Best Gay Romance 2013 (13 page)

“Yeah I dated girls. I even had sex with a few of them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. But I always did stuff with my friends, too. And eventually I realized that stuff was more interesting.”

“You messed around with your friends?” Dom said.

“Yeah.”

“Like what kind of stuff?”

“Like, you know. Kissing. More than kissing,” Randy said. Dom brought the beer bottle to his lips, tipped it back even though it was empty. Randy took a deep breath. “Did you ever do stuff like that? Like before you met Becky?”

“No,” Dom said. He turned his head to Randy and smiled. “Not even kissing.”

“Kissing's easy,” Randy said. “You know—noncommittal.”

Dom laughed. “I'd try that. Kissing a guy.”

“It's not much different from kissing a girl,” Randy said, nervously plugging his thumb into the mouth of his beer bottle.

Dom stood up. He tossed his empty bottle into the weeds and turned toward Randy. His half-hard cock tented his transparent briefs. Randy set down his bottle and stood up next to him, his hefty dick also visibly at half-mast.

“You want to?” Dom said.

“Kiss?” Randy said.

“Yeah,” Dom said. They moved toward each other, their cocks hardening. When they came together an involuntary, almost reflexive force took over. Their mouths locked and their tongues dueled, desire passing between them thick and hot as molten rock. Randy moved his hands to Dom's back. Dom placed his hands on the smooth sides of Randy's torso. Making out with Dom felt natural and breathtaking, but it was just too much. Randy had to break away.

“Thanks,” Dom said, looking at the ground, and the word
was a hollow thud. They dressed and headed to the car. The world, having disappeared for a moment, rushed back like a tsunami. They rode home in silence, each mile getting them closer to the lives they'd upended.

 

The strange thing was that after that day, hard as they tried to avoid each other, Becky seemed to do all she could to bring them together. She went whole hog in enlisting Randy's help with their house, making dates that Randy always managed to blow off.

“I saw they just opened a record store on Market Street,” she said one night over dinner at the Perlettis'. “You and Dom both like music—you guys should go down there together!”

“Sure,” Randy said, and Dom nodded politely, while Becky eyed them like they were lab rats.

“Do you like Dom?” Becky asked her brother one night after dinner. Randy was washing dishes while Becky sat at the kitchen table. Dom had already gone home.

“Of course,” Randy said. “Dom's a good guy.”

“I think he's about the best-looking guy I've ever seen,” Becky said. “Don't you think he's good looking?”

“Yeah, he is,” Randy said. “He's got a handsome face.”

“Are you happy for me?”

“Of course I am. I'm happy for all of us, 'cause if you hadn't gotten laid soon you would've drove us all nuts.”

“Hush up,” Becky said. “I hate it when you talk like that.” She dipped her finger into a candle, coating the tip with hot wax. “I never thought a guy like Dom would
look
at me, let alone
marry
me.”

“Don't say that,” Randy said.

Becky shrugged. “I know I'm not the cutest button in the box. But there was Dom, sitting across from me in my Shakespeare class, and he just…I don't know…
listened
to me. Made
me feel like I was worth his time. I asked him to go out, and he did. I'd never asked a guy out before. Can you believe that?” Randy toweled off a plate and stacked it with a clink.

“I can,” he said, turning toward his sister. “You don't give yourself enough credit, Becky. You've always been shy, but you're great. People just don't get to see it.” Becky smiled and cast her eyes downward. Randy went to bed that night with a heavy heart.

On Labor Day Becky arranged a picnic at their parents' house. Dom wore a pair of thin khaki shorts that made his ass look like wrapped cantaloupes. In the chaos of aunts and uncles and cousins Randy lost track of his brother-in-law. He had to piss, so he entered the quiet house and went up the stairs to the bathroom. The door was closed and the shower was running. He figured it was his dad, so he walked in and shut the door behind him.

“I gotta pee,” he said after he'd already unzipped. He heard the shower turn off. “Just gimme one second.” The curtain pulled back and Randy turned his head. There was Dom, naked, wet, and already half-hard.

“Shit,” Randy said. “Sorry.” Dom, who'd needed to clean up after knocking whiffleballs around with the kids in the ninety-degree heat, locked eyes with Randy. He didn't move a muscle except for his cock, which lurched like a thing from the dead until it was standing straight up.

Randy could've left the room. It was probably the right thing to do. But instead he stepped forward and wrapped his hand around Dom's fat cock. He raised his face to meet Dom's mouth. As they made out their hands moved like wildfire, Dom ripping off Randy's clothes, Randy feeling every inch of Dom's body. Randy knelt down, his shorts around his thighs and his hard cock jutting out. He took Dom's cock in his mouth.

Dom's lungs deflated. A few passes of Randy's mouth and
throat around his cock and Dom was almost juicing. Randy licked his way up his brother-in-law's body, munched on his pecs and nipples, then trailed his tongue down Dom's thigh. He flipped him around. Dom braced himself against the shower wall. Dom's ass was a gift, big and perfect, and Randy dove in. His pink, deep asshole seemed to invite Randy to dig deeper with his tongue. Dom whimpered and pushed back harder.

Randy stood and dropped his shorts so that his buckle clanged against the floor. He grabbed a bottle of shampoo and lubed himself up. He pressed his cock to Dom's asshole and in moments he slid inside. Dom stifled a cry but didn't protest as Randy porked him balls-deep. A minute or so of thrusting and Randy was blasting inside Dom's virgin butt and Dom was spraying the shower wall.

They didn't talk as Randy slid out, pulled on his pants, and left. He went to his bedroom and locked the door, caught his breath. When he came back out Dom was with the rest of the family on the patio, freshly showered and freshly fucked. He had a noticeable glow, and even nodded to acknowledge Randy's entrance.

 

“It was like you tripped a switch in me,” Dom would say years later about that afternoon. “I instantly knew how sex was supposed to feel. I felt so relieved.” Randy had apparently fucked the fear right out of Dom, and Dom got bold. Two days later he came knocking on Randy's bedroom door. Randy tossed his liquid-crinkled issue of
Mandate
on the floor, zipped up, and answered the door.

“What are you doing here?” Randy said, ushering a wild-eyed Dom inside.

“I told Becky I was borrowing a record,” he whispered. Dom impulsively leaned forward and kissed him, knocking their mouths together so hard it hurt. “Here,” he said, and handed Randy a
key. The plastic, diamond-shaped key ring had the number
428
imprinted on both sides. “I got this room for tonight.”

“For us?” Randy said.

“You don't want to come,” Dom said, his face falling.

“No, no, of course I do, it's just…Jesus. Okay. When?”

“After two. I'm supposed to be doing paperwork in the back office but the night clerk won't notice.” Randy took the key. Dom made it halfway down the hall before Randy thought to call him back. He grabbed the first record off his stack and shoved it in Dom's hands. Dom looked at it: Abba,
Arrival
.

“I already have this one,” he said.

Sex at the hotel that night was less furtive than before but even more frenzied. Randy dropped three loads into his brother-in-law in less than two hours—one down his gullet and two in his increasingly insatiable butt.

“I love your dick in me,” Dom admitted as they lay beside each other watching the blank TV, the Zen-like hum of the motel room thrumming through them. Then, “Becky wants a baby.”

“I'm supposed to be saving money to move to the city,” Randy said.

“You're moving?”

“That was the plan. I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do now.”

“Me neither,” Dom said. They fucked again.

For two more weeks they met at the motel, until Randy couldn't take it anymore and put all he'd saved on a security deposit for an apartment in Pittsburgh. He moved in the middle of the night, telling no one until he called his parents the next day.

That October, Randy heard from his mom that Dom was leaving his sister. No particulars were offered. Randy sensed his mom knew—or at least suspected—more than she was letting on, but he didn't press the issue.

He lay low all winter. He hadn't spoken to Dom since he'd left, though on several occasions he'd driven all the way back to Groom just to see if Dom's car was still parked outside the motel, which it always was.

That spring Randy came home to visit. The divorce had gone through. Becky was even dating a guy named Hugo that she worked with at the state mental hospital in Torrance.

“He likes bird-watching,” Randy's mother reported. Randy was weeding her garden. “That's what they do together in their free time, watch birds.”

“He sounds nice,” Randy said. He'd tried to call his sister the week previous and she'd hung up on him.

“Your Aunt Mary called. She wants the whole family up for the Fourth of July. A reunion, she says. It's a ridiculous idea but you know how she gets.”

“Hmm,” Randy said, yanking plants.

“Did I ever tell you that your father used to date your Aunt Mary when they were in high school?”

“Huh? No,” Randy said.

“They were in love—so
she
said. I suppose she must have felt they were—”

“Her and Dad? How long did they date?”

“Oh, a few years, I think. Even after high school. In fact they talked about getting married at one point.”

“You're kidding,” Randy said, sitting up to look at his mother, who was gazing into the distance.

“Even today I catch her looking at him. Maybe I just think I do. Who knows?” She shrugged. “Love is love and it doesn't care about anything but itself.”

With that she walked away, leaving Randy with a head full of questions and his knees in the dirt.

C. C. Williams

 

 

 

 

 

 

I surveyed the items arrayed on the stark, utilitarian bedspread of the guest room: khaki T-shirt; camouflage fatigues; a sandy, dun-colored officer's cap. Tucked neatly beneath the bed stood black combat boots so highly polished it was as if they were carved from obsidian
. I guess we're doing some paramilitary scene.

Charley waited for me in his bedroom; he'd approached me earlier that night.

I had stopped by Tony's Bar & Grill after a late night at work and sat nursing a Tanqueray while a bored go-go boy gyrated to Lady Gaga's “Born This Way.” At first I hadn't recognized Charley; he'd changed so much from our days at the academy. Gone was the vulnerable boy's face, shadowed with inexperience and bright with expectation. His face had filled out; ten years of life lay like a mask across his features. But the voice, soft and insistent, had remained the same. I had a hard time listening to him. While he spoke of joining the Marines and doing several
tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, I shut my eyes. And there I saw his young eighteen-year-old face as it had been when we had lain together in the dark—intelligent and beautiful but innocent of the evil that men do.

Stripping off my jeans and polo, I began to don the military gear. Pulling the fatigues up over my thighs, I was surprised to find that we now wore the same size pants. In college I had always out-massed Charley, but our bodies had fit just right; his wiry sprinter's form merged with my wrestler's build, like muscle and sinew entwined on bone. The shirt stretched tight across my more muscular chest and biceps; a tear on the right shoulder opened wider as I pulled on the shirt. Lacing up the combat boots, I noticed a few milky stains around the toes. The spots marred the glossy blackness, and I thought of wiping them off. But I considered they might actually be part of the scene that awaited me. I put on the starched, sweet-smelling officer's cap and tucked some stray hairs behind my ears. I recalled the last time we had been together—a beautiful night, an awful night…

 

I had returned to our dorm room, worn out after wrestling practice, wanting just a shower and some mindless TV. I switched on the lights, tossing my gym bag on the floor.

“Leave 'em off.” Charley's voice was thick and emotional, clogged with something raw. “Please.”

Clicking off the fluorescent fixture, I looked to his bed where he lay on his belly, naked. The parted curtains let a splash of moonlight fall across him. He looked like an artsy postcard—except for the welts and livid bruises on his lower back, arms and legs.

“Oh, my god!” I rushed forward and knelt at his bedside. “Are you all right? What happened?”

“Nothing. I don't want to talk about it.”

“Can I get you something? Water? Aspirin?” I blurted out, panicked, concerned. “We should go to the infirmary—”

“Shut up, just…” Charley sighed and broke down.

I fought a creeping sense of distance, a feeling of abandonment that pressed on my heart. “Should I leave you alone?”