Cheater

Rio started… happening, I guess… in my life, a few times a week, sometimes with Jacqueline, sometimes alone. Maybe he’d always been there, curled up in that particular way of his, and I’d only just started noticing. Either way I was always happy to see him, and he always had some new, unpredictably wonderful fascination to share.

One night at Pilades, he slid up beside me and took a seat on the edge of my table, smiling just a little too much. I tried to ignore it, but he tugged insistently at the top of my newspaper, like a kitten who’s done something endearingly naughty and very much wants you to know. “Hello again,” he said, practically singing with happiness. “The Times? That’s a very good paper. I approve. And I have something to show you.”

“Rio, you are a strange, strange human being.” I folded my paper back together, shaking my head. “What do you want?”

Still smiling, he stuck out his tongue at me, then nodded over to the pinball machine. “I think she likes me.” The Billionaire’s Club listings began to scroll, glowing orange in the dim corner of the room.

I ran over to look.

It Begins With a Kiss

It begins, of course, with a kiss, with the faintest press of my lips between her eyes, and then another, just below the line of her hair. My hand splays across the small of her back, and I hold her there, hold her closer, wanting the moment to last forever. She’s intoxicating, warm and comforting, and her scent fills my lungs, her soap and shampoo, her skin and her hair, a drug wound up tight around that primitive, pleasurable part of my brain.

The scent is called Jacqueline, and I have missed it for far too long.

It’s Just the Liquor Talking

Like most American boys, I had my first taste of alcohol while I was still in high school. My dad gave me a half-glass of wine with dinner. It wasn’t particularly good (I later learned that I just don’t like his taste in wine, but I get ahead of myself), so I shrugged it off and went back to my room. I looked at my bed for a moment, fell over into it, and woke up fourteen hours later.

So… yeah. I’m pretty sensitive to alcohol. I didn’t touch it again for another three and a half years.

Again, like many American boys, I had my second drink (and the first one I actually enjoyed) with my girlfriend. Her name was Jacqueline, my tiny little half-French girl. One way or another she had a little flask of her father’s cognac, some French white wine distilled into its purest essence and aged, longer than both of us put together, until the barrels stained it dark, rich amber. We were sitting in a park when she offered it to me, in one of those shady, private clearings, sealed away from the world, just the two of us watching the light dapple against our skin and clothes, talking about nothing in particular. It was stronger than wine by a long shot, and I felt it at the first swallow, felt myself relax, felt myself go mellow, placid and vulnerable, but it felt right in a way that my father’s wine did not. It was warm and spicy, smooth and sweetly addictive, a small, refined pleasure that slipped inside before I could notice, melting down my throat and coiling its vapors up into the root of my brain, leaving fingerprints across my soul.

Something – well, it didn’t quite click; it really just slid gently and effortlessly into place…

Wanting More

Val called me his Asian prince, and I never doubted his sincerity. His tribute-gifts were black silk sheets, and I would stretch out in them each night, imagining that their soft caresses were his own, quietly talking to him, spilling my words to him through the ether, a slow, sensuous seduction from a thousand miles away. Later, when I bought toys, to warm the cold nights, priceless bringers of pleasure in glass and stone and soft, fleshy silicone, I would share their joys with him, whimpering into the night as I writhed there, feeling the comfortable fullness and the tiny droplets of sweat beading their way over my flesh, disappearing into the all-consuming blackness of the sheets.

I don’t remember how I met him, or when, only that it was very long ago, and that I had not yet learned the hunger for men. Somehow we seduced one another, like heroes of old, two horsemen, each circling the other, endlessly jealous of the other’s smooth, effortless movements, until anger and fear bled into lust and admiration, and the four became two and the two became one, just as earth and horse and man and steel once blended into one seamless force of dangerous beauty. We talked for hours across the ether, staving off the loneliness of the world with our desire. He taught me to love my body, wiping away my shame at the soft-edged, almost-girlish curves, and I loved him for it, returning his quiet tribute in bright Kodak color and regal, epic language, my best imitations of the hot, just-barely-innocent styles I adored best.

I dreamed much more, then, still the quiet, beautifully confused dreams of the late-blooming child, and I often dreamt of him.