August 31, 2005
Fiction
Married in Mass., Single in SoHo
“Did you let the cat out?” Chris asked me, fingering his pocket almost obscenely for the cigarette he couldn’t have on the Amtrak platform.
“Yes. Did you tell Tony to check on her tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you send your mom’s birthday card?” I asked, hopping up and down a little to keep warm.
“No.”
“Chris, her birthday’s Monday.”
Chris shrugged. “She voted for Bush. Goddamn, I wish I could have a cigarette.”
“Already? You’ll never make it. The train’s no-smoking, too.”
“I know. I think they sell booze, though. I’ll be fine.” The bullet train screeched into the station, and we joined the crowd of confused commuters trying to figure out which car they belonged to. First class, quiet car, business class. I grabbed Chris’s sleeve so I wouldn’t lose him, pulling him in behind me only to wait just inside the doors as a short, angry redhead with three-inch heels argued with a hulking football player of a guy over luggage space. I gave Chris a grin over my shoulder; we didn’t need luggage for this trip.
Chris sat by the window, as always, and I stretched out in the aisle seat, kicking off my shoes. I loved the train. The rhythm relaxed me without inducing coma like jet roar did, and travel of any sort seemed to offer up a sense of limitless possibility. Chris watched the scenery intently, and when he glanced at his watch, I couldn’t help one last jab: “Can’t wait to be single?”
I expected a sharp-witted comeback, but he only grinned sheepishly and leaned in for a quick kiss. My Chris. I love him more than I can say.
We rode in companionable silence until the announcement we’d been waiting for came over the PA: “Next stop, Providence.” We’d painstakingly figured that we crossed the border from Massachusetts into Rhode Island around the time Providence was announced. I tugged off my gold wedding band as Chris did the same.
“I believe this belongs to you, sir,” Chris said cheekily, handing me his ring.
“And this to you,” I rejoined, dropping mine into his upturned palm.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said politely, squeezing past me to head down the aisle to the snack car.
For the next three hours as the bullet train hurtled us toward New York, I didn’t see Chris. We managed one fleeting glimpse of each other, strangers catching one another’s eye, as we joined the squeeze of commuters spilling out onto the platform. Then he was gone, and so was I.
As always, the train unceremoniously dumped me into New York City’s heart, pulsing with the crush of people that only happens in Penn Station. Normally, that kind of gridlock involved cars and outdated freeway systems; it always took me a while to get accustomed to defensive walking instead of defensive driving. I shouldered my way through other pedestrians going my direction, the opposite direction, diagonal to me, standing still; a man with no legs played jaunty tunes on a violin I didn’t dare slow down for, lest I become an obstacle instead of a commuter.
Penn Station coughed me up onto 34th eventually, all glistening, wet darkness, streetlights and neon reflected in the puddles. I raised my arm for a cab and watched four slide past before one finally stopped. “SoHo,” I requested, and the cabbie told me in broken but very polite English that he would get me there.
My bar of choice was not necessarily a pick-up joint, though it was cruisey (what bar isn’t?). There were more benefits to being single than getting to have sex with someone you’d only met ten minutes ago, although, granted, that did rank high on the list of bennies. The bartender was probably barely old enough to drink himself and wore a retro T-shirt advertising a cartoon that was likely off the air before he was even born. But he mixed the best Manhattans in town, as far as I was concerned, particularly when his pecs went tight under the ugly tan tee as he shook my drink for all it was worth. I settled down on my usual barstool and watched the eye candy on the plasma screen at the back of the bar; tonight it was an assortment of Duran Duran videos. I liked the irony of coming here; it meant I could relax and let go of the urge to remain cutting-edge and glitzy, which I felt unaccountably obliged to do in Boston. But in New York? In New York I could just be a retro gay boy, no questions asked.
I was on my second Manhattan when I spotted him. Cute, without trying desperately to be so. I was always a sucker for those no-fashion fashion glasses with the thick black rims, too. When he looked my way, I nodded at him, feeling my stomach knot up now that I’d acknowledged I wanted him. There were nights here where I just knocked back a few drinks and headed home, but I was starting to see that I didn’t want tonight to be like that. I wanted the boy in the clunky glasses.
He was with friends, and when he turned away from me to address them, I held my breath. Just carrying on their discussion, or excusing himself to come to me?
He got up. Oh, God, excusing himself. I checked my usual cowlick spots and wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans.
“You don’t belong here,” he said, as soon as he’d come close enough to be heard over Simon LeBon’s singing.
“I don’t?” I asked, completely unfamiliar with this particular conversation opener.
“Nope. You wanna come with us? We’re gonna go someplace where we can dance.”
“Who’s ‘us’?”
“Me and Alex.” He pointed to one of the guys in his group, a bottle-blond with a colorful swirl of tattoos from his wrists all the way up to the sleeves of his white t-shirt. Alex raised a hand and smiled our way. “Oh, and I’m Brian,” the boy in glasses added.
“Hi.” A dance club with a pretty geek and a friendly tattooed man? I could do a lot worse. “Sure, let’s go.”
Brian caught the very first cab that passed. I watched his technique and couldn’t figure out what was so different from my own inept cab-hailing skills. We piled into the back, and Brian, in the middle, provided an address and then instructions for the cabbie, whose confused look concerned me. Brian kept talking, his directions more and more detailed, until the cabbie finally nodded enlightenment. “Okay,” Brian said, leaning back into the upholstery as if the sheer length of his instructions had completely exhausted him.
“Okay,” Alex said with a grin, and immediately wrapped one arm around Brian’s waist and kissed him. Not a friendly kind of kiss, more of a “let’s take a look at those tonsils” kind of thing. He glanced at me while he was practically crawling into Brian’s lap, and I just smiled. Maybe they’d picked me up as a third, or maybe they’d just taken pity on me and wanted to show me a good place to dance, or maybe they got their rocks off making out in cabs in front of strangers. Whatever they were up to, I was game. That was the point of being single in New York; you never knew what might happen.
Alex’s hand, almost alarmingly big, landed on my thigh and squeezed. Another careful look from his sharp eyes, testing. I put my hand over his, and he grinned. “Good call,” he murmured in Brian’s ear before leaning over Brian’s lap to kiss me.
These kinds of things happened to Chris, not me. He was the one who always came back with fabulous stories of hot backroom sex, of hooking up with somebody within five minutes and wiping away come after fifteen without even exchanging words. I wasn’t sure whether I was more excited about the possibility of bedding Alex and Brian together or about telling the whole sordid story to Chris on the bullet train back to Boston.
I could hear the club as soon as we got out of the cab. Somehow, I always forgot how much I liked to dance, especially after a couple of Manhattans. I pulled out cash to pay my way in, but Alex covered the three of us, just as Brian had covered the cab, and I resisted the urge to think of myself as purchased for the price of cab fare and a cover.
It seemed only natural to cling to each other as we made our way up a dark, narrow staircase; Alex led, hanging on to Brian’s hand, and Brian kept a hold of mine. The music bled through the walls, loud enough that it was hard to keep my balance as we went up — or was that the Manhattans? — and when we finally emerged onto the second floor, three-quarters dance floor and one-quarter bar seating, I wanted to be right out there, right away.
“Have a shot first,” Alex yelled over the music. Did I want a shot before I started the next leg of this adventure? Hell, probably. Alex pressed a test-tube of Goldschlager into my hand before pouring one into Brian’s mouth himself. As the schnapps burned its way into my blood, I stared at the two of them, struck by the juxtaposition. Brian was a safe, safe boy. Alex was dangerous as hell. No wonder I felt so happy.
Then we were out in the crush of dancers; something loud and heavy and probably Madonna was on. Brian wrapped his arms around my shoulders as if we’d known each other for months, smiling at me as he ground his hips into mine. Behind him, Alex followed his motions, his hands on my hips, his eyes on mine, Brian pressed between us. There wasn’t any question, looking at those perverted eyes of his, that we’d all end up in one big tangle of sheets by the end of the night, and I laughed with the sheer delight of it all. Alex was perverted, Brian was pretty, and me?
Me, I was single.
Alex turned into a sweaty god by the time the DJ announced something completely unintelligible after the second song. His T-shirt stuck to his chest, translucent with sweat, and when he turned as he danced, I could see the faint outline of another huge tattoo on his back. Brian proved himself a responsible boy by bringing us all Perrier between tracks; he also proved to be no slouch in the dancing department as he clung to his Perrier with one hand and the nape of my neck with the other, humping my thigh between his legs with all the feverish abandon he could set to the beat of the latest club anthem. I was in that place where I didn’t need any more booze and I thought I could go on forever, meeting Brian’s thrusts against me and receiving the occasional sloppy, possessive kiss from Alex’s boozy lips. This was freedom. This was what I’d thought being gay was all about when I was a teen — not pretending I was someone else to keep my job or worrying about my safety walking in my kind’s neighborhood, but dancing up a storm with a hard-on.
“You wanna go home?” Alex yelled into my ear a couple of tracks later, grinning widely as he waited for my answer. Brian couldn’t have heard the invitation over the throbbing music, but he grinned, too; it was a no-brainer to figure out what Alex had asked.
“Hell yeah,” I agreed. This time, we were one big throbbing mass in the back of the cab, and this time, I was in the middle. Alex sucked and licked at my ear while Brian, no longer a cautious little minx, stuck his hand down my pants. I stammered something about wanting to last until we paid the fare, which Brian replied to by leaning down to suck the head of my cock between his lips. Alex’s laughter brought him up, grinning and licking away the taste of me. “Easy, boy,” Alex told him, “we both get some of him before the night’s up.”
Their place was on the tenth floor. Alex pinned me up against the back wall of the elevator, his kisses not quite as frantic as they’d been in the club, slower now, longer, hungrier. Brian leaned up to bite at the nape of Alex’s neck, and through the haze of alcohol and arousal, I realized this was going to be a very hot night indeed.
We didn’t even bother with lights. The three of us careened off walls and furniture until we found a bed by collapsing onto it. I couldn’t tell Alex’s hands from Brian’s as we undressed each other feverishly. My mouth found a nipple, and I deduced it was Alex’s by the steel ring piercing it. My hand found Brian’s short, bristly hair and tugged him closer with it, though he detoured again to my cock, licking at it in an attempt to give me a little foreplay before he swallowed it down whole. My startled curse made Alex laugh; his hand found Brian’s throat, fingers trailing up to Brian’s lips and then down to my balls. “You want to watch me fuck him?” Alex asked Brian, and Brian reluctantly backed off to answer.
“I wanna suck him off while you do it.” Brian’s voice was bright, eager. I groped in the dark until I found his hard-on and gave it an affectionate squeeze, gratified by the low, hungry moan I received in return.
We fumbled for the right position then, laughing and cursing our way through the arrangement of all those limbs. When Alex’s sheathed cock pressed into me, I was on my knees with my hands around the edge of the headboard, Brian in front of me, licking and sucking at my nipples. I groaned as Alex slid in, and Brian whispered, “He’s big, isn’t he?”
“Fuck, yeah,” I breathed, pushing Brian’s head down.
We didn’t, couldn’t, last long like that. Alex was what Chris called a “rabbit fucker” — fast, short jackhammer thrusts — and Brian could have made a career out of giving professional head. Alex moaned loudly as he got close, wrapping one arm around my waist to hold me right where he wanted me. Brian got the idea and situated himself underneath me, stroking me with one hand and himself with the other. “Come all over me,” he whispered to me, and Alex groaned again in response. God, Alex was so fucking big, and Brian stroked me just like I’d have done myself.
“Do it,” Alex grunted in my ear. His nipple jewelry had gone warm between our bodies, rubbing against my back with every thrust. “Come all over him.”
I tried to suck in another breath, but I was too close; it caught in my throat as I came, clenching tight around Alex, feeling Brian milk me onto his belly as he moaned his pleasure. I was still shuddering when Alex came, going utterly still inside me as he pulsed, and then I felt him reach around me to find Brian’s cock and stroke him off sharply. Brian squeaked out a startled noise and then a much happier one before he gasped, and gasped again, his orgasm shaking the bed.
We breathed, all three of us in different rhythms, coming back down, and I started to laugh. It was so fucking good, I couldn’t help it. Chris would never believe me. This was stroke-book stuff, not reality.
“You wanna stay a while, have another drink? Have a nap?” Alex asked, stroking my back. I could hear his grin, and Brian made a random little noise of utter delight in response to Alex’s question.
“Love to,” I murmured. My voice sounded tired and muzzy and utterly satisfied.
They took the cab to the Amtrak station with me in the morning. “For old times’ sake,” Alex smirked while Brian snickered, though we did nothing but squeeze thighs and smile at each other affectionately. I half-hoped I’d run into Chris as I got out of the cab, just to point out the two gorgeous men I’d spent the night with, but as usual he was nowhere to be seen. I loaded myself into the business-class car and resisted the urge to go looking through the train for him. We had rules, after all, and sitting there with a big grin plastered to my face as I thought about the night I’d had wasn’t exactly a bad way to kill a few hours.
Five minutes after the Providence stop, Chris settled heavily into the seat beside me. “Morning,” he said, giving me a tired little smile, and procured my wedding ring from his pocket.
“Morning,” I said, trying not to just combust with excitement as I fitted his ring back onto his finger. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” he murmured, kissing my ring once it was properly situated on my hand. “I’m exhausted. I’ve been sleeping in the quiet car.”
“Aw, poor Chris.” I pulled him close, letting him rest his head on my shoulder. “Was it worth it?”
“Yeah,” he agreed dismissively. “What about you? You look like the cat that ate the canary.”
“Two of them,” I grinned.
Chris lifted his head, frowning at me. “Really?”
“I knew you’d say that! Yes, really. At the same time.”
“At the same time.”
“Yes!”
Chris shook his head. “Okay, I need coffee. And then I need to hear every single detail.”
I grinned. “Coffee for me too, please, honey.”
“Sure.” He gave my forehead a big smacking kiss before heading toward the snack car, and as I settled back into my seat to wait, I felt a surge of patriotism the likes I had never felt since coming out as a gay man. God bless this country. God bless George W., and God bless all the voters who saw fit to let me live a quiet, traditional married life in Boston and, by the very rights and restrictions spelled out in the constitutions of several states, abandon my marriage and enjoy hot, legal, non-extramarital sex with strangers just by hopping over the state line. God bless the conservative Americans that allow gay people to exercise more creative control over their marriages than anyone else.
“You know, I feel sorry for straight couples,” I told Chris as he returned with two steaming Styrofoam cups.
“Yeah? And why’s that?”
I smiled. “They haven’t been granted the right to have their cake and eat it too.”
• • •
shares an apartment with an ancient thesaurus, a cranky computer, and several lively muses. Sadly, the apartment is not in Mass. See more of Kal's work in the archives of Velvet Mafia and Clean Sheets, as well as in Alex Rowlson's forthcoming anthology, Boy Sex (Carroll & Graf).
