The Man I Fucked

He was slight. He was short. His chest was smooth. He had a towel around his waist and another draped across his shoulders. He had red tattoos on his right arm, and green and blue tattoos on his left. His hair was cropped and brown and bits of it were grey. He had the body and energy of a man much younger than he was. He was easy to pick up. He was easy to lift. He had a large cock and by large I mean bigger than mine. I did not want to talk about his cock, not yet, because that will come later. There is a chronology I want to stick to, a beginning and an end. His name was Justin. He was a manager of managers. He did not look like he had that kind of job, but he did.

He wanted me to follow him, first into one cubicle and then into another, but I did not follow him – I was not in a following mood, nor did I want to be alone in a room with someone I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone in a room with. Later we would be in a room together. Later we would talk. But for now we are watching each other. For now I am walking into the darkroom and he is following me. I am standing near the door to the darkroom where there is just enough light to see who enters. He walks past me and goes to stand against a wall perpindicular to the wall I am leaning against, and in the end I walk up to him. I follow him.

Later he will tell me what he does – manages a staff of 150 – and he will ask a question so many people ask, especially in a place like this where men come to meet men for sex, a question they assume I might know the answer to. They ask: Have I read anything by you?

He had an American accent. He calls himself eloquent, though I think he means articulate. The man I fucked waited for me to touch him first. His nipples were the first thing I touched, and his knees buckled a bit, he moaned. He had nipples that were pert, the kind that has been manipulated before. When he touched my nipples in return I let him know that this is something that brings me great pleasure as well as intensifying my desire to fuck. Later he will dig his fingernails into my back and I will tell him to do it harder. I will lift him up when we are alone in a room just as I lift him up now in the darkroom and bring my fingers under him so that I can touch his hole. The man I fucked has a smooth arsehole that gives way to my finger, pushes back down onto it. He lets me play with his hole like I like to. He responds well to my use of the word pussy.

He will dig his nails into my back and scratch them from my shoulders to my arse and across my stomach, harder each time so that the skin feels like it could break and I want it to break, though it doesn’t. When I get home there will be red lines down my back, tiny grooves that one could drip ink into.

In the darkroom we are quiet. I am holding him in my arms and slowly I lower myself so that I can sit on the raised platform and he will sit on my lap, facing me, and position my cock so that it rubs against his hole, that hole that I keep playing with. Before we leave the darkroom for a room of our own, the man I will fuck kneels down and takes my cock into his mouth. His pale skin is visible in the pale light coming in through the gaps in the door.

The man I fucked said: You’re fucking beautiful. He said: I have to thank your parents for such great genes. I thought: You’d need to go six feet under to thank at least one of them. He is on his back when he says these things, the kind of things you say when you are briefly in love with the person you are with, completely giving yourself to them and to this moment. Without my glasses on he was a blur, so I will never know the details of his tattoos, the colour of his eyes, the exact shape of his fingernails, the ones he ripped down my back and which he said he’d just cut the day before. I held his nose and exhaled into his lungs, inhaled the air back into mine, back and forth, him and me in that room together.

Later I will say: Should we put it back in. Meaning my cock. We fitted well together. Whatever I touched turned to gold. His ease and the way he gave himself to me was gold. By gold I mean that I could have fallen in love with him, and for a while I did. I gave myself to him. I was ready to endure pain. No, I invited pain. For a long time I have not felt this… this… this craziness that love brings out in me. When I touched his nipples he whimpered. All I wanted was to play with his arsehole, to be allowed in. I could eat out of that, I said. Everything about him was smooth and soft and yielding.

What do you read, he says, another of those questions only writers should be allowed to ask other writers. He reads fantasy and The Poisonwood Bible. An uninteresting reading list is detrimental to desire, though he had other qualities that balanced things out: a soft arsehole, sharp nails, a staff of 150.

So, what are your plans for the rest of the day? he says, another question that cannot lead anywhere interesting. I say: I’ve only just arrived. His reply to my question is that he’s heading home to cook dinner for friends. The man I fucked will soon prepare a meal for people who will sit around his table. He will ask them to guess what he did this afternoon. You won’t believe what I did this afternoon, and his friends will say: What? Tell us.