Two Thousand Pounds Per Square Inch (The Russel Middlebrook Series Book 5) (2 page)

He sighed, even as he kept his eyes locked right on mine.

I could stay like this forever, I thought
—
and with any luck, I would.

"Then there's sucking dick," Brent said.

"What?" I said, suddenly terrified that he could read my mind.

"Sucking dick. Whether or not it's risky?"

"Oh," I said, not feeling particularly relieved.

"That’s pretty low risk too," he said. "But we know there is
some
risk. Remember what I said about cum or pre-cum needing to get into the bloodstream? Well, we know that some guys have been infected by sucking cock. They probably had cuts in their mouths, maybe even microscopic ones, and the cum and the HIV got in that way.

"Look," Brent said, leaning forward in his chair, like he was telling me a secret, "the truth is, most gay and bi guys don’t use condoms for oral sex. And for a long time, the rates of new HIV infections stayed pretty low. That’s one of the reasons we know oral sex is a pretty low risk activity. But that doesn’t mean you have to do what everyone else is doing. If you’re more comfortable using condoms for oral sex, that’s great. And as a side-benefit, the condom will help protect you from other sexually transmitted diseases like herpes, syphilis, and genital warts. But if you do decide to suck dick without a condom, it’s not a good idea to let the guy cum in your mouth. Another option is to flip a condom upside-down and put it over the tip of the dick. Then the head of the dick is covered, and the plastic ring keeps it on tight, but the shaft of the dick isn't covered. It's pretty amazing how well it works. But if you do that, throw the condom away afterwards—don't ever try to reuse a condom."

I nodded no. Absolutely not! I wouldn't ever try to reuse a condom!

"And then we come to fucking," Brent said.

Oh, Jesus! I started sinking deeper into the sofa. I was sinking deeper into that impossibly dark unbreathable ocean too. Hell, I was way down in the Marianas Trench with those deep-sea fish—the ones with the big glass fangs and the little fluorescent light hanging down in front of their face?

"When it comes to HIV, fucking is the riskiest activity by far," Brent said. "And it's not just risky for the guy on the bottom. The guy on top is at risk too—more at risk than we thought before, especially if he's uncut."

Brent turned around to a shelf behind his chair and grabbed a big upright dildo made of rubber (how had I not noticed
that
was there?). Then he plopped it right into the center of a little coffee table between us. It flopped a little just like, well, the real thing.

"First, always use latex condoms with water-based lube," Brent said. "It’ll say so on the label. And if you use massage oil, or Vaseline, they’ll make the condoms break."

Now Brent grabbed a condom from another shelf, and a tube of lube too. "Keep condoms cool and dry," Brent said. "Pockets and wallets can work for a night, but not over the long-term." He opened the condom and positioned it at the top of the dildo. "Wait till your dick is hard. Then make sure you put the condom down the right way on the tip. You don’t want any precum getting on the outside of the condom. Pinch the tip of the condom, so there’s room for the cum. Then roll the condom all the way down to the base of your dick."

And then Brent proceeded to roll the condom over the dildo. I tried to look away, but the truth is, I couldn’t. It was one of those things that it was kind of impossible not to stare at.

"Use lots and lots of lube for fucking," Brent said. "If the top cums inside—which you don’t have to do, by the way—grab the base of the condom right after, before you pull out. That way the condom won’t slip off. Then pull out, tie it up at the end, and throw it away. You know never to flush a condom down the toilet, right?"

I was pretty sure this question was rhetorical or whatever.

"When condoms are used correctly and consistently," he went on, "they're very effective in preventing HIV. But sometimes they break or leak or slip off. The cold hard truth is that fucking even with a condom is probably riskier than sucking dick without a condom. So you should think about that before you decide who you are and aren’t going to let fuck you. But if a condom
does
break, or if you accidentally have sex without a condom, there's a treatment called post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP, where a doctor can put you on antiviral medications for a short time, and they can really reduce your risk of becoming infected. If that happens to you, go to your doctor or to the emergency room as soon as possible, definitely within twenty-four hours."

"But…" I said.

Brent looked at me. "Yeah?"             

"Well, what if two guys are both negative? They don’t need to use condoms, right?"

"It's impossible to transmit HIV unless one of the two guys is infected," Brent said. "But…"

But
what
? I thought.

"If they're only having sex with each other, lots of guys do stop using condoms. But can I be honest with you? We do HIV testing here, and I talk to a lot of guys, and…" Brent peered at me from over his wire-rim glasses. "Well, sometimes guys cheat. And sometimes they lie. Remember that if you decide to stop using condoms with another guy, you’re literally putting your life in that guy’s hands. If you and a boyfriend
do
both test negative and you both decide to ever stop using condoms, make sure you both agree that you can start using them again at any time, no questions asked, and no breaking up the relationship, even if you'd agreed to be monogamous. That way, if one of you has sex with someone else, you’re not putting the other person at risk."

That might make sense for other people, I thought. But I'd never be dumb enough to be with a boyfriend who would cheat on me. But even as I thought this, I remembered: I
had
been dumb enough to be with a boyfriend who had cheated on me! And I hadn't had a clue.

It had been different with Otto—the only guy I'd ever fucked. We'd trusted each other completely, and that's why it had been so good.

"Are you sure you wanna do this?" I asked Otto.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm sure."

It was Thanksgiving week, the time that Otto had come to visit me from his hometown eight hundred miles away. He'd stayed in the guestroom in Gunnar's basement, and late one night after his parents had gone to bed, Gunnar had snuck me in too, and then given us our privacy. Otto and I had agreed beforehand that we'd wanted to try fucking, about how it would be a way for us to get closer to each other.

I'd brought the lube and condoms—so ridiculously embarrassing to buy!—so Otto insisted that I go first. I rolled a condom on my dick, and lifted his legs, almost to my shoulders. But the condom felt strange, and I couldn't get inside Otto. Honestly, if it hadn't been for computer porn, I'm not sure I would have believed it was possible to fuck someone in the ass—the angle was wrong, and the hole was just too damn small. I kept losing my boner, and then I'd have to jack myself until I was hard again. That was embarrassing and awkward. Guys never lost their boners in porn videos.

I couldn't help but notice that Otto wasn't losing
his
boner. It was completely hard even now, angling up his stomach like a guy stretching out in bed. It was a little shorter than Kevin's and mine, and maybe a little thinner too. But it was so hard—ridiculously hard. I mean, Otto got a full boner in about six seconds, and once he was hard, he stayed hard forever. Even after he came, he'd still be fully hard for at least five minutes. He once joked that he wasn't sure I'd ever seen his dick soft, but it really wasn't that much of a joke. But my dick didn't work like that (at all). Whenever I came, my boner went away right away.

And then there was the fact the Otto was soon going to be fucking me too. What would
that
feel like? Did I even want it? But what would he say if I said I didn't, especially after he'd let me fuck him?

Talk about thousands of pounds of pressure bearing down on me! No one ever said sex was going to be like this.

"It's okay," Otto whispered.

"What?" I said. I met his eyes, that warm burgundy brown.

He smiled at me. "There's no rush. Let's just enjoy each other. And we don't need to do it at all if you don't want to."

Now I felt stupid.

"Try it with just a finger," he said, so I put some lube on me and did.

It was strange, thinking about where I was putting my finger. I wasn't sure what I thought. I could feel Otto's heart beating from the inside. I hadn't expected that, and it embarrassed me a little.

"Now two fingers," he said, and I did that too.

Otto leaned back into the pillow and moaned. He liked that? The weird thing was, I liked it too. It was the exact opposite of what Web had done to me that night at the lake, forcing me to do things I had said I didn't want to do. Now I was doing something to Otto, something he wanted me to do, something that was turning him on.

It was turning me on too. I looked down at my dick, which was somehow fully hard again, rising up from between my legs, filling up the condom. I didn't have to stroke myself to get hard now.

From the pillow, Otto's eyes were back on mine again. "Try it again."

So I lubed up again. I crawled onto him like I was a kid and he was a piece of playground equipment. And this time, almost before I knew it, I slipped inside.

I gasped—or maybe it was Otto who gasped. One of us had, but I wasn't sure who. Talk about being close.

"Are you okay?" I whispered. For me, if I'd been the one who had gasped, it had been a gasp of pleasure. But for Otto, it was more complicated. There was pain somewhere in there too.

He nodded. "I'm okay. Just go ahead."

So I did.

I'd spent a lot of time wondering what fucking would feel like, but I saw now that it was all wasted time, because it didn't feel anything like what I imagined, like jacking off. It was a lot tighter, for one thing. But it definitely felt good. Now I saw the advantage of that hole being so small! I was so close to Otto now that I was actually
inside of him
.

Then we rearranged ourselves, and I started fucking him. I definitely didn't feel like a kid on a piece of playground equipment anymore. I felt like a man, more like a man than I'd ever felt in my life, which I know is a total cliché, and also pretty dumb, because even I know that sex doesn't make anyone a man. But it was still true.

Otto moaned again. He liked being fucked, in a way he hadn't expected either. I liked that he liked it. Somehow—and this part
isn't
a cliché—that made me think of Otto as more of a man too.

I kept fucking him. The condom felt strange, but good. I liked what it meant, that this was about more than just getting off—that I cared about Otto, and that together we cared about the future.

"So those are the facts," Brent was saying. "But those are just facts. That's not really what safer sex is all about."

"It's not?" I said.

"We live in a strange time. The gay community is still right in the middle of this really big epidemic of a really serious disease. But it involves sex, which is both exciting and embarrassing, so a lot of people have decided they don't want to talk about it anymore. I guess it's just easier to pretend it's not happening. A lot of straight people couldn’t care less about us—they don't care that schools are ignoring their gay students, or openly lying to them in health classes, saying that condoms don't work. I think their attitude is if a gay guy has sex, he deserves to get sick—he deserves to be punished. And a lot of gay guys don't seem to care either. They're tired of talking about AIDS, and using condoms, or maybe they're worried about offending their friends. Or maybe people are just being selfish, only caring about getting themselves off. I think the producers of gay porn are just being greedy and irresponsible, because whether they like it or not, most gay guys get most of their sex education from porn. But not very many people seem to care. So those of us who think this isn't right are left feeling like we're nagging everyone else—or that we're somehow against sex or fun or personal choice. But that's just crazy. This is a health issue, and the facts are still the facts whether they're trendy or not."

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. Brent answered, and someone gave him a sheet of paper. He closed the door again, read it, and then said, "Congratulations, you're HIV-negative." He smiled. "Or, more accurately, you were HIV-negative three months ago."

"Oh," I said. I'd almost forgotten that's why I'd come here in the first place. But I was still relieved, even though I now knew it was probably stupid to have been that worried in the first place.

Brent took his seat again.

"Wait," I said. "What's it all about?"

"What?" Brent said.

"Before. You said that the facts aren't what safe sex is all about. So what
is
it all about?" I felt like Charlie Brown asking Linus for the true meaning of Christmas.

Brent smiled again. "Well, there are two ways to look at safer sex," he said. "One way is to think about the amount of risk you're comfortable with, and then decide exactly what you will and won't do with any guy. Then safer sex becomes about sticking to those decisions, and keeping yourself away from situations where you break your word with yourself."