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“What do you want for your birthday?” It seemed like a simple enough question. A safe question, actually. Kyle Broflovski had no imagination. Stan Marsh knew this. Year after year, Kyle would waffle for a few days before finally conceding, “Just get me something nice.” Stan would take him out to dinner at Elway’s Downtown, where Kyle would get a wedge salad and an eight-ounce filet. It was predictable down to the way Stan would ask him if he wanted a bigger steak and Kyle would respond with, “Oh, no thanks. I can’t eat that much.” Stan knew this was a total bluff; Kyle could eat way more than that, and often did, on numerous occasions. Like breakfast. But it fit the Kyle’s birthday paradigm, the idea that like Stan was the husband here so he was going to pay for this, when you really added it up, totally overpriced dinner at a place packed with tourists and suburbanite businessmen. But that was totally okay, because Stan was in fact a suburbanite businessman himself. Kyle, on the other hand, was a sex therapist. And he loved a good steak.
Somehow, Stan had a bad feeling about Kyle’s birthday this year. Nothing was going right; he knotted his tie incorrectly and cut himself shaving, all within the span of four minutes. He chalked it up to tiredness, turned off the tap, and headed downstairs for breakfast. They’d been up late last night, discussing the finer points of Kierkegaard and, to be entirely honest, somehow Stan had ended up with his mouth around the base of Kyle’s cock, helping it steadily toward orgasm. Kyle was deliberate with sex, very plodding and very deliberate. Now Stan’s jaw ached and his face was bleeding. He blotted at his cheek before entering the kitchen.
Here Kyle was slicing bananas, listening to KUSA Morning News; rather, it was on in the background, but he was standing on his tip-toes in his immaculate cherry Keds with white soles, flicking wafer-thin banana slices off of his knife and into alternating bowls of granola. Though he was facing out the window, Kyle somehow heard Stan’s entrance and called out, “I’m almost done,” which Stan was able to hear over the tinny television speakers.
“Do we have coffee?” Stan asked. It was needless; they always had coffee.
“Yeah, in the usual spot.” With knife in hand, Kyle turned to gesticulate with his elbow, pointing at the press on the table.
“Sweet, thanks.” Stan took a seat, the same place he always sat at, the head of the table. (It was not that Stan was more deserving of sitting at the head of the table, Kyle often explained to anyone who came over for dinner, it was just that Stan liked a chair with arms whereas Kyle liked to rudely rest his elbows on the table and, on some occasions, in his plate.) Everything was neatly arrayed: napkin folded left of plate; tea- and tablespoons on napkin; mug, water, and juice at top right of placemat. Stan reached over the table setting and poured himself some coffee. “Do you want some?” he asked.
“Some what?” Kyle asked.
“Coffee.”
“Oh, don’t worry.” Kyle stopped slicing, flicking a final piece of banana off of his knife; he untied his apron, and used the remote control to mute the television. “I’ll pour it myself in a minute.”
Outside, their little garden was in bloom, and Stan wasn’t sure if he preferred to stare at the hyacinths that had recently exploded out of the hard, cold mountain soil, or at Kyle, with his boat-neck stripey T-shirt that made his long neck and adam’s apple seem more prominent, and his aggressive copper hair, which fell into his face if he glanced the wrong way. It was May in Colorado, and everything felt to Stan like sex and smelled to Stan of oily chunks of marrow, soft and stringy and rich in iron. Like coffee, to which Stan was now adding demerara sugar and cream. Kyle had a rule: Everything had to be real in the house, and nothing with more than five ingredients crossed the threshold. Between the two of them, they could scrape together a more-than-decent meal; Stan could braise vegetables and bake breads, and Kyle loved meat and tucked slices of butter under chicken skins, watching the heaving breasts turn golden in the oven. Kyle had never been able to keep a cake from collapsing, though, and all of Stan’s eggs came out hard and chalky. Still their meager skills together were worth something greater than their individual talents.
Kyle served himself first, and then swung back around to set a parfait down in front of Stan. He leaned in for his usual kiss, but spotted something. Recoiling, he asked, “Did you cut yourself shaving?”
“I nicked myself, yeah,” Stan replied.
“Well, you’re still bleeding.”
“It’ll stop in a moment.” Stan leaned over his bowl to begin eating his breakfast.
“Wait right here!” Kyle was back as soon as he’d left, wadding up a sterile tissue and wedging it into Stan’s cheek.
“Kyle, it’s fine,” he tried to say, but Kyle’s arm was tamping his jaw down.
“Shhh, just a sec.”
Kyle pulled the tissue from Stan’s face; it was only a speck of blood, but he unfolded the tissue and examined it, amateur forensics. “Hold on,” he muttered, ambling out of the room.
“Where are you going?” Stan asked, but before he could protest the lack of answer, Kyle had returned with a cotton ball.
“Hold still.” Kyle jabbed it into Stan’s wound.
“Jesus Christ!” he shrieked. “That hurts! What is that!”
“It’s hydrogen peroxide. And it’s difficult to keep this still while you’re talking!”
“Why are you putting peroxide on my face?”
“It’s a disinfectant. Hold still!”
“I just cut myself shaving!”
“There, see?” Kyle pulled the cotton ball away, inspecting it at he walked to the garbage can. He wrapped it in a tissue and tossed it away forever. “All better. Let’s eat breakfast.”
“Breakfast?” Now Stan’s jaw ached and his skin was burning and the little cut on his face he didn’t bother noticing before now stung like it was his entire existence. “I mean, great. Thanks. What’s for breakfast?”
“Banana, yogurt, granola parfaits.” Kyle fell into the seat to Stan’s left, the seat facing the television, and picked up his spoon. “Could you pass me the coffee?”
As Stan did so, he said, “I would have appreciated it if you hadn’t rubbed hydrogen peroxide on my face.”
“Well.” Kyle finished chewing his mouthful of granola, swallowed, and said, “Excuse me for liking things to be neat and sterile. For caring.”
“It’s okay.” Stan scooped a helping of equal parts yogurt, banana, and granola into his spoon. “So,” he began to say through a mouthful of granola. “What do you want-”
“Jesus, Stanley,” Kyle chided. “Swallow first.”
Stan obeyed, swallowed, thought to himself that Kyle had gasped something vaguely similar the night before, and said, “What do you want for your birthday?”
“Oh.” Kyle leaned back in his chair, swirling his cup of coffee. (Kyle took his with no cream, but several heaping spoonfuls of sugar.) “You know-”
Stan totally knew. Just get me something nice, he heard in his head. He studied Kyle, the way he crossed his ankles at the breakfast table and his matchstick jeans were rolled up a short fist-width higher than his ankles and the way his hair kept falling into his eyes while he thought. Stan wanted to sweep away the coffee and the placemats and the granola and fling Kyle’s long, wide-hipped body onto the table and just ravage him. But he didn’t, because it was 7:50 in the morning and he was due at work in an hour, plus Kyle looked so excellent and put-together and proud of himself that it was not worth Stan’s time to refuse to hear Kyle’s predictable birthday wish.
Of course, here was where Kyle went off-book. “You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, this year,” he said. “And I think it might be nice if you rimmed me.”
“Sure, okay, I’ll make a reservation at Elway’s and-”
“Stan, you didn’t hear me,” Kyle said. He cleared his throat. “I said I would like you to eat me out for my birthday.” Kyle then blushed furiously, his cheeks reddening like he’d been sitting in the sun for an hour. He grinned stupidly and lowered his head into his bowl, where he began to scoop food into his mouth as means of distraction.
Stan was now staring at Kyle as if he were an assaulting stranger. “What?”
“I said-”
“I heard what you said,” Stan insisted, “the second time, anyway.”
“Oh, yes. Well, you’re familiar with the concept, it’s rimming, and that’s - what’s that I want,” Kyle finished very quietly, voice barely a whisper.
“You want me to what you?” Stan repeated.
“Eat me out,” Kyle replied.
“You, Kyle Broflovski.”
“Yes.” Now Kyle just seemed annoyed. “Are you playing some kind of game? You asked me what I wanted for my birthday.”
“Yeah, I meant like a watch or, I don’t know, like what you got me for my birthday.” For Stan’s most recent birthday, Kyle had bought him a year’s subscription to the NFL channel.
“Oh, screw you, you just wanted me to be like ‘I don’t know’ so you could take me to that crappy steakhouse you like.”
“But don’t you want steak?”
“Sure. Can’t I have both?”
Stan was absolutely vexed.
“You want both steak…and a…”
“A rimjob,” Kyle said.
“I don’t - Jesus, Kyle, this is too much, I gotta go.” Stan pushed away his half-eaten breakfast, took another sip of thick, cooling coffee, and slid his chair away from the table.
Kyle sighed, and put his elbows on the table, not without narrowly missing his parfait and muttering, “Oh, son of a bitch.” He shook his head and asked, “What are you doing today?”
Stan sighed, relieved that the conversation had returned to something resembling normalcy after its very sudden detour into the mystical depths of Kyle’s ass. “I have meetings, like, wall-to-wall, until lunch. Then a lunch meeting. But it’s Friday, I guess, so at least I can leave after lunch.” (Stan had very carefully selected his life’s calling, assistant director of a small publishing house that specialized in Braille romance novels, on the basis of the ability to take “Summer Fridays” from April to October.) “Why, what are you doing?”
“Um.” Kyle leaned back in his chair, tenting his fingers, ankles still locked. “I need to help some housewife find her G-spot.”
“Why do women pay you for that, again?”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “Experiential familiarity with the female reproductive anatomy is really secondary to being able to invent, at a moment’s notice, some kind of perverse psychological therapeutic bullshit.”
“So.” Stan was rising his plate, trying to both pay attention and talk toward Kyle at the same time. “What kind of therapeutic bullshit is rimming?”
“That’s a good question. Remind me to answer it when you get home.”
Stan left for the day, not without kissing Kyle farewell.
“Think about my ass, Stan,” Kyle said at the front door, leaning against the frame post-coitally. “Think about all the things it’s done for you over the years. And - and think about all the things you can do for it. But mostly, I guess, think about this-it’s my birthday, Stanley, and I want it.”
Waggling his hips as he trailed into the house, Kyle slammed the door. Stan was left in the front yard, with his messenger bag slung over his shoulder and his umbrella in his hand, trying to will away an erection that, unfortunately, insisted itself at inopportune times throughout the rest of the morning.
~
Stan came home with a mountain of galleys, and left them on the staircase. He found Kyle sitting on the back deck, listening to something with headphones on and reading yesterday’s Financial Times. Kyle was the only person Stan knew who was embarrassed to be seen reading a pink newspaper in public. Everyone else had already gotten over it, because they weren’t 12 anymore.
“Hey,” he said, trying to get Kyle’s attention. Although it was not that hot out yet in the season, the sun beat down hard that day, and Stan took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.
Kyle looked up at him, pulling the buds from his ears and not quite smiling. “Hi,” he said, folding up the paper and setting it aside, next to a can of cran-raspberry La Croix. “How’s work?”
“Uh.” Stan sat down in an adirondack. He always sat on the very edge, uncomfortable if he leaned all the way back and sank into the groove of the chair. “Oh, I don’t know, it was fine. I guess meetings are fine. What am I talking about? It sucked, but whatever. That’s work. I brought him like eight years’ worth of galleys to sign off on.”
“Braille galleys.” Kyle rolled his eyes.
“You know, blind people need to read, too.”
“Why can’t they just listen to audiobooks?”
“I don’t know, Kyle, why can’t you just listen to audiobooks?”
“I do if I’m on a long drive,” Kyle said. Stan very well knew this, as they took most of their long drives together, to Boise, to visit Stan’s sister. There was not much in Boise, but she had gone to school up there and met some guy from Boise, had three children and refused to leave. Each time they visited, Kyle began the trip by putting all of his effort into masking his disdain for this town and its residents and their flat accents and brittle pride in the most boring things, like baroque-looking terra cotta cornices and pistachio gelato. Within a day he’d typically become exhausted and just hate everything openly. It did occur to him that perhaps someone who chose to live in a suburb best known for an infamous teenage massacre should refrain from judging other towns, but it wasn’t like he pretended Littleton was something that it wasn’t, namely, interesting.
Stan grabbed Kyle’s drink off of the teak table and swallowed about half of it in one gulp. Commuting was thirsty business. “Did you find the G-spot?” he asked, putting it back down and hunching over on the edge of his chair.
“Oh, I know where the G-spot is,” Kyle said. He made a nauseating come-hither gesture with his two fingers, waggling them back and forth. “That sort of patchy, sponge kind of place on the top of the vagina-”
Stan interrupted him. “Yeah, that’s enough.”
“Well, anatomically it’s there in all women. But everyone’s slightly different, so it’s not that I have to show women where this thing is. I more sort of talked her through why she wanted to find it, what she was going to do if she found it. Everyone’s a little different, a little sexually different. You know?”
Stan knew. He didn’t care. People who weren’t Kyle didn’t much interest him, sexually or otherwise.
“Well, that’s what I did, I don’t know, I like to think it helped.” Kyle shrugged. “Do you think you can not be a dick for the rest of the day?”
“How am I being a dick?”
“You’re giving me that look, that disgusted look. It’s a drag and I don’t have to sit here if you’re going to be pissy.”
“Well, what do you want me to look like?” Stan asked. “I mean, let’s just sit here and you can tell me all about sticking your sick little fingers in some woman’s vagina.”
“Fuck you! I’ve never put my fingers in any woman’s vagina!”
“Then how the fuck do you find the G-spot?”
“I talk them through it! Jesus Christ!”
Stan was not sure if he believed that, though. “You’re a demented little hooker, aren’t you?”
“Christ, no, I’m a fucking therapist, I got a master’s degree in social work, not - not touching messed-up people’s junk!”
“Kyle.” Stan said it like he was breathing. “You look great.”
Cocking his head, Kyle said, “Really?” He looked down at his sneakers, bright red and crisp and starchy. They seemed so American to him. So wholesome. His eyes traveled up long legs, thin legs; Kyle was lanky and his only graces were in his eyes and his elbows. His legs, crossed at the knee, swayed and knocked into each other.
“Yes, really.” Stan got off of his chair, and crawled across the deck.
Kyle wondered for a moment if maybe there weren’t splinters in the wood, even though they had had it stained and sealed, and even though Stan had just been sitting in a wooden chair, also liable to give him splinters.
“Hi,” Stan said, burying his face in Kyle’s knees and wrapping his arms around Kyle’s waist.
“Hey.” Kyle let his hands loose into Stan’s hair, thick and dark and straight and messy. Stan embodied such virility, sometimes it made Kyle want to cry. Why would someone so excellent want to be with someone so mawkish? Kyle didn’t think Stan was perfect, but insecurity plagued him just the same. They were so unmatched, the trivialities of their shared life so bracing.
The sun was slipping behind a cloud, a fat white one, totally unthreatening. Their garden wasn’t very big, but they cultivated it together. Each autumn they put in more bulbs, more shrubs, ones of pinkish leaves and ones with tiny white flowers. They were fenced-in with a tall, obstructing fence, which they felt kept the neighbors from gawking at them. Kyle was insecure about that, too; he didn’t know what his neighbors thought two men did together in the privacy of their own garden, but he didn’t want to give them any way to find out. Kyle and Stan were friends with them, these neighbors; an expectant couple down the street, an older couple with a daughter out of college who lived at home, unable to find work, and a young family about their age, with toddler twins and an infant. There were other neighbors, but these were the open-minded ones Kyle invited to dinner sometimes, the ones who appreciated homemade bread and maybe herb and dandelion green salad.
Stan had a very good job, not in the sense that it made him rich, but in the sense that he enjoyed it and it treated him well. Kyle, on the other hand, generally told his neighbors, or anyone who asked, that he was a homemaker. He was not sure if that was any better or much worse than being a sex therapist, but again, it was a conversation he didn’t need to have. His own mother, at first in ignorance and now passive-aggressively, told her friends he was a ‘sex worker.’ Anyone who knew how to spell “Broflovski” would find his website very easily, as there were only three other Broflovskis in Colorado, and he was related to all of them. His father and brother were both lawyers. Well, his brother was in law school. His mother was not really on the internet, like as a concept. She was actually a homemaker.
No one climbs across a wooden deck on hands and knees just to hug someone else’s abdomen, and Stan was not about to buck this. He lifted Kyle’s shirt and kissed up and down Kyle’s pale flesh, leaving wet patches that cooled when the air hit them, evaporating too slow for Kyle’s liking. The hem of Kyle’s shirt caught in Stan’s thick hair and mussed it, not that Stan was of a mind to care about it. His fingers left the small of Kyle’s back and migrated lower, tensing, knowing. Kyle shifted his legs, widening them, drawing his shirt down lower on the back of Stan’s head and grasping for the button-fly of his jeans, selvedge indigo denim.
Kyle wore briefs, tight black ones, high-legged with a thick elastic waistband. Kyle did not think much about what sort of underwear he wore. He thought much more often about what sort of underwear Stan should wear, as he bought Stan’s underwear and had complete control over the enterprise. So Stan wore boxer-briefs, or had been wearing them lately, as Kyle enjoyed the way they seemed to make Stan’s thighs look larger, not fleshier but more powerful, masculine and raw. Kyle had in the past purchased for Stan pink briefs and turquoise briefs, all sorts of colors, with white trim. It was interesting but hardly sexy, perhaps a bit too jocular for their life now. It reminded Kyle of his parents’ basement, the basement rec rooms of their friends’ parents, beer pong and long autumn nights over high school four-day weekends, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. That wouldn’t do.
Stan used his teeth a lot, less because it was a turn-on of Kyle’s than because he was lazy and Kyle didn’t so much mind it. Not biting, just dragging them along bits and pieces of Kyle’s warm skin. Kyle was trying to get his briefs down his thighs, but he was trapped by the jeans around his knees, and Stan’s grasp of his legs.
“Do it already,” Kyle said, managing to free his dick from its confines. It wobbled, hitting Stan’s chin, with no natural place to fall. Kyle was glad he hadn’t sat down in the adirondack when he’d come outside to soak in the sun. Being fair-skinned and averse to freckling, he had rubbed in a layer of thin sun screen across his nose, forehead, chin, and cheeks; he could feel it sweating off his face, running into his pores, clogging them. It stung.
Stan’s hands found Kyle’s cock, drawing it out. He looked up, grinning. “I love you,” he said. It was the stupid sort of thing he would say at a time like this. “You look so good, you know.”
“I know you love me,” Kyle replied. He tried to inch his hips off the chair. He wasn’t successful, but Stan got the idea, taking most of Kyle’s cock into his mouth, like he’d been born with it in there. It was practically true. Kyle wasn’t sure if he looked good, with greasy sweat running down his cheeks and neck, but the longer Stan’s mouth was on him the less he thought about it, until he was struggling to spread his legs again, begging, “Fingers,” which out of context would be an awkward thing to pant about, but this was not a rare request.
With his hands, Stan dragged Kyle to the edge of his seat, grasping the thing stuck inside of Kyle. It was a butt plug, not large but conspicuous; it was turquoise. Stan wiped his mouth. “How long has this been here?” he asked.
“This morning,” Kyle said.
“You want me to take it out?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Fingers. Please, come on, don’t leave me like this-”
“Okay, okay.” In one fluid movement the plug was out, and Stan set it aside, next to the La Croix can. He curled his two fingers into a crook and wormed them into Kyle, where the plug had been. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” Kyle sank back as far as he could go.
Stan followed, his mouth full, his fingers working against soft tissue. When Kyle came, Stan swallowed it, most of it, sparing it no thought at all. He withdrew his fingers, grabbing Kyle’s hips, burying his nose in Kyle’s shuddering belly, but only for a moment. Stan got up, fussing with the sleeves of his shirt, standing so that his erection, bound against his thigh by his pants and boxer-briefs, was visible to Kyle. He bent over. “I love you,” he repeated. He sank his lips into Kyle’s, felt Kyle’s lips trembling, moving against his.
Kyle withdrew, looking down at his lap. “Oh, god,” he said, shifting so he could pull up his pants and underwear, unconcerned about the mess, the butt plug and the tipped soda can and the fact that as high as their fence was, the neighbors’ bedroom windows were higher than any fence. “That was nice. Unexpected. Nice. Thank you.”
“You don’t have to say thank you.” Stan crossed his arm, putting his weight on his back leg so he could stress the prominence of his erection. Kyle was staring at it, fixated on it. But he wasn’t doing anything other than staring. So Stan took it upon himself to ask, “What’s up with that butt plug?”
“What?” Kyle shook his head, as if trying to stave off tiredness. He was, suddenly, very sleepy. “Oh, the plug. Yeah. I don’t know, it feels nice.”
“But like, were you seriously going to wear that all day?”
Kyle shrugged. “Probably not too much longer.” He reached out, up to Stan. “I want to go upstairs.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Nothing, really.”
Kyle was surprised at Stan’s strength, that Stan would fold Kyle up into his arms, bridal-style, and carry him upstairs. Kyle shouldn’t have been surprised, though; he knew Stan was strong. He found himself falling in love with the novelty of it, even if Stan was letting his feet and shoulders knock against the banister and the wall, respectively.
Kyle was still wearing his sneakers when Stan laid him on the bed, and crawled in next to Kyle’s limp form, arms around Kyle’s waist and lips at the arch of Kyle’s neck where it left his shoulder.
“Come on,” Stan whispered, bringing his hips as close to Kyle’s as possible. “I’ve got something for you.”
The corniness of that line brought Kyle right out of it. He was trying to doze, but this made him roll over, look Stan in the eyes, and say, “What, you want to have sex with me?”
Stan reached out, brushing his fingers, the ones that had just been inside of Kyle, against Kyle’s cheek. “Yeah.”
“Sorry.” Kyle sat up, leaning over to untie his shoes. “Not interested.”
The look of shock and disappointment on Stan’s face was priceless. “Why not?”
Kyle kicked off his shoes, letting them drop, one after the other, onto the floor. “Well, I don’t know,” he said, as if he didn’t know perfectly. “What are you going to get me for my birthday?”
“Uh.” Stan was finding it difficult to think straight with all of the oxygen in his body surging away from his brain. “Well, I made a reservation at Fruition.” This was true.
“What? That’s so fancy! Why?”
“Why?” Stan felt dazed; he was sitting on his bed with an erection threatening to split the seams on his boxer-briefs, yet all Kyle wanted to do was talk about where they were going to eat dinner next week. “You didn’t seem that into Elway’s-”
“I love Elway’s!”
“That’s not that you said.” It was taking serious self-restraint for Stan to keep from rolling over and just jerking himself off. All morning long, all he could think about was Kyle’s perfect ass, Kyle’s hip cocked against the doorway, how Kyle looked when he lay on his back arching his behind off the mattress, that symmetrical ass split open, beckoning Stan toward it. All Stan could do while his line editors loaded him down with galleys was remind himself how good it would feel to sink inside that warm, tight ass, again and again.
And here they were, talking about restaurants.
“I want to go to Elway’s! We always go there for my birthday and that’s what I want to do!”
“Fine, then, we can go there.” Stan shrugged. “I seriously don’t give a shit. Just tell me where and I’ll make a plan. Seriously. Just, for the love of god, I’ve been hard for like three hours. Please, Kyle. Please.” Stan clasped his hands together, shaking them in Kyle’s face. Maybe Kyle would find this adorable.
With one tentative hand, Kyle palmed Stan’s cock through his pants. “Mmm, I can see that. Yeah.”
Stan’s fists dropped to his sides. He tried to shift his hips more directly into Kyle’s grasping fingers.
Kyle pulled away. “I told you what I want for my birthday. You didn’t say yes or no.”
“You didn’t tell me why you wanted … that.”
“Maybe I just think it would feel good.”
“Well,” said Stan, his words breathy and short, all of his focus on figuring out the quickest way to attain sexual relief, “maybe I don’t want to do it at all.”
With both hands, Kyle found Stan’s ears, the ends of his dark hair, thick and glossy and uneven. Kyle hated having his own hair touched, hated being reminded it was there. He often contemplated shearing it all off to a close crop, as he had once done in college, but that hadn’t suited him either; without a lot of hair he had too much nose, too much lip. Kyle’s hair bound his face together; when Kyle looked at Stan’s face, Stan’s hair between his fingers, he knew it was a miracle that Stan didn’t push him away, get off the bed, leave forever. It suddenly felt imperative that they kiss, so Kyle leaned in and swept Stan’s tongue with his own, tasting the lingering flush of his own seed in the cracks of Stan’s lips and between his teeth. Or maybe Kyle was imagining that; maybe while Stan lusted his mouth watered and any little bits were swallowed away. Like it mattered, like it wasn’t completely disgusting.
“Stan.” Kyle whimpered it against his lips.
Stan responded with, “Kyle,” the only correct answer. “I want you so much.”
“Yeah, I know.” Kyle’s fingers tightened against Stan’s skull, ran down his cheeks. “I can’t believe you cut yourself shaving.”
“What? Why?”
Kyle didn’t answer. He pecked Stan on the lips again, quick and dry. Then he slipped off the bed, heart racing, to stumble into the bathroom. Behind him, the door snapped shut.
Back on their bed, Stan pulled his shirt from the waist of his slacks. He felt the pressing need to touch himself, without pausing to bother unbuttoning his shirt. As he freed his erection, he heard the shower begin to run.
~
Wandering downstairs after an unplanned nap of several hours, Stan noticed how the light fell in slats through the blinds on the living room floor; it was twilight, and he had been asleep for far too long. His galleys were still on the bottom step, piled up right were he’d left them, his sunglasses on top of the stack. Stan stepped gingerly over this mess and turned on the foyer light, a tiny gingham-shaded chandelier that had come with the house. Kyle kept saying he wanted to get rid of it, but they furnished their home piece-by-piece, and lighting wasn’t a high priority. Stan agreed that it was ugly, and now that he’d put in compact fluorescent bulbs, it didn’t even light up properly for a minute or two. But the sun was not yet vanquished; it was not that dim in the house. Stan knew Kyle would want him to lower every shade and shut all the curtains, but he wasn’t in the mood; he liked being able to see outside.
Kyle was sitting at the end of the peninsula counter in the kitchen, reading the current Financial Times and drinking an iced coffee. “Hi,” he said dreamily, folding up the paper and pushing it aside. “Someone’s up.” He lifted the curvaceous glass, all milky tan coffee and vintage-shaped ice cubes, bringing the straw to his lips and closing them in a sinister smile. He shut his eyes. He took a sip.
Stan noticed three things airing out on the drying rack next to the sink: a mortal, a pestle, and Kyle’s butt plug. “Oh, cut it out,” Stan scoffed, turning on the lights over the peninsula and kitchen sink, also compact fluorescents. “You look ridiculous.” He padded over to the head of the kitchen table in his bare feet, falling into the chair. “I can’t believe I slept that long.”
“You were just all tuckered out.”
“Kyle,” said Stan. “Shut the fuck up.” He rubbed his eyes, yawning.
Kyle slipped off of his stool and slid into Stan’s lap, tucking his sneakers under his thighs. Stan’s arms wrapped around Kyle’s waist and hips, rocking them back and forth for a moment. Then Kyle said, “You have a nice little wank, huh?” and Stan stopped.
“Whatever.” Stan’s words were bitter, but he hugged Kyle tighter to his chest. “I don’t need you to get off.”
“But you want me.”
“Maybe.”
“What if I said I needed you, would that make it better?”
“Yeah.”
Pale arms in striped sleeves wrapped around Stan’s shoulders.
“What’s for dinner?” Stan asked.
“Oh, who fucking knows, I don’t want to cook.”
“I’ll cook,” Stan offered.
“I want to go out.”
“Okay. Where do you want to go? I’d like one of those burgers that’s actually made with two grilled cheese sandwiches instead of buns.”
Kyle wrinkled his nose. “I was actually thinking Vietnamese.”
“Fair enough.” Stan stood, carrying Kyle along with him, even all the way up the stairs. Briefly, Kyle wondered how he’d been walking all these years, what with Stan’s accommodating arms so broad, capable, generous. But at the top of the stairs, Stan deposited Kyle on his feet and said, “Here you go,” disappearing behind a closet door to change pants and boxer-briefs.
“Do you want to drive?” Kyle asked, sticking his head into their walk-in closet.
Stan was mid-change, one leg in a pair of boxer-briefs, cock limp against his thigh. “Yeah, no shit I want to drive. You drive like my dad,” meaning no matter what the speed limit, Kyle drove 50 percent faster; if they were on a stretch of deserted highway, Kyle raced against no one like his life depended on it. On road trips to Boise, this was a boon; suburban Denver, on the other hand, was full of small children and, to Kyle’s utter annoyance, traffic cops.
Having spent hours of his life in traffic school, Kyle conceded that Stan should drive, and threw on a navy sweatshirt over his thin boat-neck T. All morning and afternoon Kyle had been catching glimpses of himself in the mirror, feeling quite stylish, like a knowing teenage French girl buying a morning slice of bread with jam and butter from a tabac on some outer arrondissement street corner. But now the front of his body said Denver Pride Fest and the back said Sponsored by the GLBT Center of Colorado. Instantly, Kyle felt 14 years old, trapped in a car and subject to Stan’s poky grandma driving.
Continued here.
Somehow, Stan had a bad feeling about Kyle’s birthday this year. Nothing was going right; he knotted his tie incorrectly and cut himself shaving, all within the span of four minutes. He chalked it up to tiredness, turned off the tap, and headed downstairs for breakfast. They’d been up late last night, discussing the finer points of Kierkegaard and, to be entirely honest, somehow Stan had ended up with his mouth around the base of Kyle’s cock, helping it steadily toward orgasm. Kyle was deliberate with sex, very plodding and very deliberate. Now Stan’s jaw ached and his face was bleeding. He blotted at his cheek before entering the kitchen.
Here Kyle was slicing bananas, listening to KUSA Morning News; rather, it was on in the background, but he was standing on his tip-toes in his immaculate cherry Keds with white soles, flicking wafer-thin banana slices off of his knife and into alternating bowls of granola. Though he was facing out the window, Kyle somehow heard Stan’s entrance and called out, “I’m almost done,” which Stan was able to hear over the tinny television speakers.
“Do we have coffee?” Stan asked. It was needless; they always had coffee.
“Yeah, in the usual spot.” With knife in hand, Kyle turned to gesticulate with his elbow, pointing at the press on the table.
“Sweet, thanks.” Stan took a seat, the same place he always sat at, the head of the table. (It was not that Stan was more deserving of sitting at the head of the table, Kyle often explained to anyone who came over for dinner, it was just that Stan liked a chair with arms whereas Kyle liked to rudely rest his elbows on the table and, on some occasions, in his plate.) Everything was neatly arrayed: napkin folded left of plate; tea- and tablespoons on napkin; mug, water, and juice at top right of placemat. Stan reached over the table setting and poured himself some coffee. “Do you want some?” he asked.
“Some what?” Kyle asked.
“Coffee.”
“Oh, don’t worry.” Kyle stopped slicing, flicking a final piece of banana off of his knife; he untied his apron, and used the remote control to mute the television. “I’ll pour it myself in a minute.”
Outside, their little garden was in bloom, and Stan wasn’t sure if he preferred to stare at the hyacinths that had recently exploded out of the hard, cold mountain soil, or at Kyle, with his boat-neck stripey T-shirt that made his long neck and adam’s apple seem more prominent, and his aggressive copper hair, which fell into his face if he glanced the wrong way. It was May in Colorado, and everything felt to Stan like sex and smelled to Stan of oily chunks of marrow, soft and stringy and rich in iron. Like coffee, to which Stan was now adding demerara sugar and cream. Kyle had a rule: Everything had to be real in the house, and nothing with more than five ingredients crossed the threshold. Between the two of them, they could scrape together a more-than-decent meal; Stan could braise vegetables and bake breads, and Kyle loved meat and tucked slices of butter under chicken skins, watching the heaving breasts turn golden in the oven. Kyle had never been able to keep a cake from collapsing, though, and all of Stan’s eggs came out hard and chalky. Still their meager skills together were worth something greater than their individual talents.
Kyle served himself first, and then swung back around to set a parfait down in front of Stan. He leaned in for his usual kiss, but spotted something. Recoiling, he asked, “Did you cut yourself shaving?”
“I nicked myself, yeah,” Stan replied.
“Well, you’re still bleeding.”
“It’ll stop in a moment.” Stan leaned over his bowl to begin eating his breakfast.
“Wait right here!” Kyle was back as soon as he’d left, wadding up a sterile tissue and wedging it into Stan’s cheek.
“Kyle, it’s fine,” he tried to say, but Kyle’s arm was tamping his jaw down.
“Shhh, just a sec.”
Kyle pulled the tissue from Stan’s face; it was only a speck of blood, but he unfolded the tissue and examined it, amateur forensics. “Hold on,” he muttered, ambling out of the room.
“Where are you going?” Stan asked, but before he could protest the lack of answer, Kyle had returned with a cotton ball.
“Hold still.” Kyle jabbed it into Stan’s wound.
“Jesus Christ!” he shrieked. “That hurts! What is that!”
“It’s hydrogen peroxide. And it’s difficult to keep this still while you’re talking!”
“Why are you putting peroxide on my face?”
“It’s a disinfectant. Hold still!”
“I just cut myself shaving!”
“There, see?” Kyle pulled the cotton ball away, inspecting it at he walked to the garbage can. He wrapped it in a tissue and tossed it away forever. “All better. Let’s eat breakfast.”
“Breakfast?” Now Stan’s jaw ached and his skin was burning and the little cut on his face he didn’t bother noticing before now stung like it was his entire existence. “I mean, great. Thanks. What’s for breakfast?”
“Banana, yogurt, granola parfaits.” Kyle fell into the seat to Stan’s left, the seat facing the television, and picked up his spoon. “Could you pass me the coffee?”
As Stan did so, he said, “I would have appreciated it if you hadn’t rubbed hydrogen peroxide on my face.”
“Well.” Kyle finished chewing his mouthful of granola, swallowed, and said, “Excuse me for liking things to be neat and sterile. For caring.”
“It’s okay.” Stan scooped a helping of equal parts yogurt, banana, and granola into his spoon. “So,” he began to say through a mouthful of granola. “What do you want-”
“Jesus, Stanley,” Kyle chided. “Swallow first.”
Stan obeyed, swallowed, thought to himself that Kyle had gasped something vaguely similar the night before, and said, “What do you want for your birthday?”
“Oh.” Kyle leaned back in his chair, swirling his cup of coffee. (Kyle took his with no cream, but several heaping spoonfuls of sugar.) “You know-”
Stan totally knew. Just get me something nice, he heard in his head. He studied Kyle, the way he crossed his ankles at the breakfast table and his matchstick jeans were rolled up a short fist-width higher than his ankles and the way his hair kept falling into his eyes while he thought. Stan wanted to sweep away the coffee and the placemats and the granola and fling Kyle’s long, wide-hipped body onto the table and just ravage him. But he didn’t, because it was 7:50 in the morning and he was due at work in an hour, plus Kyle looked so excellent and put-together and proud of himself that it was not worth Stan’s time to refuse to hear Kyle’s predictable birthday wish.
Of course, here was where Kyle went off-book. “You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, this year,” he said. “And I think it might be nice if you rimmed me.”
“Sure, okay, I’ll make a reservation at Elway’s and-”
“Stan, you didn’t hear me,” Kyle said. He cleared his throat. “I said I would like you to eat me out for my birthday.” Kyle then blushed furiously, his cheeks reddening like he’d been sitting in the sun for an hour. He grinned stupidly and lowered his head into his bowl, where he began to scoop food into his mouth as means of distraction.
Stan was now staring at Kyle as if he were an assaulting stranger. “What?”
“I said-”
“I heard what you said,” Stan insisted, “the second time, anyway.”
“Oh, yes. Well, you’re familiar with the concept, it’s rimming, and that’s - what’s that I want,” Kyle finished very quietly, voice barely a whisper.
“You want me to what you?” Stan repeated.
“Eat me out,” Kyle replied.
“You, Kyle Broflovski.”
“Yes.” Now Kyle just seemed annoyed. “Are you playing some kind of game? You asked me what I wanted for my birthday.”
“Yeah, I meant like a watch or, I don’t know, like what you got me for my birthday.” For Stan’s most recent birthday, Kyle had bought him a year’s subscription to the NFL channel.
“Oh, screw you, you just wanted me to be like ‘I don’t know’ so you could take me to that crappy steakhouse you like.”
“But don’t you want steak?”
“Sure. Can’t I have both?”
Stan was absolutely vexed.
“You want both steak…and a…”
“A rimjob,” Kyle said.
“I don’t - Jesus, Kyle, this is too much, I gotta go.” Stan pushed away his half-eaten breakfast, took another sip of thick, cooling coffee, and slid his chair away from the table.
Kyle sighed, and put his elbows on the table, not without narrowly missing his parfait and muttering, “Oh, son of a bitch.” He shook his head and asked, “What are you doing today?”
Stan sighed, relieved that the conversation had returned to something resembling normalcy after its very sudden detour into the mystical depths of Kyle’s ass. “I have meetings, like, wall-to-wall, until lunch. Then a lunch meeting. But it’s Friday, I guess, so at least I can leave after lunch.” (Stan had very carefully selected his life’s calling, assistant director of a small publishing house that specialized in Braille romance novels, on the basis of the ability to take “Summer Fridays” from April to October.) “Why, what are you doing?”
“Um.” Kyle leaned back in his chair, tenting his fingers, ankles still locked. “I need to help some housewife find her G-spot.”
“Why do women pay you for that, again?”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “Experiential familiarity with the female reproductive anatomy is really secondary to being able to invent, at a moment’s notice, some kind of perverse psychological therapeutic bullshit.”
“So.” Stan was rising his plate, trying to both pay attention and talk toward Kyle at the same time. “What kind of therapeutic bullshit is rimming?”
“That’s a good question. Remind me to answer it when you get home.”
Stan left for the day, not without kissing Kyle farewell.
“Think about my ass, Stan,” Kyle said at the front door, leaning against the frame post-coitally. “Think about all the things it’s done for you over the years. And - and think about all the things you can do for it. But mostly, I guess, think about this-it’s my birthday, Stanley, and I want it.”
Waggling his hips as he trailed into the house, Kyle slammed the door. Stan was left in the front yard, with his messenger bag slung over his shoulder and his umbrella in his hand, trying to will away an erection that, unfortunately, insisted itself at inopportune times throughout the rest of the morning.
~
Stan came home with a mountain of galleys, and left them on the staircase. He found Kyle sitting on the back deck, listening to something with headphones on and reading yesterday’s Financial Times. Kyle was the only person Stan knew who was embarrassed to be seen reading a pink newspaper in public. Everyone else had already gotten over it, because they weren’t 12 anymore.
“Hey,” he said, trying to get Kyle’s attention. Although it was not that hot out yet in the season, the sun beat down hard that day, and Stan took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.
Kyle looked up at him, pulling the buds from his ears and not quite smiling. “Hi,” he said, folding up the paper and setting it aside, next to a can of cran-raspberry La Croix. “How’s work?”
“Uh.” Stan sat down in an adirondack. He always sat on the very edge, uncomfortable if he leaned all the way back and sank into the groove of the chair. “Oh, I don’t know, it was fine. I guess meetings are fine. What am I talking about? It sucked, but whatever. That’s work. I brought him like eight years’ worth of galleys to sign off on.”
“Braille galleys.” Kyle rolled his eyes.
“You know, blind people need to read, too.”
“Why can’t they just listen to audiobooks?”
“I don’t know, Kyle, why can’t you just listen to audiobooks?”
“I do if I’m on a long drive,” Kyle said. Stan very well knew this, as they took most of their long drives together, to Boise, to visit Stan’s sister. There was not much in Boise, but she had gone to school up there and met some guy from Boise, had three children and refused to leave. Each time they visited, Kyle began the trip by putting all of his effort into masking his disdain for this town and its residents and their flat accents and brittle pride in the most boring things, like baroque-looking terra cotta cornices and pistachio gelato. Within a day he’d typically become exhausted and just hate everything openly. It did occur to him that perhaps someone who chose to live in a suburb best known for an infamous teenage massacre should refrain from judging other towns, but it wasn’t like he pretended Littleton was something that it wasn’t, namely, interesting.
Stan grabbed Kyle’s drink off of the teak table and swallowed about half of it in one gulp. Commuting was thirsty business. “Did you find the G-spot?” he asked, putting it back down and hunching over on the edge of his chair.
“Oh, I know where the G-spot is,” Kyle said. He made a nauseating come-hither gesture with his two fingers, waggling them back and forth. “That sort of patchy, sponge kind of place on the top of the vagina-”
Stan interrupted him. “Yeah, that’s enough.”
“Well, anatomically it’s there in all women. But everyone’s slightly different, so it’s not that I have to show women where this thing is. I more sort of talked her through why she wanted to find it, what she was going to do if she found it. Everyone’s a little different, a little sexually different. You know?”
Stan knew. He didn’t care. People who weren’t Kyle didn’t much interest him, sexually or otherwise.
“Well, that’s what I did, I don’t know, I like to think it helped.” Kyle shrugged. “Do you think you can not be a dick for the rest of the day?”
“How am I being a dick?”
“You’re giving me that look, that disgusted look. It’s a drag and I don’t have to sit here if you’re going to be pissy.”
“Well, what do you want me to look like?” Stan asked. “I mean, let’s just sit here and you can tell me all about sticking your sick little fingers in some woman’s vagina.”
“Fuck you! I’ve never put my fingers in any woman’s vagina!”
“Then how the fuck do you find the G-spot?”
“I talk them through it! Jesus Christ!”
Stan was not sure if he believed that, though. “You’re a demented little hooker, aren’t you?”
“Christ, no, I’m a fucking therapist, I got a master’s degree in social work, not - not touching messed-up people’s junk!”
“Kyle.” Stan said it like he was breathing. “You look great.”
Cocking his head, Kyle said, “Really?” He looked down at his sneakers, bright red and crisp and starchy. They seemed so American to him. So wholesome. His eyes traveled up long legs, thin legs; Kyle was lanky and his only graces were in his eyes and his elbows. His legs, crossed at the knee, swayed and knocked into each other.
“Yes, really.” Stan got off of his chair, and crawled across the deck.
Kyle wondered for a moment if maybe there weren’t splinters in the wood, even though they had had it stained and sealed, and even though Stan had just been sitting in a wooden chair, also liable to give him splinters.
“Hi,” Stan said, burying his face in Kyle’s knees and wrapping his arms around Kyle’s waist.
“Hey.” Kyle let his hands loose into Stan’s hair, thick and dark and straight and messy. Stan embodied such virility, sometimes it made Kyle want to cry. Why would someone so excellent want to be with someone so mawkish? Kyle didn’t think Stan was perfect, but insecurity plagued him just the same. They were so unmatched, the trivialities of their shared life so bracing.
The sun was slipping behind a cloud, a fat white one, totally unthreatening. Their garden wasn’t very big, but they cultivated it together. Each autumn they put in more bulbs, more shrubs, ones of pinkish leaves and ones with tiny white flowers. They were fenced-in with a tall, obstructing fence, which they felt kept the neighbors from gawking at them. Kyle was insecure about that, too; he didn’t know what his neighbors thought two men did together in the privacy of their own garden, but he didn’t want to give them any way to find out. Kyle and Stan were friends with them, these neighbors; an expectant couple down the street, an older couple with a daughter out of college who lived at home, unable to find work, and a young family about their age, with toddler twins and an infant. There were other neighbors, but these were the open-minded ones Kyle invited to dinner sometimes, the ones who appreciated homemade bread and maybe herb and dandelion green salad.
Stan had a very good job, not in the sense that it made him rich, but in the sense that he enjoyed it and it treated him well. Kyle, on the other hand, generally told his neighbors, or anyone who asked, that he was a homemaker. He was not sure if that was any better or much worse than being a sex therapist, but again, it was a conversation he didn’t need to have. His own mother, at first in ignorance and now passive-aggressively, told her friends he was a ‘sex worker.’ Anyone who knew how to spell “Broflovski” would find his website very easily, as there were only three other Broflovskis in Colorado, and he was related to all of them. His father and brother were both lawyers. Well, his brother was in law school. His mother was not really on the internet, like as a concept. She was actually a homemaker.
No one climbs across a wooden deck on hands and knees just to hug someone else’s abdomen, and Stan was not about to buck this. He lifted Kyle’s shirt and kissed up and down Kyle’s pale flesh, leaving wet patches that cooled when the air hit them, evaporating too slow for Kyle’s liking. The hem of Kyle’s shirt caught in Stan’s thick hair and mussed it, not that Stan was of a mind to care about it. His fingers left the small of Kyle’s back and migrated lower, tensing, knowing. Kyle shifted his legs, widening them, drawing his shirt down lower on the back of Stan’s head and grasping for the button-fly of his jeans, selvedge indigo denim.
Kyle wore briefs, tight black ones, high-legged with a thick elastic waistband. Kyle did not think much about what sort of underwear he wore. He thought much more often about what sort of underwear Stan should wear, as he bought Stan’s underwear and had complete control over the enterprise. So Stan wore boxer-briefs, or had been wearing them lately, as Kyle enjoyed the way they seemed to make Stan’s thighs look larger, not fleshier but more powerful, masculine and raw. Kyle had in the past purchased for Stan pink briefs and turquoise briefs, all sorts of colors, with white trim. It was interesting but hardly sexy, perhaps a bit too jocular for their life now. It reminded Kyle of his parents’ basement, the basement rec rooms of their friends’ parents, beer pong and long autumn nights over high school four-day weekends, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. That wouldn’t do.
Stan used his teeth a lot, less because it was a turn-on of Kyle’s than because he was lazy and Kyle didn’t so much mind it. Not biting, just dragging them along bits and pieces of Kyle’s warm skin. Kyle was trying to get his briefs down his thighs, but he was trapped by the jeans around his knees, and Stan’s grasp of his legs.
“Do it already,” Kyle said, managing to free his dick from its confines. It wobbled, hitting Stan’s chin, with no natural place to fall. Kyle was glad he hadn’t sat down in the adirondack when he’d come outside to soak in the sun. Being fair-skinned and averse to freckling, he had rubbed in a layer of thin sun screen across his nose, forehead, chin, and cheeks; he could feel it sweating off his face, running into his pores, clogging them. It stung.
Stan’s hands found Kyle’s cock, drawing it out. He looked up, grinning. “I love you,” he said. It was the stupid sort of thing he would say at a time like this. “You look so good, you know.”
“I know you love me,” Kyle replied. He tried to inch his hips off the chair. He wasn’t successful, but Stan got the idea, taking most of Kyle’s cock into his mouth, like he’d been born with it in there. It was practically true. Kyle wasn’t sure if he looked good, with greasy sweat running down his cheeks and neck, but the longer Stan’s mouth was on him the less he thought about it, until he was struggling to spread his legs again, begging, “Fingers,” which out of context would be an awkward thing to pant about, but this was not a rare request.
With his hands, Stan dragged Kyle to the edge of his seat, grasping the thing stuck inside of Kyle. It was a butt plug, not large but conspicuous; it was turquoise. Stan wiped his mouth. “How long has this been here?” he asked.
“This morning,” Kyle said.
“You want me to take it out?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Fingers. Please, come on, don’t leave me like this-”
“Okay, okay.” In one fluid movement the plug was out, and Stan set it aside, next to the La Croix can. He curled his two fingers into a crook and wormed them into Kyle, where the plug had been. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” Kyle sank back as far as he could go.
Stan followed, his mouth full, his fingers working against soft tissue. When Kyle came, Stan swallowed it, most of it, sparing it no thought at all. He withdrew his fingers, grabbing Kyle’s hips, burying his nose in Kyle’s shuddering belly, but only for a moment. Stan got up, fussing with the sleeves of his shirt, standing so that his erection, bound against his thigh by his pants and boxer-briefs, was visible to Kyle. He bent over. “I love you,” he repeated. He sank his lips into Kyle’s, felt Kyle’s lips trembling, moving against his.
Kyle withdrew, looking down at his lap. “Oh, god,” he said, shifting so he could pull up his pants and underwear, unconcerned about the mess, the butt plug and the tipped soda can and the fact that as high as their fence was, the neighbors’ bedroom windows were higher than any fence. “That was nice. Unexpected. Nice. Thank you.”
“You don’t have to say thank you.” Stan crossed his arm, putting his weight on his back leg so he could stress the prominence of his erection. Kyle was staring at it, fixated on it. But he wasn’t doing anything other than staring. So Stan took it upon himself to ask, “What’s up with that butt plug?”
“What?” Kyle shook his head, as if trying to stave off tiredness. He was, suddenly, very sleepy. “Oh, the plug. Yeah. I don’t know, it feels nice.”
“But like, were you seriously going to wear that all day?”
Kyle shrugged. “Probably not too much longer.” He reached out, up to Stan. “I want to go upstairs.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Nothing, really.”
Kyle was surprised at Stan’s strength, that Stan would fold Kyle up into his arms, bridal-style, and carry him upstairs. Kyle shouldn’t have been surprised, though; he knew Stan was strong. He found himself falling in love with the novelty of it, even if Stan was letting his feet and shoulders knock against the banister and the wall, respectively.
Kyle was still wearing his sneakers when Stan laid him on the bed, and crawled in next to Kyle’s limp form, arms around Kyle’s waist and lips at the arch of Kyle’s neck where it left his shoulder.
“Come on,” Stan whispered, bringing his hips as close to Kyle’s as possible. “I’ve got something for you.”
The corniness of that line brought Kyle right out of it. He was trying to doze, but this made him roll over, look Stan in the eyes, and say, “What, you want to have sex with me?”
Stan reached out, brushing his fingers, the ones that had just been inside of Kyle, against Kyle’s cheek. “Yeah.”
“Sorry.” Kyle sat up, leaning over to untie his shoes. “Not interested.”
The look of shock and disappointment on Stan’s face was priceless. “Why not?”
Kyle kicked off his shoes, letting them drop, one after the other, onto the floor. “Well, I don’t know,” he said, as if he didn’t know perfectly. “What are you going to get me for my birthday?”
“Uh.” Stan was finding it difficult to think straight with all of the oxygen in his body surging away from his brain. “Well, I made a reservation at Fruition.” This was true.
“What? That’s so fancy! Why?”
“Why?” Stan felt dazed; he was sitting on his bed with an erection threatening to split the seams on his boxer-briefs, yet all Kyle wanted to do was talk about where they were going to eat dinner next week. “You didn’t seem that into Elway’s-”
“I love Elway’s!”
“That’s not that you said.” It was taking serious self-restraint for Stan to keep from rolling over and just jerking himself off. All morning long, all he could think about was Kyle’s perfect ass, Kyle’s hip cocked against the doorway, how Kyle looked when he lay on his back arching his behind off the mattress, that symmetrical ass split open, beckoning Stan toward it. All Stan could do while his line editors loaded him down with galleys was remind himself how good it would feel to sink inside that warm, tight ass, again and again.
And here they were, talking about restaurants.
“I want to go to Elway’s! We always go there for my birthday and that’s what I want to do!”
“Fine, then, we can go there.” Stan shrugged. “I seriously don’t give a shit. Just tell me where and I’ll make a plan. Seriously. Just, for the love of god, I’ve been hard for like three hours. Please, Kyle. Please.” Stan clasped his hands together, shaking them in Kyle’s face. Maybe Kyle would find this adorable.
With one tentative hand, Kyle palmed Stan’s cock through his pants. “Mmm, I can see that. Yeah.”
Stan’s fists dropped to his sides. He tried to shift his hips more directly into Kyle’s grasping fingers.
Kyle pulled away. “I told you what I want for my birthday. You didn’t say yes or no.”
“You didn’t tell me why you wanted … that.”
“Maybe I just think it would feel good.”
“Well,” said Stan, his words breathy and short, all of his focus on figuring out the quickest way to attain sexual relief, “maybe I don’t want to do it at all.”
With both hands, Kyle found Stan’s ears, the ends of his dark hair, thick and glossy and uneven. Kyle hated having his own hair touched, hated being reminded it was there. He often contemplated shearing it all off to a close crop, as he had once done in college, but that hadn’t suited him either; without a lot of hair he had too much nose, too much lip. Kyle’s hair bound his face together; when Kyle looked at Stan’s face, Stan’s hair between his fingers, he knew it was a miracle that Stan didn’t push him away, get off the bed, leave forever. It suddenly felt imperative that they kiss, so Kyle leaned in and swept Stan’s tongue with his own, tasting the lingering flush of his own seed in the cracks of Stan’s lips and between his teeth. Or maybe Kyle was imagining that; maybe while Stan lusted his mouth watered and any little bits were swallowed away. Like it mattered, like it wasn’t completely disgusting.
“Stan.” Kyle whimpered it against his lips.
Stan responded with, “Kyle,” the only correct answer. “I want you so much.”
“Yeah, I know.” Kyle’s fingers tightened against Stan’s skull, ran down his cheeks. “I can’t believe you cut yourself shaving.”
“What? Why?”
Kyle didn’t answer. He pecked Stan on the lips again, quick and dry. Then he slipped off the bed, heart racing, to stumble into the bathroom. Behind him, the door snapped shut.
Back on their bed, Stan pulled his shirt from the waist of his slacks. He felt the pressing need to touch himself, without pausing to bother unbuttoning his shirt. As he freed his erection, he heard the shower begin to run.
~
Wandering downstairs after an unplanned nap of several hours, Stan noticed how the light fell in slats through the blinds on the living room floor; it was twilight, and he had been asleep for far too long. His galleys were still on the bottom step, piled up right were he’d left them, his sunglasses on top of the stack. Stan stepped gingerly over this mess and turned on the foyer light, a tiny gingham-shaded chandelier that had come with the house. Kyle kept saying he wanted to get rid of it, but they furnished their home piece-by-piece, and lighting wasn’t a high priority. Stan agreed that it was ugly, and now that he’d put in compact fluorescent bulbs, it didn’t even light up properly for a minute or two. But the sun was not yet vanquished; it was not that dim in the house. Stan knew Kyle would want him to lower every shade and shut all the curtains, but he wasn’t in the mood; he liked being able to see outside.
Kyle was sitting at the end of the peninsula counter in the kitchen, reading the current Financial Times and drinking an iced coffee. “Hi,” he said dreamily, folding up the paper and pushing it aside. “Someone’s up.” He lifted the curvaceous glass, all milky tan coffee and vintage-shaped ice cubes, bringing the straw to his lips and closing them in a sinister smile. He shut his eyes. He took a sip.
Stan noticed three things airing out on the drying rack next to the sink: a mortal, a pestle, and Kyle’s butt plug. “Oh, cut it out,” Stan scoffed, turning on the lights over the peninsula and kitchen sink, also compact fluorescents. “You look ridiculous.” He padded over to the head of the kitchen table in his bare feet, falling into the chair. “I can’t believe I slept that long.”
“You were just all tuckered out.”
“Kyle,” said Stan. “Shut the fuck up.” He rubbed his eyes, yawning.
Kyle slipped off of his stool and slid into Stan’s lap, tucking his sneakers under his thighs. Stan’s arms wrapped around Kyle’s waist and hips, rocking them back and forth for a moment. Then Kyle said, “You have a nice little wank, huh?” and Stan stopped.
“Whatever.” Stan’s words were bitter, but he hugged Kyle tighter to his chest. “I don’t need you to get off.”
“But you want me.”
“Maybe.”
“What if I said I needed you, would that make it better?”
“Yeah.”
Pale arms in striped sleeves wrapped around Stan’s shoulders.
“What’s for dinner?” Stan asked.
“Oh, who fucking knows, I don’t want to cook.”
“I’ll cook,” Stan offered.
“I want to go out.”
“Okay. Where do you want to go? I’d like one of those burgers that’s actually made with two grilled cheese sandwiches instead of buns.”
Kyle wrinkled his nose. “I was actually thinking Vietnamese.”
“Fair enough.” Stan stood, carrying Kyle along with him, even all the way up the stairs. Briefly, Kyle wondered how he’d been walking all these years, what with Stan’s accommodating arms so broad, capable, generous. But at the top of the stairs, Stan deposited Kyle on his feet and said, “Here you go,” disappearing behind a closet door to change pants and boxer-briefs.
“Do you want to drive?” Kyle asked, sticking his head into their walk-in closet.
Stan was mid-change, one leg in a pair of boxer-briefs, cock limp against his thigh. “Yeah, no shit I want to drive. You drive like my dad,” meaning no matter what the speed limit, Kyle drove 50 percent faster; if they were on a stretch of deserted highway, Kyle raced against no one like his life depended on it. On road trips to Boise, this was a boon; suburban Denver, on the other hand, was full of small children and, to Kyle’s utter annoyance, traffic cops.
Having spent hours of his life in traffic school, Kyle conceded that Stan should drive, and threw on a navy sweatshirt over his thin boat-neck T. All morning and afternoon Kyle had been catching glimpses of himself in the mirror, feeling quite stylish, like a knowing teenage French girl buying a morning slice of bread with jam and butter from a tabac on some outer arrondissement street corner. But now the front of his body said Denver Pride Fest and the back said Sponsored by the GLBT Center of Colorado. Instantly, Kyle felt 14 years old, trapped in a car and subject to Stan’s poky grandma driving.
Continued here.