guys have a girl over for sex. So I got curious and –”
“Wait a minute, bro.” He stopped and blinked at me. “What’s all this about me reeking of sex? How could you tell I’d had sex at all?”
“Damien,” he said, his voice impassive, “I can read you with ninety-nine point nine percent accuracy. I can tell when you’ve masturbated in the shower. I know when you flunk a test or flub a tackle at practice. When you’re younger and smaller than the Tasmanian Devil that Mom swears is your brother, you learn to read him pretty dang quick. It’s a survival skill. If I hadn’t been distracted this morning I could have told you how close your turd was to dropping.” Instead of that eyebrow, he cocked his entire head at me. “Can you honestly say that I was wrong? About any of it?”
“So you got curious and – ?” I made the two-fingered rolling motion at him. Get on with it.
He smirked and then un-cocked his head and said, “I got curious and figured I’d ask Chad. He’s learned to be as smart about Rudy as I have of you, over the years. He’d know what happened for sure.”
I let my next words ooze out in a concerned drawl. “I do hope you told him how I almost raped you and how Rudy was somehow to blame.”
Blink. And despite the exile of embarrassment, a red tendril explored the cheeks of his skinny face. “Damn. Of all the texts I told Chad to not let Rudy see –”
I snorted. “Rudy saw them all, don’t ever doubt it.”
“Wonderful.” Sigh. “That’s not exactly what I meant, that’s just how it came out. I mean, it is what I meant, but I didn’t mean it come out like that.”
“Spoken like a true woman.”
“That is so not funny, Damien.”
“Wasn’t meant to be, Sam.” At his imploring blinking, I relented and said, “It’s okay, Sam. I know what you meant.” Pause. “I’ll give you plenty of time to repent those words later.” I paused. He blinked. “Plenty of time.” Blink. Pause. Blink. “Babyboi.”
Before he could formulate a reply, a deep male voice boomed out, “Hilda!” Startled, Sam and I (and every other couple in the restaurant) turned our heads to witness the invasion of a group of teenage boys carrying backpacks and laptops into the dining room. “Bring out five waters and one Mountain Dew and some hummus! We’re back!”
At the invocation of her name, Hilda, who’d been lurking in the back kitchen, shot out into the dining room at the speed of a summoned minion. “I am NOT,” she hollered even before the door swung shut behind her, “do you hear me, I am NOT going to sit here until one o’clock in the morning while you mutants quote stupid British movies and throw dice and pretend to fight Ogre Chieftain Grummsh!”
“Grummsh is an orc chieftain, not ogre,” said the boy who’d announced the occupation. “I thought I explained the difference last week.” He wore a duster identical to Sam’s (although his fit, unlike my brother’s) and had, despite being at least a year younger than me, more hair on his face and head than Rudy had on his entire body. Dammit. He dropped his pack and laptop into a chair, and reaching into one of the duster’s voluminous pockets, pulled out what could only be a crooked tree branch sanded down and painted and glittered into a genuine imitation magic wand. When he shrugged out of the jacket I saw that he wore a too tight tie-dyed t-shirt featuring a picture of gaming dice and captioned ‘Jesus saves. All others roll 2d8.’
“Oh great,” I muttered to Sam as the other boys, laughing and joking at maximum volume, hijacked three nearby tables to pull together, “invasion of the nerds.”
“I don’t care if Grummsh is an orc or an ogre or a –” Hilda began, but broke off in disbelief when she realized the hairy boy ignored her, preferring instead to gaze in my direction. I flushed, wondering if he’d heard me, but –
“Hey, Todd,” Sam called, waving to the hairy boy.
Todd flourished the magic wand into a salute. “Hey, Sam.” Having hailed and well-met my brother, he turned his attention to fending off Hilda’s outraged whispers. Conversation in the dining room returned to normal levels; well, normal levels plus Dungeons and Dragons decibels.
“Poor Hilda has her hands full tonight,” Sam observed.
“It couldn’t happen to a nicer hag,” I grumped. Not five minutes into the dungeon and I wanted to shove a twenty-sided die down somebody’s throat. I had no inclination to discuss Hilda’s problems and even less to inquire how Sam knew Todd. Computer club, maybe. He looked the type, hair and all. “At least we don’t have to worry about being overheard anymore.”
“Say what?” It took a beat before I realized he kidded me. Snickering, he said, “I guess we need to finish this before one of those guys gets a d20 shoved up his nose.” I raised my eyebrows at him. “What?” he asked, meaning it this time. I shook my head. Nothing. “Where was I?”
“Telling Chad how you narrowly avoided becoming the bitch of cell-block Damien.” Straight-faced, I added, “Temporarily, anyhow.”
“How do you manage to go through life without a constant stream of black eyes?”
“I pay Rudy two donuts and a scoop of hummus per week for his skills as a bodyguard. Remind me to stop at Krispy Kreme on the way over to the Q’s. After the liquor store and before the bus station.”
Blink.
Sigh. “I don’t know, Sam. I’m just lucky, I guess. So, Your Horror, you were curious as to the circumstances that prompted the sudden perceived change in my demeanor.” I made the two-fingered rolling motion at him.
Sam closed his eyes, and if not for the hoopla of the rugged adventurers preparing for bloody combat, the sound of him counting to ten might’ve been be audible. When he had his emotions firmly under control, he opened his eyes and continued, “At first Chad didn’t want to tell me anything. He kept saying he didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“I bet he’s a horrible liar even over text,” I said, chuckling.
“The worst! Even I can do better than that! But finally he broke down and mentioned that he’d busted you and Rudy doing something nasty. That’s what he called it. ‘Something nasty.’ I asked him what he meant, and he didn’t answer for a long time, but when he did, he told me in exact and vivid detail what he’d seen. And then, without me even prompting, he started in on what you and Rudy had done to him last night. Omigod, the stuff he told me, Damien! If I blabbed things like that to somebody I’d only just barely call a friend, I’d die of humiliation!”
We locked gazes and both of us said the name at the same time. “Rudy.”
Sam groaned. “Oh crap, Damien, I can’t believe I fell for it. I should have seen it from miles away!”
I laughed, reached over and patted his cheek. “It’s okay, babyboi, people much older and much wiser than you have fallen victim to Rudy’s games.” As for me, I resolved, I’d make him pay. Nose or ass, his choice. Nobody asked for his “help”. “Rudy owns Chad body and soul today. No way you could have known that.”
Whap whap whap! Conversation in the restaurant ceased again, and every eye turned to the gamers. Even the jukebox was silent. The hairy guy, Todd, stood at the head of their long table, his magic wand raised and ready to whap again if necessary. He noticed he had the entire room’s attention, and he gave us all an abashed and apologetic grin. “I’m sorry about that. Y’all go back to eating and we’ll be quiet and let you enjoy your meal.” Lowering his voice, he hissed at his surprised group, “Will you dick-heads shut the hell up? We left off last week with your party in the antechamber to the orc mausoleum . . .”
The jukebox kicked back in with, you guessed it, yet another forgettable pop tune. Not, thank the white, one of he-who-must-not-be-named’s abominations. The adventurers eagerly charged into certain death, but they managed to keep the chaos muted to a dull roar, and conversation in the real world resumed.
Sam picked up right where we’d left off. “I’m just so glad I didn’t talk about my own kinky side, or how I felt about you. But it’s almost like he knew anyway. Because Chad – Rudy, I guess – started in on how I should consider playing with you guys myself, how much fun it was and how good it felt to . . . well, you can figure out what he said.”
Oh, yeah, I could figure out what he said. And what Sam didn’t say. “I didn’t put him up to it, Sam. Honest.” Too bad Rudy’s ass wasn’t listed on the spank list tonight.
He studied me intently, his black eyes owlishly wide and not blinking at me for once. “Okay, Damien, I believe you.”
Surprised at how relieved I felt, I said, “Thanks, bro,” and meant it.
He shotgunned me a quick smile, on and off. “But I’ll have to say it worked.”
“How?”
Sam took his time before answering. “It got me thinking about it. Like I said, I’ve always leaned more to the dom stuff than the slave, but I admit I’ve wondered about the other side. Not because the thought of it turns me on, but because it just seems like a good idea to me to know what it feels like. If I’m going to tie somebody down and spank them and . . . and screw them in the butt then maybe I should experience all that for myself. So, you know . . . so I don’t hurt them too bad. And so I got to thinking that if I were going to bottom for anybody, it might as well be you. Since I have this irresistible draw to you anyhow.”
I barely bit back a chuckle. Trust Sam to take something as mind-blowingly illogical as sex and worry it into a shape he felt comfortable with. Not that I had a problem with his personal goals and quest for knowledge; I applaud anyone who chases their dreams with more than a stick to tilt at impertinent windmills; but I didn’t buy it. Not completely. Why couldn’t Sam lay back and enjoy the ride? Why couldn’t he just accept this as a crazy adventure, one that promised a bond for those brothers who dared dip a toe in the mystery? Was it really necessary to analyze it all out to the last spurt of semen?
Why not simply admit that he wanted me to fuck him as badly as I wanted to do it?
“I guess what it all boils down to is that I wanted you to . . . to fuck me. I wanted it bad. I wanted you be rough, and hurt me, and show me how it felt to serve.”
Oh. Well alrighty then.
“Because,” Sam continued, his tone steady and face unashamed, “you’re big and strong and naturally dominant. Because you’ve been dominating me all my life, and I’m comfortable with it. But mostly,” he paused and looked me in the eye, “because I trust you. Something like this, I trust you, Damien, more than anybody else in the world.”
Now that was unexpected. For the second time that night I reached over and laid my hand lightly on his wrist. “I trust you too, Sam,” I said, holding his gaze. “Because if I didn’t I couldn’t go through with this either.”
He smiled, grateful for the touch. And for the words too, I hope.
I squeezed his wrist and withdrew. “Go on,” I said, “tell me the rest.”
“Okay. So I figured out that I wanted it, and you wanted it too, I knew that both from Chad’s, or rather, Rudy’s texts and from seeing it with my own eyes those two minutes you stood in my doorway. The next question was, could I actually go through with it? You know, suck and . . . everything else. So I decided on two tests, one for each of us. The first one was for me.”
“The shower,” I guessed.
“The shower,” he confirmed.
“The shower was a test for me, too,” I said. “A test of my patience. I wanted to beat you to death with the club you left me holding.”
His facial expression scrunched up in sympathy even as his eyes blinked at me in apology. “I’m sorry, Damien. That wasn’t about cumming, for either one of us. It was about seeing if I could . . . could do those things with my mouth. And about seeing if I could please you.”
“You were truly a babyboi on a mission,” I observed. “I just wish you’d stopped and explained it all to me before you lit my fuse.”
“I knew Mom would be home soon,” he said, but even he kenned that his explanation bordered on weak. “And like you said, I was on a mission.”
“You might have had time for a discussion of your motives if you hadn’t been so intent on scrubbing all the skin off my body.”
His nose wrinkling, Sam said, “Damien, I wash all the towels and underwear every Tuesday, and, no offense? I’ve seen your skid marks.”
Stung, I muttered, “More diplomatic to say you wanted to run your hands over my body.”
He grinned at me, cocky, almost of Rudy quality. “That too.” He lost the grin. “And then you almost aborted the mission I was on.”
“Uh, what?”
“When you made me get hard. Yeah, that’s exactly right, Damien, you made me get hard. I wasn’t expecting that. Your hand felt so amazing, I almost came.”
I shrugged. “I just wanted to see how we matched up down there.” Remembering, I added, “The way we do is sooo fucking cool.”
“And that’s what saved it,” Sam said. Reading the confusion in my face, he explained, “Not the way we fit together, but the way you got me hard just so you could compare us, that was hot. And then when you took control and . . . and shoved yourself into my mouth like that . . . yeah, I knew right then that I could do it. That I wanted to do it.” The memory caused my cock to stir, and I’d be willing to bet Sam’s did too.
“Okay. What about the second test? The one for me?”
“Don’t worry, you passed.” He smiled. “You even got a gold star.”
“Well? What was it?”
All serious again. “When you told me the truth about what happened with Rudy and Chad last night. The whole truth, not just the parts that made you look good.”
“I figured you already knew most of it, anyway.”
“I did. Most of it. Chad, or Rudy, or whoever –”
“I’m sure Rudy dictated and Chad transcribed.” I snickered. “Cracker so humiliated he probably came every time he hit send.”
“Well, whoever I talked to, they were very explicit and detailed about your . . . uh . . . activities, so yeah, I knew most of it. What I didn’t know I guessed.”
“Oh, you guessed. What did you guess?”
Eyebrow. “How about that little fit of jealousy when Rudy took his attention off you for five seconds? I know how . . . uh . . . fond you are of him. I had wondered if any of Rudy’s, uh, activities with Chad made you . . . uh, uncomfortable.”
I glowered at him. Undaunted, Sam widened his eyes and the corners of his lips curved up in a smug ‘you asked’ expression. But he took the hint.
“The point is, Damien, you didn’t lie to me. And that’s when I decided that, yeah, we can do this.”
“Wait. Wait a sec.”
“What now?”
“You’ve had my dick in your throat and my asshole on your tongue. You’ve even drank my piss.”
“Yeah. So?”
“And you just decided ten minutes ago to fully commit?”
“Damien, if you’d lied to me, I’d have shut down completely, no matter what we’ve done so far.”
I snorted. “That would be asking for rape.” Sam raised the eyebrow again. “Okay, okay, yeah, you know I wouldn’t force you. But damn, Sam, if you backed out now, leaving me all hotted up for you like this, well, that would do more damage to our relationship than anything I might do to you tonight.”
“That was a risk I chose to take,” he said to me, looking at me steadily. “Because I had faith in you. And I was right.”
I blew out a stream of not quite frustrated air. “Okay, Sam, I get it. But just to ease my mind, if it so please you, tell me point-blank that we’re going to do this.”
“What? Damien, I just –”
“Dammit, Sam, tell me, in plain, unadorned, and explicit English, that you are going to let me take you to Rudy’s house and fuck your brains out.”
“Damien,” he said, “sir, I want you to take me to the Q’s and fuck my brains out tonight. I want you to be rough with me. I want you to spank me and, and, and twist my nipples, and, and whatever else you want to do to me tonight. That plain, unadorned, and explicit enough for you?”
I nodded regally, magnanimous in victory.
“But there are rules, Damien. I – “
Another disturbance broke out at the gamers’ table, distracting both of us. The hairy guy, Todd, stood up at the head of table, pointing his wand at a large and pock-marked young skin-head who resembled, to me, one of the ogres Hilda had spoken of (and yes, I do know the dif between an orc and an ogre; duh). “Because I’m the DM, that’s why!” Todd insisted, shaking his wand so hard flakes of glitter dusted the air around it.
Ogre, leaning back in his chair and compulsively rolling dice on the tabletop in front of him, protested, “But it clearly states in the PHB and DMG that immediate actions are –”
“I don’t care what it states in the PHB, there’s absolutely no way you can hold a dagger to somebody’s throat and take an opportunity attack without –” Todd noticed that once again all eyes in the dining room were upon him, and, brushing his hair back over his shoulders, he lowered his voice and sat back down. Ogre kept rolling his dice contemptuously.
“I hate rules lawyers,” I observed.
“Rules are there for a reason,” Sam said, his mouth quirking. “Like the rules for –” A fresh outburst of squabbling broke out in orcville, and my brother sighed and pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Can we finish this discussion in the car? Those idiots are more annoying than Rudy when he’s bored.”
I laughed, knowing exactly what Sam meant. “Yeah, good idea. I gotta go piss again anyhow.” I’d had to go for quite awhile, but I didn’t want to break the mood with Sam. “You flag down Hilda and order the hummus to go, and I’ll be right back.
“Wait,” Sam said, stopping me as I started to slide from the booth. “Hang on and I’ll go – Hilda!” he called to the waitress, who happened to be passing (what a coinky-dink!) with a tray-full of beverages.
Startled, she halted, almost losing a glass, and therefore the entire tray, but, a true professional, she managed to prevent the catastrophe with an amazing feat of grace. “What?” she grumbled at Sam peevishly when she had her load back under control. “Now you decide you want a tart?”
“No, no, but thanks for asking. No, I was just going to ask you to bring us an order of hummus –”
“Two orders,” I interrupted. An image of my brother licking hummus off my personal pita pulsed through my groin.
Sam shot me an intrigued glance, as if reading my mind, but he merely continued, drily, “Okay, make it two orders of hummus to go, please, Hilda?”
She narrowed her eyes, as if contemplating the best way to cook bespectacled black-haired boys, but she nodded. Grudgingly. “Five minutes.”
“Then we’ll go away,” Sam promised.
She looked as if she rather doubted she should be so lucky, but she nodded again and moved along.
“Can I go piss now?” I demanded. “Before I’m forced to use my tea glass?”
He eyed me speculatively for a sec, as if he might like to see me to do that, but at last he nodded, and, when I slid out of the booth, he followed. “I just wanted to go with you,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, suspicious. “So we can discuss which of our dates is cuter?”
“That’s easy. Your date is the cutest one,” he said, and I barked out a laugh and maybe a drop or two of urine at his sally. He winked at me and continued, “No, I found out I had a little room left for dessert after all.”
I stopped and cocked my head, smiling at him.
“What?”
I liked this side of Sam; so submissive; so assertive in the way he went about it. “Nothing.”
“I thought you had to pee?”
“I do. Why’d you stop?”
He huffed and stalked off. I followed, grinning.
On the way to the service hall, we had to stop for a moment to allow a tiny Mexican boy to carry a loaded bus tub bigger than he was into the back kitchen. As he inched through the swinging door, we spotted the obese white girl at work running the dishwasher. She saw us at the same time we saw her, and her fat face lit up in a wide, stoned grin. She waved to us, then took her spray hose and held it above her head, opened her mouth and pulled the trigger and got a face-full of water for her efforts. The Mexican busboy, struggling with his load, didn’t notice, thank the Lord. After a surprised (for her; appalled, for us) moment, she burst into a roar of laughter, then checked herself and laid a ssh! finger across her lips. We smiled and nodded until, at last, the busboy and his tub made it through and the door swung closed.
“Dear God, Damien,” Sam said, “let’s hurry up and get out of here before swat teams from the entire tri-state area converge on us.”
“I hear ya, bro,” I said, and we hurried on down the hall to the restroom, fortuitously unoccupied. We went in and, almost before I could click the lock on the door, Sam had fallen to his knees on the perfectly good if slightly unsanitary floor and was impatiently pulling down my zip. I spread my legs into P.U.P. stance and leaned a hand against a wall for balance as Sam fished out my hose and put it to his mouth.
No hesitation this time, folks, none at all. No sooner had Sam parted his lips than my flow streamed out, hot and strong and heavy, and Sam took it, eagerly, drank it down with a thirst that bordered on desperation. I put the hand that wasn’t required to hold me erect on Sam’s head, tousled his unkempt black locks, thrilling to the power and to the give and take that twined so effortlessly between us. After a moment, though, Sam put his palms against my upper thighs and pushed gently against them, signaling that he needed me to stop. With a great deal of mental cursing and willpower, I halted the stream, and he let me go. “I’m sorry, sir,” he whispered, moving aside so I could make it to the urinal. He watched me let loose the flow once again with regret on his face. “I couldn’t swallow any more. Another drop and I’d explode.”
I laughed and finished my piss, glad that the restroom door had a lock on it. I wouldn’t have put it past the obese girl to decide that the perfect time to clean the restroom was the moment my brother was once again swallowing my urine, and I would have hated to invent a bet involving the Cubs. They have enough troubles without me using them as an excuse. “It’s okay, Babyboi,” I said as my flow at last began to ebb. “There will be plenty more of it, and probably sooner rather than later.” He didn’t answer, but as I went to shake off the last few drops he grabbed my pecker again and licked them off instead (apparently the remark about the consequences of drinking even one more drop had been hyperbolic; he didn’t explode), sparking a fire that was neither ethereal nor metaphysical but blatantly sexual in nature, and I boned up into a semi in the time it took me to blow out a shaky breath.
The little shit merely grinned and tucked me back away. “Time and place, sir,” he reminded me, zipping me up.
“You are so going to pay for being a prick-tease,” I told him as he stood up.
“I hope so. Sir,” he said. “Sir, may I –” he asked, nodding at the urinal.
I stepped away, giving the pisser a game-show hostess flourish with my hands. “By all means, Babyboi.”
“Thank you, sir,” Sam murmured, brushing past me, and then he did, like, the cutest, most adorable thing ever. He pushed his pants and boxers down to his knees and hiked his pull-over shirt up to his ribcage, then, thrusting his skinny buttocks forward and without handling his penis at all, let loose a stream of urine. He even swiveled his hips back and forth, drawing short-lived yellow designs on the urinal wall. Behaving, all in all, like a small boy making wee.
That innocence contrasted sharply with the perverse sexual dilettante I’d discovered hiding in my brother tonight, and it drew me to stand behind him, drew me both sensually and emotionally. I needed to touch him, suddenly, and I reached out, laid my fingers on the nape of his neck. I heard him inhale, and his stream faltered for a nanosecond. He felt the vibrations in our contact too. I slid my fingers down, across his bunched shirt, onto the bare flesh of his lower back. He hissed and again his flow stuttered. “Sir,” he breathed as my fingers dropped lower, lower still, until they stroked his tailbone. “Sir,” he said again, as my touch crawled into his crack and came to rest directly on his fluttering hole. I massaged the quivering flesh, feeling it nip at my finger, and, with my other hand, I reached around to grasp his rapidly inflating cock, heedless of the warm piss that still spilled from it in erratic bursts. He boned up to full, and I stroked his cock with the same rhythm I used in rubbing his hole. “Sir,” he panted, “sir . . . not the time . . . or . . . oh sir . . . or the place.”
I leaned over his shoulder and whispered in his ear, “I’ll decide times and places, not you.” He let out a gasp as I left the seductive tide of his asshole and reached up to grasp a hank of his hair and yank his head back. “Understood, Babyboi?” At the same moment I ground my jean-clad erection into the small of his back, giving him evidence that he did not suffer a monopoly on horny.
He gasped again. “Yes, uh, yes, sir, Damien, under, uh, understood!”
I released his hair, put my hand on his shoulder and spun him around to face me; down below, his surprised penis spurted out another stream of piss; drops of it landed on my hand and on both our pants, but most of it hit the tiled floor, changing the description of the room from “slightly unsanitary” to “decidedly unsanitary”. Oh well. Shit, you should pardon the expression, happens.
“But maybe you’re half-right,” I said, releasing him and backing away. Teasing him. Pulling a Rudy. “Maybe this isn’t the time. But it’s for sure the place.” And, very deliberately, I brought my saturated middle finger to my lips and lapped up the droplets of his urine splattered there. Sam had been right. It tasted like mostly nothing; dribbles of rapidly cooling salt water. But it was Sam’s. That fact alone gave it flavor.
He moaned, standing there rigidly a couple feel away, his eyes blinking in disbelief and lust behind the thin lenses of his glasses, his hands bunching his shirt higher and higher on his narrow chest. If not for the jeans and boxers cushioning his knees, you could probably have heard them knocking. His erection poked out from his shaved crotch, strumming and throbbing in the air, demanding to be touched, and Sam heard the call, felt the call, and he reached for it.
“No!”
His hand stopped micro-millimeters from encircling his rigidity. “Yes, uh, yes sir.” He didn’t want to, but he pulled it away and settled it back on his chest, glaring at me the whole while. I smirked at him. “Now . . . uh . . . now who’s being a tease, Damien? Uh, sir? Who?”
“Ah,” I said, winking at him, “but that’s my right, now isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes sir, that’s –” He broke off as I stepped up close again, reached around with my dry hand to re-entwine my fingers in his hair and yank his head backwards. I pressed up against him, trapping his cock between my blue-jeaned thighs. I held up my other hand, still glistening with his moisture, and wiped each finger and my palm across his lips, cleaning myself. His tongue snaked out to taste the driblets of piss I left there, and I flicked it, hard, forcing him to withdraw it with a gasp of unfeigned pain. My fingers finally free of piss, I reached up and pulled his glasses from his face, and he blinked up at me, our face inches apart.
“I’m only going to do this once,” I said, not caring if my breath or his reeked of caramelized onions and pesto, “and don’t ask me why I’m doing it because I don’t know.” He started to speak, but I cruelly screwed a tighter grip in his hair, and he shut up. “And, for the record, whatever else happens tonight, this little dysfunctional family moment will stay completely between me and you. Neither Rudy nor anyone else will ever know.” And, before I could lose my nerve, I smashed my lips to his.
He gasped, and for a moment I thought he’d refuse my kiss, but he didn’t. Instead, he reached up and circled his arms round my neck, bringing me in closer, holding onto me tighter. He came up on tiptoe in hunger for our embrace, and his cock head knocked pleasantly at my denim-covered balls. The cool, salty drops of urine I’d deposited on his lips contrasted sharply with the heat of his mouth, and I moaned deep into his throat. Our tongues twisted and tangled around each other, our teeth knocked together in the careless passion of our kiss. I ground myself against him, and he ground himself against me, both of us craving more, but both of us also knowing that, yeah, this was neither the time nor the place.
So, at last, requiring breath and despising my species for its silly reliance on oxygen, I released him, stepped back, faced him. Looked at him looking at me. Both our chests heaving from the exertion. Both of us boned to the max, his pointing at me accusingly, mine throbbing against my pants, threatening to tear a hole in the denim. Neither of us possessed the words to speak of what we’d just felt thrum between us. And that was fine. We needed no words, and sometimes ’tis better to not name something so fleeting and fair.
Thump thump. Thump! The sound of an irritated fist pounding on the door echoed through the room. “Holy freakin’ moly, hurry the fuck up in there! Other people have to piss too, y’know!”
“Dammit, Babyboi,” I whispered, “you make me forget there’s such a thing as a real world.”
“I’ve been told I have that effect, sir,” he grinned, squinting at me, his face naked. Oh, right. I handed him back his glasses, and while he wrapped them back onto his ears I knelt and yanked up his boxers and jeans (giving his cock a quick and friendly squeeze as I put it away; the muffled gasp he gave proved reward enough for my efforts), fastening the pants, and pulled his shirt down, covering the tent I’d left behind. Stepping to the mirror, I smoothed down the hem of my own sweater, and then both of us washed our hands, hurriedly. But not our mouths. Or our faces. It is, after all, rude to make a rude person knock twice.
Which is precisely what the rude person was preparing to do as we opened the restroom door; his fist almost rapped Sam on the forehead, and my little brother ducked and weaved instinctively; the guy checked his knock with little space to spare. His other fist jiggled rapidly at his crotch. I thought for a sec that he masturbated, until a faint clicking sound made me realize he held a fistful of dice and was compulsively rolling them around in his fingers.
It was, of course, Ogre.
“Jeez,” he grumbled, his gaze flickering between me (bigger than him) and Sam (smaller), and he took what he considered the safer option by settling it on Sam (thus proving himself stupid as well as ugly). “You guys been in there for hours. What, you had to help each other pee-pee?” He guffawed, thinking himself funny.
Neither Sam nor I laughed, although I at least smiled. Sam stepped up close to the buffoon, and looking up into his surprised face, said, very seriously, “Did you know that playing with your dice when you’re not actually rolling can lead to blindness and hairy palms?”
Ogre took a step back, glanced over to me, clearly wondering if Sam was a crazy person and I his keeper, but I just shrugged and said, “On the other hand, studies have shown that it reduces stress and may even enhance your immune system. You have to decide for yourself if the risk is worth it.”
Ogre gaped at us, and his hand stilled; the sound of no dice clicking together echoed through the hall. Failing to regain his composure quickly enough to suit himself, he muttered, “You assholes are retarded,” and pushed between us into the restroom, slamming the door behind him and snapping over the lock with the haste of an old woman fearing werewolves in the night.
“I thought you were gonna punch him, Sam,” I said as we turned to go back to the dining room. “Why didn’t you punch him? You could take him.”
“Of course I could take him,” Sam said, not conceited, just convinced. “But then somebody would call the cops and somebody else would call Mom and next thing you know we’re beating off in separate cells instead of you beating on me.” My cock, which had deflated some in the altercation with the nerd named Ogre, swelled up again, even though it knew good and damn well nothing good could come of it. For about the thousandth time that night I congratulated myself on the decision to wear a long sweater.
“You have an absolutely incredible way of expressing yourself in words sometimes,” I said. “Why have I never noticed that before?”
“You’ve never paid attention before,” Sam replied as we reached our booth. The hummus waited for us, all bagged up and ready to go, on the table, along with a new check adorned on the back with huge, swirly message (“Thanks tons! Hilda”) from our dedicated server. Sam reached into the booth seat and pulled out his dress robes; I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone.
“What are you doing?” Sam demanded as he began the laborious process of shrugging into his duster and buttoning himself in.
“Texting Rudy,” I answered, ignoring my brother’s huff of annoyance. “Telling him we’re on the way. You might make yourself useful and text Mom that we’re for sure going to the Q’s.”
He grumbled but did as I asked while I awaited Rudy’s reply.
Rudy: “cool cool u bringin hummus???”
Damien: “yes we’re bringing hummus asshole”
Rudy: “awesome love you tell s next time to put fuk’n before douche-wad when he’s imitating you”
I burst out laughing, and Sam looked over his own phone at me, eyed me suspiciously. Waving at him to mind his own business, I replied –
Damien: “yup u be da masta at imitating folks over text”
No immediate reply. Not that I expected one. I’d just lobbed a word grenade at him, and he needed time to figure out the best way to lob it back. While I waited, I asked Sam, “What did Mom say? She replied yet?”
“Yeah, a minute ago,” Sam said. “She said fine and have Mr Q call from the landline when we get there.”
“Man, she’s not trusting me at all tonight,” I said with a frown. “I wonder if she knows something or if it’s just in general.”
“Probably just in general,” Sam said. “But then you did lie about Rudy’s parents being home last night.”
He only avoided strangulation because my phone chirped “Dude!” right as my fingers started itching.
Rudy: “wuz onwy twying to help a bwuddah out”
Hmm. Rather than lob the grenade back he chose to throw himself on it instead. Interesting.
“Will you hurry up?” Sam had managed to get his duster all buttoned up and waited for me impatiently, hands in his pockets and playing with whatever he had stashed there.
“If you’re in such a freakin’ rush summon your broomstick and I’ll meet you at the Q’s.”
“Oh ha ha, that’s so funny I forgot to laugh.”
“Forget to talk for a minute, okay, and let me finish up here?”
He made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a groan, but he piped down and let me finish.
Damien: “u got choice to make before i get there”
Rudy: “shit”
Rudy: “nose or ass??”
Damien: “nose or ass”
Rudy: “shit”
Rudy: “oh well it was fun so worth it”
“What was that all about?” Sam demanded as, chuckling at the audacious twit I have the dubious honor of calling my best friend, I slipped my phone into my pocket and shrugged into my jacket.
“Nothing,” I said, zipping up. If I had the right to hold our unsettling kiss secret from Rudy, I had the right to hold my private dissatisfaction with Rudy secret from Sam. “Just master stuff, that’s all.”
“That’s worrisome,” he muttered, making me laugh as I gathered up the bag of hummus and the ticket and rummaged in my pocket for the debit card.
“Relax, Babyboi,” I said, reaching out and smoothing the lapel of his dress robes, “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
“Well now that just defeats the purpose,” he said blithely, turning to go. I chuckled and watched him walk off. Like with Rudy, you never know what’s going to come out of his mouth. Although I had, ho ho, an idea what was going to cum into it.
Yeah, I groaned too, even as I thought it.
Sam had made it several feet away from me, but instead of heading for the cash register and the exit, he headed instead for the table of gamers. I noticed that in the time I had been texting Rudy and teasing my kid brother, Ogre had come back from the restroom and lounged in his place opposite the hairy dungeon master, still rolling that handful of dice in his hand like he masturbated fickle fate herself. I further noticed that Sam had clocked Ogre’s return as well, and I hurried to catch up before I missed anything good.
“ . . . and in the dead orc crypt-keeper’s hand you find a gemstone worth . . . ” Todd trailed off as my brother came up beside him. “Hey, Sam, what’s up?”
Sam didn’t answer; instead, he took from Todd’s hand the genuine imitation magic wand, and aiming it down the table at a very much surprised Ogre, the best kid brother in the whole wide motherfucking world hollered at the top of his lungs, “EXPELLIARMUS!” Glitter danced in the air around the wand, proof of the magic in his spell.
In the shocked silence of dining room, I registered two things. The first was that I saw Ogre’s fist open and the dice spill out onto the table and floor before his own horrified eyes. And the second was that I heard Justin Beiber’s voice moaning something with about fifteen ‘baby’s in it. And there I stood, too damned shocked to even think about making the “ptui!” sound.
I don’t think Sam noticed the hated voice in the air (and if he did, I’d forgive the threatened spanking simply for the entertainment he’d just given me); he merely turned to me and, with both his face and voice deadpan, said, “Y’know, Damien, you just might be on to something with this Hogwarts student business.” Then, bowing to the still-floored and still-hairy Todd, Sam returned the wand and said, “Thanks.”
“Anytime, Sam,” Todd answered automatically, then, regaining some of his composure, he added, “Wrong universe, though.” I think a grin sprouted somewhere in all that beard, but I couldn’t be sure.
“Don’t care,” Sam grinned back. “I still threw a crit.”
“That was a natural twenty if I ever saw one, my friend.”
“See ya, Todd.”
“See ya, Sam.”
As Sam spun around and began marching back toward the cash register, the table of gamers got over their amazement and burst out into a roar of laughter and insult. Ogre, his cheeks red with humiliation, slid out his chair and started patting around on the floor for his elusive dice. Conversation resumed around the restaurant, although it seemed, to me, to be fairly hostile towards the gamers, and me, and Sam, and, in general, anything on this end of the room.
I didn’t care. I was leaving.
Sam abruptly turned on his toe and marched back toward me. “Give me that,” he said, snatching the bill and the debit card out of my hand, “you’ll leave too big a tip. Besides, I’m on a roll here.” I had to agree. He most certainly was on a roll. He spun back around, and I trailed along in his wake, pure delight in my step.
Hilda and the ancient assistant manager with the smelly bowels and bad toupee stood at the register, Hilda because she wanted to witness our departure with her own eyes (I presume) and the old man because he needed to lean against something or crumble into dust (I’m certain).
Sam gave the manager the bill and the card. Ringing in the transaction, the old man and his toupee asked, “Was everything awesome tonight?” Trying to sound energetic and hip, and failing miserably.
“The food was excellent, as usual,” Sam said neutrally. “Fresh veggies do make a difference.”
“Yes, they do, don’t they?” the manager replied, completely missing that Sam had omitted mention of the service.
Hilda didn’t miss it. Her eyes narrowed, warning Sam to be careful.
“Here you go,” the manager, pushing the card and receipts and an ink pen across the counter to Sam. “If you’d like to, ah, leave a tip for your server, just put it in there and total it up and give us your, heh heh, autograph at the bottom.”
“I’m going to leave a tip because the service was fast and efficient, and because my Mom raised me to believe its only right, as servers depend on their tips to survive,” and he paused here, first to decide the amount he should leave and then to figure the total (while Hilda watched him with smoldering slits in her eyes, just itching to come across the counter at him), then continued, “but when my Mom asks me why I only left ten percent I’m going to tell her because my waitress was a raging bitch who apparently gets off on serving alcohol to minors.” With a flourish he scrawled Mom’s name across the bottom of the ticket and pushed it back across the counter to the flabbergasted Hilda and the shocked old man.
Hilda recovered first. As Sam folded his receipt around the debit card and shoved them into his pocket, she snarled and slapped both hands on the counter, preparatory to launching herself up and over. The manager snapped to and yanked her back, surprisingly strong for such an ancient being, and, shooting us a “please just go” smile full of false teeth and desperation, he chattered inanely, “Well, ah, not everyone is fond of Hilda’s, ah, method of serving!”
“Orcs and ogres wouldn’t be fond of Hilda’s method of serving,” Sam called over his shoulder as he turned to walk away.
“Come, ah, come back next week sometime for a free pizza,” the manager called, trying to wrestle Hilda into the back kitchen. “And sit in Robin’s station, Robin is, ah, nice!” He called out something else (I’m guessing for someone to call 911) but we were outside by that time and couldn’t hear exactly what. Yes, back out in the wind and the rain and the cold, and I felt warm enough to survive temperatures at least a couple degrees lower.
“Sam, I just have to say that makes two times, count ’em, TWO times in the last five minutes that you have made me prouder to be your brother than you ever have before.” And, right there in front of God and everybody, I grabbed his chin and laid a fierce smack-a-roo on him.
He pushed me away before my lips had lingered on his for more than a second or two. “Dammit, Damien,” he said, he spluttered, “you said you were only going to do that once! And out here? Are you nuts?” But he was pleased, I could tell.
“Relax,” I said, still grinning at him like, yeah, like a love-struck idiot, “that was a ‘good job, kick-ass bro, way to go’ kind of victory kiss, not a weird, incestuous, Tennessee Williams on crack kind of kiss.”
“It’s the kind of kiss that can get us arrested or beaten up,” he said crossly, turning towards the Saturn.
“Relax,” I repeated, following him across the parking lot. “We can obviously never eat here again anyhow, so who cares what they think?”
“Oh well,” he said as I unlocked the car, “I heard Big Ed’s across town has good pizza. But no hummus,” he finished, regretfully.
“We all have to make sacrifices, Babyboi,” I pointed out, ducking into the driver’s seat before he could reply. I leaned over and unlocked his door, and he slid in beside me.
“But it’s hummus, Damien!”
“After tonight, you won’t want any hummus for a couple months, Babyboi,” I promised, “and by that time Hilda will be in prison, the old man manager will have taken his toupee to the afterlife, and Ogre will have died at his own party’s hands. We’ll come back then and I’ll order you all the hummus you want.”
“But the obese girl will still be here,” Sam complained, and I rolled my eyes.
“Nah,” I said in my best ‘placate the drama queen’ voice. “She’ll probably get fired tonight, for smoking weed and making up crazy stories on the job.”
“We can only hope,” Sam said.
I started the car, turned on the heater, cracked my window so we’d be safe from carbon monoxide poisoning. Sam stared out at the parking lot, chewing his lip, hands in his duster’s pockets.
“Stop worrying about the hummus,” I told him. “If it means that much to you I’ll print a recipe off the internet and buy you a thousand pounds of chickpeas.”
“Oh, screw the hummus,” he scoffed. I picked my jaw up off my lap and waited for him to retract his blasphemy. He did not, to my sorrow. “Only I’m starting to have second thoughts. I mean, yeah, what we just did in the restroom was hot, but –”
I shot a hand out and grabbed his chin, jerked his head around to face me. “No,” I said. “Just – no.”
“Damien –”
“Don’t ‘Damien’ me,” I said. “After all the soul-searching and fear-swallowing and blue balls we’ve both suffered through today, there’s no damn way in this world we’re going to back down.”
“Damien –”
“I said don’t!” He shut up, but I could see my name hovering on his lips, ready to drop a third time. “Sam, check this out. If you go chickenshit now, they win.”
“They?” He looked at me as if wondering if I’d suddenly gone paranoid, and his hands fiddled with the contents of his pockets. I wondered if he had a straightjacket in there; there was certainly enough room. “Who is ‘they’, Damien?”
I let go his chin, sat back in my seat, tapped an irregular, frustrated rhythm on the steering wheel. “Them,” I said, nodding my head at the world outside the Saturn. “You know. Society. The law. The church. All the adults who say we’re only kids, that we don’t know what we’re doing or even what we want. Too young to have sex, too young to smoke cigarettes or weed, too young to have an opinion or a brain. Don’t do anything, be safe, they say, be careful, don’t destroy your life, like they aren’t destroying their own every day. They’re just jealous, they are, because we’re young and daring and willing to take what we want, damn the consequences. So ignore them, Sam. Don’t let them win.”
He sat quiet a moment, mulling over my words, then, “You sound like you’ve given this a lot of thought, Damien.”
“I have,” I said truthfully. “Not this particular situation; I never had a clue that one day I’d be debating the ethics of screwing my brother. But dammit, Sam! Don’t you get awfully tired of being told how to think, how to act, what to say and what not to say? The whole point of being young is to experiment, to act crazy, to make fools of ourselves in pizza joints the world over. To figure out this crazy thing called life for ourselves, to make mistakes, to fall down and learn and pick ourselves up and move on. And all those so-called concerned adults out there in the world? All they do is cry and wring their hands and pass knee-jerk, masturbatory laws designed less to prevent us lost, ignorant teenagers from hurting ourselves and more to keep us out of their hair, to keep us from presenting them with annoyance and problems that need to be solved. And the longer we let them lead us, the longer we allow them to cushion us from the ‘real world’, whatever the hell that is, the stupider we become, so when some major crisis does hit all we know how to do is weep and look around for some helpful adult to pick up the pieces, because we don’t know how, because we’ve never had the opportunity to practice at minor crises, because we’re stupid sheep with no brains and no opinions and no fucking spines.”
I could have crawled into one of Sam’s eyes and out the other, they were so wide.
“Look, Sam,” I said, tempering my tone downward, “have I ever told you about my ‘Permanent Record’ moment?’ He shook his a head. “It was a couple of years ago. Coach was haranguing me about my grades, threatening to bench me if I didn’t raise them a couple points, and he was going on and on about how my grades and my attitude and smart-assed ways were all noted in my ‘permanent record’ and how I’d better keep my nose clean. But you know what, Sam?” He shook his head, fascinated and a little frightened by my passion. “There is no permanent record. There’s an academic record, yes, and I suppose it’s important for college, but some huge terabyte file listing all your foibles and mistakes and embarrassments that follows you all your life and gets bigger and bigger every time you fuck up? There ain’t one, Babyboi. The only permanent record is the one in your head, and in your heart, and in your gut, and the only person who ever gets to read it is you. And you have to decide if you want it filled with accomplishment or failure, with joy or regret. With knowledge or ignorance. You yourself, no one else.” I sighed and sagged in my seat, winded by my long speech but not regretting it in the slightest, even if it had slipped from the main point of persuading Sam back into commitment. But the words needed to be said, and, no matter what did or not happen later in the evening, Sam needed to hear them. “Anyhow, that was probably the most significant epiphany I had ever had in my life, and now I’m laying it on you.”
He stayed silent a minute, thinking over all I’d said. “That sounds like something Rudy would say,” he ventured finally.
I blew out an irritated sigh. “I can think for myself, you know. Me and Rudy do not share one brain, no matter what anybody says, and I am most certainly not his puppet or acolyte. It was my epiphany, not his, but when I explained it all to him, his face lit up and he said he felt exactly the same way, he’d just never known how to express it in words.” Sam looked as if he doubted that Rudy knew how to express any complex idea in words, but he kept quiet. “And say what you want to about Rudy, that he’s reckless, and brash, and rude –“
“And an idiot.” Sam said it under his breath, and I pretended not to hear it. It wasn’t the first time he’d expressed that particular sentiment, anyhow.
“– but he grabs every moment and drinks it in, sucks it like milk from the teat of life, and he takes just as much joy from the last drop as he did from the very first. He’s alive, Sam. He doesn’t care what the world thinks of him, only what he thinks of himself.”
“All Rudy ever thinks about is himself,” Sam muttered, but it was an automatic reflex insult and his heart wasn’t into it. I’d definitely given him something to ponder.
“And besides, Sam,” I said, segueing gently back to the main point, “whatever happens between us is between us. It’s nobody’s business but ours.”
“And Rudy’s, and Chad’s, and Mr Q’s,” he retorted. “Which is kind of freaky in itself, Damien. What kind of father –”
“A human father,” I interrupted. “A father with issues of his own, and a tolerance of teenagers thirsting for experience and a good time. Don’t worry about Mr Q. He knows what we’re doing, but he’ll be off in another room, not right there with us.” Probably. Maybe. “And he’ll be discreet. He could get into more trouble than us if anyone found out what he let go on in his house. The point is, Sam, that, yeah, Rudy and Chad and Mr Q may know what we do, they may see what they do, and maybe they’ll even do it with us, but they won’t know why we’re doing it. They might see our bond, but they won’t feel it. Like the kiss in the pisser while ago, that bond is between us. It’s ours.”
“Stop, Damien, stop!” Sam said, putting both hands in his hair and yanking on it, illustrating to me how far I’d ridden him to distraction. “Fine, we’ll do it, I’ll go through with it, just shut the hell up!”
“No!” I reached over and grabbed his left hand, engulfing it between both mine. He looked at me, flabbergasted at what he perceived as my sudden change of heart. “No, Sam, I still want to do it, I want you so bad that if I don’t have you tonight my head just might explode. But I don’t want to do it if it means subjecting you to something you don’t want to do yourself. If you’re not willing, I’ll sweep up the pieces of my skull and quietly drop the subject. And –” I hesitated, but it needed to be said. Because I meant it. Whatever I wanted for myself, I refused to steal something that may only be given. “And no recriminations, no grudges, no hurt feelings. We’ll go back to being ‘normal’ brothers again, whatever that means, and I’ll never mention it again or throw it in your face, not ever.” And then I shut up. Either the war was won or it wasn’t. I had no ammunition for another campaign, and no energy for it, to boot.
The decision lay with Sam, and I could not make it for him. If I did I became the object of my own derision, a pure red flag of everything I despised, everything I’d just railed against.
Sam said nothing for a long while, just sat there in the Saturn’s passenger seat and stared out into the rain- and wind-swept night, his cool, dry hand between my own warm, sweaty ones. He stayed silent for so long that I interpreted his reserve negatively, assuming that he’d decided against continuing our surreal journey and was currently trying to figure out how to break the news to me gently. Well, I thought, good thing I had a back-up plan. Movies first, then drop Sam off at home and head to Rudy’s, on foot if necessary. Just because I intended to keep my relationship with Sam intact no matter what didn’t mean I had to become celibate; I needed, absolutely needed to drain my balls of all the frustration my little brother had caused me today. I mentally reviewed all the movies I knew to be playing at the mall, and had just about decided on the latest superhero sequel, when Sam tightened his grip on my hand and turned to face me, his black eyes flashing behind his lenses and, writ large upon his skinny face, that fierce but nervous determination I’d first seen in the shower and last seen in the Pizza Joint’s restroom. Even before he spoke I knew he’d been won over, either by my words or his own undeniable desire.
“Yeah, Damien,” he said, slapping his other hand on top of our clasp, “yeah, let’s do this. You’re right. If anybody is going to win this thing, it should be us.”
“So you want this experience etched into your permanent record?” I teased, wincing at the relief and gratitude I heard booming in my words.
“I want it etched into my flesh, sir,” he said, softly, almost inaudibly, over the twin hums of the heater and the engine. “I want to ache all over for days after you’re through with me. I want it etched into my fucking bones.” His fingers rubbing gently against my skin, his eyes unblinking and stolid. “Sir.”
Boing! I sprung a boner so quick I swear it gave my cock a charley-horse. Barely resisting the urge to laugh like a loon at my good fortune, I squeezed his hand, hard, tight, and smiled at him.
“There’s that wild child Sammy I know and love,” I said, and before he could rebuke me for my use of that most despised diminutive, I shrugged off his hands and said, “You won’t regret this, Sam. Neither of us will, I promise.”
“I promise too, Damien,” he said, gifting me with a grin of such startlingly blatant lust I throbbed and probably stained my boxers. At that I couldn’t help but allow the loon in me to emerge, and I laughed like hell as I put the Saturn into reverse to leave the parking spot.
But wait. I shifted back in park and willed myself to calm down. Sam looked at me, that eyebrow arched, and suddenly I loved the mischievous expression rather than hated it.
“What, Damien?”
I took a breath. “You said something about there being rules to this. I reckon that’s something we need to talk about.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot.” He laughed, but when he looked at me he he wore his most serious, don’t fuck with me expression on his face. “These rules are non-negotiable, Damien. I have to be able to trust you to follow them. To the letter.”
“When I said you could trust me,” I replied, my face as serious at his own, “I meant you could trust me all the way down the line with this. Whatever your rules are I promise to respect them.”
He nodded. “I know. I don’t even have to think about that. I know. But I had to say it, all the same.”
“Understood.”
“Okay, first rule. Ready?” I nodded. “You are my Sir tonight, Damien. Nobody else. Not Rudy, not Mr Q, you and you only.”
“What about Chad?” I asked, snickering.
“If you make Chad alpha slave over me, I’ll challenge him to a bout in the arena and rip out his heart and intestines.” He roared that patented Sam laugh at my startled face. “Kidding, Damien. Duh.”
“I think at some point very soon we need to address the, uh, somewhat violent bent of your newly-discovered imagination,” I ventured, only half-kidding.
“Oh, bite me,” he said, still chortling, then suddenly stopped and proffered his left wrist to me and said, “Seriously, sir. Bite me. Please?” Begging, but dignified about it. His aggressive submission a world away from Chad’s more servile version.
Who could resist that? I took his hand and raised his inner wrist to my mouth and bit down, not hard, but no softly, either. He gasped and jerked back against his seat. When I removed my lips and glanced down I saw my teeth-marks in his flesh. I’d not left a hickey, but it was close.
Sam looked over at me, a lazy, contented smile on his face as he took back his arm. “Thank you, sir.”
No, thank you, I wanted to reply, but didn’t. I merely winked and waited for him to return to the subject at hand and tried to ignore the throbbing ache in my balls.
“I want your word, Damien,” he said, still smiling at me despite the seriousness of his tone.
“I’m your Sir, Babyboi, nobody else.” I hesitated. “Does that mean you won’t do anything with Rudy or Chad at all?”
“Would that be a problem?”
“If you don’t want it, then, no, but . . . well, I kinda figure I owe Rudy for letting me use Chad last night.”
Sam thought about it. “We can compromise on this one, I guess,” he said finally.
“Put it on the table, bro.”
“If you order me to, I’ll do whatever you want with whoever you want, Rudy or Chad or even Mr Q. God help me. But you have to tell me to, not them. And nobody but you gets to pee down my throat or, uh, finish in my mouth or butt. No, uh, fluids from anybody but you.”
“Done.” We nodded at each other, an oath more binding than a hand-shake deal. “What’s the second rule.”
“Damien, sir, I want you be rough with me. I want you to hurt me, I want you to make me cry out, but you can’t leave any marks, and you can’t harm me at all.”
“Hurt, but not harm,” I said. “Yeah. It’ll be a fine line, but I promise I’ll find it.”
“What it means,” Sam said, “is that you can twist my nipples but not tear them off. It means you can spank me till my butt is fire-engine red, but you can’t leave me black-and-blue and unable to sit down for a week. It means you can’t draw blood. That clear enough?”
“I get it,” I said. “I get it.”
“You know about safe words, Damien? Sir?”
“Yeah, I know about safe words. Sir.”
“Don’t mock me, Damien.”
“I’m not mocking you, Sam. I’m just playing with you.” I thought for a sec. “How about ‘polka-dotted elephant’?”
“How about ‘stop that now or when I get loose I’m going to rip your balls off’?”
I blinked at him, ninety-nine point nine percent sure he was kidding. “That’s a little extreme.”
“So is ‘polka-dotted elephant’. Seriously, Damien, do you think either one of would be able to remember something that specific under severe mental or physical pressure?”
“Never thought of that. Good point. So, Professor de Sade, what do you suggest?”
“First, that you go online and look up the meanings of the words ‘sadist’, ‘masochist’, ‘dominant’ and ‘submissive’. I think you’ll be surprised to find they all mean different things.” I raised my eyebrows at him. “De Sade was a sadist,” he explained, as if to a child, “I am a ‘dominant’ currently exploring my ‘submissive, slightly masochistic’ side. I am not a sadist. So calling me Professor de Sade wasn’t quite as funny as you imagined it was.”
Pause.
“You spend waaaaaay too much time online,” I said finally.
“With all the knowledge that’s out there, free for the finding, there’s no reason to –”
“Can we skip the Super Bowl ad for the world wide web, VP Gore?” I demanded. “And before you take issue with that and assert that you’re a card-carrying Republican so my joke wasn’t legitimate, let me beg to remind you that we have only a few more minutes at best before Rudy starts ‘dude’-ing us to death again about his hummus.”
“Fine!” He glared at me, enjoying the bickering every bit as much as me. It only seemed to heighten the already dramatic tension between us. Very hot. “We were discussing safe words.”
“Close. We were discussing youcoming up with something that doesn’t involve bloody revenge.”
“I read online –”
“Of course you did.”
“– that its best to use a simple system. So it’s easy to remember. Some people just use yes or no. That, uh, that won’t work for me. I want to say no even when I mean yes.”
“That is so hot,” I said, shifting in my seat, trying to get comfortable and failing miserably.
Blink. “I like the idea of using primary colors, like on a traffic signal.”
“Green means go, yellow is slow down, red is stop that or nuts go bye-bye.”
“You always was a fast one, dude,” Sam drawled, sounding so much like Rudy it made me giggle. “That’s exactly how it works. And remember, Damien, safe words work for you too, you know.”
“Uh, what?”
“What if I’m so deeply into whatever we’re doing that I’m begging you to do something to me that you’re not comfortable with, or something that you think has a fair chance of harming me?”
“So I can say ‘red’ too, and you’d respect that?”
“I might be disappointed, but I’d respect it. Same for you. You might be disappointed, but you’d respect it.”
“Fair enough.”
“And no jokes about notrespecting the safe words, Damien. At all. I have to trust you, and you have to trust me, or somebody could get seriously hurt. Icould get seriously hurt.”
“I realize this,” I said. “So. Done. From the primary colors to the one size fits all approach, done and done.”
“Cool,” he said. “Now, rule number three, and this is a biggie. You ready?”
“Lay it on me, bro.”
“This game we’re playing, this bond we’re building?” I nodded. “It ends after tonight. If you ever call me ‘babyboi’ again, I swear before God and Bruce Lee I’ll –” he thought for a second, came up with on our grandfather’s sayings “– I’ll knock your dickstring up into your watchpocket.”
He’d do it, too.
“Understood,” I said, nodding my head. “This is a one time thing for both of us.”
“And for the fourth and final rule,” Sam said, his face lighting up into sly amusement, “is you owe me. You owe me big-big.” Reverting into the language of our childhood so I’d comprehend how serious he was.
“Fine,” I said, laughing at him, “I owe you big-big.” I figured he’d want me to get him some pot sometime, or introduce him to girls who might let him spank them.
I was wrong.
Anyhow.
“Well, what are you waiting for, Sir?” he asked, his eyes wide and face all a-glow with excitement because the negotiations were complete, the terms agreed. Because he’d given in and allowed himself an adventure. Because he loved me and trusted me and knew I wouldn’t let him down. “Put this sucker into drive and lets get nekkid!” Figures he’d know the difference between that and naked.
“Yes, sir!” I barked, giving him a backwards British salute, and he snorted, and I reached down and shifted into reverse.
“Dude!”
I paused before putting the transmission into drive and fished out my phone, tossed it, unopened, into Sam’s lap. “Tell him, quote, O T W slash B R T slash fuk’n –” I spelled it out for him “–douche wad. Unquote.”
Sam did so. As I pulled out into the far lane and prepared to make an almost immediate right –
“Dude!”
“What’s it say?” I asked when I’d completed the tricky maneuver and somehow managed to not get us killed.
Sam sighed. “’Nice try, Sammy’.”
I reached over and patted him on the knee. “If it’s any consolation, you’ll grow up to make a shitload more money than he’ll ever dream about.” I kept my hand right there on his leg. Matter of fact, I inched it up a little.
“I don’t know, sir,” Sam said, dropping my phone into my jacket pocket before laying his hand atop mine and moving it even further up his thigh, “I hear shit-talking monkeys make pretty good on the freak-show circuit.”
I burst out laughing. Sam’s remark, as usual, hit his target dead on. I’ve always enjoyed his scathing insults, as long as I wasn’t on the receiving end.
We drove the short distance to the Q’s house in comfortable silence, our hands still joined on his thigh, dangerously close to his jewels. His hand atop mine was cool, and dry, and confident, but I could feel, through the fake leather of his duster, his skinny leg vibrating in anticipation.
As for me, I was so fucking hard it hurt.
Finally, as the digital clock on the Saturn’s radio switched over to 7:36, I pulled into the Q’s driveway. I killed the engine and we sat there for a second, neither of us quite willing to give up our touch yet. At last, of course, we had to, so I squeezed his thigh and he squeezed my hand, and we let go. He grabbed the bag of hummus and pita triangles and I grabbed the hijacked coffee cup from this morning (thought I’d forget, didn’t you, bitches? Ha!) and, steeling ourselves, yet holding ourselves back as well, to savor the moment, I suppose, we stepped out of the car and started up the walk.
“Wait!” He stopped and glanced back at me. “I just remembered something,” I explained. “What’s the max amount of points you could get if you bingo-ed ‘fellatio’ across two triples? Theoretically.”
He didn’t remark on the oddness of my question. I guess he was as attuned to the night’s surreality as I was, and was taking things as they came, no matter how odd. As I was. “Well, if somebody left a single-pointer on the row to play off and give that eighth letter, I guess you could get,” he calculated, “one hundred and forty-nine points. Theoretically.”
“That is so fucking bizarre,” I commented. “So bizarre.”
“What?”
I shook my head, not wanting to get into it. Sam could be a demon for dream interpretation, and he was horrible at it. “Nothing.”
He shrugged. “Okay.” Accept it and move on. As we mounted the front steps, the porch light switched on and Mr Q opened the front door, holding a cordless phone to his ear with one hand and his finger to his lips with the other. He still wore the wife-beater he’d sported that morning, and he remained just as barefoot, but he’d traded the jeans for a worn pair of sweat pants that left no doubt as to his, uh, endowment as well as his religion.
“. . . that’s right,” he said into the phone as we moved past him into the warmth of the house, “they just pulled up, and I wanted to let you know they arrived safe and sound . . . uh huh, yup, still in one piece, no major dents that I could see . . .” He closed the front door.
Funny, Mom, I thought as I pulled off my jacket, already feeling the heat in the house. The Q’s kept it hot as a sauna in the winter and cold as an iceberg in summer.
“. . . you’re very welcome, I don’t mind a bit, your boys are always welcome here . . . uh huh . . . uh uh . . .”
I hung my jacket on the coat-rack and helped Sam hang his duster on the next hook (that fucker was heavy!) and made the yak-yak motion at Mr Q. He winked at me, then shook a mock-scolding finger at for not respecting my elders.
“Sure. I’ll make sure to tell him. Good night. Yes. Uh-huh. Good night. Enjoy your dinner with your girlfriend.” With an expression of relief, he switched off the phone and said, “I like your mother, boys, she’s a fine woman, but she can be awfully, um –”
“Exacting?” I offered.
He touched a finger to his nose and pointed at me. “That one,” he said, that clown-wide, ugly but charming grin on his face.
“You should live with it,” I said.
“I have female problems enough here, thanks very much,” he said, and we both laughed. I turned to Sam, expecting him to be bemused at my easy familiarity with Mr Q, but he just stood there, listening silently, waiting to be introduced.
“Mr Q, you remember my brother Sam?”
“Of course I do,” Mr Q said, smiling down at my brother warmly. “I’m glad you could make it.”
Sam smiled back, and I was relieved to see no intimidation or humiliation in his face or hear any in his tone. “Thanks for letting me come, Mr Q.”
“You’re welcome, Sam,” Mr Q said, then, turning back to me, “Before I forget, do you have my coffee mug?” He was teasing, but I was glad to be able to hold it up. He took it from me, saying, “Good boy. Thank you, son, I really appreciate that.” He grinned. “Your mother said you’d be happy to walk the rest of my dishes over tomorrow afternoon. She said they’d be sitting right there in the box on the garage steps where you left them.” He put the phone and the coffee mug on a nearby table, where he presumably forgot them. I know I did.
“See? Exacting!” I said.
He laughed. “She made me promise to have you home by noon, too. But, ahh–” he said, drawing out the word more from amusement than embarrassment, “– you should have plenty of time to get stoned and buttfuck your black little souls out. Which reminds me,” he said, sobering to seriousness, “I have a couple questions I’d like to ask your little brother, if you don’t mind.” His tone said he didn’t care if I minded or not, he meant for Sam to answer.
“Go ahead, Mr Q,” I acquiesced. “You have every right, and he has every obligation to answer.” Raising my voice, I said, “Sam, front and center,” and we turned to where we’d last left my Babyboi, right there beside the coat-rack, and both myself and Mr Q gasped in astonishment.
Sam stood a few feet away from us, beside one of the living room’s plush easy chairs. He’d stripped down and folded his clothing into a neat little pile on the chair’s seat and, even as we watched, his skinned down his boxers and stepped out of them and folded them neatly in with the rest. He hesitated for a moment, and then he unwrapped his glasses from his eyes and laid them gently on the end-table by the chair. As if he might never see them again. Then, buck naked, his tiny flaccid penis and monster balls quivering with each step, he came back over to us and knelt in front of me, stared down, either at my feet or at the carpet. In a strong yet submissive voice, he asked, “Permission to speak freely to Mr Q, sir?”
I looked at Mr Q and he looked back at me, both of us speechless. When I had picked my jaw up off the floor I said in my haughtiest voice, “Permission granted, babyboi.”
Sam looked up at me gravely. “Thank you, sir.” Then, to Mr Q, he said, “Mr Q, this slave knows the reason it is here, and is well aware of the trials that it will be expected to endure. Mr Q, this slave and it’s Sir have spoken a great deal about what each of us expects and wants from this, uh, situation, and we have come to an agreement about how, uh, this slave will conduct itself, and how it’s Sir will conduct himself, and we have, um, implemented a safe-word system of red, yellow, and green. Mr Q, I freely grant my Sir my consent to use me as he sees fit.” And with that, Sam fell silent.
“He spends way too much time on the internet, Mr Q,” I said. Sam shot me a reproachful look, but I ignored it and he didn’t say anything.
“Well, I certainly can’t ask him to be any more explicit than that,” Mr Q said with some amusement. “Thank you, Sam. I appreciate your, um, clarity.”
“You’re welcome, Mr Q,” Sam murmured, then, back to me, he said, “Permission to retrieve some items from my jacket, sir?”
“What kind of items?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.
“Nothing serious, sir,” he said. I nodded and he reached into his dress robes and pulled out, as if by, yeah, magic, a chain dog-leash with matching leather collar and –
“What is that?” Mr Q asked, peering at the small black object in Sam’s hand.
I peered at it myself. “Looks like vet wrap.”
“It is vet wrap. Sir. I got it and the leash out of Mom’s work truck before we left.” Sam handed me the leash and collar and wrap and knelt again at my feet.
“Vet wrap is sort of like a cross between cloth bandages and duct tape,” I explained, handing Mr Q the roll so he could examine it for himself. “You wrap it around the muzzle or the legs of a struggling animal and it sticks to itself like tape.”
“Thus immobilizing the animal safely,” said Mr Q approvingly. “Nice.”
“Or,” Sam said, still staring at the floor and waiting patiently for me to lock the collar on his neck, “you could use it to tie down babybois and crackers and do horrible things to them and they couldn’t get away. Sir.” He sounded resigned and apprehensive about the idea, but both me and Mr Q heard the excitement quivering underneath.
“Good thinking, Babyboi,” I said, patting him on the head before fulfilling his silent request and slipping the collar around his neck. “I might have to reward you with an extra load in your ass.” I winked at Mr Q, and he winked back, bemused at both of us.
“Thank you sir,” Sam said serenely as I fitted the collar snugly around his neck, using my finger to make sure it wasn’t too tight. I tugged on the leash and he stood up, and, Omigod, the power that rocked through me! Again, not a sexual power, but neither was it the power of vitality I experienced when pissing down his throat (which, by the by, I needed to do pronto). Rather, this was a savage burst of dominance, an explosion of possessiveness and greed. I held a leash with my little brother on the other end, and that meant that tonight he was mine and I could use him as I willed. For the first time I grasped that fact deep down in my heart and guts and in my mother fucking balls.
Mine!
Mr Q grinned at me, like he understood exactly how I felt, but also like he understood exactly how Sam felt as well. Who knows, he probably did. He didn’t say anything though, merely handed me back the vet wrap and said, “I like the wrap. Use it along with the other toys I gave Rudy and Chad and you should have yourselves a night to remember.”
“What kind of toys, Mr Q?” I asked, and Sam looked up at him too, both curiosity and apprehension on his face.
“Rudy will show you,” he said, teasing us both. “The boys are downstairs, in the rec room. It’ll be a whole lot easier to clean up and air out than the boys’ bedrooms.”
“Thanks, Mr Q,” Tugging on Sam’s leash, I said, “Come on, boy, heel.” He trailed along behind me obediently as I headed down the hall to the basement steps.
“Have fun, boys, and I’m up here if you need me.” He flopped down on the couch and grabbed the television remote and I left him to it. If I didn’t get downstairs and into this whole thing soon my dick might just break off like a frozen tree limb.
“Sir?” I felt a tug on the leash. When I glanced back, Sam said, “The hummus?” It still sat, all bagged up, on the table by the front door where he’d deposited it when he took off his duster.
Might as well get it started, I thought, and, raising my hand, I slapped him across the face, cupping my palm so it sounded like it hurt more than it probably did; the report thundered through the room, overwhelming even the sound of the football game Mr Q had settled on. Mr Q himself glanced over sharply at us, but his gaze held no concern, merely amusement.
“You stupid little bitch,” I hissed at Sam, while he blinked at me in surprise. “How much intelligence does it take to remember the one thing you’re responsible for?” I yanked him back over to the table.
“I, I’m sorry, sir,” he gasped, abject misery at having failed me on his face. But I could not help but notice that his pecker had started to plump.
“Pick that shit up,” I ordered him, and he snatched the bag from the table, held it against his chest, willing to guard it with his life. I nodded in grim satisfaction and tugged him back towards the basement, but then, remembering my manners, I stopped and asked Mr Q, “Would you like some hummus, Mr Q? Rudy wanted some, and we brought plenty.”
“God no I hate the stuff,” Mr Q said. “Thanks for the offer though. How much do I owe you? Let me get my wallet.”
“No, Mr Q,” I said firmly as he started to rise from the couch, relieved that he hated the stuff; that left more hummus to feed my babyboi later. “Me and Rudy don’t worry about who owes what to who. We share and share alike.”
Mr Q settled back into his seat, chuckling. “You certainly do, don’t you? Go, go, have fun, leave me to my game.”
“C’mon, Babyboi,” I said, dragging at Sam hard enough that he stumbled –
“I’m sorry, sir, I’m clumsy,” he muttered, flinching as if he expected another blow.
– which I ignored. “Let’s get that cherry popped.” I strode off across the living room and down the hall at a good clip, Sam stumbling and tumbling at my heel. As we descended the stairs to the basement, I heard the unmistakeable thump-thump-thump of what Rudy called ‘gay bar music’ coming from behind one of the three doors at the bottom of the stops. One of the doors led out to the garage; another led to a small toilet and smaller shower, and the third, the one literally shaking with the bassline of the dance music, led into a large cheaply carpeted room with a pool table, big screen tv, and two plush overstuffed couches already stained with the history of two active male children.
In other words, the perfect room for an orgy.
I didn’t bother knocking on the door; they wouldn’t hear us over the music. I just turned the knob and pushed open the door.
Several things assaulted me at once.
The music beat at me, beseeching me to come in and join the madness.
The smell of marijuana and sweat rolled out, as heady and enticing as the funk of last night, and my dick throbbed at the reminder.
Heat reached out and enveloped me; a fire blazed in the rarely used fireplace on the other side of them. A prudent move, I thought; I’d soon be naked in there, and I knew the room to be prone to chilliness.
And then I spotted the action in the center of the room.
Rudy, shirtless, his chest and back gleaming with sweat, held a huge (and ancient) camcorder to his eyes, filming . . .
Uh, filming . . .
Oh lord.
They’d draped a sheet over the pool table, upon which stood Chad, gyrating to the beat of the frantic music like a furry go-go girl in a cheap porno. He wore a bright red fright wig on his head, a stuffed bra on his hairy chest, and a pair of thigh-high panty hose. Nothing else. Except for (of all things) a belled collar encircling his balls. On every bare patch of skin the boy possessed (including a newly-mown area above his genitals) Rudy had written in lipstick every name he’d called Chad last night. Yeah, and some new ones too. “Ckskr.” “Asslkr.” “Cum Dump.” The crackers cheeks were redder than the lipsticked insults, and his peter jutted out from his crotch like a, yeah, gonna use it again, like an exclamation mark punctuating his excitement. A wire from Rudy’s camcorder trailed over to the bigscreen tv, providing Chad with every opportunity to study himself and relish his own humiliation.
Neither he nor Rudy noticed that we’d opened the door and stared in at them in amazement. “Put more hip into it, Cracker,” Rudy barked. “Show me how bad you want my cock in your hole!”
I felt a tug on the other end of the leash. I glanced at Sam, bent down to hear what he had to say. He spoke two words and two words only.
“Sir? RED!”
Coming up in “Because–the fourth orgasm–You Put The Hummus On The Pita And You Slurp It All Up!”: The sex is back! Our boys take turns being porn stars, and Sam again gets kissed in a bathroom.
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