SACRAMENT
PART ONE
Darius, in fact, had no client coming, and the fact that he’d told this lie depressed him. He thought of going to his stash and getting high, but he had told himself almost twenty years ago that drugs was never a way out of depression, and this had served him well. A good shower was the way out of it and maybe a nap, and then he might take the 151 and roll around on the slowly trawling bus down Sheridan until it passed through Buena Park, down and then the green hills of Lincoln Park and wound through green gardens and old apartment buildings, making its way to Lake Shore Drive and the high rises of Streeterville.
There was something about the beauty of Chicago combined with the abject misery of its residents that made him happier,” Darius Mc.Cready discovered as he undressed and plodded across the living room floor to the shower. He stopped for a minute and went for his vape and a beer. Drugs might not have been the answer, but neither was lack of pleasure.
He sang tunelessly in the shower, already plotting a day for himself out of the remains of what he’d been given and he was whistling and drying himself off, wrapping the towel around his waist and knowing he’d have to wipe the fuzzies away from his scalp before he headed out the door. He needed a cup of coffee and a cigarette wouldn’t be bad either. Cigarettes were bracing. Michael would call again, and why did that make him feel better? He needed to stop letting the idea of Michael intrude in his life. The fool was getting married and they’d barely been split up.
Once, Michael had been sitting naked on the old couch in the kitchen. They’d had sex earlier and were so used to each other that once clothes came off they never came back on. He was making a cup of coffee in the kitchen, padding back and forth, and slowly, curled like a cat, Darius discreetly began taking pictures. He was so lovely. The tattoos no one suspected, the brown hair up his long limbs, the little hair running up and down his body, his little hard belly.
“Enough of that shit,” Darius murmured, and finished drying his head, roughly rubbing his naps. He would put on the green paisley rayon shirt. It was not in the bureau, or in the chest of drawers kept in the kitchen, but in Alex’s room. He nodded, and only scantly putting the towel around himself he, turned and pushed past the partition.
In the semi light, Max was fucking Jamal. They were quiet and Darius hadn’t heard them and Jamal was pressed under him, eyes closed, gripping the mattress, breathing out wordless swears and Max’s bigger, thicker brown body, round ass shifting in the darkness moved slowly and forcefully, pressing into him. Darius stood there, wondering if it had ever happened before. I mean, they’d known each other for some time and it was in the nature of friends to… well… now and again.
He was thinking too much. God had given him this. He sat in the chair and watched and this was not the first time he’d been a watcher, though it was the first time with them.. The three of them were in the silent room, Max’s naked body gathering up Jamal and pumping into him, Jamal, letting his voice catch and finally Max grunted and Jamal cried out, and when they began to move faster, to make noise, Darius understood that was them assenting to the fact that he had arrived, and there was no need for quiet. He had forgotten all about the shirt, and all about his clothes. He had forgotten his depression and felt foolish for the towel. He got up naked and left the room, only to return, half fearful that it all had ended, with his little bong and fire it up. As it bubbled and smoked, Max separated from Jamal, and the man and the white boy lay gasping on the bed.
White smoke came up and Darius coughed, putting the hitter down. Max got up, climbed over Jamal, and covered in a sheen of sweat, left for the bathroom. Darius smoked again, saying nothing, looking over Jamal’s long thin body. The toilet flushed and some moments later, Max returned with a blow torch, a baggie and a glass plate.
“Are you going to work?” Max asked Jamal.
“I’m supposed to be there at one.”
“Well, if we keep doing this, you’re not going to be. So are you going to work?’
Jamal considered, pushing his hair out of his face.
“Probably not,” the twenty year old said with a frown.
“Then go to the fridge and get us some pops.”
He looked at Darius.
“You staying? Looks like you’re staying.”
“Looks like I am.”
“Then go get me a credit card or something to cut this ice down with.”
“Is it that kind of a party,” Darius said, standing up.
Max nodded as he placed his stuff on the table.
“Today I think it will be.”
When Alex Raynard was maybe sixteen, back in what might as well have been another world. Catholic high school, Ronnie Belanga, who looked and talked like he was forty and whose head had never seen a comb, asked if he was gay. It wasn’t like nowadays when everyone was everything. It was an antagonistic, public and troubling question about his manhood, about the whispers that would come behind his back, and about a sexuality he was only beginning to understand. He’d heard that question or that remark a few times, and it was the equivalent of being suspected of witchcraft in Salem. Years later he owned both homosexuality and witchcraft and owned them gladly, but back then he was troubled as fuck by Ronnie’s question.
He was well into his thirties, getting high one day, when he realized that everyone who had ever asked him, had on one level, wanted the answer to be yeas. When he was very young, in a very different world, a world too big and frightening for him to handle with a family that didn’t care to help him handle it, it never occurred to him that the nascent feelings he was having for others boys were not embarrassing dead ends, but proof of another world, another way, and that there were many many men who would have been glad for his company. In his mid thirties, when two wealthy men had proposed to him—he wished from a financial aspect that he’d said yes and gotten good paperwork—and when boys half his age and men twice his age pursued him, he understood that sex was a power and he, who had thought of himself as clumsy, unlovely, overly bookish, perhaps even a candidate for the priesthood was, at least to some, sexy. And he never knew who it would be who found him so. It was only now, years later, that he looked back on occasions in college and even in high school and realized that he had not picked up on little signs, or even the big ones, that he had often missed the chance to have a lover.
So when he lay half asleep, wound up in the blue blanket, and Jamal Lee began to undress, he told himself to wake up and pay attention. There were many, many reasons for pretending—and there were men who could pretend—that Jamal wasn’t horny for him. There were a lot of men who would have rolled over and went back to sleep, and there were lots of reasons Max should have. But he didn’t care about any of them. Or even as he did, even as he unwound the blanket, he put those reasons away.
And he was glad he did. He’d known that boy almost three years, and when he met him he was seventeen, and made like a puppy, big paws for hands and feet, sweet face almost like a girl’s, long limbed, no longer in high school but simply because he’d dropped out. Utterly lovable. Definitely untouchable. But it hadn’t been like that in the last year—possibly longer. The night two years ago when Jamal had gotten on a bike and rode across town to bring him a bag of mushrooms for his birthday, Jamal had instructed Max on how to take them, and then remained with him for about an hour and a half, but when Max sensed that he was going to take his clothes off, that he was going to try to have sex with the boy, he sent him away and tripped by himself.
How, when Jamal climbed into the bd with him and they linked their limbs together, now after last night’s debauchery, they both sighed with the pleasure of pressing their bodies together, rubbing one another, Jamal’s mouth meeting his, his tongue pressing inside of the boys, the two of them slow humming, taking out the lube, sniffing poppers pressing dicks together, finally tasting each other. They did it slow and quiet in the darkness. What happened in the darkness of a man’s room was a private thing What happened in bed, under covers, was no one else’s business. Ten minutes ago this would not have been a possibility. Now, while Jamal pinned him down, planting kisses on him, and he ran his hands up and down Jamal’s soft skin, anything was possible.
Sometimes men asked, but usually they moved, and when Jamal kept moving so that it was clear he wanted Max to fuck him, Max retreated. After all, had he ever even been fucked? His ass was so round and full and warm, and when Max slipped his finger in, hot, tight and hairy as well. He ground his erection against Jamal, pushed his dick a little inside. The reason so many books and so many stories and so many men compared penises to swords, Max was long convinced, was because they were nothing like swords. They were vulnerable things, and Max had felt at his most vulnerable when fucking. All of his emotion was there, rising as he became longer, harder, and shocked himself with the pleasure of lubing up his penis, and then, when he pressed inside of Jamal and they both cried out, and when he wanted to stop, but Jamal, breathlessly urged him on. And the tightness of him, how he held him there, and how all of Max entered that one usually small part of his body, all of him flowed into that tight trap, and he began pressing and there was no end to the hot, tight tunnel Jamal was taking him to.
They were fucking in almost silence, both moved out of themselves, and Max was so emotional he almost wanted to cry. He was so on the edge of everything. And when Darius came in the room, he didn’t even care. Another version of him would have, but the last decade of his grown up life had seen him in many places, all the places he’d wished to visit, bath house, back rooms, orgies, and the fact was, if you were going to go there and do everything, ,everything included sex, and sooner or later you just had to learn how to have sex in front of other people. Getting your dick sucked in the sauna of a bath house was a study in Zen concentration, and Darius wasn’t even a stranger. His entry into the room made things almost easier, not less, made Max fly out of his body, made him rejoice in someone else here to share what was happening. He’d been close to coming, probably would have groaned and ejaculated in a minute or so more, but at Darius’s coming, his body changed, and their bodies realized separated. The intimacy between two became the friendship of three, and Max also realized he was taking so long to come because he needed to piss. Underemployed, all of them out of love and out of life, a new communion was needed, and as he pissed loudly, Max remembered the meth Nicky had left that he hadn’t know what to do with and, almost sacramentally, brought it into the room and laid it on the table.
The joker who has been ruining the scores on my stories by giving them 2s and 3s needs to stop. If my stories are not to your taste, then move on and find some that are. Thanks. Have a nice day. You've been seen and validated. Move on now.
