The Quirk (10 page)

“I don’t see how you can, monkey,” Rod said with a laugh. “Except that you’re such a clever little devil I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised if you managed to turn yourself into a girl.”

Patrice rolled onto his side and propped himself on an elbow to face him. “I would be very glad to try.”

Rod smiled at him with a little shake of his head. “I shouldn’t have seemed too cooperative the other day. That was a fluke. You know that. I was half-asleep and drunk and hardly knew who you were. Now that we’re friends, nothing would happen, if you know what I mean.”

“You forget how good I am,” Patrice declared with ironic innuendo. “And what if it has already happened, the way you were this morning? Couldn’t I give you pleasure then?”

“No, monkey. I wake up with a hard-on every morning. That doesn’t mean anything. Don’t you understand? I wouldn’t feel right lying back and letting a guy go to work on me.”

“It is not what I call work, but I’m not thinking only of that. Don’t some girls use something to make it easier?”

“Use something? How do you mean? You mean vaginal jelly, a lubricant, that sort of thing?”

“Yes, that’s what it is. Have you used it?”

“Sure. I knew a girl once–” He broke off with a laugh. “It can sure make things very interesting.”

“I don’t want you to do anything you find strange, but if you’ve used it, it can’t be strange. I have some. I can be your girl.

Their eyes met and held, and their gaze intensified. Only then did Rod fully grasp what Patrice was proposing. He’d heard guys say they’d rather have a clean boy than most whores. He had thought it was a joke but perhaps not. Perhaps it wasn’t necessarily queer. Still, the idea chilled and shocked him. He found himself staring into eyes that had grown insistent with desire.

“I don’t even want to kiss you,” he blurted, “let alone–”

“Oh, kissing,” Patrice said with a dismissive shrug in his voice. “Kissing is for being in love. I don’t expect you to be in love with me.”

Rod continued to stare at the boy wondering as the initial shock passed if it would be queer of him
not
to take what was offered him. His pampered background? Stripped of mockery and mischief, Patrice’s droll beauty had a sort of sylvan innocence that made his proposal seem almost natural. He drew a hand out from under the covers and brushed it tentatively over the mop of hair on his forehead. He was struck again by the boy’s fastidiousness. He couldn’t imagine him doing anything messy or distasteful. “I thought it was agreed–no sex,” he reminded him edgily. He was being made to feel that his reluctance was unreasonable.

“It is agreed, certainly. But this is something perhaps you haven’t thought of. It wouldn’t be like before–a guy working on you.”

“You really want it like that,” he asked slowly into his eyes, “as if you were a girl?”

“Very much. When I see your big erection, I feel a great need to be your girl.”

“You go on about how big it is. Are all queers obsessed with big cocks?”

“Not necessarily big. Fortunately for me,” Patrice said with a little giggle.

“If it’s so big, I’d hurt you. I don’t like hurting people.”

“You won’t hurt me. I have seen big boys before.”

“You frighten me, monkey.” He realized that much of his shock was rooted in fear. Fear of what? Fear of being exposed to the abnormal? He was training himself not to fear any experience.

“There is nothing frightening,” Patrice assured him. “It is a pleasure we can give each other, more for me, perhaps, than for you, but we don’t know that until we try.”

“Oh, hell,” Rod muttered. “I don’t want to be coy with you and have you thinking I don’t know what I want. I don’t think my body is holy.” He flung the covers off and lay without moving. “There. You’ll soon see it won’t work. If you think you can get any fun out of it, go ahead and try.” He spoke and acted in a moment of bravado without reckoning on Patrice’s skill. A fingertip strayed across his chest and was joined by others, followed by a mouth, playing amorous music on his body. Within seconds he knew the boy was winning. It wasn’t desire; he was being undermined by a brilliant technical performance. He was filled with sudden unfocused anger. The boy was somehow taking advantage of him, paying exquisite homage to his body instead of making outright demands on it that it wouldn’t be capable of satisfying. He flung his tormentor from him and sprang out of bed and snatched up his dressing gown and pulled it on. He had almost hit the boy. He could feel the violence in his hands and arms. He waited for a moment to calm down and then turned back to the bed. Patrice was lying with the covers pulled up to his chin. His eyes pleaded. He looked small and young and touching.

“Please. I am so very sorry,” he said in a voice that sounded liquid with tears. “Please come back. You said I could try. I will never do it again.”

“Oh, hell, monkey,” Rod burst out with bewildered exasperation. “I just don’t understand it. Maybe you can give me a hard-on. We both know it was beginning. You
are
good, but what then? I tell you it won’t work.”

“No. I was very wrong,” Patrice agreed helplessly. He had made his first major blunder, been carried away by his American’s gentle kindness, forgotten caution too soon. He was terrified by the hard, intent scrutiny of Rod’s eyes. Faced with the abrupt end to all his dreams, he found courage to say more. “Please. I want only for you to be here and for everything to be as you wish it. I told you and you must believe me. It would be better for me to sleep on the sofa, at least until we’re used to your being here and I will no longer make such mistakes.”

“Dammit, you’re not going to be put out of your bed. That’s final. He continued to be annoyingly touched by the slight figure in the bed. He was a faggot who was trying to lure him into being his lover. If he hadn’t just gone through the big move, the sensible thing would be to get dressed and go. He was trapped with a question he was forced to admit he hadn’t quite answered to his own satisfaction. He took a step closer, his eyes fixed on the trouble young face. “Come on. Get up,” he said, anger gone from his voice. “There’s something I’ve got to find out.” He turned and headed for the door.

Patrice scrambled for his robe, mystified but no longer frightened. He had heard the note of kindness that he knew now he must beware. He followed Rod down the hall back to the living room. Rod switched on all the lights at the end of the room that he had claimed as a working area. He collected a big drawing pad and some charcoal pencils and pulled up a chair. Patrice watched, beginning to dread what was coming. Rod turned to him. “OK. Stand over there by the easel. Take off that robe.”

“But I can’t. Please,
mon ami
. You don’t like to look at boy’s bodies.”

“I’m used to male models. That’s all you’ll be while I’m working.”

“But it will soon be cold.”

“Then we’d better hurry.” He sat and flipped open his pad and settled it on his knees.

Patrice moved with dragging feet into the light. “I wish you wouldn’t. I have been most careful so that you won’t see me without clothes. I understand that is what you want.”

Rod laughed. “Do you think you can seduce me by staying all bundled up in that thing? Now listen. No boy has ever given me a hard-on before. I told you that the other day was a fluke, but you make me wonder. The only way I can learn anything is with my eyes. I’m not very bright otherwise. You say you want to be my girl. Let me see you, monkey.”

The robe dropped slowly to the floor, and Patrice stepped away from it. Rod was glad to see that there was no sign of sexual excitement. A quick glance took in the modest accent of genitalia between slightly bony hips. It was a stripling’s body, not coltish but slim and graceful and well-knit, the flat straight line from neck to thighs broken only by a faint swell of breast, charmingly fresh and virginal. He took a long hard look at it and watched the muscular tension in it smooth out and relax as Patrice adopted a casual pose. His hand began to move rapidly over paper. He looked at what he’d done and found that the problem was to make him look like an adult. He had drawn an adolescent He smoothed out another sheet in front of him, and his hand moved rapidly again, refining the line, making sure to give the right weight to the shoulders. When he had finished he was satisfied that he had come as close as need be for a quick sketch. He studied the figure he had created, not looking at the model. Did he want this boy? He saw with the stirring of curiosity that the sensuality of the line was uncharacteristic of him, but physical response wasn’t necessarily desire.

“Yeah,” he muttered to himself. “OK. Turn around. Shift your weight slightly to the right. Good. No. Forget it. Walk around and stand naturally with your back to me. Beautiful. This is going to be a bitch.” He stared for a long time before putting pencil to paper. How to capture the long globes of the buttocks without making them look girlish? They were supported by slim legs and depended on their masculinity on the set of the proud shoulders. In quick succession he tore three sketches out of the pad and crumpled them and dropped them to the floor. He was drawing a girl. He closed his eyes and tapped his forehead with the pencil.
Look,
for chrissake, he told himself.

He opened his eyes and concentrated them on the torso before him. He bisected it, quartered it, subdivided it, searching for his error. He found the misleading girlishness in a half-inch, a centimeter of unusual length in the pelvic area. He took a firm grip on his pencil and moved it lightly, with an iron control that stopped his breath, over the paper. When he was finished the pencil slipped from his hand, and he took a long breath and looked at what he had done. Here was a slight male body that was waiting to be taken by him, and he knew he was going to take it.

The shock of it seemed to ricochet through his chest and settled in his groin. He had once had a girl in the way Patrice had suggested–not because he had wanted it but because she had–and remembered that there had been aspects of it he had decided to forget and that it had been exciting in a way he had supposed was perverse.

He lay the pad on the floor and rose silently and slipped off his dressing gown to be on an equal footing with his friend. Whatever happened he was determined to be honest with himself. He was aware that his sex was lengthening and growing heavy. He moved in behind Patrice and put his hands on his shoulders. Patrice gasped audibly and began to tremble but remained rooted in place. Rod ran his hands along the shoulders, finding the feel of his pencil strokes. He lowered his hands to shoulder blades and moved them out to the side so that his fingertips briefly entered armpits. Patrice’s trembling grew more marked as hands moved down his sides. Rod held Patrice’s waist for a moment while his erection lifted slowly between them. He placed his hands on the buttocks and parted them slightly as his fingers defined their elusive masculinity. Boy or girl, no matter how he might resist it, there was beauty in the body he held. He started to move his hands around to the front of it but remembered that they would encounter a flat chest instead of breasts, perhaps an erect cock–nothing was where he would expect to find it. He gripped the boy’s waist and moved in closer to let him feel what had happened. “Where’s that lubricant,” he asked against his ear.

Patrice uttered a low cry and dived for his robe and trotted toward the door. “Come to bed,” he called breathlessly.

Rod followed him, watching the almost girlish behind dancing down the corridor. When he entered the bedroom Patrice was stretched out on his belly with a towel spread out under him, his arms at his sides. Pausing at the bedside, Rod saw that one hand held a tube in a loose grip. He lifted himself over the supine body and straddled it and took the tube.

Patrice raised his head and looked over his shoulder. “Do you want me to–”

“No. Stay there.” He squeezed some ointment into his hand and applied it liberally to himself. He tossed the tube onto his pillow and wiped his hand on Patrice’s back. He got a grip on Patrice’s hips, and they lifted to him. He overcame some brief initial obstacle and then drove slowly into the boy as easily as if he were a girl. He had barely completed his penetration when the body beneath him was seized by violent spasms. Patrice shouted and uttered a succession of hoarse cries, his hips writhed, his torso pitched about on the bed. He was finally still, sobbing quietly. Rod waited calmly for the storm of ecstasy to pass and then began the rhythmic thrust and withdrawal of possession. He was fucking a boy. It was a purely mechanical act–he had never made love without kisses and caresses–but it was a surprisingly satisfying facsimile of legitimate copulation. Since Patrice had had an orgasm and, unlike a girl, wasn’t likely to have another, he didn’t pace himself but used the boy’s body for his own pleasure and felt its passionate response. He was slowly filled with a sense of extraordinary power at exacting such total submission from a male. As he approached his climax, his movement accelerated, and his thrust became hard and deep. Patrice lifted himself on his arms and pressed his hips back to welcome the demands of the man he adored. His cries drowned Rod’s long animal groan as they collapsed together in a deep stillness of shared repletion.

“Did you come again at the end?” Rod asked without moving.

“Yes.”

“You liked it that much?”

“
Oh, mon amour.
I feel as if I had never been alive before.” It had lacked passion, but it had been the way Rod had wanted it; Patrice couldn’t imagine wanting it any different.