His cock grew hard again as Andy ran his palms over Ferguson’s naked skin, and when Andy put that hardened cock into his mouth and gave Ferguson the first blow job of his life, Ferguson was long past caring whether it was a girl or a boy who was giving it to him.
HE WASN’T QUITE sure what to think. Undeniably, the two orgasms that had swept through him and out of him in Andy’s apartment that day were the strongest, most gratifying physical pleasures he had ever experienced, but at the same time the means to the end had been purely mechanical, a one-sided operation in which Andy did to him what he had no desire to do to Andy. What they had done, then, was not quite sex in the strictest sense of the word, at least not sex as Ferguson understood it, since for him sex had always been about two rather than one, the physical expression of an extreme emotional state, the longing for another person, and in this instance there had been no longing, no emotion, no anything but the desires of his dick, meaning that what had happened with Andy wasn’t sex so much as a higher, more enjoyable form of masturbation.
Was he attracted to boys? Until then, he had never even asked himself the question, but now that he had allowed Andy to jerk him off and suck him off and run his hands over his naked body, he began paying more attention to the boys in his school, especially the boys he knew best and liked best, which included everyone on the freshman basketball team, all of whom he had seen naked in the shower and locker room scores of times without giving the matter a second thought, but now that he was starting to think about it, he tried to imagine what it would feel like to kiss elegant Alex Nordstrom on the lips, a true kiss with tongues digging into each other’s mouths, or to jerk off muscular Brian Mischevski until he came all over his bare stomach, but neither one of those pretend scenes produced much of a reaction from Ferguson, not that he was repulsed by them or scared by the thought of engaging in real boy-on-boy sex, for if it turned out that he was a faggot boy without having known it until now, then he wanted to know for sure, beyond any doubt or possibility for error, but the fact was that the idea of embracing other boys didn’t excite him, didn’t make his dick grow hard, didn’t fill him with the lustful thoughts that sprang from the wells of deepest yearning. But Amy excited him, and even now the thought of his never-again-to-be-touched-or-kissed lost first love continued to fill him with deepest yearning, and Isabel Kraft excited him, especially after he saw her walking around in her red bikini last June twenty-eighth on the ten-person group outing to Far Rockaway, and when he thought about the naked bodies of his friends and compared them to the almost naked body of Isabel Kraft, he understood that girls aroused him and boys didn’t.
But maybe he was deluding himself, he thought, maybe he was wrong to think that emotions were an essential part of sex, maybe he should consider the various forms of loveless sex that brought physical release but no emotions of any kind, masturbation, for example, or men screwing whores, and what that must have been like in relation to what being with Andy had been like, sex without kisses or feelings, sex for the sole purpose of attaining physical pleasure, and maybe love had nothing to do with it, maybe love was just a high-flown word to cover up the dark, uncontrollable demands of animal lust, and if you were in the dark and couldn’t see the person who was touching you, what difference did it make how you managed to get your juices flowing?
An unanswerable question. Unanswerable because Ferguson was still just fifteen years old, and whether time would transform him into a man who sought the company of women, or a man who sought the company of men, or a man who sought the company of both women and men, it was far too early for him to know who he was or what he wanted when it came to matters of sex, for at that point in his life, which was also that point in history, that particular moment in that particular place, America in the first half of 1962, he was barred from having sex with members of what he believed to be the right sex, for even if he managed to win back the affections of Amy Schneiderman or make a surprise conquest of Isabel Kraft, neither one of those girls would allow herself to do to him what Andy Cohen had already done, and now that his body had evolved into the body of a man, he still found himself trapped in his boy’s world of enforced virginity, even as he reached the moment when he had begun to crave sex with a passion that would not be equaled at any other moment in his life, and because the only sex available to him at that moment of thwarted desire was sex with a member of the wrong sex, he showed up at the Thalia Theater the next Saturday afternoon to see Rashomon with Andy Cohen, not because he had formed any special attachment to the City College boy who lived with his mother on Amsterdam Avenue and West 107th Street but because the things that boy did to him felt so good, so excessively and extraordinarily good, that the feeling was all but irresistible.
They got down to it more quickly the second time, dispensing with the preliminaries on the living room sofa and heading straight for Andy’s bedroom, where they both wound up with their clothes off, and while Ferguson couldn’t bring himself to touch Andy where he wanted to be touched, to jerk him off in the same way Andy was jerking him off, he watched as Andy did it to himself and didn’t mind when the cum landed on his chest, which felt rather nice, actually, the warmth of it, the suddenness of it, and then the languor of Andy’s slowly moving hand as he rubbed the ejaculation into Ferguson’s skin. It was becoming more about two now, less about one and more about leaving behind the good of glorified wanking for the better of something more like real sex, and for three Saturdays in a row following that second time together, the Saturdays of The Blue Angel, Modern Times, and La Notte, Ferguson gradually eased his way into abandoning himself to Andy’s bolder and bolder seductions, no longer holding back as he submitted to the promptings of Andy’s tongue as it moved up and down the length of his body, no longer frightened to be kissed or to kiss in return, no longer hesitant to take hold of Andy’s stiffened cock and put it in his mouth, for reciprocity was fundamental, Ferguson realized, two was infinitely more satisfying than one, and only by seducing the seducer could he thank him for the pleasure of being seduced.
Andy was softer and flabbier than Ferguson, skinny and tall but with the no-muscle body of someone who never played sports or did any exercise, and he was fascinated by the hardness of Ferguson’s muscles, the basketball body Ferguson had built for himself by lifting weights and doing a hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups every night, and again and again Andy would tell Ferguson how beautiful he was, running his hand over Ferguson’s taut stomach and marveling at its flatness, telling him that his face was beautiful, that his ass was beautiful, that his cock was beautiful, that his legs were beautiful, so many beautifuls that by the second of the last three Saturdays they spent together Ferguson was beginning to feel oppressed by them, as if Andy were talking about him in the way that he (Ferguson) would talk about a girl, which was another subject Ferguson was beginning to have some doubts about, the question of girls, since every time he mentioned Isabel Kraft’s remarkable looks or said something about how much he still loved Amy Schneiderman, Andy would make a face and then come out with some insulting crack about girls in general, saying that their brains were genetically inferior to the brains of men, for example, or that their cunts were cesspools of infection and disease, ugly, ridiculous statements that seemed to suggest that Andy had not been telling the truth in March when he said he liked girls, for not even his mother was exempt from his bitter condemnations, and when Ferguson heard him call her a sad, dumb cow and another time call her a revolting tub of shit, he countered by saying he loved his own mother more than anyone else in the world, to which Andy replied: Not possible, kid, just not possible.