He walked slowly over to Kevin, put their glasses on the coffee table, and folded him into his arms. Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure his own natural grace and poise.
Kevin shuddered in his arms. Guy tried to re-create in his mind the delights and repulsions of a virgin’s first time, but he decided to be bold, firm, not a sensitive reed bending in the gusts of the boy’s desire and dismay. If they were both hesitant the whole thing would prove a fiasco.
Kevin’s skin was so cool it was almost clammy, especially the high, rubbery buttocks. They probed each other’s mouths with big, slippery tongues, eels flowing into and out of deep-sea grottoes, shrinking to enter, bloating once inside.
When he knelt to suck Kevin, he glanced up and caught him grimacing. “Are you okay?”
“You mean my wincing? I always do that when I’m jerking off. It’s pleasure — too painful. Is that too weird for you?” His way of submitting his behavior so innocently to Guy’s judgment was so guileless.
Guy thought, Pain as pleasure. He understood that. He licked the boy’s balls, raised high and taut in their hairless sac, and Kevin groaned a bit stagily. Then he shook all over, flinching like a splashed horse. The flinching seemed real, involuntary. Guy thought of a Thoroughbred, how his curried coat drank the light. Guy touched the boy’s fragile pink nipples — no reaction. His body hadn’t been thoroughly eroticized yet, which made Guy think of that Chinese model he’d slept with once, a guy he’d met in São Paulo, someone who wore his body like armor, which had made Guy irrationally conclude the Chinese weren’t sensual, weren’t good sex. They didn’t inhabit their bodies, Guy had decided on the basis of his sample of one.
Kevin fucked him. Guy guided the little hard penis into his body; Guy was lying on his stomach in order to afford Kevin the full plush glamour of his muscular buttocks. The boy didn’t seem to know how to thrust. He just lay couched on Guy’s bigger sleek body, this million-dollar body soaked for decades in costly unguents, and more or less wobbled in there for a very short time until he exploded.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kevin said. “I came in you. I wasn’t expecting it.”
“That’s fine,” Guy said, kissing him and then running toward the shower. “I wanted it. That was great,” he lied. He didn’t know if Kevin might be feeling guilty after his orgasm. (So many men did at first.) That’s why he didn’t linger in bed. But then again, he didn’t want to seem cold, so he called back, “Come take a shower with me,” and the boy almost ran to join him. They rotated in the narrow tub under the showerhead; whoever wasn’t under the water soaped up, stood with legs ajar to wash his own crack, took the blast full in the face, lifted his arms to clean his hairless pits. Kevin was already spotlessly clean except for the lubricant greasing the length of his little cock; he washed it. Then, their bodies warm from the water, they waltzed around so neither of them would get cold. In a few seconds Kevin was hard again and Guy filled his mouth with hot water and knelt to engulf him. The boy let out a groan and tried to lift Guy to his feet. “We should take turns. It’s only fair.”
“Only Princeton boys care about fairness,” Guy said. “That’s why they rub against each other. The Princeton rub.” He whispered, “You’re my stud, my mister,” and filled his mouth again and dipped back to his chore.
“How can I be your stud?” Even the word seemed to embarrass him.
Guy looked up, the water splashing on his face, his wet hair dripping over his eyes. “Bet you can come three times.”
“I came five times once. But it was jerking off. And it was pretty limp and watery at the end.”
Guy looked up admiringly.
After Kevin came, Guy rubbed him dry with a hotel-sized towel and wanted to say, “My little stud,” but censored himself. The “little” might not be appreciated. And post coitum the “stud” might rankle.
Guy put Kevin to bed and gave him the TV remote. Then he went back to the toilet, closed the door, and was oddly proud of how much semen Kevin had squirted into him. Of course, Kevin wasn’t Andrés, with all his barbaric beauty and gypsy passion, as thin and tortured as a Spanish Christ who’d climbed down from the cross, banished the god within, and resurrected the outer man.
Before dawn Guy woke up to an exquisite pain, an inner plundering that his dream tried to make sense of (a hand was reaching for his heart), then he woke up and realized the boy was fucking him again and simultaneously reaching around and jerking Guy off. They both came at the same moment.
Guy’s strategy was to make the boy into the active partner based on the notion that with his small dick and youth he would seldom be cast in that role and that it would build up his confidence. He knew most experienced gays would find such a policy counterintuitive; they all said the way to a man’s heart was through his asshole. But Pierre-Georges had told him otherwise, that men might style themselves as passive at first because it was easier to take it than give it, but that as a young man became self-assured in a relationship he became more assertive — the return of the repressed. So that both male partners in a couple end up as tops and look for the occasional bottom to fuck.
Perhaps it wasn’t that systematic, but Guy trusted his instincts, and after a week together Kevin was walking with a new swagger and even swatting Guy on the butt the minute they turned a corner. Because Kevin thought of Guy as more sophisticated and five or six years older, more the New Yorker, he let Guy decide when they’d go to the gym or what movie they’d see. They usually ate at a diner because it was quick and cheap and Kevin, if left to his own devices, could live on cheeseburgers and fries. He wanted, however, to have cheekbones like Guy, those knuckles about to burst through the taut sheet, and so he docilely ordered the salad and Diet Coke but then rewarded himself with a slice of cherry cheesecake, a taste for which was a New York acquisition, just as he could order now a poppy-seed bagel with lox and a “schmear” (salmon and cream cheese) — and he never gained an ounce.
His legs were meaty enough to remind Guy he was a man, but each segment of his six-pack when he sat up was the width of a beer can and he was so thin his stomach almost touched his backbone, and he had three muscles on his side under his armpit, “obliques” (the gym teacher had called them) that looked like finger-paint daubs or streaked commas or fingers holding his core as if it were a glass of milk. When he turned on his stomach, his spine and ribs looked like a trilobite fossil.
Kevin had bought a Walkman and was obsessed with Madonna and U2 and New Order. He spoke often about his “music” and defended it as if Guy were challenging it. His music was his one article of faith, the sole fatherland he pledged allegiance to. He’d sit there with his black earphones on and nod his head rhythmically, mouthing the words. He knew all the words and for him they were canonical. He would often cite them to Guy as if they expressed superior wisdom. Guy never doubted their gravity or timelessness and that seemed to pacify Kevin, who would tense up in advance, spoiling for a fight. Otherwise he was docility itself, always good-humored and smiling, almost too affectionate. Guy found his affection oppressive, as if he were a joyful lapdog circling around his feet and yipping and biting excitedly, impeding his progress. Indifference and mystery were more appealing. A little distance let your partner’s imagination and tenderness expand to fill the space between you and him, give your mind and emotions permission to work, to yearn. Hankering might constitute an attachment in Buddhism, but in love it was a virtue, one that was constructive, that allowed you to build and articulate the very object of your affection. Whether the Buddhists were right or wrong — that love itself was always disappointing — was a matter of indifference to Guy. Love was his vocation, though he’d inspired more love than he’d experienced. He was like one of those legendary Hollywood actresses who drove men mad with desire and yet felt nothing themselves, who became old, fat, gap-toothed, and right-wing after years of being synonymous with the bikini and Saint-Tropez, say. Guy knew that the baron and Fred and Andrés had all loved him and that even now Andrés might be beating off in his lonely cell and whispering, “Guy,” as he came, afraid that he’d rock the bunk bed and wake the brute below.