Bird Came Down

So when this story was posted it was at a 9.4 and then it ended up at 8.7 which doesn't mean much, but when you add up the number of votes means someone is being a troll and giving low marks to a story you've been reading for thirteen chapters.

THERE WAS A limit to Thomas Frushour’s love. Tom had no interest in being sodomized, and didn’t offer his ass up to Joey. Once Joey asked, and Tom said, in a gentle way, “I don’t know if I want to do that, Joey.”

“But you do it to me.”

“But you enjoy it,” Tom said.

Joey wanted to protest, but realized that he did enjoy it. Even that first time when there had been discomfort and pain. When it was over, Joey kept sitting on the toilet waiting for something to come out. Still, he thought there was some lack of logic in Tom’s argument; only he couldn’t point it out.

Meanwhile, for the rest of that year, up until Joey was fourteen, he continued to have a relationship with Tom Frushour. It left the equipment room and went into Tom’s house at sleepovers, or sometimes when his parents were away. It never occurred to Joey to have Tom over to his house. The fact that Tom wouldn’t let Joey fuck him sat in Joey’s head, a ghost of the knowledge that things were not equal between them. But Tom was two years older, after all, and in everything else, sexually and otherwise, Tom was equal, or at least as equal as Joey could have expected him to be.

One night Tom called Joey up and asked him if he could come over.

Between the Flowers’ house and Tom’s house was a stretch of pine lined road, a little country where the northern end of town was yet to be developed. Next came the slightly larger and newer houses of East End where Tom lived.

“Just come on in,” Tom had told him over the phone. “My folks are gone.”

Joey parked his bike on the new black asphalt driveway, and he did just come in. He called Tom’s name, but Tom didn’t answer. He went into the kitchen, which was built over the garage on a bridge connecting the lower level to the top level of the house, and he poured himself a glass of orange juice, drank half of it, and then went up to Tom’s room.

He heard noises, but they didn’t make any sense. Not because he didn’t know what they were, but because he knew exactly what they were. It made no sense for them to be coming from Tom’s room if Joey wasn’t there with him. They were loud and whimpering, Tom’s voice was at least.

And then he must have gathered up his nerve, and he went in there and there was Tom who wouldn’t be fucked, wild hair tousled and pulled, being fucked, by a slightly older guy, a guy with a little diamond stud earring, and slick with sweat, like someone from one of the twink porns. His eyes were spaced out with the joy of fucking, and Tom’s red face looked out and saw Joey, but there was no shame. There was just this desperate motioning with his hand.

Joey came into the room, half dizzy. The guy fucking Tom stopped. The world seemed to have stopped. Nothing made much sense, even less sense than usual.

“You Joey?” the guy said.

He nodded.

He pulled out of Tom, and Tom whimpered while this guy sat on the edge of the bed with beautiful thighs and chiseled chest. He must have been seventeen or eighteen, and Tom was lying on his side, curled up and not in control. He said, as the guy took out a lighter and lit a marijuana pipe:

“This is my cousin, Cage.”

Without any explanation of himself, Cousin Cage, letting smoke leak out of his mouth and nostrils said, “Tom says you like to fuck. I’d been telling him I’d like to try out a three way or somethin’ like that.

“You cool with that?”

Joey thought that this boy with the buzzed body, with the light brown hair on his face and brown lashes, with his hazel eyes, was the most beautiful guy he’d ever seen, that he definitely wanted to have sex with him, that this was so cool, like something he’d seen in movies, and the smoke, leaked slowly out of Cage’s nose.

But when he looked at him again, Joey realized with complete clarity that this definitely was not cool with him. That he did not want to have sex with two people at once, who were related to each other, who were.... there was something wrong with all of this.

But he did not say no.

The next day was the first time that Joey ever felt like he was a horrible person. During the whole dizzying affair with Tom Frushour he never felt guilty. He had the sense not to run around telling everyone or anyone for that matter, but he never felt like there was something at the root of him that was bad, that was tainted. But that night Tom and his cousin had seen the same porno clips he had seen and, apparently, had imagined him as the boy in the middle, the one who was being fucked in the ass by one, sucking the other, while they talked over him and smacked his ass and said, “You like that, bitch. Don’t you? Bitch likes to suck that dick.”

That was something he didn’t live down. He didn’t live down the fact that he hadn’t been forced into being disgraced, but he’d consented anyway.

What Joey kept chasing around was the question of identity. What was he to Tom? He felt betrayed. He was angry, but the anger was directed toward himself. Who would have done what he did? Who would have let it happen? Who would let their boyfriend do that to them? But then Tom was not his boyfriend. When had Tom ever said, “I love you, Joey,” or when, in all the times when he was down on his knees, sucking Tom’s dick, had he ever thought of asking, “Do you love me?”? Had he ever asked for some type of assurance? Even now, a few years later, Joey didn’t know what to call Tom. He had imagined that things were equal between them, but now, as an adult, Joey looked back and saw it differently. Tom, latently gay and unable to admit it, had seen someone a little younger he could experiment with, and this person, Joey, had offered no resistance, had let Tom do everything he wanted, and had done to him everything he wanted with no messy questions, no, “Are we gay?” or “Are we a couple?” just simple capitulation to all of Tom’s sexual whims.

There was no reason, Joey realized, that Tom should have told Joey, “I like to have sex with my cousin,” or that, “me and my cousin talk about you and having a three way with you.” In fact, knowing Tom, there was no reason Joey should have been surprised by anything about him. What Joey was surprised about, though, was the level of his own stupidity.
After it was over, and Joey was lying there almost bored by the sight of Cage’s thick and magnificent dick which just sat there while Cage lay on the bed, smoking pot, Tom’s cousin offered him a toke that Joey refused.

“I’m not gay,” he said. “I just like to do this now and again.”

Tom was chuckling behind Joey. Joey could almost see Tom, naked, reaching across him for the pipe. He had a moment upon a moment upon another moment of clarity.

This Cage was a sad person and so was Tom, and so was he if he kept this up, this skulking. If enjoying having sex with your male cousin on a regular basis and being a seventeen year old having three ways with a fifteen year old and a fourteen year old boy didn’t make you gay, what did?

And what was Joey to Tom? Certainly any hazy idea of being a boyfriend was dead right here on this bed.

One of the Frushour cousins lightly farted, and it left the earthy smell appropriate to Joey’s discovery.

That was the end of Thomas Frushour, and for high school, Joey ended up at Calverton, where Scott had graduated eight years earlier. He joined the football team, and when Molly Taghon introduced herself to him, he was so convinced that guys were a bad idea that he never thought he would be with one again. He was sure the experience of Thomas Frushour had burnt him and so, Homecoming weekend, when he was fifteen, he fucked Molly on the football field after the game and entered the world of proper sex, the world where boys went with girls and didn’t end up with the things happening to them that had happened to him. That old memories and desires would assert themselves, that he would eventually seek out the attention of other boys now and again, he had not foreseen. Molly wore his jacket, and by junior year she wore his ring. Things did not work out with them, and this left him free to meet boys. Once, when he and some guy in a trailer park were sitting up naked on a sofa, the guy asked him, “So, how does this whole bisexual thing work out?”

“It’s like the best of both worlds. Why limit yourself?”

He’d been with this guy a year before, the same time he’d broken up with Molly, and the sex had been so hot, so passionate, so unsafe, he had refused the guy’s calls and not answered his emails afterward. He couldn’t go back to the feelings that had opened him up. And then, one day, after he had been hired at the Maron Arms, he was laying out a white tarp and spray painting the walls of a corridor when Felix Owens 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 Feli 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 had 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 had raised an eyebrow.

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

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