Best Gay Erotica 2011 (9 page)

My handsome Tobias should have stuck to songwriting. If he had, the fantasies I entertained about him wouldn't have shifted so radically and moved into the sphere of practical planning. I wouldn't be here tonight, only yards away, admiring his face and body, sipping this cabernet, readying the scourge.

What a fine specimen he is. He leans back in his leather-upholstered chair, drinking beer, grinning at some colleague's joke. His eyes are as blue as the photos on his CDs. He has a full head of curly blond hair, and his goatee is golden brown and carefully trimmed, bespeaking carefully controlled wildness. His lips are very full, the lower one so thick it contributes to the surly look he's know for in the press, a pout made all the more dramatic-dark by the rare gleam of his arrogant smiles. The jeans and muscle-shirts of his Nashville days have been replaced by slick politico suits, though he has yet to relinquish his cowboy hats and boots, just to retain the good-ole-boy image that appeals to so many of his conservative constituents. Expert at studying clothed male physiques and discerning how those forms might look stripped bare, I can make out the wide shoulders, thick chest and beer belly of a well-fed ex-athlete. At his age, midforties, the bulk's as much fat as it is muscle, a proportion that has always appealed to me, bear aficionado that I am. Big as he is, he'll keep me snug and warm tonight, after our official meeting.

My kind—Scots Highlanders, mountain men—we love to tell stories. I order a second glass of wine from a lean young waiter with hairy forearms and an angular Mediterranean face shadowed with beard—a muskily aromatic boy who, due to my plans for Tobias, will be spared my sharp attentions tonight—and I think about those whose stories brought me here. Karen,
Charlotte, sweet little Chet: three of my handsome senator's ill-fated constituents. Vivid narrative often makes for the most convincing political advice. Once Tobias retires for the night, we'll begin that summit discussion.

As if on cue, Tobias checks his watch, orders a bourbon nightcap, knocks it back, and says goodnight to his little crew of sartorial vipers. It's approaching midnight, and he has early morning meetings, he explains. No distant human ear could pick out his words over the chatter of the parlor, but I can. I can smell him too. As he passes me, heading for his room, he leaves a lingering scent of spicy aftershave, and the sweat-smell of a big man whose deodorant gave out by late afternoon. I lick my lips. Beneath the table, I nudge my hardening cock with the back of my thumb. He will, without a doubt, taste as fine as he smells.

I have had several hundred years to learn the subtleties of strategy, and so I wait for a bit once Tobias leaves. After what will happen to him tonight, I don't want anyone remembering me as a suspicious character who directly followed him out. Instead, I finish my wine slowly. I think of Karen walking into the barn, Chet standing by the creek, Charlotte gasping in the hospital bed. I study the waiter, whose shirt is open one flirtatious button too many to be truly professional, and I make out, in the cleft his open collar makes, the black chest hair I've tasted on so many Middle-Eastern, Italian and Greek men. Perhaps, upon my next trip to DC, I will have to sample him, though carefully and abstemiously, considering his frail build. With a man as hefty as Tobias, my appetites will have significantly wider range.

It is time. Leaving my asocial nook, I stand by the fire to take in the heat and finish that last sip of wine. Cold as I am, cold since 1730, I gravitate to fireplaces, to any flame, those restless substitutes for the sunlight I am denied. Matt, sweet husbear,
pants away summer afternoons stripped to the waist, chopping oak to fill the woodshed, and by the time I rise with dusk, he is richly rank and tastes of sweat-salt all over. With those hard-won cords of wood, he keeps the hearths hot all winter in our snow-swathed Mount Storm farmhouse. Every night, as hard wind rattles the panes, he fixes us hot scotch toddies, strips us both and pulls me into bed to curl with him beneath the quilts. He wraps his big arms around me, presses his hot, hairy chest and belly against mine and sighs, head lolling dreamily, as I carefully and blissfully feed on him. Sweet boy, he has never entirely reconciled himself to what happens when my rages and my hungers go untrammeled, but he certainly understands my need for erotic and culinary variety, and, as grief stricken as he's been lately—sobbing on my shoulder every night for a week—I think he understands the necessity of this mission I'm on tonight. The nation, after all, stands in need of improvement.

Outside the Tabard, thickening snowflakes scurry down N Street like swarms of white flies. In order to visit Tobias with complete discretion, I must indulge in a little shapeshifting. That's the ability that Matt has always most envied in me, ever since he found out what I really was, a wintry night much like this one, down by Kanawha Falls. My paranormal powers delight him, especially when I gently pluck his adorable, furry mass into my claws, spread my wings and give him a ride up to the top of Spruce Knob to take in the summer stars.

So, were there onlookers—and there are not—they might see, striding into tonight's dark DC alley, a tall man dressed in a long black Western duster, sporting unruly, gray-streaked hair and a silver beard. They might see, flying out of the alley, an unnaturally large, hoary-backed, black-winged bat, a bat that methodically hovers by window after window of the Tabard Inn, front and back, looking for ingress, some escape from the cold. To
those hypothetical witnesses, the size of the bat would be odd enough; odder still, its presence in midwinter, when it should be hibernating.

Here is Tobias, in a top-floor room in the back of the inn. He's chosen it for its spacious privacy, its relative isolation, desires that conveniently dovetail with my intentions tonight. I perch on the sill, swaying in the cold wind, hungry darkness on the edge of the light, savoring the warmth so soon to come. He's pulled off his blazer and tie, unbuttoned his dress shirt a few notches and rolled up his sleeves. The light of a single lamp glints along his forearm fur. He sits at the desk, big fingers working over his laptop. He uncaps a bottle of scotch, fills a water glass with its amber, slugs it down and sets out his clothes for tomorrow's meetings.

And then Tobias strips for me. Not that he knows he has an audience. He stands, tugs his shirt over his head and tosses it on the couch. He pulls off one cowboy boot, then, hopping around, pulls off the other. He unzips his charcoal-gray slacks, shucks them and his boxers down his thick, hairy thighs. For a few seconds, as if aware he has an admirer, he stands naked in front of an ornately framed antique mirror. His back to the window in which I peer, he grins at himself, knowing his power. He grins and lifts his glass to his own reflection. The world is his. His charm knows no limits. Tonight, he sleeps only five blocks from the White House, but in the future, perhaps…

Tobias is built just as my careful study of him in the parlor led me to believe. In the mirror's depths loom his huge football player's shoulders, his chunky pecs, his solid, muscled arms. Only a little blond hair around his nipples and over his sternum, to my disappointment, though there's a decent thatch across his tastily broad, gone-to-seed beer belly, honey-blond fur the color of broom sedge that whispers over abandoned pastures back in
Appalachia. His back, turned to me, is wide and muscled; his ass is beefy, smooth, curvaceous and very pale. It will feel like volcanic velvet beneath my cheek. He's the perfect combination of occasional weight lifting—my guess is his ego demands that he stay in some kind of shape—and regular gastronomic indulgence; a poor boy who grows up to live high on the hog just can't forego good food and drink.

Ripe, ripe, mature, ripe. Other than the sad sparseness of his chest hair, he's exactly my type.

The proud gentleman from Virginia gulps the last of the glass and steps into the bathroom, beyond the line of my sight. There's the rush and splash of the shower; wafts of steam curl around the frame of the bathroom door.

Time to focus. My membranous darkness and silvery fur dissolve. As glowing chartreuse mist, I hover about the window, find a slight opening between brick and frame—these old buildings are always blessed with expedient little gaps—and enter. Time for Tobias's surprise.

By the time tonight's lover has finished his shower, I'm naked too, cozy coverlet pulled up to my belly, propped up on thick pillows, hands behind my head. If he were gay, he might perhaps—if he were into leatherbears instead of twinks—enjoy the sight of me, my thick beard, my hairy chest and armpits, my tattoos. But he's straight—a nasty homophobe, in fact—and besides, it takes him a few seconds to notice, in the low light, the silent stranger awaiting him. Oblivious, he fumbles about for his robe in a closet at the other end of the large room, pulls it on, belts it, pours himself another shot of scotch and then turns toward the bed.

If I were in his shoes—well, his situation, I should say, since he's barefoot—I might drop the glass in shock. He doesn't. He simply gasps. He tightens his grip on his drink and, born fighter,
starts assessing. You can tell from his song lyrics that he was quite the redneck bar-brawler in his day. He's bigger than I am, he figures out fast. I'm naked, I have no weapons in sight. His initial second of fear metamorphoses almost instantly into anger.

Tobias backs up a step and says, low, intense, “Who the fuck are
you
?”

I smile. I stare into his wide blue eyes and start feeling for a purchase in his thoughts. He shakes his head and takes another step back.

“Bad manners, Senator Crockett. Aren't you going to offer me a drink?” I arch luxuriously against the flannel sheet, run my fingers through my silver chest hair, and keep smiling. “I prefer single malt, but I'll settle for that blended you have there.”

Two more steps back, then three to the left, and he's put the scotch on a dresser and pulled a gun out of his suitcase.
That does it,
he thinks.
Checkmate. I was born to take control.

“I asked you a question. Who the hell are you? And why the
fuck
are you here?” Tobias levels the gun at me. I level my glance at him. I take in that heaving chest, the heartbeat speeding up with adrenaline, the soap-scent of his crotch. I would have preferred him unwashed when I took him. I like to carry a man's dense musk in my beard after we part.

Our eyes lock. I continue to dig. Sensing an intrusion he's never encountered before, he shakes his head again and again, trying to dislodge me. Big man, big will. It's like arm-wrestling. But he's only had forty-some years to gather his strength. I've had centuries.

“Put down the gun, Tobias,” I say quietly. “I know you're an avid gun-toter, but those days are over. Put down the gun.”

He shakes his head. His big hand begins a fine trembling.

It's intoxicating when they fight me. It makes overpowering
them all the more thrilling. Forcing strength and beauty to submit: that's a quest worth the dedication of many lifetimes.

I rummage through his brain, trying to find it, the place from which to rule. Rare is the human whose will I can't subdue. Like wrapping my hand around an uncut diamond, like holding a man's heart-lump in my grasp and squeezing ever so tenderly. The fulcrum with which Archimedes suggested we might move the world.

Here
.
Here
, I think. I press down. Tobias blinks, staggers back, lowering the gun.

“Why don't you put down that gun and fetch me a scotch?” I'm stroking my beard, smiling at this latest in several centuries of triumphs. And, just when I think my fingers have sunk deep enough to encircle, enslave, his will flexes—an abrupt expansion, a hardening, like the sudden strain of an athlete's biceps. His eyes grow wide, and to my amazement, he shakes me off. He raises the gun, pointing it at my face.

“You tell me who the hell you are, you bastard, and what you want, or I'll blow your head off.”

“So you're one of those,” I say, sitting up. “You really are remarkable. In all these years, I've met only a handful of men who could do what you just did. Warriors and heroes, every one of them. A magnificent will to match a magnificent body.”

“Get the fuck out of my bed, asshole.” Tobias waves the gun. “And do it slow, or I'll shoot.”

“Yes,” I say. “Gladly.” I obey. I stand in front of him naked, a mere yard's distance between us.

“What the hell?” Tobias stares down at my erection.

“This is what beauty inspires,” I say. “Your fault entirely.”

“What are you? Some kind of fucking—?”

That's all he gets out before I leap. I'm on him before he can lift his eyes or draw another breath. In a split second, his grip's
broken, his gun's on the carpet at his feet and my hands are wrapped around the pulsing trunk of his neck.

“How—?” he gasps, before I dig my thumbs into the flesh over his windpipe and cut off his breath. His big hands claw at mine. His robe falls open as we sway and circle. “Jesus,” he croaks. His eyes bulge and water. His face reddens. He's very, very strong; even robbed of air, he weakens very slowly. It takes more time and effort than I ever would have expected to force him backward, step by straining step, to the bed's edge, to force him down and then back onto the sheets.

“And I was trying to make this meeting as cordial as possible,” I say, lying on top of him, his nakedness so warm beneath mine, so moist with terror's sweat. “But of course you're a fighter. I should have known you'd opt for troublesome.”

All that blood, pounding in his neck as he bucks beneath me. “You're only making me harder,” I say, wrapping my legs around his to subdue his panicked kicks. He's been too proud to try to summon aid, but finally now his fear overcomes that pride. Too late, too little breath left. His cries for help are no more than frantic wheezes. I gaze into his eyes, studying the rapid flickering of his long lashes as he pries futilely at my fingers.