Beautiful Boys: Gay Erotic Stories (22 page)
Read Beautiful Boys: Gay Erotic Stories Online
Authors: Richard Labonte (Editor)
Then he scooped me up, carried me to the bed and fucked me again, driving all other thoughts from my mind. After he finished, I fell asleep with Jack’s powerful arms wrapped around me.
When the sun rose, I slipped out of Jack’s bed and walked through the entire villa. I couldn’t find him to say good-bye. I didn’t have time to hang around, so I found my clothes on the porch where I’d left them, pulled them on and headed down to the beach. Nine steps into my descent I stepped on broken glass, and, at first, I thought it was my broken shot glass from the night before. Then I looked down and saw an empty picture frame—the same frame that had once held the photograph of Jack’s handsome lover.
I hesitated. Jack was gone. The picture was gone. I was out of time. There was nothing I could do but go back to Jamie.
I walked south along the beach, back to the cottage.
As soon as I pushed open the door, Jamie shouted, “Where the
hell
have you been?”
hell
have you been?”
“I went for a walk.”
“All night?”
I didn’t respond.
“You went to see him, didn’t you?”
I didn’t deny it. Instead, I finished packing. Then I had the front desk call us a cab. When it came, we shoved our bags into the trunk and sat in the backseat as far from one another as we could get. I sat seaside and stared out the window.
Halfway to the airport, a long stretch of the road hugged the shoreline, with only a thin stretch of white sand between the road and the water. Ahead of us, at the point where the road turned inland again, an ambulance and a trio of police cars with their lights flashing blocked the road. A dozen people had gathered on the beach, watching two paramedics working over someone or something.
A lone police officer stood in the road directing traffic. As the cab slowed, our driver rolled his window down and asked what all the commotion was about.
“A body washed ashore,” the officer said. “Looks like a tourist got caught in the tides.”
A tourist? Thin blond? Muscular brunet? I craned my neck to see but the cab moved forward and the crowd below shifted position to close the gap between people. I never learned the answer.
The flight home next to Jamie was long and uncomfortable, and we barely spoke a dozen words between us. As soon as the cab deposited us in front of our dormitory, we went our separate ways. A few days later Jamie dropped out of school.
I never saw him again. But I often revisit the image of a perfect man emerging from the sea.
HYACINTHUS IN BLOOM
Gerard Wozek
I am finishing up a box of hard candy hearts from last week’s Valentine’s Day. Each message passes quietly over my lips as I read them to myself then let the cliché sentiments dissolve on my tongue: BE MINE and KISS ME and COME CLOSER. All these clever taunts stamped on the side of each compressed confection melt onto my tongue as I stroll through the glass-enclosed botanical garden.
I found the little box of pink and beige saccharine hearts in the clearance bin next to the Safeway checkout. I could have offered a few to my coworkers or designed a clever ruse and left a handful next to my computer screen at the office and pretended someone had set them there just for me. But instead, I am taking them all for myself, sucking them down to pools of sugar syrup, as I brush past the newly budded larkspurs and garden house pansies, their bright petals tipping onto the drenched soil after a fresh watering.
I come here on my break from work to invent conversations I imagine having with a newfound lover. I want to hear someone, perhaps another garden stroller I might encounter here, ask me to kiss, or offer a half-hushed enticement to linger skin to skin somewhere behind the exotic ferns. I want to taste the scent of roses on my imagined companion’s neck, languish in a steamy wind spell of dahlias with him, then let the delicate perfume of baby mandarins and Italian blood oranges wash over us as we descend into a primal heat.
I am usually able to keep my full-blown fantasy of a man-to-man exchange of muscled embraces amid wet, languorous kisses and unbridled thrusts straddling somewhere between my subconscious and waking mind. But being here today, ensconced in the muggy Lincoln Park Conservatory, an oasis of tropical plants housed just to the north of Chicago’s urban district, those covert, submerged impulses are offered freer rein.
There is something semi-arousing about the water slowly dripping down the cloudy glass panes of this aging greenhouse, the damp smell of the freshly fertilized soil and the artful way the moss is wilting down off the branches of the transplanted Florida palm trees and gingerly brushing the back of my goose-bumped neck as I saunter by.
The last heart that dissolved on my tongue had a hot licorice flavor. The taste of anise and cinnamon is sticky on the roof of my mouth, so I pop in a WILL YOU and savor a fresh burst of cherry infusion as I make my way toward the rear of the building. I pass through a narrow, rectangular area filled with tropical violets and hanging garden pots stuffed with dewy, overgrown succulents. It’s nearly impossible to make out the classical composition piped into the greenhouse because of the intermittent radio static. The music buzzes through the ceiling then gets lost in the tangle of suspended foliage, as though the pulse of the plants is taking over the piped-in concerto.
At the end of the hall, I notice a dark-eyed groundskeeper with a raffish buzz cut, wearing a ripped athletic T-shirt and faded green-gray overalls. He is methodically rolling up a garden hose around the spigot of a clay aqueduct poking through a cracked stone wall. His sewn-on name tag reads GIACINTO, and as he turns to wind up the green piping, I dart a few quick side glances at his jutting derriere, then quickly look away, pretending to examine a steamy ground-level fern bed. He finishes coiling the snaky tubing around the spout then moves toward me with an alarmed jolt.
“Careful. You’ll hit your head on that hanging grape ivy.”
“Oh! I didn’t notice it.” I touch the side of the thick clay pot just above my forehead. “That could’ve been fatal.”
“
Cissus rhombifolia
is generally pretty tame.” My rescuer looks straight at me. “It’s that heavy stone pot it’s sitting in that might have given you a good bump on your head.”
Cissus rhombifolia
is generally pretty tame.” My rescuer looks straight at me. “It’s that heavy stone pot it’s sitting in that might have given you a good bump on your head.”
“So that’s another name for grape ivy?”
“Grape or oak leaf ivy. Either one really. You can tell by the spindle shape of the leaflets.” He gently holds a purple-colored tendril between his two thick fingers as he stands just inches from me. “This subtropical variety resembles the common grape leaf. Can you see the subtle variation?”
I touch the moist stem and my fingers momentarily graze his wrist. “Yes, I do see,” I answer, nearly breathlessly, taking in his cleft chin, strong Roman nose, and dark, thick eyebrows and lashes. “It’s just that, well, grape leaves make me think of my lunch yesterday near the Halsted Street Greek Town.”
“This particular variety is imported from the West Indies.” His soft breath is on my cheek, and he smells like cool summer field grass after a sudden drenching of rain. “So, are you a horticulturalist or do you prefer a pedestrian stroll through the plants?”
“Well, I am pretty enamored with all the connecting greenhouses.” My face flushes with blood and the humidity seems to have rapidly increased. “But I actually come here on my lunch break, for the subdued tempo and the sun.”
“I love it, too.” He nods, brushing away a bead of sweat from behind his left ear. “Especially in the winter, I love the ultraviolet light coming through the wide glass panels. It keeps everything in here warm and lush and growing.”
“Growing, yes. I believe that it’s even working on us,” I say. My Italian-branded gardener winks and places a firm hand on my elbow.
“Have you seen the fifty-foot fiddle-leaf rubber tree in the center of the main greenhouse? It dates back to 1897.”
“I believe I noted its thick trunk earlier.” It’s clear we’re both sensing the same primitive vibe as we walk together down the brick footpaths wending toward our destination. My guide steps over the low wire fence and motions me to follow him onto the manicured flowerbed.
“Perhaps you’ve never seen the fiddle-leaf from this particular vantage.” He walks through patches of purple violets and clover then disappears behind long shafts of thick, dark-green foliage. I follow him into a natural enclosure crafted by long leafy branches crisscrossing over one another.
“You’re right.” I can barely speak and I’m not certain if it’s my pulse thundering in my ears, or the heartthrob of the towering tree we’re standing under. “It’s magnificent up close.”
“Just be careful,” he whispers, pointing to a dribble of white sap oozing from one of the cut leaves. “This old rubber tree has just been pruned, and its juice can be pretty sticky. The stain is nearly impossible to get off of clothing.”
“You seem to know quite a bit about plants. You must be the resident horticulturalist.”
“My grandfather tended prickly pomegranate trees in Sicily. Every summer my father would take our family for an extended trip there, and we’d help him with the orchards. You just pick things up, that’s all.”
My tongue is still coated from the black cherry-flavored heart. Giacinto’s dark eyelashes shade his hazel eyes, and his lips resemble the shape of the weeping fig tree’s bounty, bursting next to us. The branches seem to dip lower around us as we huddle close to each other, my nose now nuzzling his damp chest hair.
“It’s only us in here?” I try to keep my voice steady and quiet.
“It is only us.” He slips his tongue into my mouth. “Ah. Hot sun-berry kisses?”
“I have another, but I don’t know what flavor it is.”
“I like your flavor just fine.”
Dirt encrusts Giacinto’s fingernails, but I don’t mind. He smells like the earth, damp and grassy and fertile. His lips glide over mine and the hair on my neck stands on end. Our bodies become one with the ropey branches and umbrella-like leaves.
Centered within an almond-shaped cocoon of greenery, we become a fire of jungle instinct amid the vines and brush. Our tongues seek refuge in exposed musky armpits and on jutting nipples, then trace down the trail of soft brown hair coating our hard bellies. Behind the chalky, chestnut bark fiddle-tree, we move slowly, silently into each other. I try to keep my heavy breathing hushed as we collapse onto the craggy trunk of the sheltering tree.
The black-haired cherub cradles my head atop a bicep tattooed with a purple vine of tiny three-pronged leaves. I am damp from our shared perspiration and the oozing sap of the rubber tree that has leaked onto my forearm. A nimbus of blue-winged butterflies circles above us, then settles onto a long ficus branch to perch above our shiny shirtless bodies that have now reflexively folded into each other.
“Giacinto,” my voice cracks, “I don’t usually, I mean—this isn’t typical. It’s just, I have to see you again,” I reach into the jeans knotted around my ankles and hand my blushing gardener my business card.
“Nice to meet you, Luke.”
“As in Lukeois. I’m named after my father. I think it means wolfish, so you’ll have to forgive me today for my lack of boundaries.”
“I think we can make an arrangement to satisfy the wolf that roams within you.”
“An arrangement?” I steady myself against the peeling bark of a dwarfed willow tree a few inches away.
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