Dangerously Happy (11 page)

Sorry,” I mumbled, instantly knowing it was silly to apologize.

He laughed. “Fuck, don’t be sorry. I’m in heaven.”

“
Obviously I don’t know what I’m doing, so feel free to offer your sage advice.”

“
You don’t need any advice. If you keep at it the way you’re going, I’m going to come. Soon.” Compliment? Warning? “Just, you don’t need to deep throat me to get me off. Don’t feel like you have to choke on it to be good at this.”

I smiled, embarrassed. Turned on. Happy.

“
I’ll warn you when I’m close. Promise.”

I kissed him just inside his hip bone, feeling incredibly full of tender warmth and want, then took him in my mouth again, wondering what he’d been doing when he’d sucked me off, the best head I’d ever had, playing with different ways of licking, of teasing him with my tongue while I had him deep in my mouth, playing with sucking, trying to create that strange, wonderful pressure I’d felt when he’d had my cock buried in his mouth. I thought about getting the lube and fingering his ass, but figured one thing at a time. I did fondle his balls a little, though, the way I’d tried to teach Avalyn. Dario was grunting and huffing already, and I felt like I was feeding on his whimpers and moans, on the way his belly and his thighs were quivering, as much as I was feeding on his big, tumescent cock.

“
Soon,” he gasped, and I was dying to hear him, feel him succumb to me. He caught my free hand, the one not massaging his balls, and held it tight, raking his other hand into my hair, not pushing me down on him, but I felt his urgent need in the way he caught a fistful of hair in his grip, the way every now and then his hips spasmed upward, that desperate seeking, and then he said with an urgency that could have been orgasmic anguish or alarm for my sake, “I’m going to, baby,” and I gave him all I had, nursing diligently at his engorged cockhead, then sinking down, sucking, rubbing at his rigid shaft with my tongue, and he huffed, “Now, now, I’m coming,” and a warm gush splashed into my mouth before the words left his lips, shocking how much of it there was, and another spurt spattered against my tongue and I struggled to keep my lips sealed tight around his thick, twitching girth as he seized and shuddered under me. When he finally collapsed and went lax, I drew the thick length of him from my mouth, still sucking lightly as I finally drew the fat flushed bulb free of my lips with a little slurping sound, then struggled to swallow the huge mouthful of his cum. For a second I didn’t think I’d be able to get it down, but in two swallows, I finally managed.

“
Fuck, baby. Fuck,” he panted, gazing down at me, caressing my hair. “That was fucking delicious.” He drew me up to him and gave me the sweetest, gentlest deep kiss imaginable. “It’s sexy as fucking hell, tasting my cum on your tongue.” I felt my face turn red, and he smiled. “And it’s indescribably adorable how you keep blushing.” Then his smile faded and he was looking at me with his earnest, searching gaze. “Are you alright?”

“
I’m euphoric. My jaw aches, but I’m euphoric.”

God, that smile. “I almost didn’t let you.”

“
Afraid I felt like I had to, or something?”

“
A little. Especially because of how I’d kind of shoved you down there. It wasn’t for that, but I didn’t want you to feel like I was asking, or hinting, even.”

“
I knew you weren’t. I know how patient you’re being.”

“
Not just patient. You should know that when I decided to pursue this, I was resigned that there were certain things you might never want to do.”

“
Like give you head?”

“
Giving me head. Letting me fuck you.” I was blushing. Again. And he was smiling again.

“
Yeah. I’ve been thinking you’re likely to get pretty bored pretty quickly with me.”

“
I deserve credit for a little more creativity than that, if you think not being able to put my cock in your ass is going to end in boredom any time in the foreseeable future.”

“
It’s more than that.” It came out more serious, sadder than I meant it to.

“
What do you mean?”

“
The difference in our levels of experience. The difference in our range of . . . interests.”

“
You think you’re boring.” Another diagnosis from Dr. Dario.

“
I’m realizing that I am pretty dull by comparison. Yeah.”

“
I know what it feels like to be intimidated by a more experienced lover. A more adventurous lover. But believe me, some of the most daring, kinky people, the polyamorous switches with a huge closet full of gear and toys are some of the dullest lovers. You’ve got that spark that makes every encounter exciting and arousing. Your newness to a lot of this, your shyness is actually one of the sexy things about you. Don’t you get how fucking hot it is, bringing you blushing and trembling over each new threshold?”

We made out for a long time, that wonderful, languorous, sleepy, sated kind of making out, until we were too tired to go on and we curled up together and fell asleep. I woke up to him kissing my neck in the early morning light. Kissing my ear. My shoulder. We made love for an hour, and I was almost thirty minutes late for work.

The weekend was impossible. I couldn’t take it. All night long—from ten until three or four in the morning Thursday, Friday, and then Saturday, that fucking tragedy of a Saturday, pretending there was nothing between us, pretty much avoiding him because I knew if I got anywhere near Dario anyone who paid the least bit of notice would see that I could barely resist my urge to touch him, just to make contact, to close up that fake distance between us, distance that had been real for three years, distance that hurt physically now that we’d spent those three nights whispering and touching and kissing and stroking and licking and sucking each other into nirvana, as if he hadn't trembled and bit my shoulder clutched me against him while I'd fucked him. Since I’d started to feel closer to him than to anyone else in my life at present. Closer, suddenly, than I’d ever felt Avalyn. It hurt watching him talk to person after person in that easy, intimate way he had of making anyone who came close feel like they were heard. Seen. Cared about. It hurt watching a handful of the women and—since probably a third of our crowd was queer—most of the guys flirt with him, more than a handful very obviously trying in earnest to seduce him. I wouldn’t have even gone Thursday or Friday, except I had some delusional fantasy that somehow we would sneak away just the two of us, not necessarily to fuck, but to make out, to continue nourishing whatever it was between us that was so new and that felt so, so fragile. At least to me. I confess that as my workday came to an end on Thursday, I was more or less convinced that three consecutive days of us not sleeping together was going to mean the end of it. But sneaking off was impossible, between his vigilance and dedication as a host, and my total incapacity to play it cool when making up lies about things like that. So I was stuck there, not talking to him (not really, since fake small talk in front of an audience doesn’t count), watching Sung, the unbelievably tall, luminous, quiet emigre from Korea and sculptor of elaborate towers of dolls’ heads and water pistols talk to Dario for fifty minutes straight (I timed their conversation), then watching Joe Burke from one of the bands that played that night hunt Dario before and after the set, finally very publicly and not at all discreetly putting his hand on Dario’s crotch at one point, to which Dario’s response seemed to me (from half way across the loft) to be an amused smile that could have meant, “You wish,” or maybe “I’ll text you in five with a place and time to hook up.”

Each night I waited and waited, wishing the place would empty so that at the very least we could talk, just us, just for a couple minutes, or maybe even crawl into the cozy nest upstairs and curl up together, maybe not even fooling around first because we’d both drunk too much and smoked too much and talked too much to everyone but each other. But each night as it got later and later, I reluctantly gave in to the reality that there was no way to linger behind until the others had left, without drawing more suspicion than I was ready for. And each time I left I was convinced that there was no way he’d end up spending the night alone, that some other guy was lying there in that bed where he’d touched me so gently, where he’d kissed me so tenderly, where he’d gazed at me and given me that luminous smile of his, and that this other guy was gleefully doing all the things that Dario liked and that I was too scared to try. I didn’t sleep at all Thursday night, thanks to the waking nightmare that was a ceaseless succession of images of Dario fucking Sung or Joe Burke, or maybe both of them, tying them up, fucking their asses, their mouths, sticking dildos and butt plugs up their asses, until they all collapsed in a sweaty, cum-laced heap, Dario smiling in a perfectly sated bliss I could never give him. Friday was pretty much the same, except that I was even more on edge thanks to my endless night of perpetual torment on Thursday, and sleep deprivation has always reduced me to a state vaguely resembling the emotional and mental fragility of someone going through morphine withdrawals (according to my education via
Trainspotting
).

Then there was Saturday.

I was more or less out of my mind. Out of my mind with insecurity. Jealousy. Sleep deprivation. Dario and I had texted a few times, but those texts felt so casual, so distant, so cold compared to the way he’d looked at me, compared to that soft, intimate voice that had told me how good he felt with me, how drawn he was to me.

If our band hadn't been playing that night, I like to believe I would have done the smart thing and stayed home. But we were playing, so I went. In the mysterious way these things happen, all the sleep deprivation, my frayed nerves, my jealousy, my certainty that the unprecedented and nascent joy I’d just started to feel with Dario had already been crushed under the untenable weight of the universe of the art collective all came together in a hideous confluence which, against all odds, made me play my best set in memory. Probably my best set ever. My voice—despite (or because of) the fact that it was a little raw from too much weed and booze that week—sounded more ethereal than ever. My guitar felt like an extension of my arm, like every note that passed through my mind was instantly born under my fingertips wailing and thriving. And I was on. Turned on to every phrase, every chord, every deep thought, every exhilarating thrill and every soul-wounded sadness of each song in the set, turned on to the mood of the crowd, turned on to the rest of the band, which maybe by coincidence, or maybe because they were feeding on my crazy energy, also played the best set we’d ever done together. By the end of our set I felt like a fucking god. A terrible,
Nietzschean
Übermensch
.

Someone—I don’t even remember who—handed me a drink. Not a beer. Some kind of mixed drink. Women know better than to take open drinks from random people, but I didn’t give it a second thought. And after that, I feel like the night skips ahead every fifteen or twenty minutes, like looking at photos at a party, where you can never know what brought any given person away from the keg and over to the pool, or away from the pool and over to the couch, or away from the couch and over to the dance floor. I remember Dario coming over to me and me feeling utterly elated, believing that he was going to say,
fuck these people, let’s kick them out and have some time to ourselves
, or that he was going to say,
Baby, no one will notice—lets sneak up to the rooftop even though it’s a freakishly cold night
. But all he did was tell me how amazing the set was, and tell me my voice sounded like Thom Yorke and Maynard James Keenan made a baby together twenty-six years earlier. Then he gave me an indecipherable smile and walked off to join a group of regulars, one of whom I know almost for sure he’d slept with a few times.

Next, Melissa, who I’d hooked up with the first time we’d played after Avalyn left me, came over with two of her friends, and she was pretty much throwing herself at me, to the point where I felt like her friends were a little embarrassed for her. Then I was by myself, watching all those clusters of people pulsing and scuttling over the floor of the loft like a hive of insects, chattering, giggling, chortling bugs. Then Melissa was flirting with me, her friends nowhere to be seen, her mascara darkening the skin under her eyes as if she’d slept as little as me the last seventy-two hours, her upper lip dotted with beads of sweat. Then I was alone again, watching Dario and that guy I knew he’d slept with huddled together in a dark corner whispering to each other intimately, their mouths almost brushing against each others’ cheeks as they murmured their private thoughts. Then Jamie and Tom and Steve were next to me, and Jamie said, “Your boyfriend isn’t cheating on you, is he?”