Bird Came Down

You think that I go home at night

Take off my clothes, turn out the lights

But I burn letters that I write

To you, to make you love me

-Liz Phair

“You want a cigarette?” he said.

“Yes,” Felix said.

They sat in his kitchen. For a long time they had been talking back and forth, but never until this night, was he in Felix’s house.

“I love Marlboros,” Felix said, looking on the cigarette, as he lit his and poured his guest a drink.

“This is good Scotch.”

“It’s decent Scotch,” Felix said.

“Damn I like your apartment.

Felix looked at him. Little red goatee. Feed cap, good manners, good teeth, marmalade hair.

“I just got back from Baltimore,” he told Felix. “You ever see The Wire?”

“That was my show! Well, up till the last season.”

“The last season was shit, the fourth season wasn’t much either.”

“No, no,” Felix differed, “it was alright. But, really, they could have just stopped with season three, after they killed Idris Elba. But… is Baltimore really like that.”

“Shit,” Felix’s friend pulled off his hat and exhaled a jet of smoke. “Ten times worse.”

Felix laughed.

They kept smoking and drinking, but not really needing to talk more, comfortable in the two in the morning space where everything was possible.

When the Scotch was done and they had both smoked, Felix said, “Well, what next?”

“I don’t know,” the guy from Baltimore replied, comfortably. “What do you want to be next?”

Faint heart never won…. Well, never won anything. And he was here, after a year of talking and missed opportunity and there was no need for another missed opportunity, so Felix reached for the button of Baltimore’s slightly baggy jeans, and he unbuttoned them and unzipped them as Baltimore opened his legs. Felix got down on his knees and reaching under Baltimore’s ass, pulled down his underwear. He had nice thighs, nice flat stomach. He was the color of strawberries and vanilla and his cock up as Felix took it in his mouth. Two a am and a Scotch and no noise, no sound, and they were in his kitchen on the little sofa in the kitchen like this. He felt Baltimore’s hands softly on his head, then on his shoulder, shallow breaths escaping and then moans. This magic that people talked about and dreamed of so often did happen. You didn’t need cameras or a magnificent body, just a good attitude and a will and the ability to follow through with things. Eventually this thing where mind disappeared and it was only two people feeling together, happened.

Felix stopped. He turned his head to the darkness of the room in his studio he used as office, bedroom and den.

“The bed is ready,” he said. “Shall we?”

Weakly, Baltimore nodded.

After a while you knew what worked, what did not, and how not to humiliate yourself or waste your time. You found someone like gold, someone like Baltimore who was never going to be a boyfriend, but never going to be an asshole either. Who brought the cigarettes and drank the Scotch before, and after the two of you lay naked, half asleep, covered in come, redressed, and had two more cigarettes saying:

“Goddamn, you got your life together. I need to get my shit together too.”

“It’s not even close to being together,” Felix said. “And who knows what it’ll be like tomorrow?”

In time Felix walked him out and they went down the seven floors in the jiggity elevator.

“Are you sure this goddamn thing won’t break?” Baltimore said.

“Well, I’m never really sure of anything,” Felix said.

A few minutes later he was back in the four am blackness of his apartment, his body still humming with the memory of sex, and he was undressing and climbing into bed.

He had been an only child and fairly sheltered at that, largely friendless. Once, when he had been out with his father he declared, “I like that man.”

Sourly, his father had said, “You like everybody.”

Felix had been seventeen and not very sexual at all. When he was eighteen he had thrown himself into college life, into knowing as many people as possible, and being involved in as many things as he could. Late blooming, he had masturbated for the first time at eighteen. He didn’t know it was happening, his hand was down there and nothing had ever happened in his late blooming body, but that day something did. Wet dreams meant little, He wasn’t awake to feel what they did, just to see their results. This was his first orgasm, and he never tired of them.

The sexual encounter, in the night, past midnight, before the sun, was the most enchanted of times, the promise of meeting, of touch, and the possibility of orgasm. Better than his own coming, was Baltimore’s, when the guy in jeans in ball cap, nervous of being undressed, had been naked and lean and white in the moonlight, beautiful beside him, and leaning over him, hard arched, coming in long, wet jets of semen, sighing against him, leaving Felix’s stomach and chest hot and slick with his presence. There was no such thing as casual or empty sex. All sex was ceremony, Sex was always full and fully loaded.

ONE DAY, AFTER HE had been hired at the Marion Arms, he was laying out a white tarp and spray painting the walls of a corridor when Felix came walking down the hall and he apologized, “You can come around. Just let me move this right out your way.”

“It isn’t necessary,” Felix said, “I’ll just walk downstairs and come back the other way.”

“Are you sure?”

Felix had stopped, because he knew the boy. He had to think a while and get up close to him and then he realized he had seen him naked, on Adam4Adam with the screenname: Orange Hat and the tagline: When you see me, say you know what the Orange Hat is for.

“Absolutely,” Felix said, and when he came back around, Joey said, “I’m Joey,” and Felix said, “Felix. Pleased to meet you,” and doffed his fedora.

He wasn’t going to bring up orange hats today.

When Max was fixing the drain, Felix came into the kitchen with its black and white check pattern and saw Max’s legs hanging out of the sink.

“Joey not here?”

“Joey’s downstairs,” Max said, his voice echoing from under the sink.

It had been a month since Felix met Joey, and he had hoped to see him again.

“Um,” Felix said. “Well, that’s too bad. Tell him I saw him the other night.”

“Where?”

“Just tell him, Felix said, “I know what Orange Hat means.”

By the end of the day there was a knock at the door and Felix wasn’t surprised when Joey was standing there looking jumpy and amazingly hot.

“Whaddid you mean by…. Orange Hat.”

“I mean I saw you on the net. I saw your—”

Joey put a finger to his lips and pressed inside the apartment, closing the door behind him.

“You can’t say shit like that?”

Felix raised his eyebrow.

“Were you trying to make me feel weird. Or embarrassed?”

“No,” Felix said. “I was trying to tell you I want you.”

The first time Felix and Joey had sex, they were sitting on the couch and Joey said, “So whaddo you wanna do?” and Felix put his hand on Joey’s thigh, and then Joey put his hand on Felix’s and Felix moved closer. He began to massage Joey’s thigh, and then he opened up the boy’s shorts, and started to stroke his dick through his underwear. Joey made a moan like a cat purr and leaned his beautiful head against Felix’s shoulder, opening his mouth a little, his green eyes closing into slits. His mouth reached up for Felix’s the same time Felix squeezed his dick, and when Joey turned and thrust his tongue in Felix’s mouth, the flat of Felix’s hand held Joey’s balls, hot and hanging.

Felix went to his knees because he knew Joey couldn’t ask, ahd he pulled down his shorts and his briefs, and pulled Joey into his mouth. He was firm and heavy, large and growing larger.

“Felix,” he moaned, stroking Felix’s hair. “Felix.”

But Felix couldn’t get enough of it. A girlfriend of his said that the day a bride went down the aisle the man smiled because he was coming toward her, but she smiled because she never had to give another blowjob. But every since his first man, ever since Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos, he’d loved a cock, large, fat, throbbing with life in his mouth, loved the way that working his tongue around could elicit the deepest pleasure, loved how Joey, feeling the pleasure, was eager to return it, was on his knees now.

They were both naked and pulling out the bed, then on the bed, twisting together. Joey pulled Felix’s face up. It wasn’t just head he wanted. He wanted eyes and arms and lips and tongues and kindness. He wanted to look up at Felix in love and pull his face down and kiss him, press his body up into a man who wasn’t Thomas Frushour, and wasn’t the others, quickly forgotten, who slaked the need.

In the end he asked Felix to fuck him, but this was easier said than done. They’d never done it before and so it was just fumbling around, but happy fumbling. Joey was so hard and Felix had already come all over his stomach. They had stopped to relax and hold each other after this. Now Felix, in a pinch, took Vaseline and oil and rubbed it over Joey’s swollen cock. Joey knew just what to do, He fitted himself tightly between Felix’s thighs and they glided together, each time Joey moaning in the shock of his pleasure.

“Caress my ass?” Joey begged.

He didn’t have to beg. Thin as Joey looked, he was well built with healthy thighs and buttocks that longed to be stroked, caressed massaged. Felix had already eaten him out. He thrust his finger in the boy’s ass and massaged his asshole.

“Ohhh, fuck!” Joey cried, his dick jumping when Felix did that.

So Felix kept doing it, rubbing his hands up and down Joey’s back, caressing his shoulders, running his hands through his hair, pulling his face down to kiss him, running his hands back down.

“I’m about to…” he began, his voice shallow.

“It’s okay,” Felix said, putting his hand on Joey’s cheek.

“But I’m about to…”

“Do it.”

With a relieved groan, Joey came, and Felix felt the load, hot and thick between his thighs. He kept pressing his dick between Felix’s thighs until everything was spilled out, and Joey came out, the length of his cock red and wet.

They lay side by side, chests heaving, bodies slick, and Joey grinned and looked up at Felix in friendship. The two of them laughed, and suddenly Joey lay on his side and pressed his mouth to Felix’s.

“Do you think we can do this again?” he asked.

“We can do this whenever you want,” Felix told him.