Take This Man: Gay Romance Stories (20 page)

We still couldn’t marry in Texas, but our relationship was as committed as any marriage in every way but legal. We had done all we could to let the world know we were a committed couple. What was mine was Gary’s and what was Gary’s was mine, with joint checking and saving accounts, joint ownership of the loft and both cars, and each other named as beneficiaries on our life insurance policies. Some of the things we did to cement our relationship were things we learned from our parents while other things we learned by watching the mistakes of our friends, many of whom ran through relationships like water through cheesecloth.

We settled into our early thirties confident in our careers and our social status but no longer the hot-bodied young men we had been when we met. The years had softened us both, but we still saw each other through a lover’s eyes—a gaze that tightens flab and softens wrinkles, especially when we fail to wear our glasses or put in our contact lenses. Even so, I couldn’t avoid the reality of the single strand of gray hair only inches from my nose.

As my lover snored lightly, I wondered what else might have gone gray. I pushed back the sheet covering us both and repositioned myself so that I could examine the neatly trimmed black pubic hair nestling his cock and ball sac. I soon found another gray hair spiraling outward from his left testicle.

Without my glasses, I had to get quite close to his crotch to see it and my warm breath must have tickled Gary’s fancy. His flaccid cock twitched and began to rise, just as long and thick and magnificent as it had ever been.

I couldn’t help myself. I wrapped my fist around the base of Gary’s erect cock and took his swollen purple cockhead between my lips. I pistoned my fist up and down his stiff shaft as I traced the circumference of his glans with the tip of my tongue. Before long my lover moaned softly and shifted position ever so slightly.

I knew Gary was waking when I felt one hand on the back of my head and the other on my shoulder. I released my grip on his cock shaft and slowly drew the entire length of his cock into my mouth, something I had not been able to do when we first met. Then I drew back, stopping only when my teeth caught on the ridge of his swollen glans.

As I lowered my face to his crotch, I cupped his ball sac in the palm of my hand, covering the telltale gray hair. I massaged his testicles as my face continued bobbing up and down the entire length of his cock shaft and I tasted the first drops of precome.

My saliva and his precome dampened his pubic hair and slid around his ball sac to his asscrack. As I massaged his scrotum in my palm, I teased his sphincter with the tip of my index finger.

Soon Gary began bucking his hips up and down, thrusting upward to meet my descending face, and I knew he would soon come. When I suspected he was close, I pressed my finger hard against his saliva-slickened sphincter, pushing my finger in his ass up to the second knuckle as he cried out and came in my mouth.

I swallowed and swallowed again, and I held his cock in my mouth until it finally quit spasming and began to contract to its flaccid state. After I released my oral grip on my lover, I returned to the position I’d been in before I’d spotted his gray chest hair: his arms.

Gary stroked my hair and asked what had prompted me to rouse him from sleep the way I had.

I told him about the gray hair, how it had made me think of how young we’d been when we’d met, and how those thoughts had reminded me of everything we had shared during our time together.

“It’s not the first gray hair,” Gary said when I finished. “I’ve been pulling them out for weeks, hoping you’d never notice. If I had known this would be the result, I might never have pulled them out.”

“Don’t pull out any more,” I told him as I looked into his eyes, seeing both the young man I had fallen for so many years before and the man who still made my heart beat fast. “Let me love you as you are.”

UNWANTED FREEDOM

P. L. Ripley

C
hance Marlow spent his last day of unwanted freedom in O’Henry’s Pub drinking enough boilermakers to kill the desire to skip town. Tomorrow Tommy Bradley was being released from a five-year stint in Hardaway Prison. Chance had sent him there.

Running would be a smarter move than staying, but he had to face Tommy like a man. They had, after all, been lovers for more than a decade.

The door opened, filling the pub with an explosion of afternoon sunlight. Chance and the handful of other customers squinted against the invasion. “Christ!” one of the old men at the bar screamed, the shot glass in his hand quivering as he brought it to his liver-spotted lips. The light reflecting in the glass shimmered with a dull gray color. The old man was drinking whiskey. It should have been a soothing amber. Chance suspected the old man had been served mop water but was too drunk to notice, or care.

The draw of O’Henry’s was its lack of light. In the dark, Chance could forget he had once been happy.

Chance glared at the door as it swung shut, sealing off the light and the outside world. A silhouette filled the archway. It was a familiar shape. Tall, lean, with one leg cocked oddly to the side. The silhouette took a step and Chance realized it was Bennie, his oldest and closest friend.

Bennie limped into the pub, nodded his head at the men at the bar. They gave him a big hello and clapped him on the back as he passed them. Everyone loved Bennie. Maybe it was because he handed out blow jobs like they were sandwich coupons, or perhaps it was that he genuinely liked people and treated them with respect. Even when they didn’t deserve it. Like Chance. He didn’t deserve Bennie’s friendship but was grateful he had it.

“Jesus Chance, you look like shit,” Bennie said, pulling out the chair across the table. He dropped into it, keeping his bad leg stuck out from under the table, and massaged his knee. Bennie had his kneecap shot off in Afghanistan. A little reward for serving the current Washington administration, who, in all fairness, had inherited the war from the previous one. Though the current one was in no hurry to end that mess over there. Bennie was lucky it was only his kneecap that got blown away.

“Thanks man,” Chance said and emptied his glass for the… what was it, sixth time now? Seventh? He didn’t know or care. He just wanted to get drunk and it was starting to piss him off that he couldn’t seem to.

“So, Tommy’s coming home, huh?” Bennie asked and pulled his pant leg up to really get in good on that knee. His fingers worked the flesh. The plastic kneecap rolled and slid over the bone. Chance glanced down at the thin, hairy leg with the dragon tattoo curled over the shin, its mouth open, fangs dripping saliva or venom, looking like it was ready to take a bite out of Bennie’s bad knee. He stared at that leg and wanted to feel it against his face. He wanted to run his tongue through that long leg hair, watch it clump with his saliva as he pulled those legs onto his shoulders and buried himself inside Bennie. He wanted to hear Bennie cry out his name as he pounded him to the fragile ledge of an orgasm, then push him over it. He wanted to feel the insides clamp down on him as Bennie came.

But, it would never happen. He knew that just like he knew he was in love with Bennie, and always had been. Bennie knew it too, that’s why he would never sleep with Chance. “Good friends are hard to come by,” he had said once when Chance proposed a bedroom maneuver. “If it doesn’t work out, and it won’t because I’m a whore, then we will end up with nothing. We won’t be lovers and will no longer be friends. I don’t want to lose you.” Chance had thought it was a cop-out. That Bennie didn’t want to risk feeling…something, anything. That’s why Bennie had never been with anyone for more than a few weeks. He also realized Bennie was right. If it didn’t work out then it probably would end their friendship. Reluctantly, he retracted his offer, but he still wanted him just the same.

“I don’t know if he’s coming home,” Chance said, answering Bennie’s question. “He is getting paroled. I’m just not sure where he’s going to end up.”

“Has he written to you?”

“No.”

“In five years, he never wrote one letter? Not even a phone call?”

“No. I received a letter from the prison board that his parole has been granted, because I am his last address contact and…” he paused, struggling to verbalize the rest.

“The arresting officer,” Bennie finished for him.

“Yeah.”

“So, you’re just going to what…sit here and get drunk and let whatever happens tomorrow when he gets out, just happen?”

“What am I supposed to do? Wait outside the prison for him?”

“Yes. That is exactly what you should do. Confront him. Find out if he does want to come home with you.” Bennie stared at Chance. Their eyes bored into one another. “You do want him to come home, don’t you?”

He did. That was the big kick in the teeth about the whole mess. He did want him to come home. He loved Tommy as much as he loved Bennie, if not more. He wanted him to come home so they could pick up their lives where they had left off five years ago. But he knew that was unlikely. He had arrested Tommy. He was the one who had held Tommy’s hands behind his back and put on the cuffs. He was the one who read Tommy his Miranda rights, then dragged him from their home and shoved him in the back of the cruiser. How could Tommy ever want to come home to him after that? But then, how could Chance want Tommy after what he had done?

“I’d rather just get drunk. Maybe you will be nice and take me home. Maybe you will be really nice and let me suck you off before I pass out,” Chance said, and he could hear his own voice slurring. The whiskey was finally kicking in. It was affecting him down below, too. He reached down and pulled the alcohol induced semi-erection from the crease of his leg and up onto his thigh.

“I’ll take you home,” Bennie said. “But that’s all I’ll do. We can drive up to Hardaway in the morning. You can hear it from Tommy himself if he wants to come back to you.”

“And if he doesn’t? What if he wants to kill me? I’m sure it’s crossed his mind a few times in the last five years. I know, if I had been in his position, I would want him dead.”

“You’re a big boy. I’m sure you can handle him.”

“I’m not afraid of him killing me, I’m afraid he will want to. I don’t want him to hate me. Isn’t that fucked? After what he did. Breaking into that old woman’s house, tying her up and… Jesus, why do I give a fuck what he thinks? Why do I care if he’s pissed that my testimony sent him away?”

“Because, you’re just as crazy as he is.”

“Perhaps. Maybe that’s why we fit so well together all those years. All this time not hearing from him has given me the illusion that we can still be together when he gets out, though. That maybe he has forgiven me. Tomorrow, I guess, I’ll find out what he really feels.”

“You are the one that needs to forgive him. He is the one, after all, that…did what he did.”

“I have. I forgave him the night I arrested him. He didn’t kill anyone anyway. It was Sam who pulled the trigger on the old lady.”

“If you forgave him, maybe it will all work out then.”

Chance doubted it, but what option did he have but to hope?

After another couple of rounds and a slow, painful vomit session in the men’s room, they stood on the sidewalk while Bennie hailed a cab. Chance weaved left and right in the fading sun, his eyes squinted against the light like a bat on his first day out of the cave. Dusk was coming, the streetlights flickered to life along the avenue, but it was still brighter out there than in the pub.

Chance squinted against the dim light, suppressed the urge to run back inside the pub. It was safer in there. There was booze still to be drunk in there. More importantly though, there were no reminders that Tommy was getting out tomorrow in there.

When they arrived at Chance’s home, Bennie staggered him down the hall to the bedroom. The same room where Chance had slammed Tommy against the wall and applied the cuffs. The same room they had slept and fucked in for ten years. Some nights the only thing Chance could see when he closed his eyes was the look of shame in Tommy’s eyes as Chance asked him if he understood his rights as they had been read to him. Other nights he saw the look of bliss on Tommy’s face as Chance made him come again and again. Both memories hurt now.

Bennie dumped Chance in the bed, pulled his shoes off for him and started to leave. “Stay,” Chance called to him. “Please.”

“I’ll be back in the morning to take you to Hardaway.”

Chance woke when he was pulled from the bed and thrown to the floor. He opened his eyes to see the intruder drop to his knees, the left one planted firmly in the center of Chance’s chest, and shove a thin slice of steel to his throat.

“Tommy, you’re home early,” Chance said, not surprised to see his old lover.

Tommy grunted a hard reply. “No thanks to you, asshole.”

Chance stared up at him a moment, waiting for the knife to pierce his skin, to tear into his larynx or slice into the jugular vein. When it didn’t happen Chance said, “You look good Tommy. You’ve been working out.”

Tommy had always been muscular from a lifetime of working construction. He was bigger now than the last time Chance had seen him, the day of the sentencing, five years ago. His chest was thicker, arms so fat with new muscle growth Tommy seemed barely able to keep them at his sides. They kept wanting to balloon out from him as though his hands were filled with helium.

“I didn’t have much else to do, besides trying not to get raped or killed,” Tommy replied, pushing the blade a little harder against the thin flesh. A tiny bead of blood welled up under the knife. Chance could feel it trickle down into the hollow of his throat.

“I’m sorry you had to go to prison. I’m sorry I had to arrest you,” Chance said, and ran his fingers through the thick hair on Tommy’s forearm. He traced the tattoos all the way up to the shoulder. Tommy had most of them before he went away, but there were a few new ones. A skull on his hand, a line through Chance’s name on his bicep. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it.”

“You always were impatient,” Tommy said and rose to his feet. He stuck out his hand for Chance to take. Chance accepted it, lifted himself from the floor and stood beside Tommy. It felt good to touch him again. He missed him more than he had admitted to Bennie. He was still powerfully, terribly in love with Tommy.