Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 116 of 344 · 20 per page

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Jason is so wet I could fuck myself on him without any lube, but I’m not nearly ready to let him come so close to coming. I have only just begun to worship, I have just begun to let my tongue get slippery in all that moisture, pushing it into the lit tle hole that opens and opens and opens for me to fuck it but is still too small, so I suck him up instead and feel his head get harder and hotter and I know he’s ready so I slide him out from between my tightened lips and back away again just as I did with the boy at the lake, and watch him throb before my eyes enfolded now in nothing but this wind I’ve whipped up with my breath to blow on him, to cool him down, to slow his movement that he wants and needs and thinks is inevitable, letting him show me now how much he’s learned because he knows he doesn’t have permission yet, I haven’t said good boy notv you can come, I haven’t finished yet with Jason’s cock. There is this little line, this little crimp of pleated skin, below his head in front that leads me down to where his hard soft shaft is so translucent I imagine I can see the muscle filling and emptying, this little line that leads me away from his small hole and down the thick blue vein I want to bite into so I can drink his hidden blood while he comes, and so I nibble now a little letting Jason know that I have teeth and that I am not us ing them, not yet, not as fully as I could, and when he shakes so hard his thighs and belly tremble but he still does not come then I know that he has understood. This other vein that runs along the side reminds me more of rope and so remembering the first boy I ever tied to my bed I lick that rope on Jason while he tries to keep from screaming. The boy was probably a virgin, and he let on that he was straight. I brought him home on the pretense that he’d like to

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  balls it dances like a lap dog, and his balls begin to steal away as if they’re tiptoeing out the door at midnight when they promised to stay home at ten, and if I rest my ear against his sac I can hear the single odd-nailed floorboard creak with al most every other step. The way it arches like a well-strung bow brings back the fantasies I used to have of sucking cock when I was still too young to have really tried. I thought I’d find another boy who’d somehow be staying in a house nearby when we were on vacation at the lake in Michigan. I’d see him on the beach one day, and even though we wouldn’t say a word I’d know that he’d seen me as well. Dusk would fall, and then full night. My family would go to sleep and I’d go out for a moonlight walk. The air would still be warm from the day, and the lake would be so flat the moon and her entire history would lie across its missing ripples like silver two-dimensional apples. There would still be frogs and crickets in those days, fireflies would glitter like tiny spotlights caught on distant tinsel tas sels, the grass above the sand would be wet with early dew. I would have no way to know that he was there and still I’d walk along the grass and underneath a tree right into his arms and we would kiss until we fell down from the weight of memory, knowing already how our lives would fit. Somehow our clothes just disappeared, and I made him cry out with de sire as I milked him with my mouth but took myself away be fore he came and made him stop, and made him count from ten to one aloud and slowly before I swallowed his balls and let them try to slip from between my thinly parted lips, ran my tongue like a swift snake down his root to where it disap peared inside his body, and licked him where the hot lake had not dried yet. I tongue his Rimbaldian fawn-brown pucker and come

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "You probably want to know if he's got anything for you, don't You? Well, he has." "Who is this, please?" "My name's er—Casey; Matt's left me in charge of his things." "What, like Casey Hopper. That's really great." "Like . . . I don't think I know him." "Oh, you'd like him. Actually he's very popular." "I've got something very special for you. I think you know what it is, don't you?" "If it's what I hope . . . Is it from a certain young man?" I consulted a clipboard Matt had left. "It is. To be precise, it is from—Master David K—" "Shush, Casey, don't say it." I felt I'd entered a secret place. I wondered if my interlocutor, my customer, was naked. "Please be so kind as to describe it for me." I reached down at random for one of the items. "I hope you will want this, Dirk. Matt has gone to great trouble to get it." "Of course. Anything of. . . David's . . ." "Well, it's a white pair of briefs. Calvin Klein." "Such vanity," Dirk whispered. "Medium." "Mm, mm," Dirk affirmed. "Is it, is it enriched, autographed?" I twisted it round rather gingerly, and noticed the red name-tape of one P. R. Maris. "It has a firm primrose signature in the front panel. It seems he dresses left, by the way." "I knew it." "It will be quite expensive, though," I said, looking at the price Matt had underlined on the list. "It has the front marking, about the size of a franc, very rich, but also a clear . . . rearward indication." "Oh the wicked boy!" "Yes, a proud stripe." I could feel a flush coming down the line. "Such youthful haste and high spirits." I let the sagged item, with its legend of juvenile incontinence, drop to the floor. "Do you know, I saw him, the other day, coming out of the school gates as pretty as you please in his breeches and I thought, little do you know, my angel, that I'm wearing your shameful little soccer-shorts at this moment—so tight and small they were." "Quite so. Well, wait till you see these. Which you can do when you send six thousand-franc notes to the usual address." I heard him absorb the insult of the price, just for a moment humiliated by the extravagance of his need, then considering that only he and I need know of it. "I may have to ask you for other things, too," he said. "By all means; but I'm afraid I can't come down on this price." I swivelled round to where Patrick Dhondt's black swimming-trunks were spread, sleazily lustrous, on a plinth of empty boxes. "Many people are prepared to pay far more than that for the top items. For god's sake, Dirk, it's a hazardous business." "You look rather tired." "I haven't worked so hard in years." "Are you not enjoying it?"

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Tender violent thoughts circled, tail in mouth, in my brain. Creator and destroyer, I cradled you in the gentle curves of my protecting arms, against the softness of my body, wanting to be as brutal as I was loving, to ruin you with the force of your very own desire. My fingers searched within your cunt, trem bling, wriggling, in and farther in to you, almost shaking with the effort not to go too fast, not to blow my cover, not to wake you too soon. I wanted a sudden, rough, raw, overamped fuck like the one we had on the first night we did it, when our bod ies screamed for each other like the angst-driven guitars on stage at the club where you backed me up in the corner behind the speaker stack and bit my neck and told me you wanted to take me home with you so you could bend me over in my miniskirt and shove your tongue into me. You told me later that it cost you a good deal to restrain yourself until you’d got ten me into your apartment before you shoved your fingers into me, pinning me against the wall, reaching without pre amble under my skirt, shoving past my panties and making me arch and groan out loud with the outrageous desire to feel you there, so rude and yet so pure. It cost me at least as much in the dark hours of this early morning not to do the same to you, not to slam-fuck you into the bed with sharp corkscrew ing strokes, not to bite your bubblegum tits until you screamed, not to shake you awake with the rude force of un bounded lust. With a slow spiraling motion your hips moved, sluggish, the burgeoning energy of the fuck drawing you toward me. Your pussy opened a little to take me in, and I distinctly heard a foggy moan muffled against the pillow. I plucked your nip ple: she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not, letting my fingers slip off of the tip before they could pinch hard enough to puncture the bubble of unconscious arousal in which you were still, somehow, sleeping. Twisting my wrist a bit, I began to knead the resilient walls of your cunt, a sensa tion I know you adore, reading the braille of muscular twitches, the occasional contraction, the opening-up just at the tips of my fingers that made me suddenly wish I could cum into you like a man, fill that space with the essence of myself so that it would ooze out of your cunt later and remind you where I’d been.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  views: a native of East Los Angeles, he was the only American boxer to win a gold medal at the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. Born in 1973, he lost his mother to breast cancer when he was eighteen. His father was a professional boxer in Mexico who pushed his young son to fight as early as five years old. But a tenderness emerged that sounded all too familiar. When he first tried boxing, one of the profiles shared, he would cry and run home to hide in his room because he didn’t want to fight. “A handsome young man with no steady girl friend who is focusing all his energy on his boxing.” His recipe for “Golden Blintzes” appeared in a Tito Puente celebrity cookbook. He rebuilt a run-down boxing gym in his old neighborhood, giving inner-city boys a chance at self-esteem and a career like his. And again, “A bachelor who dates often but has no steady girlfriend.” Cooks, does volunteer work, no steady girlfriend: sounds like the stories I told my family when I was in the closet. That night I joined Team de la Hoya, his fan club. Four weeks later, for $39.95,1 received a black baseball cap, a poster of Oscar dressed out in an electric-blue sweatsuit, a license plate frame (too bad I don’t drive a low-rider), and a steamy, autographed portrait of him in black and white, wearing a black satin robe, his hands gloved and held up, the hollow of his chest a dark thicket of hair. This lasted me for a while. Soon every Latino boy I passed on the street was a stand-in for Oscar, and I’d sniff as they passed to catch a whiff of cologne. My head would turn at every salsa tune drifting from a passing car. Riding the sub way, I’d stiffen at the sight of a gold chain on a brown neck next to me, and I began to wish I were a crucifix to nestle in the black, wiry bramble of a Mexican boy’s chest.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Those who know his ways greet each announcement with a delight unshared by the novice; in my first week at the club the disdainful announcement that ‘Mr Beckwith has a man in reception’ had brought a round of silly laughter as I walked, blushing, from the gym. And the pool is a busy place. Except for certain mournful periods—early afternoons, Sunday evenings—there is a crowd: friends are racing, practised divers arch into the water making barely a splash, the agile avoid the slow, groups sit in a dripping line on the edge, feet flicking the water, cocks shrunken by the cold sticking up comically in their trunks. Miles of serious swimming are wound up in those twenty-five yards each day, and though some dally between lengths, of most you see only the heave of breaststrokers’ backs, the misted goggles and gasping, half-averted mouths of crawlers, the incessant cleaving movements of their arms, and the bubbling wakes of their feet. I went to swim most days, sometimes after exercises on the mats in the gym or a shortish turn in the weights room. It was a bizarre occupation, numbing and yet satisfying. I swam fast, alternating crawl and breaststroke, with a length of butterfly every ten. My mind would count its daily fifty lengths as automatically as a photocopier; and at the same time it would wander. Absorbed in thought I barely noticed the half-hour—one unfaltering span of pure physical exercise—elapse. This evening I thought of Arthur a lot, running real and projected conversations through my mind as I tumble-turned from length into length through the cool, gloomy water. A week had gone by since we’d met, a week spent in bed, or trailing naked from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen; sleeping at irregular times, getting drunk, watching movies on the video. I was engrossed in him. He was still strange to me, though, and much less predictable than I was. Perhaps he felt stifled in the flat. After hours of languid vacancy he would spring up and run from room to room, tapping door-frames and chair-backs as he went. Sometimes he ploughed through the stations on the hi-fi till he found some music to dance to, and would swarm around wearing nothing but my school straw hat, or a towel which he flirted about or shook like a fetish.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When I got close to him, he was looking around as if unaware of me, as it might be waiting for his mates to show up. But the solitude of the churchyard made this altogether unlikely—it was not a thoroughfare, but a sequestered rendezvous. On the other hand, if he was on the lookout for sex, he had chosen a spot where he might have gone unseen all evening. There was something desolate and adolescent about his singleness, and I was not surprised to see that he was only sixteen or so. He did not meet my gaze as I walked past him, but when I was just beyond he said, in a pure Cockney voice, ‘’Ere, got a light?’ It was faintly incredible too to have this oldest of pick-up questions put to me, though I suppose all techniques have their freshness and wit when one is very young. I span round with a welcoming grin. ‘No, sorry,’ I said. He met my smile with a shy blue gaze. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got no fags.’ This could have been a calculated snub, expressed in the strange symbolic style of the streets. Still, I kept on grinning, to show I didn’t mind, and so perhaps to stir his worse contempt. He looked away, and I took in his appearance: tight old jeans, a blue T-shirt with a horizontal pink stripe running under the arms, baseball boots; a slender build, a roundish face touched with acne about the mouth, heavy dark blond hair, naturally oily, swinging forward like that of a Sixties model. I scuffed around in the dry, unmown grass beside him, my cock lurching into a hard-on which he could hardly fail to notice. His own genitals were pinched up tight in the crotch of his jeans, and he squeezed the swelling outline of his cock with the palm of his hand.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Left alone, I gazed down the busy bar and thought how attractive and interesting everyone looked: it was the onset of any thing-will-do time—often of course (one tended to forget) a mutual compromise. There was a parting of the crowd and a couple shunted through: I dwelt on them for a second or two before I placed them. In front was the shatteringly pretty lad I suspected of servicing the Spanish girls, and propelling him with a hand on his neck was the assistant from the camp clothes-shop—I'd seen him here before—the one who had sold me my bad-taste Orst tie. "He's not queer, he's not queer," he kept saying excitedly. They shouldered into the bar just by where Edie was standing, so I slouched over. Shop was still sheltering Shattering with an arm round his back as if otherwise he might panic and run off, or else be pinched and spoiled by the inflamed clientele. I said to Edie, "This boy works in a fashion shop in town, you ought to meet him", and then told the boy how he had once fooled me into buying some deviant swimwear. Never having worked in a clothes shop, I imagined the staff must fondly remember everyone who went in. "You were wearing jodhpurs," I said, to seal it in his mind. He stuck a hand in his fine dark hair, widened his large dark eyes and then dubiously exclaimed, "Of course!" He was slight, mobile, playing on looking so young, unfairly eclipsed by the beauty of his friend. Edie passed me my glass and stood looking politely at the boys, who had half-turned away to catch the barman's eye and obviously thought our conversation was over. "I'm Edward, by the way," I said. The shop-boy looked back uncertainly. "Edward. Me Edward." I stuck out a hand. "Alejo," he said; and then compelled by Spanish courtesy: "This is my cousin Agustin, from Bilbao. He's not queer." "And this is my friend Edie from England. She's not queer either." Agustin looked terrifically cheered at this, and shook hands fervently with both of us. I held his gaze until his grin faded, he looked down and I let go of the fingers I was still absent-mindedly clutching. I felt almost sorry for him having to carry the responsibility for such deranging beauty through life. His short dark curly hair, his quick dark eyes, the slightly everted lips and the little lines made by his smiles, the small ears, the unblemished fineness of his skin set off at the neck by the upturned collar of pale old denim, all made one long to kiss him and fuck him. I was hollowed out with envy of the Spanish girls having him on the other side of my wall.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Gregg pushed Pali back on the bed, his knees on either side of Pali’s waist. He pressed his asshole onto Pali’s standing dick and took it slowly in. Gregg’s cock branched hard into Pali’s sliding fist. Each inner ring of his ass opened until Pali’s cock was buried deep inside. Pali’s stroking blurred. Gregg’s cum shot onto the wall beside the bed and ran down Pali’s wrist. Pali took Gregg’s legs in his arms and brought Gregg belly down onto the bed, arching his hips into Gregg’s clutching cheeks. Pali’s face was empty like a runner’s. Gregg’s groans carried into the living room. Pali came inside Gregg’s smooth, shaking ass. Then he kissed Gregg’s thick shoulders, pressed his face against Gregg’s, and closed his eyes. © “Our wives will be coming back from their shopping trip to Chicago tonight. It’s only been a weekend, but I miss the grandchildren!” said the Pastor at breakfast the next morning. Pali watched Gregg, who was working the Sunday crossword puzzle. Before you could say, Kafefe! Pali was back on the free way headed toward the towers of the Twin Cities. This time the Pastor himself drove him. Gregg stayed home, trying to repair a bicycle for one of his young daughters. “You know, it’s about time Gregg took on his own parish,” said the Pastor in the car. “I’m thinking of a really nice place I know near Moscow, Minnesota.” Pali was entertaining thoughts of becoming a Buddhist. He’d met some Tibetan monks at a doll store in Stillwater. Minnesota has the largest Tibetan population in the U.S., they’d told him. “Oh what shame I will bring to my family, if I return to Samoa without a degree in Lutheran divinity!” thought Pali to himself. “Better to hide myself in this place forever, become a prostitute or a computer programmer.” What other work had the seminary trained him for? Pastor Knarffssen noted Pali’s distraction and suggested they stop outside Minneapolis—St. Paul Airport to watch the jets take off. They sat silently together in the Pastor’s car, parked within the repair yard fence. The planes taxied one at a time up to a turning mark near their viewpoint. Rumbling, the aircraft raced onto the field. Watching, Pali decided he would finish out the years of study he had begun, marry a nice Samoan Lutheran, build himself a Swedish sauna near Apia. He leaned back to watch the planes through the sunroof. One by one, he felt them shudder into the air and vanish. CLAIRE TRISTRAM When the Student Is Ready |_|

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  when he cries because he’s just so full he cannot stand to have me near his dick and I don’t even want to pause to breathe, I want to drink the smell and sound and taste and sight and feel of him down into me until he fills me up, which he can never do, and so it’s easy for me to keep him on the edge as long as I want and he knows it is my right to do it, my right to com mand him to come or command him not to come and let him sleep with his blue balls for a month, but I have never been pointlessly mean, I just like him to know who’s boss and that is what he begs me for, crawling down the corridor on his knees and manacled hands some days after I’ve been lunching on his straining cock while the sun moved gradually across the pa tient sky, dragging his shackled ankles chained to his steel- collared balls from the kitchen where I’ve sent him for a glass of water just because I can and back into the living room where I’m leaning against the far arm of the couch watching traffic in the street two floors below. The woman who lives across the narrow courtyard, old enough to be his mother, is standing in her window the way she’s done for weeks when I come into the living room bare- assed, I think she thinks she’s hidden by her lacy drapery and that I can’t see she’s got her own hand up her skirt I know she’ll have off long before I’m done with Jason crawling to ward me in his chains, bringing with him not only the glass of water but also his pretty penis dick-a-dangle heavy hot-hung hook of hulking manflesh ramrod pigtool Lenny Bruce’s thick fuckin’ pile-drivin’ fist at the end of a baby’s arm O! so sweet and graceful cock I want to rip it from his body and carry it with me in my mouth next to my heart, take it out and look at it on the subway suck on it and show it off, honey cock I dream about from time to time like a blimp taking up my en tire sky, like a love fat baby I rock in my arms, like a stag I run down and mount, like the whole loved life that Jason reminds me is here before it’s too late and gone.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  they had no idea how much time the two of them spent to gether. Their grades stayed high. The next year a new student transferred in from Kansas. They both had History with him. He wasn’t a jock, a club kid, one of the super-students who ran the school, or a burnout who would be tossed out, but like them, one of the weird kids. He was between them in height and had pale sleek blond hair he wore to his shoulders. His eyes were a dark haunting blue. He had a scar through one light brown eyebrow. His cheek bones were high and sharp and his profile looked to her as if it should be carved on the prow of a sailing vessel. He always had shadows of stubble on his cheeks that made him seem older, more experienced. Half the guys had just started shav ing. Evan had a darkish beard but not much of it. He only had to shave every other day and it took him about a minute, al though she did like to watch, ’cause it was such a male thing to do. She was almost hairless on her body and never shaved her legs. To each other, they called the new kid the Decadent Viking. “I want him,” Evan said. “So do I,” she said. “We’ll share him.” They made up stories of capturing him, tying him up and doing things to him. His name was Chad, a silly name for such a fascinating-looking guy. He was broody. He sat at the back, and even when he knew the answers, he sounded as if he re sented being right. She sat down next to him in Assembly one day. His wrists stuck out below his shirt. There was a scar on each of them. He caught her looking at his wrists. He didn’t hide them. She stared at him. He stared back. Then he smiled. For two months they didn’t do anything more than make up stories about Chad the Decadent Viking. Then Evan asked him one day, “Want to study for History finals with Elena and me?”

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  silently wanting, your back slightly arched, your areole crin kled, still fast asleep. Thank God you don’t dream of sex every night, you tell me, since it always frustrates you when you do. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, you say, you never do get what you want in those dreams, and you wake frustrated, slippery between the legs, softly grumbling. I can always tell when you’ve dreamt of sex. In my study I hear you through the wall when you shower, leaning against the tile with the water pummeling the lush breasts I like so much to tease, your hand between your thighs, unaware that the shower actually does precious little to cover your noises. I listen to you, some thing deep between my hips quivering at the high, piercing whimper that I know means you’re hovering, aching and des perate, at the edge of orgasm. I wish I weren’t such a morning person, wish my body didn’t always insist on my being awake so long before you. This morning—morning for me comes when my body says it does, circadian jackboots kicking me rudely awake even if it’s December in New England and still dark as the hem of a cas sock—I began to wake, yearning to just roll you over and slide between your legs but not daring to rouse you just for that. You slept deeply, though, and in the depths of your slumber you seemed to welcome the caress of my hands, letting me spoon you cozily, my palm sleeking the fine full curve of your hip and drifting over the pillowsoft of your belly. Stirring slightly but not waking up, you seemed to know I was there, and for a while that was enough. And so I pressed myself against your spine, my nipples perking slightly at the contact with your skin, slid my arm under the graceful arch of your neck. Unconscious kitten-murmurs came from your throat as my fingers traced the seam where my thigh pressed the back of yours, and as I let my hand meander to the top of your thigh

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  And then I saw a wonderful young man, perhaps about my age, and with just that air of bland international luxury about him, come from the lift and saunter towards the cocktail bar. He was tall and graceful but gave the impression of weighing a great deal; as he approached I was startled by his deep-set brown eyes, long nose and curling lips and his trotting, swept-back hair; as he walked away I took in his maroon mocassins, his immaculate pale cotton trousers, through which the shadow of his briefs could be seen, the cashmere slip cast around his shoulders. I felt he must belong to some notable Latin American family. It hardly required thought to follow him, though I gave him a second or two to get settled. I feared he might have gone to sit at a table or have joined his diplomat father and ragging, adoring younger brothers and sisters. But no, he was perched at the marble curve of the bar, and I was able to greet Simon—all in braid and tumbling his cocktail-shaker—as I took up a convenient high stool. ‘What are you having?’ Simon wanted to know. He was a skinny Lancashire boy who loved fucking girls and should ideally have been following a career as a pianist. He played extremely well, and had a long, long tongue with which he could easily lick the tip of his nose. He knew all about my little ways. ‘What’s he having?’ I said, as I watched the wild pink liquid rattle from the shaker into the inverted cone of the glass. He raised an eyebrow and murmured disgustingly, ‘Cunnilingus Surprise.’ ‘Mm. Not quite my kind of thing perhaps.’ Here the notable Latin American said: ‘It’s really good. You should try one.’ And then smiled immensely so that I went funny inside. His lips curled back in a friendly primitive way, and gave an unexpected animation to his dully beautiful face. I realised he reminded me of one of the sketches of Akhnaten on Charles’s stele—not the final inscrutable profile, but one of the intermediate stages, half human, half work of art. I watched incredulously as the various ingredients, some exotic, some European, were measured into the shaker. Simon gave me a smirk of lewd surmise as he agitated it.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Chad was erect so he couldn’t be that put off. She stared at his cock, because it was only the second one she had ever seen. He looked different from Evan, sort of bigger and looser around the top. “I’m not circumcised,” he said. “My father doesn’t be lieve in it.” Evan straddled his desk chair, keeping out of the way. Elena waited until Chad had undressed completely and sat on the bed’s edge next to her. Then without waiting for him to make a move, she slid toward him and, taking his face in her hands, gave him a sensuous tongue kiss. She moved her thigh against his. She wanted him so badly she ached. She did not think she had ever wanted Evan this strongly, but she would never let him know that. It would hurt his feelings, and he was her own. Her flesh. Her more-than-brother. Chad’s hand was on her breast now, a little awkwardly, squeezing hard. With Evan she would have instructed him, but she couldn’t risk discouraging Chad. They had wanted him and now they were going to have him, both of them. Now he was lying on top of her, kissing her almost frantically. She slid a rubber on his prick with both hands and guided him in. Normally she would have liked fooling around with him longer, but she did not want anything to go wrong. He thrust hard and came almost at once, long before she could. Then he lay spent on the bed, while she eased out from under him. Evan let him lie like that for several minutes. Then he mo tioned for her to get up. She took the desk chair, which Evan had dragged to just beside the bed to watch more closely. Evan lay down beside Chad. At first he just caressed him from the back, making spoons. Evan’s chest and pubic hair were dark, almost black, and Chad’s body hair was the palest brown. Chad was tanned over his arms and chest. Evan was milky pale. Evan patiently caressed Chad, reaching around to his

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  his giant wings cumbersome, more jagged than angel wings my cunt a gash between dimensions his tail hangs down in the crack of his ass as he humps forward, the marble slab is so cold so hard love is bruises love is bruises I only see him in quick cuts, occluded by the sizzling haze of hell but he is truly a marvel to behold, his bubbly luminescent green hide, his sulfurous breath hot as a blowtorch on my flimsy cheeks, his molten red cock, two feet long with a spear-shaped head, there are words inside it, molten words dreams unwind love’s a state of mind misty psychedelic colors undulate as he brays he loves me in Latin backwards. I am insatiable my name is Legion can’t get enough of his demon cock for many demons have dwelled within this body ripped open by this snorting cloven creature red face forked tongue sweating and heaving I come quickly, a fireball of sulfurous farts explodes from my bloody loins, my screeches break the sound barrier, rattling the tranquil vibes of Venus, booming back I cry out, YIKES! AIGGEUUUU!!!! DAN TAULAPAPA McMullin Sunday | here was a seminary student from Samoa. His parents es- corted him to Minnesota. He was the first Samoan Lutheran seminary student. There are Mormons, Catholics, Congrega tionalists, all over Samoa. But he was the first Lutheran. His parents stood on either side of him in the middle of Nicolett Mall on a summer day. In the same spot where Mary Tyler Moore threw her hat into the air. The Reverend Knarffssen came out of his cathedral at the north end of the mall. Approaching the three Polynesians, he suddenly smiled. Winter was so far away. Somewhere among the gargoyles. “Such warm, happy people,” was his first thought. “I shall treat Pali as I treat my own son, the assistant rev erend,” the Reverend Knarffssen told Mr. And Mrs. Saolefale-

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘What are you having?’ Simon wanted to know. He was a skinny Lancashire boy who loved fucking girls and should ideally have been following a career as a pianist. He played extremely well, and had a long, long tongue with which he could easily lick the tip of his nose. He knew all about my little ways. ‘What’s he having?’ I said, as I watched the wild pink liquid rattle from the shaker into the inverted cone of the glass. He raised an eyebrow and murmured disgustingly, ‘Cunnilingus Surprise.’ ‘Mm. Not quite my kind of thing perhaps.’ Here the notable Latin American said: ‘It’s really good. You should try one.’ And then smiled immensely so that I went funny inside. His lips curled back in a friendly primitive way, and gave an unexpected animation to his dully beautiful face. I realised he reminded me of one of the sketches of Akhnaten on Charles’s stele—not the final inscrutable profile, but one of the intermediate stages, half human, half work of art. I watched incredulously as the various ingredients, some exotic, some European, were measured into the shaker. Simon gave me a smirk of lewd surmise as he agitated it. Mr Latin America and I glanced at each other and then found it proper to look around the lofty bar, with its concealed lighting, reproductions of Old Masters and vulgarly gathered blinds half down against the westering sun. Across the road were the boles of the great trees in the square into whose upper branches I had so often gazed; and that did remind me of Phil, and how I must not take long over this drink. ‘Perfectly revolting,’ I pronounced after taking a sip. ‘If that’s what cunnilingus tastes like, I think I’ve done well to stay away from it.’ ‘You like?’ said my new friend. I nodded, as if to say it was nice enough. ‘You are staying in this hotel?’ ‘No—no, I’ve just come in for a drink. After my swimming.’ ‘Oh you like swimming. I am a very bad swimmer.’ I smiled politely; perhaps in his country, which I believed to be poor and old-fashioned, there were few swimming-pools. Even in Italy there were few: hence the fondness of the language children for hours of bombing and showering. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ he asked. ‘No, no,’ I said, actually slightly shocked at his naive forwardness. I let a minute or more pass in silence, but had to grin when Simon started humming Tristan. I wasn’t sure what to do. The boy was undoubtedly a find. I swivelled on my stool so that we were sitting with our legs apart and knee to knee. He looked frankly at my crotch before meeting my gaze and we smiled enquiringly at each other as he ran his finger up the back of my hand where it dangled from the bar.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The shower room was crowded, so that I had to wait at the entrance with one or two others, anxious to be through and in their offices again, eyeing the more determined lingerers with a sceptically raised eyebrow. The gross-cocked Carlos cooed ‘Hey, Will’ and beckoned, so I jumped the queue and joined him under his nozzle, his rose. ‘Is very busy,’ he acknowledged, ‘but I like to see the boys.’ Here was the conscience of the Corry in a phrase. He soaped my shoulderblades in halting, appreciative arcs, slowly moving further down my back, and I began to get a hard-on. Andrews the gym instructor was across the way, austerely washing his head with coal tar soap. With his wiry, pre-war, slightly bowlegged body and his square, thin-lipped, grizzled head, he seemed to be scrubbing away in search of some lost puritanical cleanness; and as he left to dry he looked at Carlos and me with an almost regimental reproach. His place was taken by a dal-coloured Indonesian boy with strong yellow teeth, enormous hands and an exceptionally extensile cock, which, quite ordinary in size to start with, filled out lavishly with a few casual strokes of a soapy hand and was burdensomely erect a few seconds later when he grinned across the room—in response, of course, to Carlos’s frank appreciation. O the difference of man and man. Sometimes in the showers, which only epitomised and confirmed a general feeling held elsewhere, I was amazed and enlightened by the variety of the male organ. In the rank and file of men showering the cocks and balls took on the air almost of an independent species, exhibited in instructive contrasts. Here was the long, listless penis, there the curt, athletic knob or innocent rosebud of someone scarcely out of school. Carlos’s Amerindian giant swung alongside the compact form of a Chinese youth whose tiny brown willy was almost concealed in his wet pubic hair, like an exotic mushroom in a dish of seaweed. On the other side of me a young businessman displayed one of those long, dispiriting foreskins, which gather very tight about the glans and then bunch and dribble on childishly for an inch or so more. Beyond him the cock of one of the weightlifters, radically circumcised, was in its usual ambiguous form, not quite at ease, not quite at attention. I looked obviously and lovingly at him as he turned slowly from side to side, unaware of me and lost in his serene, numerical weightlifter’s world. I couldn’t wait any longer, and at the merest word to Carlos took him dripping and giggling to the lav, where we brought each other off swiftly and greedily.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I got undressed and turned the light off and sat waiting for the next remark or the first explosive chord. Once or twice I thought I heard the first squeaking stoppings, the hunched rehearsal of the chord-changes before the right hand springs its hackneyed horrors from the box . . . But perhaps it was just a distant creaking in the house or the bell of the night tram out by the station. After a while I could hear only my own indignant pulse and the hairs on my legs sliding together. Then the twelve o'clock carillon from St Narcissus, almost welcome, with its plonking hymn that had become a sort of malign lullaby. "Yes, close your eyes up tight: you will not sleep tonight"—the dud note, the metrical space marked only by a rusty click, falling on the word "eyes". Chapter 3 Saturday, and a late start—waking in the usual cosy surge of memories and fantasies, the fantasies lacking in focus. It wouldn't quite work with Luc, I recalled a lad or two I'd seen about in the street, then hustled Cherif in quickly for the close. I took a shower, maddened by the sudden shrinking of the supply, spinning the hot tap and getting nothing but a feeble rope of cold. I stood out on the floor, leaning in through the curtain to test it. Then there was a far-off whining and knocking from the cistern in the roof, and the hot came thrashing back in an instant devilry of steam. Of course! It was my new neighbours at work, their shower had some kind of priority over mine, they could draw my water off and leave me shivering with annoyance. I mopped my little mirror clean and peered into it. It was absurdly small—it would almost have gone in a handbag; my face was cropped by its edges and looked rather good in it, I thought, like the features of any biker in the classic frame of his helmet. I swept my thick black hair around—my best feature, which people sometimes thought was dyed if they hadn't seen my forearms or bare legs. I imagined Luc might quite admire it, and see the claim it made for my being romantic and young. He ought to see it in this mirror, which left out all the rest of me. I thought of Cherif, with his comforting extra poundage, how he seemed to like all of me, and had no inkling of my steady disappointment at how I'd turned out and was likely to stay—never having looked fabulous in a swimsuit, caught in other people's photographs with a certain undeniable burliness. While my hair was still wet I combed it back, and it lay appealingly where I left it. It appealed to me, that is to say, though perhaps to other people it was the tell-tale feature of my self-delusion.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  In the top drawer of the desk the last thing dropped in was a bright paper wallet, showing angled family snaps on the outside, and letting slip from within a glossy stack of lightly curved colour prints. The nervousness of sixty or seventy seconds earlier had left me, and I shuffled through the photographs with a burglar's certain hand. And up they bobbed, one behind the other like bathers rising and dropping on the incoming waves—Luc, Patrick, Sibylle, Patrick, Patrick, Luc, Sibylle, Sibylle, Sibylle. The boys in singlets, or bare-chested, mock-heroic, she very composed, self-aware, conscious of her beauty; the boys were conscious of their own, as well, it showed in every capering gesture, even when one was pointing at the other, who stood cross-eyed, with his tongue sticking out. Then there was a picture of Luc so mythically beautiful that my mouth went dry and then I found I was flooded with a little sob. He was looking through me, eyes narrowed but translucent in sunshine, sea-wet hair pushed oddly, darkly back, lips apart but firm, as if trying out his own name, naked to the bottom edge of the photograph, just below his navel, and his long hands stretched wide, some ordinary gesture caught half-way through so that he looked like Nijinsky resting in the air. I heard the quick stride of his ascent on the flight below and as I thumbed and squared the photos back I slipped out the strands of negative in their crinkled wrapper and tucked them deep into my inner breast pocket. When he came in I was sprawled in the chair with one of his story-books and sucking the ear-piece of my twiddled spectacles. I did detect a certain anxiety as to what it was I was looking at. "There will definitely not be coffee," he said. He looked quite pleased and amused to have made the effort and carried out his plan with such provoking reasonableness. He sat on the bed again, and rubbed his hands together. I wasn't sure if we were allies in this tiny episode, or if it was all his own. "What are you reading?" he asked. I didn't have the wildest idea, a glance at the page gave nothing significant away, I proffered the book with a bored smile. It wasn't a very attractive book—it turned out to be a history of the Crusades, in a fortified school binding. "I never could sort out one crusade from another," I said. Luc grunted. "That's one of my father's books," he said. I took it back with kindly dim interest, not sure what I was looking for. "It doesn't seem very . . ." "All those ones are published by him," he said. "Of course I never read them, but he sends them all, and I think it makes him feel better."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Luc's room . . . I walked through it with an open-minded air, as if I were being shown it by a house-agent, and looked down into the street from the window, noticing the smaller globed reflection of the view in the mirror that hung beside it. Luc's room didn't have that much character: a battered old desk with a secretarial kind of swivel chair, bookshelves above with schoolbooks, English, French and Flemish novels, several volumes of a cheerful and unlovely children's encyclopaedia; a mini sound system with headphones plugged in and a stack of tapes, the yellow Walkman too; fawn carpet, magnolia walls with a framed school photograph and a poster from the Town Museum (some chaste Memling); a single bed hastily covered with one of his mother's gaudy bedspreads, kicked-off moccasins seen beneath its fringe . . . If only it could happen now, my hand in his hair, the whole length of him pressed against me, our tongues rolling over each other. He was wearing very baggy desert-coloured trousers, pinched in at his slim waist with a useful-looking belt; his shirt was almost a jersey, with three buttons at the neck—the effect was quite feminine, and had me imagining his cock with more than usual hunger and wonder. We danced a clumsy excuse-me in the middle of the room, and I fetched up in the chair whilst he retired to the bed, and sat nervously at its edge; I glanced across the litter on the desk beside me, and read the beginning of a letter, "Dear Arnold" in big disconnected writing, "How are you getting on?"—at which point inspiration seemed to have dried up. "So your father's coming?" I opened with. "Yes, that's right, my father. We don't see him for ages, and then, bouf!, he just goes and turns up." He blew out a puff of air and nodded illusionlessly. "Then my mother gets very worried and we have to clean up the house." "I'd have thought it was immaculate already." "Yes, of course. But I would not suggest that you tell her that. She is not listening to things too much today." I couldn't tell if he was really got down by all this. "I can't remember how long you said they'd been . . . apart." He almost jeered the answer: "Four years," and stood up. "I don't see any reason why we can't have our coffee," he said. "Do you want some?" "Urn . . . thank you. But . . . Shall I come down?" "All right," he said, but then turned back and looked at me as if I might be a liability, or as if he wanted to save me from the ludicrous trouble he was about to stir up. "Perhaps it will be better if you don't come"—and he was out of the door, leaving me, already, alone.