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.

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• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Some of America’s best features—the belief in democracy, equality, consensus-building, compromise, fairness, and mutual tolerance—can, when carried too punctiliously into the bedroom, result in very boring sex. Sexual desire and good citizenship don’t play by the same rules. And while enlightened egalitarianism represents one of the greatest advances of modern society, it can exact a toll in the erotic realm. Elizabeth spent twenty years shepherding Vito from the machismo traditions of southern Italy to the postfeminist equality of suburban New York. When he says, “I think we’re partnering better,” in a voice that still sounds like Don Vito Corleone’s, I know just how much cultural transformation has taken place. Elizabeth is a woman in her mid-forties who describes herself as “hyperresponsible.” She’s a school psychologist who oversees the well-being of more than 400 elementary school children in addition to being in charge of most things in her own home. “I’ve always done the right thing. I’ve always been very task-oriented. I’ll make a list and keep it. In some ways it’s always worked. And I’ve always been in relationships where being the coordinator, competent and in control, was my designated job. There didn’t seem to be any time when I could just let myself go, feel free and giddy and maybe even a little irresponsible” Elizabeth pauses and smiles shyly. “Then I met Vito and discovered just how much I’m drawn to sexual submission. It may not fit the way I always thought of myself, or the way others thought of me, but it’s the truth.” “Because sex is a place where you can safely lose control?” I ask. “Yes.” “It is the one area where you don’t have to make any decisions, where you don’t have to feel responsible for anyone else.” “For me it’s like a vacation,” she explains. “I don’t have to wear makeup; I don’t have to answer the phone; I don’t have to be in charge. It’s like being on a wonderful, distant island, far away from my ordinary life. I can just step out of my world and be somebody else, sexy and a little wild.” Elizabeth wants to be manhandled, told what to do—as if, through her erotic self, she can correct an imbalance in her life and replenish something vital. She delights in the abandon that comes with the sense of powerlessness. And I would add that she also gets a charge from playing in the forbidden zone of inequality. “When he comes on to me forcefully, it makes me feel sexy. It heightens the tension. Like he wants me so much he just can’t help himself,” Elizabeth says. Vito, quick to respond, adds, “She can’t help herself, either. When she gives in, I know I’m irresistible.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "He is a fucking cunt," I agreed, and Mark Lyle gave a big bright laugh. He had a wide sun-tanned face and a large mouth with one or two spots by it that he should have left alone. When we'd more or less finished, he patted his thigh and asked me if I wanted a cigarette. I blushed and said no. "Mind if I do?" he said, with surely unnecessary courtesy. Actually I was terribly worried about him meeting an early death from lung-cancer; but I was overcome by the glamour and intimacy of the occasion. I watched him raptly as he smoked an Embassy to the filter. Each frown, each wincing inhalation, the way he balanced the smoke between his open lips and then as it escaped drew it back up his nose, the two or three different fingerings he essayed, all were written on my mind like a first exercise in sexual attraction. I thought Mark Lyle was the most handsome man I'd ever seen. Later that summer I saw him again. The friendship I had envisaged had not blossomed. Indeed he'd vanished altogether for about three weeks, leaving me full of forlorn agitation. Then one evening I was rambling homewards from the Blewits side of the common through the long dry grass when I saw his unmistakable mane of fair hair. He was sitting on a bench with his back to me, and I dithered for several minutes just a few yards behind him. He wasn't aware there was anyone there. Occasionally he lifted what looked like a beer-can to his lips. I looped round and came back in front, pretending to notice him at the last moment. Following our convention I said nothing, but sat down beside him and waited. He can only have been fourteen, but he was managing to grow real sideburns, a more gingery colour than the rest of his hair. He was wearing a Cream on Tour T-shirt, and tight high-waisted shiny brown trousers with generous flares. You could see the stub of his cock very clearly. "I wondered if you'd been flying that kite again?" I said at length. "I should think it's a jolly good one." Mark Lyle tilted the last of the beer into his mouth, swirled it round and swallowed it, then belched so that I could smell it. He seemed to have forgotten about the Old Spice. "I'm fucking pissed, man," he said, and dropping the can on the ground stamped on it violently two or three times. Again the conflict of excitement and distress. In a way this was the opportunity I needed to put my redemptive impulse into operation, but when it came to it I wasn't at all sure of myself. It was one of my mother's phrases I used: "There can't be any need for that." He looked ahead and laughed mirthlessly. "Yeah, fuck off now, there's a good little fucker."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I settled back, pulling the musty multi-coloured crochet of the shawls around me, already fetishising them as remote kin of Luc's own bedspread, familiar, unnoticed trappings that he sprawled and stirred amongst, thinking of elsewhere. I dreamt we were at Mr Croy's. Luc was lying naked on the table, surrounded by five or six men, some in naval uniform, a couple in cheap suits with their huge cocks jutting sideways and already seeping into the taut cloth. I was somehow amongst them but also outside and above their casually concentrated circle, as if I were writing the story of the dream and setting them in motion. I seemed to catch and share the haunting, forgotten dynamic of group sex, jealous and democratic at once. And Luc was ready for the ritual, lifting his head slightly, moistening his dry upper lip with a nervous tongue-tip. But to my bafflement all the men did was inspect him, closely but politely, as if they might have him but hadn't decided, and didn't want to mark him and be obliged to pay. Or almost like doctors, whose interest was scientific and excited by other invisible symptoms. I saw them push his legs apart, run their hands lightly, testingly up and down his thighs, and over his chest and stomach. One of them weighed his balls noncommittally in the palm of his hand, while another slipped back his foreskin and pinched open the little goldfish mouth of his swollen cock-head. They turned him over and one of them pressed his cheeks apart while the rest appraised his other hidden orifice; I saw it clench and gape with anticipation and delay. I was in the bathroom, confused by the back corridors of Mr Croy's, the pantries and stairways overhung by dripping cisterns. I knew I wanted to get back to the main room—I had left it with the repressed anxiety with which one leaves luggage briefly unattended or asks a stranger to keep one's place in a long and hungry queue. I trotted round in confusion, sometimes hearing a shout or a slap from behind locked doors, through walls. I caught just a glimpse of Mr Croy himself, in a curtained back parlour—gross, brilliantined, with a gin and tonic, listening to "Beggars in Spats". A sense of misery and wasted money began to weigh in my chest.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  His mother got hold of me first, and took me into the dining-room. She hoped I didn't mind coming to the house, it seemed better discipline than sending Luc across town to me—and then she knew where he was. I was already imagining the squeaking board that gave away her presence at the door. She went on with a number of blunt and incoherent instructions, which I barely took in—I was pretending I hadn't seen him, just at the moment I entered the hall, behind his mother's back, skidding through to the kitchen, a towel round his neck, a glimpse of his bare heels, a vision of his undomestic size and energy. She left me in the darkly panelled room, among the family portraits. I waited a minute under their humourless gaze, one above the other, prudent, black-bosomed, as if they had all been painted in widowhood. Feeling faintly culpable and unfit for responsibility, I went to the long window and looked out on the garden, a high-walled strip that ended in a canal with swans idling past and a little angular gazebo above the water, where I pictured Luc smoking or waiting for a tryst. Mrs Altidore's work was less evident in this room, just a kind of tasselled runner on the sideboard. Then I pulled out a chair and discovered the terrible industry of the seat. There were footsteps, no voices, crossing the hall, and their brief hanging back to let the other enter first showed me they were both nervous too. Mother and son, side by side: I sensed the treaty between them and the unresolved cross-purposes. "This is Luc," she said. "Mr Manners." He was pushing back his hair and his hand was damp when he shook mine. "Hello." "Hello!" How old-fashionedly keen I was. And he nodded, so that his hair fell forward again. Through the coming hour I would see that tumbling forelock dry from bronze to gold, and get to know the different ways he mastered it, the indolent sweep, the brainstorming grapple, the barely effectual toss, and how long the intervals were of forward slither and lustrous collapse. But for the moment, when we were left alone, I didn't altogether look at him; my eyes fixed uncomprehendingly on the sideboard, a hideous epergne, a sugar dredger, a tantalus of brandy.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  And then the Spanish girls, the voices in the woodwork, murmuring and shrieking in what felt like derision as I sat in Frits's lap in the armchair and slipped my hand inside his denim shirt and jiggled backwards and forwards on him until he had a big fat hard-on. "Yes," he said, "I began to know that the life of being in an office all day, every day, was not for me. I then needed to take time to find out what it was that I really wanted to do. I wanted to read good literature, and travel around the place. I had to get out of the mouse-market, Edward. I lifted the bedclothes a little and looked at his sleeping body in the greyish light, slumped, hairy, held in, it almost seemed, by a long brown hairless scar, the plump bud of his cock shifting and stiffening as he rose himself into the light of early dreams. Chapter 10 "Hello." "Hello? Matt?" "Matt's not here, I'm afraid." A thoughtful pause. "Oh yes." The line went dead. I carried on sorting out the orders, clipped pink slips on which products were tactfully referred to by number. A good sprawl of post awaited me each afternoon on the floor of the porch—the business letters addressed to Matt, and occasional envelopes for a certain Wim Vermeulen, which I set aside and which aroused my curiosity more. I supposed he must be one of his old lovers or partners, or perhaps the previous occupant. Something kept me from opening them—I wondered raffishly if it might be thieves' honour. The letters from Matt's subscribers were often several sheets long, full of secret enthusiasm and not easy to read. "I can't thank you enough for introducing me to young Casey Hopper," one of them began. "What a 'doll'! I've quite fallen for him. It's such a pleasure to find a lad of that age who really likes to take it from an older—and bigger—man. And Casey, I am pleased to say, is certainly well set-up himself. He has such a pleading look as he lies there spread out, when his arms and legs are tied to the bedposts and I can gaze at his secret treasure. Sometimes it is 'all over' then, before anything else has happened. "Perhaps I should tell you a bit about myself. I used to be in the agribusiness in Ghent, where I have lived all my life. I am sixty-seven by the way, and have retired now, so I have plenty of time on my hands, and will certainly be getting in touch with you again. I like young men, eighteen to twenty-five or so, well-built, with short hair. I do not like boys with obviously dyed hair or who are effeminate in any way and wear ear-rings or jewellery. As you can imagine Casey Hopper tops my bill!

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Yeah . . . Yeah . . ."—a concentrating tongue peeped and havered. "Oh boy. Here comes Big Boy. Just look at that . . . Looks like they're going boating again." I squinted through, somehow convinced that without the binoculars I wouldn't be able to see a thing, though there of course Sibylle and Patrick were, encumbered with paddles and a bailer and boxy pink life-jackets. "Now where's your little friend, I wonder? He'll probably stay indoors to do his reading, and you won't see him at all, which will be your fault." I gave Matt a blow in the ribs—just like the boys fighting, I saw—and he cackled and said, "No, hold on, who do we have here?" And Luc was back again, awkward on the steps, as if unable to give help when it was expected of him. "If I was young . . . Luc," said Matt, "I'd be getting a bit jealous of Big Boy and the girl." When I got the glasses at last though, and caught the pair as they scuffed out on to the beach, there was an angry firmness about them. They looked unlikely to enjoy themselves. I took off my specs and twiddled the focus to my shorter sight. The lenses were powerful, ocean-sweepers proved perhaps in some war-time conning-tower, treasured later for their ability to capture shorebirds' markings and charming movements. The heavy casing was chipped, the leather was frayed and in the paint the name DHONDT was roughly scratched. Half an hour raced and drifted by before Luc appeared again. Then things began to unfold with a canny momentum of their own. He came on to the porch and I had the field-glasses on him: he was starlingly clean and close, palpable but also stylised in the flowing depthless picture-plane. When I shifted my position the picture twitched uncaringly to various greenery, a nodding sapling's top, and I had to run the glasses down and across in a worried blur to find him strolling over the lawn, just beneath me it seemed, like a figure in the flattened foreground of a Japanese print. I didn't dare open the blinds further, and the picture was hazily occluded above and below by the unfocused slats. They gave an edge of mystery to the brilliant image they framed.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He said, "My mother's going to bring some coffee," the voice light and mildly interrogative, the accent educated. Then I looked. He was lean and broad-shouldered in an old blue shirt; and I liked his big flattish backside as he walked past me, though his loose cotton trousers gave nothing else away. He was as tall as me (I could imagine him saying he was taller, and a laughing challenge, back to back). Did he understand that I was weighing and measuring him like this, or possibly envisage the tingle of desire that ran up my back when I saw his brown bare insteps between turn-up and low-cut moccasin? It was hard to know if something vain and mistrustful in his look was more than the ordinary wariness of a boy with his teacher, or of people starting cold at knowing each other. To me of course he wasn't quite new, though when he took his place on the far side of the table and waited for me to begin I could hardly keep from telling him how different he was from his picture, how much odder and better. In his father's generation his features might have been thought ugly or exaggerated, though now they had come into fashion and could be admitted as wonderful in their own way; he must have taken from his father the long nose and high cheekbones which gave him the air of a blond Aztec. His eyes were narrow and colourless—his mother's lost look given a new caution and sharpness; while his long mouth seemed burdened with involuntary expressiveness, the thick lips opening, when later I twisted a smile out of him, to show strong sexy canines and high gums. His upper lip was almost too heavy, a puckering outward curl, with no downward dimple in the fingermark beneath the nose, where it had a straight edge, as if finished off impatiently with a palette-knife. There was something engrossing, even slightly repellent, about the whole feature.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  As she talked I was increasingly drawn under by a current of recollection that her presence, and the lines from Gray, had obscurely triggered—the desert air of that summer of 1976, in which she and Geoffrey had somehow played a part, a memory of sexual loneliness, which would later pull so much I did into its own fierce patterns. I remembered the day after that first time with Dawn, coming downstairs with a kind of wary astonishment, feeling I'd been given access to a world that lay just on the other side of the parquet, the fridge, the radio, the piano declaiming in the sitting-room. I looked covertly at my family, wondering if they too were inhabitants of this thrilling dimension. Perhaps Charlie was; but his accounts of life with Lisanne seemed oddly to leave out any mention of it. I felt both irritable and supremely tolerant at the same time, sulkily looking over my mother's shopping-list, but then when I got outside, dancing to the baker's like a character in a musical comedy. It wouldn't have been an early start. Throughout my adolescent holidays I got up wastefully late, as though to make up for the austerity of school mornings, the wintry dressing in the dark. Sometimes it would be 11.30 or 12 before I came down for a cup of coffee and was warned off spoiling my lunch. They were hours of luxurious tedium in the half-light of the bedroom, reading for a bit, dozing in and out of songs coming from downstairs, Schone Mullerin all that summer, my father flagging and dissatisfied. I evolved fantastic sexual situations around boys at school, dropping off in the middle of them, then waking and putting them through some further fabulous depravity. My mother's weary, unwitting half-joke, "Are you getting up?", would be shouted from the hall, and I would reply with my comprehensive euphemism, "I'm just having a think."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  His breathing was—heavy: it was heavy breathing. I felt it wasn't poute to show that I'd noticed. All the same, I pictured a person, perhaps no older than me, naked on a bed, in subdued light, somehow encumbered with clips and straps and probes, greased and hard but holding off the time-and-money-saving moment. I imagined I too was naked in his scenario. I took another mouthful of burger. "Have you got a big one, Ed?" "Mm. Mm." And when I'd cleared my throat: "Yeah, it's huge. It's like, a half-pounder." "Oh Ed, that's really wild . . . A big, big sausage." "Well . . ." "Do you have it in your hand right now?" "Yep, I sure do. I can hardly get my hand round it. I'm lifting it up towards my lips . . ." "Oh, man" (though it sounded like oh, men). "It's kind of oozing stuff out of it!" There was no immediate reply to this, so I carried on eating, faintly troubled by the priapic monster I'd so concisely evoked. He must have covered the mouthpiece—a residual modesty screened the final moments. Then he said, crouching right at my ear, "I love you, Ed." I didn't know if I should respond with something similar; I could only think of "Well, I'm very fond of you, too", but before I could say anything I heard the clunk of the receiver being dropped and saw it twirl on its flex, knocking a table-leg. Then the line was dead. "Who was that?" said Matt as I hung up. "I don't know." Now it was time to eat, please; and there was a surprising twinge of regret amongst my hunger for my new friend. I wondered if he'd get in touch again. "You were great," said Matt, stepping towards me through the clutter of the room. "It seemed to do the trick." "Of course it did." "I didn't really say anything, though." "Well, that's what the trick is," said Matt, and gave me a horrible leer.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  sinfully soft leather jeans. Bent over, this goddess stretched long golden arms sparkling with a thin film of sweat reaching over bouquets of flowers to retrieve her target. Choosing a wild rose a certain shade of pink so luminous it was almost fuchsia, she raised the flower to her face, allowing the silky petals to caress her nose. Satisfied, she cupped the bulb within the palm of her left hand, her long dainty fingers tenderly stroking the external smooth petals. I wasn’t exactly prepared for what she did next. With her right hand, sinking her long finger into the corolla of the flagrantly pink rose, she pene trated the bulb while her left hand squeezed the silky petals. In a split second, every conceivable part of me capable of be coming aroused was demanding some serious attention. Severely chiseled cheekbones cradled dark and sultry bed room eyes that were opened only halfway as if in a perpetual state of arousal. Her short, naturally bushy spirals were streaked in brown and gold hues. Her skin color, glistening in the sunlight, reminded me of Grandma’s hot buttered biscuits. Tall and thin, centuries of African royalty seemed embedded in her dignified posture. Full breasts were giving her ultra- tight T-shirt a hard time. Seemingly content with her selection that included the pink rose, she thrust the bunch at the farmer. I couldn’t believe her nerve. First, she assaulted me, then she molested a defenseless flower, then she jumped in front of me while in line. Strangely, instead of feeling angry, her aggression was turning me on. The farmer handed the roses back to her, wrapped simply in a thin sheet of tissue paper tied with sisal. My gullibility ex pected eye contact with her when instead, she slammed her entire body against me: breasts, thighs, mounds of Venus, all crashing together creating this confused exchange of energy so fast and hard it rattled me, making my head spin. The wind knocked from me, my orchids were tossed to the ground as “Leather Pants” marched on. “I think she likes you,” the farmer remarked, gathering my orchids and wrapping them for me. “I don’t think so. She practically knocked me over, ” I an swered, attempting to regain my coolness because my body was vibrating with both pain and pleasure while I watched her escape. “Well, she asked me to give this to you.” In his hand was the fateful molested rose. Lingering behind her at a safe but interested distance, I watched as she browsed through a few veggie stands before darting across the street and into the Coffee Shop, a trendy restaurant on the Square. Once inside, I didn’t see her. Where could she have disap peared to that quickly? With flower in hand, I followed my feminine instincts and went directly to the ladies’ room.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  It was time to finish your dream the way I’d often wanted to, to be the one to take the place of whoever had begun to se duce you as you slept. I parted your labia with my lips and nose, tongue extended to stroke its way to your clit. At the taste of you my own cunt clenched, and I think I moaned against you as I found your hard sweet clit and fastened my lips around it, fingers still swirl-kneading the very bottom of your muscular cunt. Your hands abandoned your breasts and made a basket around the back of my head, holding me as I licked you, up and up and up against your clit, the motion I know will get you to come and come again if I keep at it, if I fight you after the first time when you try to push me away. Starving for the taste, the feel, the sound, the clinging grasping arch of you at orgasm, I battered your clit with my tongue, making no pretense at subtlety. Mashing my face against your soaked pussy, you ground against me with an agonized sound and I tried to lick faster, wishing my mouth into a blur of spit and muscle to please you.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Then something very strange began to happen—or perhaps it had really begun to happen much earlier on. Ch had walked back across the room, scuffing the plaster & rubbish that covered the floor where part of the ceiling had collapsed. Rainwater must have built up above it, & indeed the whole room, with the somewhat sepulchral effect of the stained glass, felt hideously damp & had that sad mouldy smell that must have meant the beginning of the end for the old Castle. I turned around myself & found Chancey looking at me in the queerest way, his glass stiffly held out in one hand at an angle, so that the contents were very slowly running out down the stem & dripping on to the floor. Outside I heard Eddie shouting ‘Charlie’ & then Tom’s boy saying ‘They’ve all gone, sir.’ There were whoops & whistles from the wood & Tim, presumably, tooting on his horn. I smiled quizzically at Chancey, wondering no end about the possibility of all this, though I didn’t really think I cd go through with it, & went back into the hall. The door was open, but the party had been cleared away, apart from a dozen empty Bollinger bottles which had been left where they had fallen. There was no one there. I went & sat in the old loving-chair, rather appalled by its hackneyed readiness for the occasion, & after a moment Ch came back in, & walked over with the same intent look on his face. As he sat down I noticed, as I hadn’t been able to help noticing earlier in the van, how terrific his private parts were, & now he was conspicuously more excited. As old Roly Carroll wd have said, ‘you cd see the copper’s ’elmet’. I looked at them coming towards me, & felt that frightful inner convulsion of lust, my heart in my mouth & blushing like a rose. The mud, too, spattered up his boots & over his white breeches as tight as a trapeze-artist’s, had some strangely unsettling effect on me. But as soon as he sat down he changed tack completely, & went on about his wretched family as if nothing had happened. How hard his father had worked, & what his mother had done to give him a good education, & how people like Eddie looked down on him because he had been to a school he’d never heard of, & how—& this was the unearned climax to his peroration, which went on for a good 5 minutes while I said nothing whatever—I was the only person who showed him any true consideration, & thought about his inner life. Now this fairly astonished me, as, without being callous, I had never for a moment imagined he had an inner life & frankly, the glimpse he had just afforded me of it was none too appealing. There is nothing worse than making a bid for someone’s body & getting their soul instead.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When he next left the country—for France, quite soon, and then to winter in the desert villages around Cairo—he wd never return. It was a childish & theatrical moment, difficult to respond to seriously, & yet, like occasional lines in melodrama, mordantly moving & true. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he added. I was beginning to see why he did not attract drinking companions, & wondering whether we too might not be moving on, when he invited us all to go & hear the negro band at the Savoy: ‘It’s the most wonderful music there is,’ he said. So we knocked off the rest of the champagne at giddy speed, & lurched out into the street: I assumed we wd walk, but our author’s pedestrian performance was as wayward as his sessile one: it combined the futile caution of the drunkard with a true instinct for elegance—if of a somewhat decadent kind. With each step he rippled upwards, from foot to head, whilst appearing somehow to steer & balance himself with low-down oscillations of his hands: again I was reminded of wall-paintings in Egyptian tombs—there was so linear a quality to him. We hailed a cab in Piccadilly Circus & as he slumped into the smoky compartment beside me he exhaled his new resolve: ‘We must have the most heavenly talk about Africa.’ Phil agreed to come with me to visit Ronald Staines, and since we were at my flat I dressed him myself. I forbade him underwear, and forced him into an old pair of fawn cotton trousers which, tight on me, were anatomically revealing on him. The central seam cut up deeply between his balls, and his little cock was espaliered across the top of his left thigh. A loose, boyish, blue Aertex shirt set this off beautifully, and as I followed him downstairs I was thrilled at my affront to his shyness, and could hardly wait for the strapping I would give him when we got back. All along the pavement in the beating sunshine I kept letting my hands knock him, my fingertips trail over him as they swung. We crossed over Holland Park Avenue and were strolling north up Addison Avenue when there was the slap-slap of running sandalled feet behind us, and my little nephew Rupert was prancing along beside us. ‘Roops—this is a pleasure,’ I said. ‘Are you running off somewhere again?

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I thought perhaps I should go and eat somewhere, but I ordered another beer first. They were quick and lightweight—You could have as many as you liked. I stretched and admitted how tired I was. I'd been up at dawn to leave, my mother speechlessly helping, unable to disguise her misery and anxiety as she drove me to the Dover train. I sympathised with her, and felt confirmed in the rightness of what I was doing. It was something I couldn't explain, although explanations were asked for. I had mumbled reluctantly about time running on, and about the job abroad being only temporary; but not about the darker sense of stepping already along the outward edge of youth, and looking back at those who were truly young with unwelcome eagerness and regret. Just in front of me was a boy with thick fair hair and a long rather mouthy face—it must be a local type. I saw that the older man he was with couldn't quite believe his luck and was clinging to it with clumsy determination while it lasted, though the boy himself appeared relaxed by his frequent caresses. I caught the boy's eye from time to time, while he carried on talking as if he couldn't see me. I found myself idly imagining our life together. A middle-aged man in a suit came and stood by me and started talking about his success in business; I was polite, as always, but he could probably tell I thought something wasn't right. He looked around a good deal and wanted seconding in his view of other people here; several times he backed into the pathway of kids who were going to the loo and then turned his apology into a hurried half-embrace. Sex was very firmly at the top of his agenda, but in some obscurely unflattering way he seemed not to regard me as a sexual possibility myself. He asked if I had any contact numbers. I said no, and then wondered what they would put you in contact with. I couldn't explain to him my odd sexual economy of the past few years, the fantasy-ridden continence, the sparse ration of intense and anonymous treats; I didn't know myself how it had come about. I wasn't sure I could expect much from my hotel, the Mykonos, which advertised in the English gay press. It had seemed the usual stuffy warren when I checked in, the tiny lounge sour and abandoned.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  My father brought me through it, reminded me how to clear my head and strike out with that impalpable falsity that actors need. As I looked down through the grey November light at wretched faces, I remembered him describing an audience and its expectations, the control of yourself you needed to control them. They wanted something from me that it was surprisingly in my power to give. "Speak out," he said. It was rather like on certain still nights, I had never told anyone, but I felt him stooping out of the dark continuum he was banished to and pressing about me with advice too stern to be strictly followed. Back in my seat I was quietly elated, almost expecting congratulations, and took a moment or two to adjust to the heavyheartedness around me. I'd shared a sympathetic smile with one of Dawn's sisters—all three were in the front row with their parents, two of them married to men who sat between them with the diplomatic dry-eyed look of outsiders. It was odd the role these women played in my sense of Dawn, odd that in my keenest memory of him I was absent and they were there—their family holiday, when he was just sixteen. It is some banal Mediterranean resort, the sand shuffled and rubbishy at the end of the day, the sea still and salivary, the four children tearing about, Ralph muscly in tight little trunks, his shoulders pink from the sun, lightly terrorising the girls, whom he keeps on kissing and pinching, picking up and throwing into the water. He is full of unfocused energy which finds issue all day long in teasing and chasing, broken by spells of lordly basking, when they rub creams into him and, hoping for a truce, bring him drinks. He is all potential. His sturdy little cock gets hard as he nestles in the sand, and he likes to surprise the girls with the jut of it; they are censorious about it, as they are about his four chest hairs, and as he is about their breasts. What a busty little group they are. The day cools and the girls trail in while he has a last swim—a long fast lap of crawl. Then I see him wait out there, treading slowly, breathing sharply, looking back at the land where the first lights have appeared. He kicks his legs apart and feels the cool water touch his grateful sphincter. No one ever knew, no one ever will know, so I have him thinking of me, back at Rough Common, thinking of him, waiting for him, reaching down, as I imagine him doing, to feel the quick undertow of possibility.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  tion, as a matter of fact. Not that she had any plan to actually touch this man. She was just curious. That was all. She wanted to understand how someone so ugly could also be so confident. She wanted to study him. Once inside he began to fondle her immediately, squeezing her breasts as if testing them for done ness. She pushed him away and laughed and said he’d gotten the wrong idea, would he like coffee? A drink? And wasn’t it warm for early May? He peeled off his shirt and threw it on the floor. Such hair! He was going to shed all over. Worse. Now he let his pants drop without ceremony, leaving his naked body exposed before her like a strange primordial land scape that had no relationship to sex as she knew it. She stood there, then, sun streaming through her kitchen window, and wondered how such an event could have hap pened to her, how she could find herself with such an ugly naked fat man in her kitchen. It had not been her plan. He was very fat. His great stomach, round and solid-looking, obscured any view of his cock. Then she saw it nestling there, his little manhood, so shy, pink, so painfully small even though it was fully erect, like a snail hiding beneath the shadow of his paunch. Possibly the sight of it awoke some maternal instinct in her, for when he took her hands and drew her to him, pushing her to her knees, she didn’t resist. How amazing, the audacity of it! He wasn’t ashamed of his tiny thing, he was actually expecting her to worship it! He was so small, so exposed, that in her confusion she felt a kind of tenderness toward this man. There was no help for her but to eat him. She may have felt pity. Then she realized at once that she could take both the cock and the pre cious balls into her mouth at once, that she could enjoy the whole salad at the same time. The knowledge swept away her curiosity, her pity. She gobbled him up. Even the taste of his stale urine excited her. For the first time in her life she could appreciate the downy skin, the pulse of cock against her lips, without fear of choking on meat and cum. She milked and milked his little snail until she felt him bucking in her mouth and the sting of semen on her tongue, and she felt herself come in return, right there, kneeling on the kitchen floor.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  When they can get one, I say. It might be a while. They don’t think your condition is urgent. Not urgent? she sputters. I can’t move. I can’t do anything. What do they consider urgent? Shhh, I say, rubbing the taut skin of her breasts, one hand to either side of where her legs rest in front of me. How do they feel? Pretty good, actually—she says, and then she sighs at the feeling as I caress the overtaxed skin. I gradually manage to get her panties down over her legs and off. I suppose that was to make me more comfortable too, she says wryly. I don’t say anything. I move her legs apart and begin to lick where her cunt is against her breasts, prying my tongue into the narrow space where they’re pressed together. She squeaks. What, you don’t like that? I ask. I press one hand into her breasts on either side to steady myself and go in again with my tongue, sliding it up along the sensitive skin of her breasts and then moving directly into her crotch. Poking my tongue in hard to overcome the pressure. She gasps. Hmm, this is tricky, I say aloud. My tongue is not quite long enough, given the position. Don’t go away, I can’t resist saying as I walk into the other room. I get our favorite silicone toy and some lube. Squeezing the dildo in my hands to warm it up, I go back into the living room. She can’t see me. I push hard and rock her forward, rolling her like a ball, so that her head tilts down and almost hits the floor. She stops herself with her hands. Hey! she says. Have you lost your mind? I walk around onto her side and pull her legs up into the air, away from her breasts. Now she almost looks like she’s doing a headstand—next to an earthball. I slide the lubed toy into her

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I started to tell Gerard about my father, and the records he had made, and about what it was like growing up in the house of a musician, the smell of starch, the hospital quiet, the cold suppers left under a cloth for his late return from a recital in Hove or an oratorio in Guildford Cathedral. Gerard was torn between friendly enthusiasm and condescension towards this unheard-of tenor with a repertoire descending from Handel and Mendelssohn through Balfe and John Bacchus Dykes to Oklahoma! and the occasional medley from Lennon and McCartney. He shook his head and said, "It's another world, isn't it?"—as if to marvel at my father's endurance and to remove himself, as a musician, from any taint of association. I would have gone on to point out that Lewis Manners had brought far more happiness into the world than the Ghezellen van der Musycke were ever likely to do and that moreover he could sing, but I was distracted by Cherif climbing on to a stool further down the bar and twirling the remains of a drink with a look of moody disaffection. Later I was talking to Matt. Matt was lean and pale, with slicked-back hair, and a cynical smile that never quite extended to the left side of his mouth. There was an affected calm to him; he looked at you with a glancing stare as if you had already come to an agreement. When I'd seen him here before he had been over-smart, and showed a spivvish self-consciousness about his cuffs and the creases in his flannels. I understood that he was something to do with computers, he was in the money, which explained his groomed composure among the transient youngsters of the bar and added to the static of sex and faithlessness he knew he gave off. Tonight he was in clean new denim and a Tom of Finland T-shirt: a bulging biker arm-locked another across the shallow dip of his chest. He listened closely but impassively to my pained gauche hints about Luc and Cherif, then put a hand on my shoulder and talked to me quietly. His conversation was flat and narrow, and whatever he said took on the feel of a double entendre. He made my back prickle and my chest feel hollow. He talked about "the best places to go": the best place was the Hermitage, some old gardens on the edge of town.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Everybody's wild if they're given the chance," I announced, too pissed to care if I was right. "There's this place I used to go to when I was about, well, twenty or so, it was like a sauna, but just in someone's house—You'd never have known it was there, it didn't have a name or anything: people who went there called it Mr Croy's. though I must say there was never any sign of Mr Croy himself." The thought of those wild afternoons had me catching my breath to find I already had such epochs in me, and that I could look back through the drizzle of wasted time to arcadian clearings, remote and full of light and life. I stopped and called Matt back. "Just come down here a moment with me. I want to look at something." "Come on, man, it's fucking half past one." I took no notice, and doubled down the side lane that led into Long Street. It was only a quick couple of minutes and I was standing across the way from the tall house, gazing up reverently, like a young man in a Schubert song, at the sleeping beloved's window. Not that I knew which window was his. Curtains were closed at every one, and the discreet illumination of an old-fashioned lamp, highlighting the black shine of the front door, lost the upper floors to the night. Where I had been shy before, I gazed hungrily now, with anxious exhilaration, at each shadowed opening, up to the dim roofline and the stars that stood beyond. "What's this?" said Matt, coming up beside me. "In there, a beautiful seventeen-year-old boy is asleep." Matt shook his head. "Is that all we've come to see? Or do we get the seventeen-year-old boy as well?" "Please!" I grinned at the Altidore residence and somehow brought Luc to light in my mind, dreaming, lips parted, in near-darkness—pyjamas, for some reason, but the jacket unbuttoned and twisted under him, an arm across his stomach unconsciously repulsing the possessive duvet. I spoke to Matt for a while, incoherently, trying to bring him into my mood, but glad in the end that he wasn't drunk or romantic enough to get there, and that I possessed it unviolated. He had a hand round my waist, under my jacket where I was a bit fat above the belt; when a taxi came by the driver commented on us to his fare—and when they had gone the silence left me awkwardly alert to the noise we must have been making. I remembered nights at home woken by drunks, passing or stopping for half an hour outside our gate, loud and heedless with drink, sometimes women's wild recriminations . . . I pictured Luc stumbling, half-cross, half-curious, to tweak back the curtain, seeing us propped up and talking rubbish in the doorway opposite. Then Matt started undoing my fly. Chapter 6

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I towelled myself down at the rubber-matted threshold of the showers, and I was largely dry when I heard a whoop and a couple of lads came splashing in through the foot bath, a nicely curvy dark one and a skinny one with long fair hair twisted up in a knot like a girl. They ran straight into the showers and fell against opposite walls, panting and laughing at each other. Without hesitation I flung my towel aside and went back in, unstoppering my conditioner bottle and preparing to wash my hair all over again. I hadn't seen them since that first evening at the Bar Biff, the hot little loudmouth and his friend, his lover, who now unknotted his hair and shook it over his shoulders as if he were Jane Byron herself; and it did give a scatter of glamour to his hollow-eyed face, still blurred by spots around the forehead and jaw. The dark boy, who wasn't plump but would never perhaps be thin, was as hoarsely sexy as possible: I flickered a look from moment to moment over his square full-mouthed head, like a Roman street-boy's, the soft black hairs on his upper lip—and one or two already on his broad-nippled chest—and down to the bow in the draw-string of his trunks, the string hanging and diverted across the neat side ways jut of his cock within the tight red fabric. Yet it was his scrawny friend, just beside me, who gave me again the feel of those lost months of self-discovery, the first possession of the rights of sex. The dark boy would always be sexy, even when he ate himself into middle age, and, who knew, into marriage and its infidelities; but the blond one—not blond even, but a sort of no-colour that took body in the wet—I saw as a common scrap irradiated by love and confidence. I remembered how the whole world changed, how you were suddenly inside the great luminous concourse of human happiness, and how you thought you would be there always—though now, fifteen years later, I found myself glancing myopically in from the limbo of baffled hopes and bad habits that was always ready and waiting just beyond. My boys didn't actually wash or strip, just lounged around and laughed. After ten minutes or so their unembarrassed possession of the place was tiring me and I had washed so frequently and industriously that I began to feel like the victim of some traumatic guilt, who must wash and wash till his skin is chafed away . . . Then at last the fair one had finished, and hurried off into the changing-room—I couldn't quite catch his remark. He had on knee-length trunks in phosphorescent orange, lime and mauve, nightmare colours from my own childhood that seemed to be fashionable all over again. His friend grinned in appreciation, in anticipation, but stayed behind. My heart stepped on the gas.