Birds Do It
Conclusion
He dreamed with such an intensity it was like he was there. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t there upon waking. In his sleep he was in Lance Bishop’s room, just waking up with him, the sun on his long body, and nothing was complicated, Lance was looking at him, his blue eyes full on Dylan, and a light smile on his face.
“I love you, Dylan,” he was saying. And then Dylan Mesda woke up.
His dick was hard with yearning. His heart hurt right now. No complications. None of this foolishness. He went down the hall to Ruthven’s room and opened the door. He locked it behind him. Ruthven was deep in sleep. His snores came up pronounced. Dylan, in shorts and tee shirt, crawled into bed, pressing his back into Ruthven’s hot, naked body.
In only a few moments, Ruthven’s snoring changed, and he shook, moaning, “Dill.”
“Listen,” Dylan said, sharply. “I don’t regret last night. I think last night we didn’t harm anyone and no one harmed us. We just did what we wanted. And how many people get to do that? Even if all three of you can’t look each other in the face, I don’t regret a fucking thing. I wish you’d stop doing something, and then getting angry and embarrassed and turning away from me. I don’t care what you and I do, I never regret it. I don’t go into anything that I think I’ll regret. I’m not like that.”
Ruthven was still looking at him with mild wonder. “Now…. Just move over,” Dylan said, “and give me some space on this bed.”
And so Ruthven moved over, and while Dylan pulled off his clothes, Ruthven pressed his body to him, embracing him.
He spent this strange summer having sex with Ruthven, and before that he’d been sleeping with Lance. Sex was very much a part of his life, and he had no intentions of it going away. He didn’t want to be like those born again people or, worse yet, born again gays, born again sluts, who spent all their time telling you what they shouldn’t have done, what they wished had never happened.
Thinking about this summer, thinking about what it felt like to be with Ruthven, a grown man, a filled out adult as opposed to Lance, his body cried out for physical contact. He wanted to touch everything. He wanted to fuck everyone. He didn’t understand those dreary people who said that once they’d had sex they were over it. He didn’t understand Sheridan’s headshaking regret about his past. He did understand the total zeal that filled Casey Williams, at least in his ads. Would he go on camera and film his sexcapades? No. Would he want to make a living screwing people, like Sheridan’s ex, Logan? Again, no. But could he understand the appeal, the delight in man after man, and was he tired of just thinking about it? Indeed. After Ruthven broke things off, he had been hurt, and he had been angry, but it didn’t stop him from wondering what it would be like to be with a Black man, an Indian, a tall man, a short man, the rough looking trucker, that music teacher. He began to become a young man of desires.
Before he had been gone from Ruthven a month, Dylan put up an ad, as old looking of a picture of himself as he could, on Manwave, and before a day was out he was hit up by losers who used for their profile pictures shots of small penises, deflated asses or horribly nude bodies, and thought that the phrase “Can i fuck u in ur ass?” was a come on. Ruthven had not contacted him or returned his calls, and with an adult dose of pragmatism, Dylan had moved on.
At first he was amazed at how quickly his Manwave inbox filled with adoring messages. If Dylan admitted the truth to himself, he had been feeling distinctly unlovable. But now he was dismayed by the bad catches that came his way, and by the end of two weeks, when he was about to get offline and just end the whole thing, he got a note from an attractive man.
Before he opened the note he looked at the picture. He seemed to be, perhaps, Todd’s age, maybe a little younger. He had beautiful, fierce blue eyes that sent a jolt through Dylan, and straw colored hair that was a little messy. He was in a purple dress shirt a little tight fitting, and he wore a slim tie. Dylan imagined he was a professor of some type.
“Would you be interested in meeting me?” was all the note said.
That could mean a million things, and Dylan knew it.
“Yes,” he wrote back.
This was going to be, gratefully, a game of e-mail tag, long enough to think about meeting and rethink about meeting and even cancel out.
“Good,” was the email that came that night. “Where would you like to meet?”
“There’s a coffee shop on Salem?”
There was the whole business, of course, of going someplace where no one who knew Dylan would be. And then there was the fact that, possibly, this man was thinking the same thing and, added to that, Dylan would have to be home by nightfall. In the end, there was a coffeeshop on the other side of the Strip, in Willmington, and Dylan could easily take the Number Nine from there all the way back to Dorr Street.
“It’s a nice coffeeshop,” the man said when Dylan reached it.
“Yeah,” Dylan stood there with his hands in his pockets.
He remembered himself and sat down.
“I like how in coffeeshops people just leave you to yourself,” the man with the messy blond hair said.
Dylan nodded.
“So are you a student?”
“Over in Chicago,” Dylan lied. “Why?”
“Nothing,” the man said. “Just I’m a teacher. Have to play it discreet.”
Well, now that was the most fucking indiscreet thing you could have said, and God knows I’m not here for your mind or your character!
Dylan nodded.
“You got a name?” he said.
“Ferguson. I teach jazz.”
“Um,” Dylan remarked. “I didn’t know they had jazz class at Loretto.”
“I didn’t say it was Loretto.”
“Well, where else would it be? Around here?”
The man shrugged.
Dylan took another sip of his coffee. He hadn’t sugared it because he didn’t really care about it. They were in a booth, and this was the perfect place for murmuring, “What do you want to do?”
“How do you mean?” Ferguson said.
Bold, or tired, Dylan reached under the table and felt the thick knob of Ferguson’s erect penis.
“You know what I mean,” he said.
While Dylan squeezed the pulsing thickness of his erection, Ferguson leaned forward and confessed, breathlessly, “I want to fuck you.”
“Good,” said Dylan. “Where at?”
“My car.”
“It’s four in the afternoon and I don’t do that crap.”
“There’s a motel down the road.”
“That’s better.”
“I’d pay,” Ferguson said.
“You’d have to.”
“IS THAT YOUR MACHINE gun?” Dylan gestured to the case.
“No,” Ferguson said. “This is the gun that I shoot to get through the day.”
He opened it up.
“Well, holy Armstrong,” Dylan exclaimed, chuckling. “You really play? Can I hear you?”
“I don’t play like Louis Armstrong,” Ferguson said. “But yeah.”
Ferguson sat on the edge of the bed, and he took out the trumpet. As he did, Dylan’s eyes went from the shiny brass to the bulge in Ferguson’s well fitting khakis.
Whatever he called good, Dylan was instantly hypnotized by the rapid syncopated rhythm of a song he had heard on Lee’s stereo once. He hadn’t known it, but he loved hearing it. What was more, as he listened, he wanted to play it. He wanted to move up out of himself. He was in a new place, a freer one, and when Ferguson was finished the teacher grinned at him and said:
“The jazz bug has gotten you.”
Dylan looked like he was coming off of orgasm, and he felt that way too, a little. He nodded.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Well, is that all you wanted to do,” Ferguson said, putting the trumpet in his case and the case under the bed.
“No,” Dylan said. “Hell no. Now I’m just a little more stolted for what I want to do.”
Ferguson came into his arms and his mouth was greedy on Dylan’s. Their hands were firm on each other, insistent. They pressed their bodies together.
“If today works out,” Dylan said, “you wanna teach me trumpet?”
Ferguson smiled down at him.
“What a strange question.”
“Will you, though?”
“Yes,” Ferguson decided. “But first, let’s make today work out.”
That afternoon, in a room in Willmington down the street from the coffeeshop, Dylan marveled at the joy of undressing another man whom he had never known. He thrilled to the beauty of an adult body, the hair on his chest and down his stomach, the light hairs on his buttocks, the thick lifting of his cock, how the clothes on a normal man came off to reveal the lover within, and quickly Dylan put him in his mouth and tried to take his penis to the back of his throat. He waxed it with his mouth the way he’d seen in the pornos, and licked his balls and they went to the bed and Ferguson did the same to him. He closed his eyes while Ferguson’s wet mouth sucked on him, pulling the seed out of his cock, and his body trembled with the first orgasm he’d had with a total stranger, the first sex without baggage. When Ferguson had the condom on, Dylan moved himself to sit on him, to take him in. At first, he held his breath with the stiffness, the pain arriving in his ass. He sat down for a while, rocking the cock into him.
“Are you alright?” Ferguson whispered tenderly.
“Yeah,” Dylan said, lifting up and then down, lifting up and then down.
“Yeah… I’m real alright.”
Dylan closed his eyes, planting his hands on Ferguson’s chest and took him deep, deep inside. He began to rock him slowly, deeper inside of him.
And so they began.
