Best Gay Erotica 2012

SUNDAY IN THE PARK Jamie Freeman

George has a crooked grin on his face when I arrive. He’s leaning against the fence rail wearing blue and khaki, legs crossed nonchalantly at the ankles. Light streams down from the canopy far above, transforming his body into a dappled landscape of dark and light. A white comet trail of drying cum is smeared across his midsection, shimmering in the patches of shifting light.

“Henry!” he shouts. “I was afraid the churchies got you this time.”

It’s the same thing from him every Sunday. He thinks it’s funny.

“Not this time,” I say.

“Just as well,” he says. “Just as well.”

There’s something reassuring about the ritual greeting, about having a place to go on Sunday afternoons, about knowing what to expect when I get there. Somehow it makes life milder and easier, like neutrals added to a spring wardrobe. Most days I’m just looking for a place to hide from the chaos for a while, a place to feel safe from the relentless temporal tide of new experiences. Sunday in the park with George is my religion. Dick is like communion; sometimes I partake, sometimes I don’t.

I smile, settling next to him on the fence and feeling the lightness in the air.

“I see you took your first communion without me,” I say.

He chuckles, slightly embarrassed. “New guy looked like that Wolverine—had to drain him.”

“This is my cum you drink; this is my body you eat.”

“Christ on a cracker, Henry. You’re one fucked-up bubba.” He’s braying like a donkey now. I look at him sometimes and I can’t believe a guy this disconnected and backward is an engineering professor. But I like him anyway.

I met George a couple of years ago. It was early morning and I’d come down to the park for a run. I was wearing loose cotton shorts and a tank top, worn Nikes pounding through densely swirling, knee-deep fog. The fog absorbed all sound and made the world seem more like a soundstage than a city park. I was running along a packed dirt path that twisted through the woods in the direction of the lake. I was starting to pick up speed when I jogged around a giant lichen-covered boulder and I heard a soft, sexy whistle pierce the white stillness. I looked toward the sound and spotted George leaning against the boulder with his enormous cock sticking out of his jeans. It was still only partially erect, but he was slapping it against his hand like a pork tenderloin, coaxing it to startling length and girth.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

I glanced at his face—the plain round features and the dark, laughing Cherokee eyes—but all I could see was that enormous cock, growing and growing in front of my eyes.

I dropped to my knees in the dirt in front of him, took him in both hands and started working him over. I couldn’t get much more than the giant purple knob into my mouth, but I sucked it like I was sucking the juice out of an orange. He squirmed and did a little shimmy with his hips, working his head deeper into my mouth. I used my hands to stroke him, working up to a fast rhythm, encouraged by his “yeah, babys” and his “that’s its.” I was drowning in precum and pulling on him with both hands when he cried out, “Comin’ atcha.” I pulled his head out of my mouth, yanking and tugging on the shaft until a gusher of cum burst out of his slit, splattering my shorts and soaking the front of my shirt.

“That was mighty fine,” he said. “Mighty fine.”

I tried to brush the cum off my shorts and shirt, but the gooey mess just smeared everywhere, and when I stood up I realized my knees were black with damp soil. I brushed at them too, but the cum mixed with the dirt and I finally gave up and legged it back toward my car, trying not to be seen in my sullied state.

I found out later that George is usually the one on his knees because most guys see his size and bolt like rats from a python. Eddie, one of the twinks who sometimes hangs out with me on Sunday afternoons, bumming cigarettes and gossiping about the others, says he once watched George fuck a guy against the outside wall of the men’s room at the far side of the park. He said the guy’s ass was stretched out like the Lincoln Tunnel, his lane wide enough for even George’s wide load.

Eddie’s usually full of shit, but George told me the same story one time, pointing to this guy we call the Hat (because he’s always wearing one) and describing the sounds he makes when he’s taking something up the ass. A week or two later I walked up on the Hat getting fisted in the back of a Toyota Camry. The windows were rolled down and the Hat’s breath was exploding from his body in staccato bursts like bullets from a human tommy gun. Just like George described.

I haven’t seen the Hat in a couple of weeks, so I ask George what’s up with him.

“He’s here,” George says. He points down a side path. “The Painter’s finishing off the Hat.”

The Painter’s another regular. He has the dubious honor of having literally scared the shit out of this little twink we call Monkey (because he is skinny as a rail and he sometimes climbs up into the live oaks and drapes himself along the branches). Monkey was on the ground that day, strutting a little, but starting to lose his swagger as the sunny afternoon light shifted to deeper, evening hues. He passed me a couple of times with a look of desperation on his face, like he was suddenly afraid of the woods. The last time he passed me, I saw the Painter come zooming around the corner, walking fast. About ten minutes later Monkey came running back along the path, tears streaming down his face, holding the loose waist of his baggy jeans in a wad in his right hand. He tripped on a root when he reached the parking lot and flew at the ground, rolling and tumbling onto the gravel.

“You okay, kid?” I called, but he was up on his feet, running for his old Ford pickup. He was out of the parking lot by the time the Painter came stumbling up the path. He was buttoning the fly of his 501s with a dumb, half-stunned look on his beautiful face. I like looking at the Painter, with his strong jaw and patrician nose, his dark eyes and full, luscious lips, all the individual details coming together to form a radiant whole, like the face of Apollo staring down from a Roman altar. Sometimes he makes me feel things.

“What happened, man?” I asked.

He stopped and looked at me, blinking his eyes like I’d just turned on the light over his bed. His cheeks were spotted with pink, his lips red around the edges.

“I dunno,” he said. “It’s so strange.”

I waited for him to process the moment.

“He was right there with me at first, down on his knees—kneeling on my shoes, actually, to keep his knees out of the mud—and his mouth felt so good, so tight and round and… moist, I guess. And he was moving through this rhythm, like he was trying things out to see what would make me groan loudest. He had his hands on my hips, banging me into his mouth—wham! wham! wham!—and then he stopped suddenly. And I said, ‘Come on, Monkey,’ and he leaned back on his heels and looked at me again and then—I swear to god this is true—it smelled like shit, suddenly, like he’d… I don’t know about that part, really, but then he just took off like a bat out of hell. It was so strange. Do you think he got upset ’cause I called him Monkey? I mean, maybe he got offended or something.”

“I don’t think he knows we call him that,” I said.

“Oh, shit. Do you think he thought I was being racist?”

“Maybe…”

“But he’s white.” The Painter looked distraught.

“Not cool, man. I think he’s brown.” I said this mainly to make the Painter squirm. I’m pretty sure Monkey’s people were from Italy.

“I just don’t know, Henry. He was so cute… and he kinda left me in the lurch.”

I looked down at his pants. “What’s that, dude?”

He looked down at the smears of wet scarlet that trailed down his right leg.

“It’s paint.”

“Looks like blood,” I said.

“It’s not. It’s paint.”

“Just sayin’,” I said. “Looks like blood.”

The Painter started rubbing the paint into the worn denim of his jeans. There was something sexy about the motion of his hands and I was mesmerized by the pale fingers streaked with red against the faded blue denim. I imagined the smell of the denim, the dampness of it near his crotch where his precum has soaked through. I could feel my cock slithering inside my underwear.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, considering my options. I was pretty sure Monkey stuck his hand in the wet paint and, bewitched and beguiled by the taste and scent of cock—and probably tweaking—mistook wet scarlet paint for blood. I laughed out loud, a sudden, harsh bark of a laugh that made the Painter look up. Our eyes locked, green confronting brown.

He put his fingertips on my hip. Sensation radiated out from the point on my hip like ripples in a still pond. He grabbed my arm and pulled me into the woods to finish what Monkey had left undone.

A couple of months later, the Arts section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a profile of the Painter. There were photos of him standing in a rather tidy, spacious loft in front of a trio of canvases in brilliant reds and oranges. One of the photo captions read, Brilliant autumnal paintings from the Young Turk of Pointillism. I was surprised by the extravagant praise heaped on a man who had once convinced me to pee on his muscular chest. The memory surfaced as I read the article: the waterfall of yellow cascading down the tan planes of his chest, the copper-colored nipples, the black running shorts tented beneath the flow, and then hovering wetly above all of that, the gaping mouth full of perfect white teeth, and the dark brown eyes, pupils wide with pharmaceuticals. The piss play had done nothing for me, but the ecstasy in his glazed eyes told me he was being transported beyond the yellow stream, beyond our sweating bodies or the green canopy above us.

I don’t remember many details of the newspaper profile, but I do remember one image and one quote. The photo featured the Painter standing in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, his feet bare and his clothes speckled with red and yellow paint, hands crossed over his chest, his left hand holding half a dozen paint brushes tipped in red, yellow and orange. He had a look on his face that was somewhere between concentration and transcendence. And the quote was audacious in its simplicity: “Art is about taking all the fragments, all the bits and pieces of the world as we know it, and making meaning. Art gives meaning to our experiences.”

I’m leaning against a wooden fence listening to George talk about a new guy he calls the Soldier. He’s talking about having seen him a couple of times running in a tight gray Army T-shirt, about the pattern of the sweat stains on his muscular chest and under his arms. And then he’s talking about sucking him off under a pedestrian bridge, about the big mushroom-headed cock and the scent of curry on his skin. And then he’s talking about letting the soldier fuck him in the men’s room near the band shell, about hearing an old Rosemary Clooney song coming in from the open window, and the overpowering smell of the newly painted stall walls. All of the pieces of his story are swirling around in my head, mixing with the voice of Rihanna coming from speakers out on the lawn beyond us. The yellow sun is high in a brilliant blue sky and I close my eyes, feeling the warmth on my cheeks and eyelids, and listening to George. “And he had these binoculars…”

“So what makes this one guy stand out? What makes that experience special?” I ask.

“He was hot,” George says. “I just told you.”

“But why tell that story?”

“You don’t like it?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. You know I love your stories.”

“Like a Sunday sermon for the kneelers and the benders,” he says.

“If it’s a sermon, there’s gotta be a message,” I say. “I mean, there’ve been a lot of guys… what makes you remember this guy in such detail? The smells, the sounds—why is it so vivid?”

“It wasn’t very long ago.” George looks at me with dark eyes unaccustomed to abstraction. “And I have the database.” The database started decades ago as a Lotus spreadsheet and has progressed to Excel and finally to an Iphone app in which he enters encoded information about all of his tricks. It is a mass of sortable data points; he gets hard just scrolling through the table, reading the dates and times and inches and sounds and positions and colors.

“Yeah, but… I mean, what makes it worth remembering?”

He blinks. “Are you putting me on?”

I let him off the hook. “Yeah, kinda.”

He laughs, slaps me on the back and takes off for an ambling lap around the lake.

I lean back and close my eyes, letting the sun warm my face and neck. Bright colored dots appear on the inside of my eyelids, my own personal kaleidoscope. Sweat trickles down my back. I peel off my T-shirt and hang it over the fence rail.

Yesterday I was with a man I met on Craigslist. He had dark curly hair and a Cary Grant dimple in his chin. His body was plain and a little stocky, but his ass was flawless. His skin smelled of baby powder. The day before that I got sucked off under the stall in the men’s room at Macy’s by a guy with fat fingers and an MIT class ring. Before that there was a guy who wore a gingham shirt and yawned while he was blowing me; a guy who had a wide silver wedding band and a carpet of hair that enfolded his entire body like a wetsuit; a guy with amber eyes and overactive sweat glands; a guy wearing flip-flops in the elevator at work; a guy trying on khakis in the changing room at the Gap. I can take myself back a couple of weeks before the details become blurry, the incidents bleed into each other like chalk drawings on the sidewalk abandoned to the rain, and the majority of the experiences are lost.

I carry around bits and pieces of my past, holding them close and attempting to draw meaning from them, but sometimes I wonder if they are real or imagined.

When I was eighteen I met a guy named Tony in front of a rack of foreign films at Pick of the Flicks, a neighborhood video store. He was holding a copy of My Beautiful Laundrette and reading to himself. His lips moved slightly as his eyes scanned the words. He was tall and chubby, but he had beautiful hands and an amazing, wide-open smile. I struck up a conversation, which moved from the video store to a coffee house to the apartment he shared with a couple of other guys. Pretty soon we were naked, rolling around on his futon beneath a poster of Madonna, with “Northern Exposure” on the television, and then he was lying on his back, looping his arms under his legs and pulling them back to expose his pungent, intriguing rosebud. I slid two fingers inside, feeling my way around the loose heat. I grappled with a condom and plunged in a little too quickly. There was a little stop-and-go, but when he got used to me we found the rhythm and he started yelling like it was the end of the world. About the time his roommates started banging on the wall he shouted, “I’m comin’, stud!” and shot all over himself. I was right behind him, straining and pumping, wracked by a truly powerful orgasm. When I had depleted myself, he pulled me against his chest and I was shaking so hard I couldn’t resist. We squelched together on his bed. I felt tremors rocking his body. “Holy shit,” he said over and over like a mantra, rocking me against him until he started to cry quietly in the candlelight. John Corbett’s calming voice whispered from the little television, the sound drifting in the air above us, blending with the smell of sweat, lube and vanilla candles.

I remember that night so vividly that even now I can conjure the details: the smell of his body, the feel of his chest shaking beneath mine, the sound of him crying, the candles, the television—even the straining postorgasmic exhaustion I felt that night—but I cannot remember his face. And I did not remember it nearly ten years later when we met under different circumstances at a friend’s wedding. Tony, now heavier and married, approached me with a plate of cake balanced in one hand and said, “Dude, please don’t say anything.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Okay,” I said.

He broke into a relieved grin. “Thank you. It was a long time ago and, well…” He looked around the room to see if anyone was listening and then lowered his voice to a whisper. “It was the best sex I ever had. I mean, it almost spoiled me for women completely.”

“Oh, well. Thanks, man.”

“You don’t remember.”

“Um…”

“I’m Tony. We met at Pick of the Flicks like, ten years ago.” He started giving me details and it was not until he mentioned “Northern Exposure” that I realized who he was. He remembered different details too. He said we were standing in new releases; that we’d gone to Chili’s for drinks; that he’d been living with a girlfriend who was out of town. He remembered me crying as I lay on his chest. I watched him recount the tale with detached amazement. We might have lived entirely different experiences, so radically different were our memories. But something had happened that night: something that made him cry and something that made me have that crazy, overwhelming orgasm. So why were our memories so different?

Tony wandered off and danced with his pretty, overweight wife. I drank whiskeys at the bar and wondered which of us remembered more of the truth, and whether it mattered. Was the core experience—the emotion, not the meaning—the same for both of us? But I was too distracted by the pale blue eyes and dark brooding eyebrows of the bartender to let my questions evolve in the direction of answers. Toward the end of the night I knelt behind his furry ass among the boxes in the back of the catering van. I pushed him forward on his elbows, grabbing his hips to position his ass in front of my face. The smell was exotic and dangerous and I dove in with abandon, rimming him until he screamed and squirmed and, at one point, fell forward slamming his head against the cargo door. He was wobbly, but he said he was okay as he sheathed me in a pink condom and resumed his submissive position in front of me. I fucked him hard, smelling his sweat mingled with the smells of whiskey, bread, cheese, chocolate and latex. When we finally came, we did so with a simultaneous jolt that toppled us sideways, flailing and laughing into a pan of white, sticky icing. He wiped a gob of icing off the side of his face and slid his finger slowly, sensually between my lips. He crawled forward on his hands and knees, pants still knotted around his ankles, and kissed me. I reached around to pull him closer to me and wondered how each of us would carry this experience forward into our separate lives.

Last year I was in Chicago for a conference and I skipped the afternoon sessions to go to the Art Institute. I wandered for a while, restless to find anything that would make me feel something. I wandered until I found myself staring up at Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. The painting hung large and low on the wall, the figures nearly life sized, the colors so vibrant and alive I felt momentarily disoriented. The images inside the thick, plain frame looked more real than the people around me. I looked down at the pale skin of my hand and then back up into the brilliance of the painting. I stepped closer, close enough to peer into the dense pattern of the brushstrokes, close enough to see the tiny dots and dashes that made up the grand and glorious whole. The tiny daubs of color, meaning nothing on their own, together formed this extraordinary moment in time, a moment that never existed in reality. I thought about the Young Turk of Pointillism, his pale fingers streaked with red paint, his faded blue jeans molded tight over muscles and his velvety brown eyes staring hungrily into mine. He longed to create something out of nothing, when everything surrounded him. “Art gives meaning to our experiences,” he’d said. But I was pretty sure he’d gotten it wrong. Life gives meaning to itself, and life itself can be art.

I stood in front of the painting for hours, thinking and pacing and staring into the galaxies of dots and dashes and daubs. And I felt something overpowering, something real and revelatory as the moment imprinted itself indelibly on my soul.

Today, leaning against the fence in the sun, I am putting all the pieces together in my mind, thinking about the tiny flashes of memory that cluster together to give meaning to my life; thinking about how they seem to fill in the spaces between the big moments, lending color and order to the whole canvas. Right now the pieces are: sunlight; heat on my skin; the smell of pretzels; the heaviness of the humidity; constellations of color dancing behind my eyelids; car horns; a helicopter; the music on the lawn; the sounds of children playing soccer. I am standing here between moments, waiting for the next thing to happen.

And then it does.

“Beautiful day.” His voice is low, with a soft Southern twang. I turn to face the sound, opening my eyes to the outline of his body, a black form between my eyes and the blinding light of the sun. He reaches out like the god of the sun, his hand tweaking my nipple. I glance down and see pale fingers and a smear of blue paint.

“Walk with me,” he says.

“What about the Hat?” I ask.

“You’re observant, Henry,” he says grinning.

I raise an eyebrow.

“Forgotten already.” He turns and walks away, glancing over his shoulder with a pouty little grin that makes my cock twitch.

I follow him away from the main path into the overgrown smear of green ferns and shrubs. The canvas of green around us is pierced from above by long, slender shafts of light. Above the canopy the afternoon light is fading from insistent yellow to mellow orange. He half turns periodically, grinning and beckoning me deeper into the woods with dewy brown eyes and a flashing white smile.

I hear the sound of water, flowing through a ravine that girds the east side of the park.

We climb down a steep embankment, walking sideways, our feet sliding in the loose, gravelly earth, and finally leaping down to a small grassy clearing at the water’s edge. The sides of the ravine rise above us on both sides checkerboarded by ferns and palmettos. Above us towering pines and oaks eclipse the summer sky. At our feet the stream, tumbling over loose rocks and tree roots, is glassy, striped with frothing, white ripples.

The Painter is standing in the center of the round grassy clearing watching me, like an emcee standing patiently in a cabaret spotlight. His eyes are so dark, I cannot distinguish pupil from iris. He reaches down and rubs his crotch and I realize his cock is already hard, standing out beneath the tight denim like a pistol. I think of the old Mae West joke and smile.

“That’s it, baby,” he says. “Come on over here and see what I’ve got for you.”

We’re both naked pretty quickly. Any resistance I might have had to getting completely naked melts away when he drops his own jeans and steps out of them. His body is lean and lanky, with long, interlocking arcs of muscle. His arms and legs are tanned and hard, dusted with fine dark hair that becomes denser and more unruly as it approaches his torso. His cock is familiar, but it looks longer and more imposing now that it is not collared by the fly of his jeans. It stands out from his crotch erect and eager, bouncing and dripping with precum.

The earth is springy beneath my feet and I realize for the first time that the grassy clearing is not grass at all, but a mass of green, spongy moss. I’m looking down at my pale feet, toes flexing in the moss, when the Painter’s perfect tan feet step into view.

I feel his hand grasping my erection and then he’s on his knees pulling me between his wet lips and down his throat. He works on my cock, taking it in impossibly deep and massaging the length of it with his insistent throat muscles. His eyes are closed and his breathing is labored; he’s immersed in his work. I close my eyes and lean my head back, savoring the lightheadedness that accompanies the growing tension in my groin.

When he has dragged me to the edge, I try to gently pry him off me, but he holds fast, ignoring my “I’m coming” announcement and taking my cum down his throat. My knees weaken and he holds on to my hips, holding me inside him as I expel wave after wave of cum. And then he continues to hold me inside him and starts again, bringing me slowly, deliberately to a second, shivering orgasm. When he finally releases me, my hands are shaking and vertigo drives me to sit down. I drop onto my T-shirt and watch the Painter, still on his knees, jacking himself with his left hand, strong leisurely strokes.

I crawl toward him on my hands and knees, the sweat between my asscheeks cools in the gentle breeze. I reach out and touch his cock, letting the heat warm my fingers. I jack him for a few minutes, then dig a condom out of my pocket, sheathing him in emerald green, lubing him up and rolling over on my back in the moss. I pull my legs up like Tony did all those years ago, watching the Painter’s greedy eyes and toothy grin as he positions himself, aims, and then slides himself inside me. He grabs the back of my thighs and pushes down, compressing me and tilting my ass toward him to give himself leverage. His pale, paint-streaked fingers are digging into my muscles as he rocks himself in and out of my ass.

He finds his stride easily, like a thoroughbred on the track, his flanks sweating, his face transforming as intentionality flees from the beast between his legs.

I stare up into the canopy beyond the Painter’s head, my unblinking eyes mapping the constellations of sunlight in the sky of green leaves. He is grunting above me and sliding his cock deliberately along my prostate, listening to my groans, watching for signs of my own growing excitement. He’s pushing and I can feel him shift into that uncontrolled cadence that marks the end of the race. His face is slick with sweat, his hard eyes staring down at me.

He bends down without breaking his stride and kisses me roughly, wetly on the lips. He pulls back and sees the surprise on my face. “Come on, baby,” he says. “No distractions.”

He shifts the angle and a bolt of pleasure shoots through me. My body is trembling; there is nothing in the universe but his cock reaming me like an overripe orange.

“Can you come three times, Doc?” he asks me through gritted teeth.

“Oh, my god,” I say. And I do come again.

A deep guttural sound escapes his throat, and he does too. He collapses on top of me. His heart is beating fast against my chest, the sweat on our bodies cooling and leaving goose pimples up and down our arms and legs. He pulls himself up on his arms, thick cords of muscle supporting him above me. I can feel his cock twitching against my thigh; he reaches down and pulls off the condom, tossing it aside. He looks down into my eyes and kisses me again, gently this time, like there is something else to be had here. And the kiss sparks something inside my body, nudging blood toward my exhausted, deflated cock, and making my cheeks flush.

“Something’s happening,” I say.

“Finally,” he says.