Tenderness

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 Filthy Animals (2021)

  She wanted to cry again. She almost cried again. She put her arm over her face. “What’s wrong?” Sigrid said. She could feel Sigrid’s shoulders under her legs. “What’s wrong, Marta? Do you want to stop?” “No,” she said hoarsely. “I’ve just. I’ve never.” “Oh, Marta,” Sigrid said. She kissed Marta’s thigh and then her knee. “It’s okay.” “I’m afraid I’ll mess it up,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll see me.” Marta looked at Sigrid, who was looking up at her, those green eyes. “I see you,” Sigrid said. “You’re wonderful.” Marta did cry. She cried, but Sigrid didn’t stop. She seemed to know that the crying meant that Marta didn’t want her to stop. It hadn’t been that way with Peter, Marta thought. It hadn’t been like that. She had not cried with him. She had not felt nervous with him. Because with Peter there hadn’t been any room for her feelings at all. • • • Marta worked in a cubicle at the plant. The walls were thin and covered in a kind of coarse linen fabric. She had tacked up a picture of her parents and a couple of pictures of herself from summer camp when she was a girl, when she’d had thick glasses and a shaggy bobbed haircut. One of the pictures showed Marta as a smiling seven-year-old standing at the edge of a dock, the water a deep green, the sky over the bursting hills a smooth, tranquil blue. It gave her something pretty to look at when her eyes grew tired and the columns of figures and sums swam together. Her desk was tidy except for the in-box, where people from other departments dropped their own reports, and Marta had to organize them and figure out what she was supposed to do with them. She’d been working at the plant for about five years, and the work had adhered to her like the accumulation of calcium in a pipe, until she was no longer sure if she’d always been suited for the job or had simply become suited through prolonged exposure. In the plant, there was always the sound of dripping water and the dull, distant roar of surf. The hallways had flickering green lights, and when she walked from tunnel to tunnel, climbing up the ladders to inspect the tanks and take down their measurements, it was like moving through an emerald dream. Not many people worked in the plant, not on Marta’s shift—maybe thirty in all. There were of course the men who worked underground, who did the real work and sometimes were burned by acid or lye, who came up the elevators screaming because they’d gotten their hand caught in a hydraulic press. The men were the thick, blunted sort whose lives had deposited them in the plant the way a sluggish stream accumulates debris.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s sumptuous La Beauté Humaine that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycée in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult. 3Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita). Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “I’ll go first,” I said. Although I put lots of spit on him and me, he still said it hurt. I’d get about half an inch in and he’d say, “Take it out! Quick!” He was lying on his side with his back to me, but I could still look over and see him wince in profile. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s like a knife all through me.” The pain subsided and with the bravery of an Eagle Scout he said, “Okay. Try it again. But take it easy and promise you’ll pull out when I say so.” This time I went in a millimeter at a time, waiting between each advance. I could feel his muscles relaxing. “Is it in?” he asked. “Yep.” “All the way in?” “Almost. There. It’s all in.” “Really?” He reached back for my crotch to make sure. “Yeah, it is,” he said. “Feel good?” “Terrific.” “Okay,” he instructed, “go in and out, but slow, okay?” “Sure.” I tried a few short thrusts and asked if I was hurting him. He shook his head. He bent his knees up toward his chest and I flowed around him. Whereas face to face I had felt timid and unable to get enough of his body against enough of mine, now I was glued to him and he didn’t object—it was understood that this was my turn and I could do what I liked. I tunneled my lower arm under him and folded it across his chest; his ribs were unexpectedly small and countable, and now that he’d completely relaxed I could get deeper and deeper into him. That such a tough, muscled little guy, whose words were so flat and eyes so without depth or humor, could be so richly taken—oh, he felt good. But the sensation he was giving didn’t seem like something afforded by his body, or if so, then it was a secret gift, shameful and pungent, one he didn’t dare acknowledge. In the Chris-Craft I’d been afraid of him. He had been the usual intimidating winner, beyond excitement—but here he was, pushing this tendoned, shifting pleasure back into me, the fine hair on his neck damp with sweat just above the hollows the sculptor had pressed with his thumbs into the clay. His tan hand was resting on his white hip. The ends of his lashes were pulsing just beyond the line of his full cheek. “Does it feel good?” he asked. “Want it tighter?” he asked, as a shoe salesman might. “No, it’s fine.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Barda is a vodka-distilling sop given to cattle in Russia. The “geographic” names offer an ironic tribute to Miss Weiss’s heroic efforts. Feu: French; Fire. Impredictable: a portmanteau word; unpredictable plus impredicable (from predicated): “incapable of being categorized.” a feminine “ah!”: see I shot ... said: Ah.’ and shooting her lover ... making him say “akh!”. trudging from room to room: the keys jangling in H.H.’s pocket have not locked the rooms (see keys ... locks ... left hand); a fairy tale and nightmare blended. Quilty’s refusal to die mocks the Double story, and the idea that evil can be exorcized so easily. pink bubble: see bubble of hot poison for the original, figurative bubble. purple heap: the color of his bathrobe and his prose. staged for me by Quilty: see The Strange Mushroom. CHAPTER 36 Thomas had something: Thomas the Apostle, the “doubting” disciple of John 20:24, who refused to believe in the resurrection of Christ until he himself had touched the nail wounds. Asked if an allusion to Thomas Mann might also be intended here, Nabokov replied, “The other Tom had nothing.” Hegelian synthesis: the death of Charlotte is remembered here (the killer’s car going up the slope; here), blending with the whole story of Lolita, from the cows on the slope (here) to her assumed death (if the reader reads the book, Lolita must be dead; see here, here, and here). This “Hegelian synthesis” realizes Quilty’s “Elizabethan” play-within-the-novel, The Enchanted Hunters, which featured Lolita as a bewitching “farmer’s daughter who imagines herself to be a woodland witch, or Diana,”, and seven hunters, six of them “red-capped, uniformly attired.” A “last-minute kiss was to enforce the play’s profound message, namely, that mirage and reality merge in love.” When Humbert asks a pregnant and veiny-armed Lolita to go away with him, he demonstrates that the mirage of the past (the nymphic Lolita as his lost “Annabel”) and the reality of the present (the Charlotte-like woman Lolita is becoming) have merged in love, a “synthesis linking up two dead women.” heavenlogged system.... crisscrossing the crazy quilt: Part Two’s final reference to Quilty by name mirrors the section’s first entry, “crazy quilt.” We’ve seen that such “coincidences” limn H.H.’s entrapment, his particular obsessional McFate—“I cannot get out, said the starling”—and, of course, the author’s presence.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “We’ll gut him now and pack him back to camp to dry out a little.” “Uh…okay. Will he be all right tonight? You know, he won’t go bad?” “No. It’s cool enough. He’ll hold for a couple of days.” We hauled the buck away from the kill area and strung him up in a tree. After a couple of false starts, Markey slit its belly with a grimace of distaste. When that job was done, we hauled the carcass back to camp where we hung it again, washed out the cavity, and left it to dry. Then I grabbed a bar of soap, stripped, and waded into the lake. Ignoring the shock of cold water, I lathered up while Markey stood on the shore staring at me in disbelief. After all, it was November. “If I’ve learned one thing in the last ten years, it’s to keep clean,” I called. “Keeping clean is half of staying healthy. Coming in?” I watched as he undressed in the late afternoon sun, revealing a long-limbed, clean-muscled physique with unblemished skin and little body hair except for a pubic bush. Visibly embarrassed, he turned with his flank toward me, which merely silhouetted a long cock sprouting from curly hair. He rushed into the water and gasped aloud at its frigid grip. I continued lathering, well aware of black eyes studying me closely. I rinsed and repeated the process until my skin squeaked. When I tossed him the soap, he seemed frozen in place. Then he floundered frantically until he recovered the bar. As Markey scrubbed, I could tell my inspection bothered him, so I swam out into the lake. Sufficiently warmed by my exertions, I silently submerged and covered the distance to the shore underwater. When I surfaced beside him, Markey was frantically calling my name. “Right here,” I said quietly, startling him. “Damn, Daniel! I thought something happened to you. You were under for a long time.” “A fifty-yard underwater swim is mandatory for SEALS.” I laughed. “You’d be surprised how many tadpoles had to have water pumped out of their lungs after their first try.” Markey’s teeth were chattering, so I crawled out of the water, knowing he would follow. To spare him further embarrassment, I kept my eyes averted as we dried off and dressed. I did the cooking, a trade-off for him cleaning up the gear afterward. Later, as darkness was wresting supremacy from light, we sat at a campfire and sucked on long-necked bottles of beer. “How was it?” he asked out of the blue. “You know, the SEALS.” “Great! Best time of my life.” “Why’d you get out?” I swallowed the temptation to tell him the truth. “Found out there was more money to be made outside the navy for doing the same thing.” “I heard you were a soldier of fortune, but I didn’t believe it.” “Why not?” “You were so gung-ho.” “You grow out of that pretty quick.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Even at the cottage he would set up an office and work till dawn when he wasn’t outdoors doing manual labor under artificial light, his “hobby.” But now a houseful of guests had forced him to modify his hours and habits. Had Mrs. Cork been a beauty he might have suffered the presence of her family more gladly; he was a great fancier of women and they brought out in him a courtliness as rich and old as the best port. His irritable misanthropy vanished in the presence of a beautiful woman. She could even be a child, a lovely little girl; she would still excite gallantry in him. Once a ten-year-old charmer who was staying with us announced at midnight that she wanted chocolate and my father drove fifty miles to a nearby town, dragged the owner of a candy store out of bed and paid a hundred dollars for twenty opera creams. He once gave the same amount as a tip to a full-bodied, glossy-lipped singer in an Italian restaurant who had serenaded him with a wobbling but surprisingly intimate rendition of “Vissi d’arte” to an accordion accompaniment executed by a hunchback with Bell’s palsy freezing half his face while the other half modestly winked and smiled. The only part of his customary life my father could maintain during the Corks’ visit was filling every waking moment with what used to be called “classical” music, though most of it was romantic, Brahms in particular. He had always had hundreds of records, which he played on a Meissen phonograph that stood as a separate, massive piece of furniture in one corner of his office. I mention the constant music because, to my mind at least, it served as an invisible link between my father and me. He never discussed music beyond saying that the German Requiem was “damn nice” or that the violin and cello concerto was “one hell of a piece,” and even these judgments he made with a trace of embarrassment; for him, music was emotion, and he did not believe in discussing feelings.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “Okay, okay. I want you just as bad as you want me,” said Richard. He quickly stripped and Damian saw Richard’s dick for the first time. It was hard and large. He was maybe a touch bigger than Stan, which meant Damian’s hole would be stretched more than he was used to, but he’d be able to take what he was given with pure pleasure. Richard’s taut body was even better than Damian had imagined, a vast improvement over most of the men who got to fuck his ass. As Richard slipped on a condom, Damian pulled his knees back as far as he could to give complete access to his hole. Richard let out a low rumble of appreciation as he lubed up Damian with two fingers and then three. Damian was perplexed. He thought he loved the rough reamings he received from Stan, Bob and the men in the videos. But Richard’s slow, gentle pace nearly sent him into a paroxysm of spent lust. He had to close his eyes and calm himself so as not to come too quickly. And suddenly, he was no longer in a hurry to leave Los Angeles before Stan found out he was missing. He wanted Richard’s firm but loving penetration to last forever. While Damian’s pleasure at giving up his ass was intense, Richard’s kisses were unfathomably wonderful. In the years with Stan, Damian had nearly never been kissed, and Richard’s lips were so soft. His skin smelled clean and faintly of an aftershave Damian’s father had worn. Damian inhaled deeply. After Damian allowed Richard’s tongue to find his, he felt Richard’s cock stretch inside his ass. Damian whimpered in earnest from offering his hole so completely to such a huge dick, but instead of pushing Richard off, he surrendered, fully bringing his ankles to his ears. It was the most vulnerable his ass had ever been, and the euphoria filled Damian’s chest to the point that he could barely breathe. Damian couldn’t help it this time and with a great gasp, he came in huge spurts all over his neck and chin, his head thrashing left and right. This set off Richard’s orgasm, and with a series of grunts that turned to a roar, Richard climaxed, pushing his steel-hard rod as deep as possible on the last thrust. Damian was rewarded with the biggest, fiercest kiss he’d ever known. Then Richard looked down on him with an incredulous expression in his eyes. “That was…so wonderful,” Richard said. “I’ve seen clips of your videos, but I’ve never, ever seen you enjoy getting fucked so much.” “It’s you,” said Damian. “You’re what made it better than all the other fuckings you’ve seen me take, and it’s because you hold my heart.” Richard kissed Damian’s lips. “You certainly know how to make a man feel happy, young fellow.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The garbled license numbers left by all these Persons and Orgons and Morells and Trapps only told me that motel keepers omit to check if guests’ cars are accurately listed. References—incompletely or incorrectly indicated—to the cars the fiend had hired for short laps between Wace and Elphinstone were of course useless; the license of the initial Aztec was a shimmer of shifting numerals, some transposed, others altered or omitted, but somehow forming interrelated combinations (such as “WS 1564” and “SH 1616,” and “Q32888” or “CU 88322”) which however were so cunningly contrived as to never reveal a common denominator . It occurred to me that after he had turned that convertible over to accomplices at Wace and switched to the stage-motor car system, his successors might have been less careful and might have inscribed at some hotel office the archtype of those interrelated figures. But if looking for the fiend along a road I knew he had taken was such a complicated vague and unprofitable business, what could I expect from any attempt to trace unknown motorists traveling along unknown routes? 24 By the time I reached Beardsley, in the course of the harrowing recapitulation I have now discussed at sufficient length, a complete image had formed in my mind; and through the—always risky—process of elimination I had reduced this image to the only concrete source that morbid cerebration and torpid memory could give it. Except for the Rev. Rigor Mortis (as the girls called him), and an old gentleman who taught non-obligatory German and Latin, there were no regular male teachers at Beardsley School. But on two occasions an art instructor on the Beardsley College faculty had come over to show the schoolgirls magic lantern pictures of French castles and nineteenth-century paintings. I had wanted to attend those projections and talks, but Dolly, as was her wont, had asked me not to, period. I also remembered that Gaston had referred to that particular lecturer as a brilliant garçon ; but that was all; memory refused to supply me with the name of the chateau-lover. On the day fixed for the execution, I walked through the sleet across the campus to the information desk in Maker Hall, Beardsley College. There I learned that the fellow’s name was Riggs (rather like that of the minister), that he was a bachelor, and that in ten minutes he would issue from the “Museum” where he was having a class. In the passage leading to the auditorium I sat on a marble bench of sorts donated by Cecilia Dalrymple Ramble. As I waited there, in prostatic discomfort, drunk, sleep-starved, with my gun in my fist in my raincoat pocket, it suddenly occurred to me that I was demented and was about to do something stupid. There was not one chance in a million that Albert Riggs, Ass. Prof., was hiding my Lolita at his Beardsley home, 24 Pritchard Road.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  His real love was the late Brahms, the piano Intermezzi and especially the two clarinet sonatas. These pieces, as unpredictable as thought and as human as conversation, filled the house night after night. He could not have liked them as background music to work to, since their abrupt changes of volume and dynamics must have made them too arresting to dismiss. I never showered with my dad, I never saw him naked, not once, but we did immerse ourselves, side by side, in those passionate streams every night. As he worked at his desk and I sat on his couch, reading or daydreaming, we bathed in music. Did he feel the same things I felt? Perhaps I ask this only because now that he’s dead I fear we shared nothing and my long captivity in his house represented to him only a slight inconvenience, a major expense, a fair to middling disappointment, but I like to think that music spoke to us in similar ways and acted as the source and transcript of a shared rapture. I feel sorry for a man who never wanted to go to bed with his father; when the father dies, how can his ghost get warm except in a posthumous embrace? For that matter, how does the survivor get warm? Kevin hated music. When he was horsing around with his little brother, he’d fall back into the silliness of boyhood. Like all boys, they loved cracking stupid jokes that became funnier and funnier to them the more they were repeated. The opera singers especially tickled them (strangely enough, considering their mother was a singer) and they’d jounce along with warbling falsettos, holding their right hands on their stomachs and rolling their eyes. I was chagrined by this clowning because I’d already imagined Kevin as a sort of husband. No matter that he was younger; his cockiness had turned him into the Older One. But this poignantly young groom I couldn’t reconcile with the brat he had become today. Perhaps he wanted to push me away. In the afternoon everyone except Kevin and me left on a boat ride. We went swimming off the dock. Clouds had covered the sun, gray clouds with black bellies and veins of fiery silver. After a while they blew away and released the late sun’s warmth. We were standing side by side. I was at least half a foot taller than Kevin. We both had erections and we pulled our suits open under the cold water and looked down at them. Kevin pointed out that there were two openings at the head of his penis, separated by just the thinnest isthmus of flesh. I touched his penis and he touched mine. “Somebody might see us,” I said, backing away. “So what,” he said.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Then the coughing came, and it was like choking on air itself, as if air were made of fine wool, as if it were fibrous, tickling his throat, exciting a gag reflex. Alek put his hand to the wall outside the low building that housed the ballet studio. He could feel his stomach muscles contracting, a shuddering heave up against a wall inside him, solid and unyielding. He couldn’t breathe for coughing, coughing until he could taste blood, but nothing splashed the gravel below his feet. His body was still hot from dance, sore, aching, and he gripped his stomach and squeezed his body with all his strength, as if he could force the cough out. He saw spinning clots of light in front of him, stars from some inverted galaxy behind his eyelids. A couple of other dancers stood nearby, drinking from clear water bottles. They looked his way at first and then away. But when he doubled over, they came to him and put their palms against his back, which was damp with sweat. They leaned down to him, and he could smell their sour scent, their breath like smoke. He strained to look at them. Who was it that was looking at him? A girl, blond: Sophie. She put her small fingers around his wrist and tried to draw him up. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Are you all right?” He couldn’t speak. She slid her palm down his forearm to his elbow and then motioned for him to sit. But he kept coughing and tried to turn away so that he wouldn’t get anything on her. Still, she pulled at him, insisting that he should sit down, and he did. He slid down into the warm gravel, felt the stones through his tights, knew that their azure dust would cling to the spandex. All over, he was on fire. The sun, hazy, distant, white on the horizon, the trees, spindly fibers whirling in the distance. Eventually the coughing subsided—it had been bronchial in nature, that hollow, echoing sound—and he could breathe again. He felt stunned, slapped, like he’d been dipped into some other world tucked just under this one and brought back too quickly. Sophie was sitting next to him, one hand gripping his, the other making circles on his back. A bead of sweat clung to the corner of her mouth. A red clip kept hair off her face. He had always admired her, thought her talent terrifying. Sophie. She gave him a tentative, sad smile. She let him drink from her bottle. The water was flat and warm. It had a coppery taste. “We better get inside,” she said. “All right,” he said, and he let her take him by the arm again, to get him on his feet.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  When sex with a decent woman was not an open provocation of another man, attitudes might be less exacting. One of the finest representations of quiet indulgence occurs at the end of the fifth book of Leucippe and Clitophon. The young “widow” Melite falls passionately in love with Clitophon, yet he artfully avoids physical consummation of their engagement. When Melite’s husband turns up alive, she makes one last effort to take Clitophon to bed. The seduction scene was the deliberate inverse of Leucippe’s heroic resistance against Thersander, Melite’s husband. Melite’s speech is the cri de coeur of a desperate young wife infatuated with another man. Clitophon’s response is tender. “Something human moved me, and I truly feared the god Eros too.… This would have to be reckoned not so much intercourse as a cure for an ailing soul.… Everything happened by the will of Eros.” In the dramatic final act, Melite would indeed find herself charged with adultery. The prosecutors note that one who corrupts a wedded wife steals what belongs to another man. Nevertheless, Achilles Tatius is humane, or subversive, enough to let Melite escape on a technicality, by vowing that she did not violate her marriage so long as she thought her husband was dead, when in fact she hurriedly cheated on him as soon as she learned that his return was imminent!42 The satisfaction of Melite demonstrates that sometimes eros transcended human rules, not that the rules were changing. Despite the episode’s undoubted charm, it cannot count as a winking acknowledgment of women’s liberation. Sometimes the Roman Empire is construed as a progressive moment in women’s history, rolled back in late antiquity by the regressive alliance of religion and patriarchy. The vociferous, if satirical, complaints about powerful wives, the frank depiction of feminine sexual pleasure in the visual arts, the greater presence of women in the public sphere—all of these are signs that point to a wider range of motion for the Roman matron. As with any such caricature, this one has only a certain admixture of truth. A number of structural factors worked in a woman’s favor. By the imperial era, older forms of marriage that placed the woman in the legal power of her husband had long fallen into desuetude. Roman rules that kept spousal property in separate funds meant that the woman’s dowry was, as men complained, a subtle source of leverage. The woman’s—or, more realistically, the girl’s—consent was formally required for the marriage, and liberal laws of divorce allowed women to end marriages, unilaterally and virtually without cause. The Augustan social legislation created a path for women to achieve an exceptional legal competence, the ability to act without a male tutor, by bearing three children. The Roman woman is hardly a naive and feeble creature hopelessly under her husband’s thumb.43

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Charles had come into the kitchen. Lionel turned to him. “It’s a mess,” he said. “What?” “I don’t know,” Lionel said, but his heart was beating fast, and his hands shook. He could hardly hold himself still. “Oh, shit.” “I’m fine.” “Sure.” “No, don’t! There’s glass,” Lionel said. Charles had made to cross the room. He was still naked, barefoot. At Lionel’s warning, he drew up short. Then he put on his boots, still naked, collected a dustpan and broom, and swept a few glass fragments from the floor. Then he leaned down to inspect what was in the sink, and whistled. “You better get a new one,” he said. With the glass gone, cold air was swirling into the apartment. Lionel saw the air raise goose bumps down Charles’s back and thighs, little ridges of flesh. “Thanks,” he said. “Do you think you got it all?” “You might run a vacuum over it if you’ve got one, but I think you’ll live.” Charles leaned down to kiss Lionel then, gripped the backs of his thighs and lifted him easily. “Your knee,” Lionel said. “You’re not a physio.” Lionel wrapped his legs around Charles and let himself be carried back to bed. Charles stomped in the boots. “Stay,” Lionel said later, when Charles was getting dressed. “Can’t,” Charles said. “I have to go.” “Stay.” “I’ll be back,” Charles said. He kissed Lionel’s forehead and then his mouth and he was gone out the door. Lionel drew his blanket around himself and lay down. “I have to go anyway,” Lionel said, and the only answer was the quiet of his apartment, the soft rattle of snow striking the kitchen sink.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Night after night the story of their lives came together, as though in puzzle pieces, a clump of sky confining the still-empty silhouette of a tree, another piece shaped like a running dog but turning out to be a child’s elbow against four pickets in a fence. One passage, complete in itself but not yet oriented to the rest, would float wonderfully to its correct position on the board. Rachel had been brought up by her father, a Miami real estate investor of a cruelty that surpassed description, though incest, starvation and frequent beatings were hinted at. His evil nature I confused with his daughter’s poetic genius. Whereas DeQuincey sniggered, stuttered and shrugged his way through his gruesome account, never more than a wisecrack away from pain, Rachel refused to tell her story, but when she relented she proceeded with great gravity. Each of them, in fact, competed for my sympathy. One night I told the Scotts of my struggles against homosexuality and of my present effort to be cured through psychoanalysis. Although I maintained a flippant tone about sex, the Scotts both stood as I spoke, then came over to my kitchen chair, drew me to my feet and embraced me, tears in their eyes. “You poor boy,” Mr. Scott said again and again, searching my face for the stigmata of mental illness. “You poor, poor boy. But surely you haven’t acted on these impulses, have you?” It took a moment for me to realize they hoped I had only thought about sex with men but never actually engaged in it. I assured them I was very experienced, though I wasn’t. I exaggerated the depth of my depravity. Although I was content to accept their sympathy, I didn’t want them to pity me for crimes I had merely contemplated. My admission put them off a bit, as though the fact of sex were a coarse redundancy and the idea of it quite sinful enough. My confession spurred them on to more daring feats of self-disclosure. I learned that DeQuincey had also been homosexual briefly, a period just before his marriage and conversion, a period adumbrated as a time of faltering, of humiliation, exhaustion and confusion, of bouts of madness alternating with briefer and briefer zones of lucidity, as an accelerating train leaving the station might roll faster and faster under dim lamps before plunging into the blackout of night. Now he was no longer homosexual, not in any way, nor did he ever experience even the slightest twitch of forbidden desire. This complete change he attributed to Christ and Rachel.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  His face had lost its softness. There was still warmth in his eyes and in his brow, but now there was also sharpness, clean, cruel lines. “You look different,” Lionel said, and Charles frowned at him. “Bad? I thought you liked it.” “I do like it,” he said. “I do. You look great.” “I don’t believe you,” Charles said. His feelings were hurt. Lionel got up from the bed and gathered Charles’s hair into his hands. “We have to burn it,” he said. “Why?” Charles asked. “So that birds don’t take it and make you crazy. It’s something my grandma says.” “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.” • • • Charles made a small circle in the snow, a place that he excavated with his bare hands. When he was done, his fingers were red and numb. He put them under Lionel’s shirt and held them there against his skin. Lionel shivered, but he didn’t move or make Charles take his hands away. He could do this, could give his heat, at least. Then Charles set the hair down in the middle of the circle and tried to light it, but it wouldn’t stay lit. A couple of strands turned bright orange then immediately burned themselves out. The ground was dampening the other hairs, making them hard to burn. Lionel went back into his apartment and came out with a small pot. He set it on the ground and put the hair inside. He took out a sheet of paper and handed it to Charles. “Try this,” he said. Charles smiled at him and crouched over the pot. He lit the paper and nestled it into the hair. The smell was awful, as the strands turned to fire, like little worms writhing as they burned themselves out. Their light was insufficient to illuminate anything, but for a while, it was beautiful to watch. Charles put his arms around Lionel, and Lionel leaned back against him. The wind was at their faces, the smoke rising toward them, then above them, and then away. Lionel felt he might fall asleep right there, standing up—drift off and never come back to his body. The snowfall was even and slow. “Let’s go inside.” FLESH It was the class for stragglers. Charles shucked his joggers so that he could pull yesterday’s sour tights over his underwear. He squeezed two cold drops of Visine into each eye and blinked hard as he considered the black athletic brace in his bag. But he left it because if he couldn’t get through a class, he had no business dancing at all. He was against the back wall with two of the younger male dancers, Viktor and Ben. They were about sixteen and had been homeschooled from first grade.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  But there was warmth beneath her expression. In the porch light, she glowed. Charles stroked her arm with his finger. They could go on forever that way, Lionel thought. They knew what to do to each other. How to be together. That business in the kitchen had been an aberration, or maybe just the prelude to this tenderness. Sophie kissed the top of Charles’s head and pulled away from him. She sat next to Lionel in her thick gray tights and corduroy skirt. She had a purple jacket over her shoulders and a green hat that someone had knit for her. As everyone had been getting ready to go outside, she had passed the hat around, clearly proud of it, like a family heirloom. “Rough going at dinner. I see you and Charlie made up, though.” She propped her chin on her hand. Charlie . “Yeah,” Lionel said. “We’re old buddies now.” Sophie’s face shifted subtly under the porch light, like a figure from myth or a trailer for an ominous horror movie. Charles leaned forward on the stool and braced his arms on the banister. In the yard, the others had begun to spin in slow circles with their heads back and their arms out in Christ pose. “He’s good at enjoying himself,” Sophie said. “I’m afraid I’m out of my depth. Or maybe I’m too drunk to have this conversation.” “I just mean—he isn’t always considerate of other people.” She was amused as she said it, and Lionel relaxed. They squeezed together against the side of the house. Lionel felt he could breathe again. Sophie offered him her cup, and when Lionel hesitated, she clarified, “Water.” “In that case,” Lionel said. The lukewarm water tasted vaguely like beer—someone had done a pretty halfhearted job of rinsing the cup out before refilling it or had simply refilled it without rinsing it at all. But he was aware, the moment he took the first sip, that he was powerfully, endlessly thirsty. He couldn’t stop drinking. The water passed through his mouth and down the back of his throat, where it dissolved into nothing. He kept drinking to satisfy his dry tongue, and before he knew it, he had drunk all of Sophie’s water. She looked at him in a way that was either impressed or annoyed. “Sorry.” “The hour of thirst is upon us.” Lionel offered to replenish the cup, but she shrugged and said it was fine. She’d brought a lightweight blanket out on the porch and draped it over their legs. “I’m sorry if I was being bitchy before,” she said. “In the kitchen.” “You weren’t.” “I was, but thank you. I just hate when people lie about how they feel.” “You must be bitchy all the time, then.” “I consider myself an honest person.” “It must be nice to have a robust sense of yourself.” Lionel could feel through the house siding the pressure of Sophie’s head turning toward him.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  It was dark and dank even though Henry had painted the walls and the floor in a pale blue color and the oil burner kept it warm. A single bulb on a pull string gave them light. Piles of cartons were neatly stacked, along with summer furniture for the porch. They sat together on a beach chair until it collapsed, sending them both to the concrete floor, laughing. After that, they unwound a summer rug and lay down on it. The sisal was itchy but it would have been a lot itchier if they weren’t fully dressed. They had to be very quiet. Had to whisper. Miri wasn’t sure what would happen if they were discovered. Henry would probably be okay with it, and Irene never came to the basement. But Rusty—she never knew with Rusty. “Let’s play Trust,” Mason said. “How do you play?” “You’ve never played Trust?” “No. I’ve never even heard of it. Is it a board game?” He took her hand and smiled. “You tell me something you’ve never told anyone else. Then I tell you.” “You tell me first,” Miri said. He turned toward her, propping himself up on an elbow. “My mom…” he began. He’d never told her anything about his parents. He’d never mentioned either one of them except to say the kaleidoscope had been his mother’s. She figured they were dead or he wouldn’t be living at Janet Memorial Home. “My mom,” he began again, “she took off after my dad slugged her so hard he knocked out her front teeth and broke her nose and cheekbone. She said next time he’d kill her. ‘I’ll come back for you, Mason,’ she promised the night she came to my room holding a small suitcase. ‘I’ll come back for you and we’ll go away together.’ I was eleven and I believed her. Instead they found her on the railroad tracks the next day. She either fell or jumped and the train rolled over her. At the time, nobody bothered to tell me. Easier if I didn’t know, they thought. Jack finally told me. He said it was an accident but I think she jumped.” Miri didn’t know what to say. “Before she left,” Mason continued, “she lay down next to me on my bed and said, ‘He won’t hurt you. He’d never hurt you. You just stay out of his way when he’s drinking. Get out of the house. Go with Jack. Go anywhere. Just get out of his way.’ I ran the night he came after me with an ax. Picked up Fred and got the hell out of there. That’s the night Jack took me to Janet.” Miri could not stop the hot tears. She covered her face. “Hey, come on, don’t…” Mason said. “It’s okay.” She shook her head. “It’s not okay.” “Yeah, it is. Look, I’m here, aren’t I?” He kissed away her tears. Then it was her turn.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “Big flirt,” Richard said as he swabbed Damian’s gums. The young men who came regularly to Richard’s free STD clinic were almost all hustlers or participants in low-quality porn videos, the dangerous sort that demanded barebacking. Considering how often he had to distribute antibiotics or refer the boys to specialists, he was impressed that Damian was always negative for everything. He’d seen snippets of the website DaddiesinDamian. com and knew, from the videos, that scores of older men fucked the young stud. “So this week when I have free time, I’m going to clean your gutters, cut your lawn and paint your side door.” “You already cleaned the gutters, Mr. Helpful, and you don’t have to do anything, actually. This free clinic really is free.” “You can’t be making much money treating people for nothing.” Richard shrugged. “So I don’t have much money in the bank. The world won’t end.” Damian gave Richard a simmering smile. “But I still want to help you because…well…I want you to like me.” “I do like you,” Richard said, squeezing Damian’s shoulder. “You’re my buddy,” “But you call all your patients ‘buddy’. I want to be special.” Richard smiled but said nothing. Damian was special to the doctor, but Richard wanted to suppress the sentiment. Even though it had been two years, he was still wounded that Robbie, the only porn boy he’d ever allowed into his heart, had left him. But Damian was far more handsome and seemed so much sweeter. How could he not have feelings? “You have such pretty eyes,” Damian said. “They twinkle when you smile. And I like your beard and…you’re so built for…um…” Richard laughed. “For someone my age? I used to be a marine.” “Oh. That explains why you’re so damn hot.” Richard couldn’t help but grin. “Thank you, Damian.” Richard knew he wasn’t bad looking for an older man, but he was aware of how much Damian loved Daddies, so the compliment meant more than most, and a small wave of pleasure rippled through Richard’s stomach. “I don’t have any money for a proper date, but can we maybe go for a walk in the park or something?” Richard wanted to mention Robbie and explain why he didn’t want to open up his heart, but took another tack. “I do really like you, Damian, but I can’t help but be jealous of all the men that fuck you. The right man for you to be with couldn’t have that kind of hang up.” Damian frowned but nodded. “I understand. I’ve been meaning to get out of that situation. I figure I must have paid back Stan for the airfare from Tennessee, and I hope I’m earning more than what he expects for my room and board. He said he’d give me a chance to start college after the first year, and it’s been almost three.”

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  The blows cease. There’s the sound of the whip hitting the floor, of clothes being peeled off. Dad strokes the throbbing burn of my back, and his fingers’ soft touch makes me jolt and tremble and cry harder. Dad stands behind me, holding me inside his nakedness. He tousles my hair, pulls off the blindfold. Light floods my eyes. Snot’s running from my nose, and Dad suddenly has a Kleenex in his hand. “No, please, it’s nasty,” I mumble, but Dad holds the tissue to my nose anyway, and I blow and snort. I’m laughing and crying at the same damn time now, as Dad unbinds my hands and feet, then loosens my gagstraps and pulls the dripping ball from my mouth. I turn from the cross and my knees buckle and I fall into his arms and cry even harder. We lie on the floor, hugging one another tight, my face buried in his chest hair. I cry some more. Finally I stop. Dad helps me up. He leads me to his bed. He rubs lotion into my back and ass. “Yes, cub,” he says, spooning me. “Tonight you can stay here with me.” I sleep sound, waking only once to find Dad’s arms still around me. First light, I get up to piss. I stare at the bathroom mirror. My eyes are bloodshot and my sinuses aching, thanks to all those tears. I turn, studying my reflection. Black bruises and red welts cover my shoulders, back and butt, like someone had spilled pokeberry ink or scrawled red sentences into my skin. Today, I ain’t in any hurry to get back to the sadness at home. Think I’ll take the long way back, up over the mountains of Craig County. I’ll stop at my favorite down-home diner in New Castle and get me some coffee and some biscuits and sausage gravy, and I’ll sit there, listening to bow-hunters in camo talk about the bucks they brought down, and all they’ll see is a stocky little redneck with a bushy black beard, dressed in jeans and cowboy boots and a Virginia Tech Hokies baseball cap and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and I’ll be what I seem to be and very much not what I seem to be, with these wounds Dad left hidden beneath my clothes, each mark a reminder of all the gifts he’s given me. “Get in here, Donnie-boy,” I hear Daddy Draden growl from the bedroom. Don’t take Dad long to tie my hands behind my back and fuck my face till he cums. The load he dumps in my mouth tastes like hope. Milk of human kindness: now I get the phrase. Dad drowses a little and then pulls out, slaps my cheeks with his dick, lets me lick the post-cum ooze from his slit.

• From Escape (2007)

  Brian remained a steadfast and joyful presence in my life. I experienced a kind of intimacy and tenderness I’d never known before. Brian taught me how to dance, took me to see the Utah Jazz play basketball, and introduced me to the life he said I would have been living if I hadn’t been born into polygamy. Sometimes we’d just hang out and watch movies. I had never seen a lot of the classic films we enjoyed watching together. Brian is Jewish and he took me to his synagogue and taught me about some of his beliefs and traditions. It was interesting to me, but at the moment I’m not in the market for another God. Brian has a deep respect for women and had a hard time listening to some of what I’d been through. I didn’t tell him a lot of things because I knew they would be too painful for him to hear. We went for long walks in the park together and he got me interested in running. Brian had done the Boston Marathon five times and the New York Marathon once. When summer began, Brian gave our family season passes for Lagoon, an amusement park for children that’s like a mini Disneyland. It also has the best water park in the valley. Brian said I was always doing things for my children but that I rarely got to do things with them. Betty was furious that we were going to be riding on the roller coaster, going through the haunted house, and banging around in bumper cars. She tried her best to sabotage us by telling the younger children not to go. The FLDS believed water was the devil’s domain, and Betty tried to convince her siblings that I was throwing them into the devil’s lair. Individually, the children were doing well, but as a family we were still in the throes of the cult mentality. We went into counseling together. After a few sessions the therapist said that she wanted to work one-on-one with Betty. I was so grateful when Betty said she was willing to go. I went back into therapy with Larry Bill. He told me that I was hurting Betty by allowing her to terrorize the family and that I was jeopardizing everyone else. It was hard for me to accept, but I knew what Larry was saying about Betty was true. We needed a time-out. I talked to my brother, Arthur, and he agreed that Betty could come to live with his family for a few weeks. Betty was livid and accused me of throwing her out. I said two years of struggle was enough. She could come back when she was willing to behave.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “It’s okay,” Lionel said. “It’s fine.” “Stupid shit,” Sophie said, smiling. “Stupid shit,” Lionel repeated. Sophie took up Lionel’s hand and leaned against him. Charles drifted away from them, rolling his eyes. Occasionally, Lionel caught him giving them glances, a look of concern and mild annoyance on his face. There were moments when, coming closer, he felt Charles’s knuckles graze his, and Lionel instinctively clenched his hand into a fist. • • • Sophie’s apartment was small. Mismatched furniture, a tiny television in the living room, and some small white shelves that she had packed with records, DVDs, and books. The floors were covered with ugly beige carpeting speckled with stains. A radiator along the wall put out a great head of steamy air. Charles stretched out on the couch, and Lionel knelt near one of the shelves. Sophie said she was hungry and put on some water for pasta. There was nothing of special interest on the shelf: paperbacks, some old French workbooks, a large-print edition of a John Grisham book, and three novels by Virginia Woolf. “Are these yours?” Lionel asked. “No—they belong to my roommate,” Sophie said from the kitchen archway. Lionel looked back at Charles. “Not me,” Charles said. “She has a roommate. Miriam.” “You not much of a reader?” Lionel asked him. “Yes.” “What?” Charles sat up at this and sighed like it wasn’t the first time his reading habits had been litigated. He crossed his legs on the couch and twisted his neck from side to side. “I read mystery novels.” Mystery novels! Sophie cleared her throat pointedly, and Lionel tried to banish the image of Charles reading Agatha Christie, but the image, once conjured, refused to be dispelled. Not because he thought Charles was dumb or that mystery novels were bad but because it was such incongruous thought: Charles curled up in the corner of a library, the hulk of him, enraptured by descriptions of the weather and interiors. “God, you two are so fucking pretentious. There are good mystery novels.” “I didn’t say anything,” Lionel said. “I’m not judging you.” “Oh, sure.” “No one is judging you, Charlie,” Sophie said. She was now stirring a pot of red sauce in the doorway. Her hair was messy from the steam and the snow, her face splotchy. She stirred the pot briskly. “Mmm.” Lionel could smell the tomatoes. The sauce didn’t smell store-bought—it smelled musky and bitter, almost like vinegar. There was also the scent of spices in the air: turmeric, some paprika, something else, something nutty. “Did you make that?” “I did,” Sophie said, grinning. “For the potluck last night and I had extra. I stewed the tomatoes and added a bunch of spices and stuff. No meat.” “It smells so good,” he said. The sauce had a rich texture as she turned it over and over itself, stirring quickly so that a skin didn’t form. The pot itself was battered and gray, probably lifted from some thrift shop or Salvation Army.