Best Gay Erotica 2011 (11 page)

Warm water sluices through my shaggy dark hair, running through my beard to drip over his face. It runs down his thick torso, his hairy belly and mats up his pubes. I cup his flaccid cock in my hand. “Warm enough?”

His lips move silently. Another long draught and he'll be done.

“I'm Derek Maclaine,” I say, apropos of nothing.

“You are so beautiful,” I sigh, rocking him in my arms. “You were so strong. You could have been so good, so true. Why did you listen to them? What a warrior you could have made. What a brother-in-arms. I would have been proud to love you.”

Lifting his limp right hand from the tiles, I hold it in mine. When I squeeze it, with what life he has left he returns the pressure.

I gaze down into Tobias's glazed blue eyes for a long time. “It's
all right,” I say, smoothing curls off his brow. “Sweet boy.”

He smiles up at me sleepily. He lifts his free hand to touch the barbed wire inked into my upper arm, then, with a visible effort, reaches up to brush my tangled black hair and beard before his fingers droop and his hand drops exhausted into his lap.

“Here You are,” he whispers in disbelief, words so weak even I can barely discern them. “It's You. You. Oh, Lord, oh, Jesus, I been waiting for You.”

Together we listen to the snow-wind beyond the walls, holding hands in the steamy rush of the shower. Prisoners of necessity, we are both late for different destinations, and it is nearly dawn, nearly time to part, but let us sit here for a while yet, pressed together in this warm womb hemmed in by winter. I will stay with Tobias till he closes his eyes, till his hand releases mine, till, soon, soon, he needs me no longer.

There was a copy in his parents' bedroom on the bottom shelf of their cupboard by the bed, hidden under a pile of
Penthouse
magazines. Burt Reynolds was the centerfold, or someone like him. Charles Bronson, perhaps. That kind of look: dark, mustached, hairy chested. Suave is a word that comes to mind. The Boy felt—it was like touching—that he'd never been so close to the naked body of a man and been able to stroke it. He was sixteen. It was the first reciprocal experience of his adult life. He was, literally, giddy with desire. He rushed downstairs to the bathroom, locked the door, sat on the toilet and masturbated until he came. Then he did it again.

It was the summer holidays. Long lazy days of profound heat, moving between all-morning television and hours on the beach. The Boy's parents were at work. Later that afternoon, there'd be time for The Boy to masturbate again before they got home for dinner. That evening there was blood in his urine; it
was dark, and The Boy was convinced this was further evidence of his gradual transformation into a girl. His nipples ached and were growing bigger. Now he was having his first period.

That summer The Boy sunbathed naked on the lawn in the back garden of their new home. He took his towel and walked in his underwear from the patio into the middle of the grass, then lay on his back, stripped and covered his genitals with his briefs. The Boy believed that if he closed his eyes he would not be seen. He lay there naked, soaking up the sun as if it had the power to transport him, his skin turning brown in the middle of the week in the middle of the day in the middle of the lawn in the middle of a cluster of houses, newly built, The Boy exposed like a sacrifice for all to see.

The Boy was in love with a boy at his school, an agricultural school outside the town they lived in, a boy called A who boarded there, a boy who, The Boy now thinks, was in love with him, too, but, he wants to say, in a different way. Though maybe it wasn't different. The Boy wanted to be as slender and muscled as A, as charming and as confident, as loved. As unafraid. The Boy bought gifts for A: bars of soap in particular and shampoo. A's hair was long and brown and curly. Much like The Boy's was when he stood in that car park by the beach with his arms across his chest, A holding the camera and saying
Smile
.

The Boy is seventeen when it happens for the first time, and by the first time he means his first time as an adult, because there were times when it happened when The Boy was a boy, and by a boy he means a boy of nine or ten. Maybe a bit older, but no more than thirteen. Fourteen at the most.

The Boy is bronzed. He has been coming here all summer and the man has seen him, but this is the first time the man has
stopped his jeep and parked close enough to see every detail of The Boy's body. The Boy steps out of the sea and walks toward his towel on the sand at the edge of the low dunes by the scrub that grows on the stretch between the beach and the gravel road. The Boy is naked and slim and tall with a long neck. He walks slowly; he knows he is being watched by the man who sits in his jeep with his penis in his hand. Hair grows between The Boy's nipples, such beautiful soft breasts, and although the man prefers the flat-chested boys, he cannot take his eyes off The Boy, his gentle mound of pubic hair, the curve of his hips, the slimness of his arms, the way the sun reflects off his wet shoulders, his curls, bleached blond by the sun. The Boy lies on his stomach, turns his head to the side and looks directly at the man. The man doesn't know what to do with this lust that is excessive and inescapable.

The man comes over to The Boy. He is not the first man to talk to him, but The Boy is as excited and as terrified as if he were. The Boy will come to recognize this feeling of exhilarated panic—it won't go away—this feeling of imminent death; an excitement and terror so profound it threatens to annihilate him. The man asks The Boy to turn over. It's what The Boy has been waiting for, rehearsed when he was ten and again at fourteen; now he is choosing this kind of touch. This is who The Boy will be for the rest of his life.

Every time The Boy goes back to the beach after this day he will wait for the man to appear, the man who will take him for rides in his jeep and park farther up the coast and swim with him, and then just that once, the last time they meet, the man will kneel before The Boy and ask to be penetrated. He will expose his older-man's smooth brown arsehole and lower himself onto The Boy's penis and pleasure himself again and again and again.

The beach stretches for miles. The sea is a lesson in moderation. The Boy reenters the sea to wash traces of the man's feces off his penis, and by the time he has swum back to the shore and walked back to his towel, the man has gone. When The Boy sees the man in town, the man ignores him, perhaps because The Boy is the same age as the man's son.

If The Boy was a dog his Daddy would let him eat out of the palm of his hand and lick between his fingers.

If The Boy was a dog his Daddy would take him for runs on the beach after work in the evenings, to the harbor wall and back, and when his Daddy dashed into the water for a quick dip The Boy would bark at the waves and roll in the sand and work himself up into such a frenzy that when his Daddy came out of the water The Boy would run to him and jump on his chest and make his Daddy laugh and his Daddy would say:
Good boy
.

If The Boy was a dog he wouldn't be scared of his Daddy because he'd know his Daddy loved him. Even when his Daddy said,
Silly boy
, The Boy would hear
I love you
, and when his Daddy smacked The Boy's nose or rubbed it in his own urine, The Boy would know there was no one in the world who loved him as much as his Daddy.

If The Boy was a dog his unwashed fur would smell of sweat and grass and shit and his Daddy would say
Shit, boy
,
you stink,
and he'd scratch the folds of flesh under The Boy's chin and smile at him and say:
Good dog
.

If The Boy was a dog his Daddy would lift him into the bath and spray warm water on him and lather him with special shampoo and dig his fingers into his flesh and knead him and soothe him, and when he was done his Daddy would rinse the soap off The Boy's fur, and The Boy would shake his body and
spray water all over his Daddy, and they'd laugh together and The Boy would bark and they'd wrestle on the floor and his Daddy would hold him tight, both arms around him, and The Boy would struggle and run away because that's what he does when he is overwhelmed with joy.

If The Boy was a dog he would sleep in the kitchen or in the backyard in a basket padded with his Daddy's old blankets and he'd go round and round until he found the perfect position, and he'd lie there with his head peering over the rim of the basket and wait for his Daddy and everybody else in the house to get into bed and turn off the lights, and only then would The Boy close his eyes.

If The Boy was a dog he would dream of long beaches and crashing waves and the moon and thieves. He would dream of vast stretches of lawn and beds of hydrangeas in whose shade he would sleep on hot days. The Boy would dream of raw flesh and dog biscuits and the thrill of begging for leftovers and the strength of the hand that feeds him.

The Boy goes to the baths to be adored, to meet a young man like the man a few days ago who leaned in closer to him as The Boy got up to walk away (he'd had enough). The man cupped The Boy's breasts in his palms and knelt before him to suck on his penis, gulp on it, make those gulping noises—and even when The Boy had gone soft and insisted the young man suck someone else's, like the cock of the man sitting next to him, a cock much harder and bigger than his, the young man obliged only momentarily, to obey, not for his own pleasure. Then the young man returned to The Boy's penis. To gulp it down. And when The Boy had made to leave, the young man leaned in closer and said:
Please
. As in:
Please don't go
. As in:
Please stay
. As in:
Please
.
The Boy is rarely asked to stay. And even when he does stay, he is not the kind of person to stay for very long.

Abandonment is in his genes. His great-grandfather left a family of ten and went to spend his last days in Palestine; The Boy's grandmother was handed over to childless neighbors to bring up as their own; The Boy's father was sent to live with cousins while
his
father went on drunken binges and his mother left to live with her sisters; The Boy has an estranged sibling in Africa; he has several ex-boyfriends whom he left long before he should have.

The Boy grew up in a tribe of aunties and uncles. Every male in the family, every friend of his parents, was
uncle
. Some were dark and wore black Speedos, some were covered in lush hair, some were called playboys and had girlfriends who weren't Jewish. His aunties played bridge and baked cakes to raise money for the Jews in the land of the Jews. The Boy had an uncle who touched him. The Boy might be making this up, misremembering, but that is inevitable when it comes to memory. Sometimes he is sure it happened. At least once, at night, in the mountains or out at sea on a boat or in a pool shed, away from the family, away from everything.

“What a beautiful boy,” his uncle had said. (The Boy remembers kissing his uncle, or at least leaning in to kiss him—did the uncle turn his head?—did he say:
I am proud of you
…for what? Catching a fish? Climbing a mountain? But the memory is a blur. The Boy is not sure who said what; all he has is this gesture of leaning in toward the uncle while stepping out of the uncle's car, expecting a kiss. As if to say:
Please
.)

There is a picture of The Boy in his rugby socks taken before the ascent into the mountains. He looks ugly, ugly in the way Jewish women in the Middle Ages made themselves undesirable to the Cossacks by shaving their heads. The Boy's blond hair and
the abundance of redheads in his family only prove the futility of such tactics.

The Boy and A are tanned and smiling in their white crewneck T-shirts. Behind them: solar panels and water tanks and television antennae. A is smiling at the camera (his friend is taking the picture) and The Boy is smiling at A, his expression guarded, the corners of his mouth pulled back, his lips stretched, as if caught in the midst of saying something, or reining in a smile that wants to devour his face. The Boy has a defined jawline and clear skin; his hair is dark and cropped close to the skull. A has short hair, too. Over time it will grow longer, it will be tightly curled (his mother is Yemenite) and A will try various methods to straighten it. He will use a curling iron and will burn his hair.

By looking at A, The Boy must ignore A's friend, the friend who is taking the picture. The Boy does this often, ignores the people he dislikes, turns his head away and
voila!
they're gone. A is the focus of this picture: the viewer's gaze and the gaze of The Boy are on him. The Boy is not sure how he feels about being caught on camera, his love for A so evident and frozen in time. He does not have many pictures of himself as a boy with a boy he loves, both of them looking happy.

In a picture of two there is always a third (unless they're using the self-timer). With two, there is a triangle of gazes, eyes looking at each other: she at us, he at her, me at him. But the picture rarely reveals who is taking it (unless there's a self-timer, but even then we cannot be sure), and we can never know who the photographer is looking at. We can guess, because A is looking into the camera; it's as if The Boy isn't there, as if just A and his friend, that friend who is taking the picture, as if just they are there.

In another picture of The Boy with another man there is a third person, but the third person is absent; she is The Man's wife. The Man's wife knows nothing about The Boy. She knows nothing about The Man and The Boy's goings-on, at least this is what The Man believes, so The Boy plays along. The Boy takes the picture with a timer to have a record of this day. That's what he says to The Man:
I want to remember this day
. The real reason for the picture is that The Man will not be The Boy's lover for much longer. Within a month, The Boy will end it. The Boy is already thinking of the future; he is already there with another lover looking back at this time, at this ex-lover.