Between Men Read online

  “Dear Sir,” Piers wrote, “the can of beer belonged to the FedEx man who asked me if he could dispose of it.” Doesn’t that sound like a lie? The long steady gaze he wore gravely on his beautiful face was like a dare in three dimensions. Is he taunting me? With this beer can, of all things? They watched Charlie’s hand crunch the thing to a flat shiny surface. They watched the thing pierce the soft skin or web between his thumb and forefinger. They watched the two drops of blood flood to the surface, and Charlie, at least, thought he saw a vindicated sort of pleasure in Piers’s steady gaze.

  Charlie was the lazy kind of top who makes his slave do all the talking. Why not, it was tiring working at his office, the gym was fatiguing, Moira never stopped planning her career. “Continue!” became his favorite word, as Piers typed out story after story, like Scheherazade. Part of the fun was watching him try to entertain his master with words, since he wasn’t a verbal guy to begin with, but Charlie educated him as best he could. Soon Piers was spouting off like a regular blue whale scribbling these Balzacian tales of the sex marketplace while Charlie watched TV or just relaxed. Before Charlie’s arrival, Piers would ascertain what he wanted to eat or drink while visiting, and he kept his VCR supplied with a steady stream of videos, porn and others. At Piers’s job he often had access to tapes of first-run movies that were still playing the expensive theaters. “I like Stallone,” Charlie told Piers. “He’s an amazing physical specimen and they say he’s no dummy. So, every time Sly makes a new picture I want to see it. None of that waiting on line shit. Not for Charlie Watson.” Meanwhile Piers was on the floor, writing away in the notebook of questions or typing Charlie some sentences about having to love having to be his slave. Charlie made him write so fast his sentences had no beginning or end. “I like to be fucked My ass is so tight, ’cause never have REAL sex. OK. I used some big sticks sometimes, even the U-lock of bike. Please do it. Fuck me hard. Thank you, sir!!! I’d like to do whatever you wanna me to do. Yes, sir. Thank you! I’m daddy’s boy now, aren’t I, Charlie? Yes, I am. Piers says, I feel proud to be your son. I belongs to CHARLIE

  “Charlie: Tell me, Piers. Louder.

  “Piers: CHARLIE!!! CHARLIE!!! No, you can abuse my ass anytime you want. Piers: please use my ass

  “Charlie, sir, you’ll just tell me drop my pants. And then spread my 2 cheeks. And Piers will do what you want with your boy I belong to you.”

  Charlie told him to act out his desires, whatever they were, and Piers stood on tiptoe in his own bedroom, reached for the ceiling with one hand, and with the other felt for his own cock and pulled it out to its furthest extension. A white-label dance music compilation chugged onto the stereo, some emo-boy Cleveland sobber. Charlie laughed as Piers jerked himself off, since his body was so awkward, so willing to please. He was wearing the pair of boxer shorts Charlie made him wear all the time, white with tiny green shamrocks, and his dick stuck out of it ragged, hard, and somehow still prim. His thighs were trembling under the burden of such unwavering sensuality. He concentrated on the music to take his mind off the orgasm he wanted to unleash. The unknown track that had opened the compilation had moved into the Brothers in Rhythm mix of Kylie’s “Too Far.” Piers acknowledged the relevance of the darkly poetic track on the moment in hand. Charlie wasn’t really listening; he lay sprawled on the bed examining this picture—words suddenly made flesh.

  Over Piers’s mind and body Charlie had, contractually, every right but one—he had not the right to ask why Piers was doing this. Nor why Piers loved him.

  One Saturday afternoon Charlie was at home flipping through TV Guide while Moira was on the phone in the next room, giggling. After she hung up, she said, “That was Piers. The one with the green eyes I’m sure you don’t remember.” Moira had convinced herself that Charlie never paid attention to any of her colleagues and pals, that to Charlie all the “gay guys” she brought home were more or less indistinguishable. And they were, to a certain extent. So why was Charlie annoyed to hear Moira laughing with Piers?

  “We were talking about the magnetic door at Farjeon.”

  “Magnetic door?” Charlie said with a frown.

  Moira blushed. Or she would have, if she hadn’t told the story so often—to others. “It was at Farjeon—I’m sure I told you this story already.”

  “Believe me, you didn’t.”

  “It’s silly. But anyhow at Farjeon there’s this antistatic room with a magnetic door, and Piers and I were there one day when this boy, this temp, this wonderful redheaded punk boy, got swept right into the door and was pinned there. As though a strong hurricane were pressing him into the door. He could barely breathe. Security had to come and turn off the EM.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  Evidently this was something multimedia people understood instinctively. “It was a demo magnetic door, and he—this boy—had been caught there by his piercings. I think one or two must have come out. It must have been terribly painful. I know they brought him to St. Luke’s right afterward.”

  Charlie picked up the magazine and continued to read the story on Star Trek, disgruntled. “Your friends are disgusting,” he said.

  Finally the evening came when, as Charlie requested, Eddy, Piers’s younger brother, came to pay a call. “Tell your brother who you belong to,” Charlie suggested, while the three of them sat in the kitchen drinking brandy after dinner.

  “I belong to Charlie,” Piers said, bitterly ashamed at being so abased in front of his younger, skeptical bro. As it turned out, Eddy was intrigued at the setup. He offered to have sex with Charlie as well. “Compare how I do it with how he does it,” he said witheringly. “Piers hasn’t even got a dick, far as I’m concerned.”

  But Eddy wasn’t exactly a bottom and wanted to run things his way. Charlie grunted and the two of them went upstairs to Piers’s bedroom, where Charlie ordered Piers to tie himself to a chair and watch. Eddy Garrison had none of Piers’s weird angularity; his body was more compact, chunkier. Eddy’s hair was the color of butter, with cocoa trailed in, and his chest and butt were sculpted out of some marvelous soft marble, you wanted to eat food from them, and in due course Charlie did. Piers’s eyes were the fresh color of moss, a soft bright green, filled with an open frank awareness of the world. But whereas you might have said that he was the more sensitive of the two brothers, you wanted to fuck Eddy up more.

  Charlie put his hands on Eddy’s shoulders and kept up the pressure, increasing it until Eddy squatted between his knees. Sulkily the boy began to suck Charlie’s cock, lopped his mouth around it as though nursing. His eyes rolled, disgruntled and not amused, in their deep sockets. Charlie had to cuff him a little to get him into line. Piers looked on, expressionless, tho’ Charlie did his best to include him in the conversation.

  “Your brother’s a good cocksucker,” he said suggestively, tho’ Eddy wasn’t, not really.

  Eddy was the younger brother Piers always felt responsible for; he always told him to take condoms with him wherever he went, tried to discourage him from hard drugs, etc. Wished he would go back to college. It embarrassed Piers to know that Eddy was abreast of his own situation, but, he thought, “I asked for it.” When Charlie finally came, Piers winced as Eddy swallowed part of his semen, then dribbled the rest onto Charlie’s big hairy legs.

  “You two are regular sex pigs, ain’t you?” Eddy guessed. “Look, guys, have fun, I’m off to a party.”

  After he had sashayed out there was a certain tension while Charlie questioned Piers about Eddy’s sex life. He was certain—absolutely certain—that Eddy sneaked over while Piers was alone. Frantically Piers typed out, “No sir I never fucked Eddy, he’s my own brother no sir I am true to you.”

  “Fuck you,” Charlie snapped. The following week he lowered Piers onto the burner in the kitchen range as it glowed with the slightest tinge of orange. “This is for being your brother’s little sex wimp,” he said, as he held Piers in his arms and gently pressed his left ass cheek onto the lit burner and held it
there until they could both smell the flesh burning. Charlie compared the way Piers scrambled in his arms to trying to bathe a cat. Then, a week later, he gave the same treatment to Piers’s right cheek. Now Piers’s ass bore two sets of spiral branding marks, brown, crackly thin flesh like pork rinds—like a strip of pork rind laid into circles on each half of his slim white butt. Piers said he didn’t feel the marks, except a little in bad weather, when they creaked, but to the touch they were certainly different than the rest of that naked flesh—they were like brownish ribbon interwoven on the front of a Hallmark card, silky, as a bookbinder might underlay calfskin with Victorian ribbon. Charlie liked the look, but Eddy groaned when he saw it. “Tacky!” he hooted. “Next he’ll cook you, bro.” Eddy and Charlie had Piers bend over his couch so they could examine his butt. Eddy ran his beringed fingers over the punctured skin, lingered a little at the crack, giggled at Charlie. Piers started to cry, but stopped after a minute when Charlie ordered him to. As Charlie and Eddy pointed out, he was hard as a rock through the whole examination. “Almost looks like Piers has a dick,” Eddy hooted.

  “Charlie,” said his wife, “know what’s funny? Piers Garrison has been so quiet and withdrawn at the office. Almost mopey. He used to be so much fun. Do you think he’s sick?” She always said “sick” when she meant AIDS. Charlie shrugged, left it at that.

  “Call him,” he said. “Now which one was he?”

  “The real cute one with the brown hair, like Cindy Crawford with a butch haircut, but you wouldn’t remember.”

  Charlie told Piers to place a personals ad in the paper offering to fuck strangers under his master’s supervision. In this way Charlie made many new pals who would come to Glen Park to fuck Piers; all exclaimed at the perfection of this decorated ass. There were regular party nights, and Piers realized these were Charlie’s way of counterpoising Moira’s festive cocktail parties with some fun of his own. Late one Thursday night he stood in a corner of his house, naked but for his dirty shamrock underwear, watching some men fighting over the last pieces of Leon’s Barbeque left on his kitchen table. Others were sitting watching a tape of Friends on TV and arguing about whether Matt LeBlanc was gay or not, while three bottles of champagne sat in the open refrigerator. Others sat at card tables spread with brown paper, drinking Diet Cokes and coffee and eating sugar doughnuts. Piers looked at them all for a minute. Then he went upstairs to his bedroom. It hurt him a little to climb. The wooden stairs creaked under his feet. The men who watched him saw the dirt on the soles of his white crew socks.

  “I have a new boyfriend,” Charlie said to Piers. “Young boy, studious, who I met at the Hole in the Wall. He was dancing on top of the bar in his jockey shorts.”

  “Maybe you’ll bring him by, Charlie?”

  Piers sat at Charlie’s feet with a tiny knife, scraping the peels from a bushel of potatoes, one by one, in a very dim light.

  “I don’t know if I want you to meet him,” he told Piers. “He’s a very innocent boy, not a jaded roué like you. Morals infect the young. Once he rubs against you, he’ll have this stain on him, gray and sour, like the inside of an old ashtray.”

  “Yes, you’re probably right,” said Piers. The peeler slipped out of his hand and clinked a mournful sound on the tile floor. “I’m clumsy today.”

  “Clumsy and ugly.”

  “I am ugly,” said Piers, looking at his dusty hands, which smelled like potatoes. Later, when he had peeled enough potatoes, then fried and sautéed them, Charlie was going to make him eat them all, then hold them down.

  “Know what my new boyfriend’s name is? Eddy Garrison.”

  Piers went to the keyboard of the glowing PC. “Dear Sir,” he began.

  “I want those potatoes peeled,” Charlie growled. “Get your hands away from that computer.” And Piers complied.

  Eddy liked to prance around Piers’s apartment in a leather vest and pink garters decorated with roses. His bottom bare. He knew it was a pert one. It looked like someone had dashed a bowl of milk over a pair of bowling balls. “Charlie and I are going to the opera,” Eddy told Piers, his eyes wide, when the two brothers were alone one evening. “Imagine, me at the opera, with all those opera queens. An opera lasts for hours and hours. And you’ll be here, tucking yourself in like a good boy. Piers, I saw a mother putting her kid in a car seat, buckled him in, tucked his ears under this little wool cap, and I thought of you, bro! Don’t know why . . . just did.”

  “I belong to him,” Piers said, more or less steadily. “Don’t know why, but I do.”

  “Know what me and Charlie call you, Piers? We call you ‘E-Mail,’ ’cause you have those circa brands on your ass.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, we laugh about it when we’re out at the opera, Piers! ‘Wonder how ol’ E-Mail’s doing tonight.’ ‘He’s flat on his stomach for sure.’” Eddy paused, taking a drag off a big purple joint. He studied his older brother’s weary silence. “You don’t have to put up with this shit, bro. How much fun can it be for you, all these Hispanic dudes and old geezers traipsing up here to fuck you while some others hold you down.”

  “You put a washcloth in my mouth,” Piers said flatly. “And it was soaked with cum.”

  “To shut you up, bro,” said Eddy, stubbing the joint in an ashtray. “You were hollering so loud I thought the neighbors would call in the cops.” He lowered himself onto the bed next to Piers and sniffed. “That old pair of drawers smells, you know that? It stinks, why doesn’t he let you wash it?” He took Piers’s hand and placed it firmly on his own pierced cock, rubbed the limp resisting hand over his cock until it grew hard, rose from his body like a wand.

  “I remember when you were little,” Piers said, looking away from Eddy’s erection. “Back in Austin I used to take you to Sunday school.”

  “Well those were the days,” Eddy replied. “Now pretend I’m Charlie Watson, lick my big fat dick, bro, make it happen.”

  “No, thanks,” said Piers, rolling away from Eddy. He remembered bringing Eddy to church, holding his hand when Eddy was eight or nine, sharing a hymnbook with him, tho’ it seemed clear even then that Eddy was no reader. In those days it was easy to mistake Eddy’s clear amused gaze for the insouciance of the innocent. He would give Eddy a dollar to put in the collection plate.

  After he left, Piers walked to his front window, watched Eddy saunter down the steps to his bike. Eddy waved insouciantly, winked.

  “Please, Charlie, just leave Eddy out of this. I don’t care what you do to me, just leave him alone.”

  “You don’t have it in your head, do you, pal? I’ll do what I like with whomever I please, and to tell you the truth, that includes your brother for sure.”

  Piers remembered Eddy putting the crumpled dollar bill into the jingling collection plate, the pride and satisfaction on his round face. “Dear Charlie,” he thought. He kept composing these long letters to Charlie, not writing them out, just writing them in his head, seeing them written out along the pale bedsheets in the moonlight. Alphabets of disjointed desire that would never see the light of day. His arms itched to type them up. But he was afraid to. “Sir, I would not complain to you for myself, but I hope that you will spare my brother some of your harder caresses, for he was reared differently than me, and he is a softer boy, his pain threshold lower than mine. If you seek to punish him, withhold your punishment from him, give it to me instead.

  “Instead pamper him like a baby, because he understands no better than a baby does.”

  One Sunday when Charlie came to Glen Park, Piers was not present. Charlie let himself in with his own key, at the kitchen door, and padded to the refrigerator for champagne. From the CD player floated the tune of an old Elizabethan madrigal, sung by one of those countertenors Moira adored. “Greensleeves,” Charlie whispered, the big bottle of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin halfway to his lips. “Alas, my love, you do me wrong to cast me off discourteously; for I have lovèd you so long, delighting in your company.” The phone rang and C
harlie answered it. Moira was calling. “Eddy Garrison called me,” she began. “He told me the whole sad story.”

  Charlie stared at the phone, then noticed the general emptiness of the cottage. The CD player stood on the mantelpiece where once Eddy’s framed photo had stood. The chairs, the sofa, even the rugs were gone.

  Moira continued, in a sort of drone. With part of his mind, Charlie thought, She must be doing twice her goddamn Zoloft. “Eddy knew just where you would be and how you’d answer the phone.” Piers’s big computer was gone, and his Syquest drive, his printer. The desk they once sat on—gone. All his pictures, the walls were bare. “Eddy told me how if I called, you’d pick up for sure, thinking it was some respondent to your lovely personal ad. But it’s not, Charlie—not this time. In case you’re curious, Eddy’s taken Piers back to Texas with him.”

  “Who is this?” Charlie whispered hoarsely.

  “Someone you’ve done wrong,” Moira said, before slipping the phone back on the base.

  In the trash bin in the kitchen he found half a dozen empty champagne bottles and the stained shamrock boxers. With a sick, shuddering sigh Charlie fell against the wall, pinching his face with his hands. The CD voice continued, mocking him, like the emperor’s nightingale, exquisite, heartbreaking. “For I have lovèd you so long, delighting in your company.”

  Pretend I’m Here

  Patrick Ryan

  Clark Evans finished the talk on his NASA experience with a description of the g-forces created in a Darmotech centrifuge. He held one of his large hands open and upturned in front of him, as if displaying a crystal ball, and then moved the hand in a circle that increased in speed as he described the sensation, until Frankie, staring from the front row, felt nearly hypnotized.

  The ancient librarian who was moderating the event asked if anyone had a question for their guest. Frankie, sixteen, raised his hand. There were five people in the audience, scattered over a flock of folding chairs four times that number. The librarian and Clark Evans sat on slightly nicer chairs at the front of the library’s map room. She looked past Frankie and pointed a wavering finger at an old man wearing a sun visor.