A Madness Most Discreet Read online

  I shut off the water and we dried quickly. He followed me to the master bedroom where he wrapped his warm body around mine and kissed me again, open-mouthed and erotic. I sat on the edge of the bed, and Arden climbed onto my lap, long limbs ensnaring me like a grappling hook.

  We made out like that for a while. My stubble left red blotches all over his face and throat, his smooth, unblemished skin made raw and tender by my touch. I sucked a bruise on the join of his neck, then another, marking him as my own. Our cocks sparred playfully, until Arden began grinding against me with purpose. He took my hand and sucked my forefinger to the second knuckle, then placed it at his entrance.

  “You want that?” I asked, remembering the john’s affronted look.

  “I want you. Tonight. Right now.”

  I was too weak to argue or pretend I didn’t want that too.

  “How do you want me?” I asked.

  Arden crawled off my lap and lay flat on his back. His erection flopped against his abdomen. The bed was still made, and I didn’t bother rearranging anything as Arden gripped his legs under his knees and spread for me. His pucker was still pink and swollen. I didn’t know if he’d enjoyed the john, but he hadn’t gotten off from it. Did he ever on a job?

  I’d make it good for him. Make him know the difference between a john and a lover. I grabbed a bottle of lube from my duffle bag and drizzled some of it on my fingers. I massaged around his opening, probing delicately to make sure there was no damage. I thought about the man marveling at how greedy Arden’s hole was for his cock.

  I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to be anywhere but right here and right now. With Arden, alone. That was the only way this could work, and I wanted it to work, desperately.

  “You like this?” Please tell me you aren’t straight. It didn’t seem that way from the blowjob I’d given him in his apartment, but I needed to be sure.

  “Yeah. I like being fingered. Toys too.”

  “You like bottoming?” He nodded. His eyelids were heavy, and low moans kept escaping him, unbidden. His damp hair framed his gorgeous face as he watched me work, thighs trembling with anticipation. “Do you ever top?”

  “Sometimes. You’re thick,” Arden sized up my cock. “It was hard to get my mouth around it.”

  “You did a good job.”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said smugly.

  I didn’t want to think about all the cocks he’d had in his mouth, but I couldn’t separate the two either. That had been the point of Arden’s lesson. He wouldn’t let me ignore that he was a sex worker. What they did and how they did it—how often—all of that was out of my control. All I could command was his body, here and now. I’d make the most of it.

  His muscle was relaxed, still a little loose from earlier, so I edged two fingers inside. Arden raised his hips and let out an ecstatic moan.

  “I knew who you were,” he said in a rush. “At that book signing where you spoke. I wanted to meet you.”

  I stared at him, realized I’d paused, then started up again. I aimed for his sweet spot, secreted away like buried treasure. There, along the smooth wall of his rectum, I found that walnut-sized bundle of nerves and massaged it with my fingertips. Arden twisted on the bed like he was bound in ropes.

  “How’s that feel?” I asked as I circled and stroked his gland.

  “Amazing. Don’t ever stop.”

  “Did you spill wine on me on purpose?” I was flattered that he’d been seeking me out in the first place.

  “You spilled the wine. I was working up the courage to introduce myself when you came barreling my way.”

  Serendipity.

  “Why didn’t you give me your name?” I nudged him again, and he whined like a puppy, one hand reaching for his cock. I guided it to his nipple instead, and he pinched, transforming the pale pink nub into an angry red.

  “I was nervous. You were nothing like I’d expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I thought you’d be…” Another gasp as I added a little more pressure. “Arrogant. Snooty.” He vibrated with a low hum. “But you weren’t. You were…” Another soft whine. “Humble.”

  “I could make you come like this.” I felt certain of it.

  “No, I want you inside me.” His tone was just shy of begging as my fingers curled, and he jerked again.

  “I noticed your eyes first,” I said.

  “I thought it was my abs.”

  “No, it was your eyes.” He looked at me then, and the connection between us was undeniable. “I want this.”

  “Me too.”

  He broke eye contact first and my focus went back to pleasuring him. His swollen cock lifted off his abdomen each time my fingers stroked his interior. I massaged his smooth sac with my other hand, clutching at his nuts possessively and manipulating them lightly in my palm. By the time I added a third finger, Arden was sweating and restless.

  “Michael,” he said.

  “Tell me how you want it.”

  “In your arms.”

  I sat back on my heels and suited up with a condom and more lube. I arranged Arden so that he was crouched on my lap, then crawled toward the headboard to grip it for leverage. Arden’s thighs cinched my waist as he squeezed my cock with one hand and perched delicately on top of it. He swiveled his hips, teasing me, then slowly lowered himself with athletic control.

  “Ah, so thick,” he murmured. He gasped when my cockhead breached his sphincter and stilled for a moment, hovering precariously above me. He throbbed around me while I supported him in my arms. The wait was excruciating. I wanted him so very badly. Then, in one sinuous movement, he sank down around my shaft and covered me completely. Arden shuddered, now fully seated on my cock, and I did too. He was hot all over, and there was a febrile look in his eyes. He hugged my neck as I gently rocked, loosening him up and gaining his trust. Arden made small noises in my ear—whines and murmurs and soft, begging sounds.

  “You feel so good,” I murmured into his neck, licking and kissing wherever I could reach his skin.

  “I like doing this. With you,” he said in his halting way. “Feels… right.”

  “So right.”

  He shifted, sinking down even farther, his tight balls flush against my groin, stiff cock poking my stomach, leaving behind sticky trails on my skin. I moved my hips experimentally and Arden groaned, signaling that was the spot. With his noises as my cues, I fucked him slowly, allowing time for the burn to fade and his anticipation to build. Arden’s fingernails dug into my back and he whimpered, in pleasure or frustration.

  “Too slow?” I asked.

  “No. I’m just… not used to this.”

  I moved like that, getting to know his rhythms, the weight of him, the slide of his skin against mine. I caressed his neck, back, and shoulders, learning where he liked to be touched and how. Franco had sometimes been impatient, had wanted me to hurry up and fuck him already, but Arden didn’t seem to mind the prolonged attention. If anything, he basked in my small affections, his normally stiff body now supple as rich, Italian leather.

  I wanted to penetrate him deeper, but our positioning made it difficult to get the leverage I needed. So, I laid him on the bed, and with my hands on both his knees, opened him like a book. I propped him up with a pillow and rolled my hips with long, sensual strokes aimed at his very core. Arden took it beautifully, hands braced against the headboard, limbs spread wide in a posture of ultimate abandon. He whimpered when I withdrew and cried out when I surged forward. Our bodies shifted like tectonic plates, creating mountains and trenches with every collision. The sturdy wooden frame knocked against the wall in time with our cries of ecstasy.

  “I want you to come first,” I said to him. I took his cock in one hand, already lubricated by our sweat and his slick. “Think you can?”

  Arden nodded as I stimulated both his dick and his prostate. One way or another, he was going to climax for me.

  “I’m close,” Arden said. “F
uck. Michael.”

  Conscious thought left me as we moved in tandem. I wanted to overwhelm him, tunnel into his body and his psyche and uproot him completely. But Arden was fighting his release. His mouth was stretched into a tight grimace, his eyes shut tight.

  “Let me have it,” I urged. I wanted his orgasm more than my own, wanted him to burst open like an overripe fruit, spill his juices everywhere, and know it was my doing. “Come on, Arden, you’re so close now. You just have to let go.”

  His flushed face turned red from holding his breath, and I worried that he might lose consciousness. Arden seized like a corpse, clenching me so tightly that my rhythm stuttered. He shuddered as his cock started pumping out hot, sticky fluid, coating my fist. His channel pulsed and spasmed, so that I had to push through the friction to stay inside him. I ground into him a few more times, until I felt myself tipping over the edge. The tension that had been gathering like an electric storm broke free, and ripples of bliss stretched, web-like, to my nerve endings. Pleasure lanced through me, a whetted blade, and I rode him until the last shivery pulse faded, and my body was utterly spent.

  Arden’s knees fell apart, and his muscle unclenched at last. His mouth curved into a lazy grin as he stared at me in a sexed-up stupor. This was far better than any fantasy I’d been able to conjure. I leaned closer and kissed his forehead, wanting to prolong our coupling for a little while longer.

  “That was incredible,” he said. I thought so too.

  “I like being inside you.” Not just his body but his mind, too. I wanted him to think of me the way I thought of him. And I wanted him to see himself for the treasure he truly was.

  Our separation was a tiny death as I eased out and tied off the condom, tossing it onto the floor to be dealt with later. It was a bad habit I’d picked up from Franco when we’d treated our dorm room like a pay-by-the-hour hotel. I grabbed a corner of the sheet and wiped my hand and the puddles that had collected on Arden’s stomach, then lay alongside him with my arm and leg trapping him in my embrace. He turned toward me, so that we could be tangled up in each other again.

  “You make me wish I were a poet,” I said, not even as a joke. I’d tried my hand at poetry in undergrad, but I wasn’t very good at it. Poets have a gift of carving away at everything non-essential, leaving the reader with lines that pierce the psyche like a shiv. I was always too attached to my words.

  Arden laughed and poked me playfully. “Why’s that?”

  “So, I could dedicate poems to you. They’d all be terrible. And none of them would rhyme.”

  “I thought it was no longer fashionable for things to rhyme.”

  I chuckled, thinking of Liam and his assessment of my condition, a madness most discreet. I recited the lines of that passage to Arden.

  “Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;

  Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;

  Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears.

  What is it else? A madness most discreet,

  A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.”

  Arden stared at me with soft, expressive eyes. “I could listen to you recite Shakespeare all night long.”

  “Don’t tempt me.” I drew him close so that our noses brushed lightly. His eyes closed, and he let out a contented sigh.

  “It’s too late,” he whispered, “for the both of us.”

  He was absolutely right. With Arden, I chose madness.

  Part II.

  “Are you an alcoholic?” the boy asked his father one day. The man drank a lot. Beer during the day and wine at night with only an occasional soda in between. Hardly any water at all, which was what the boy preferred, even though water on the boat was room temperature, and the tank made it taste funny, like farts. Sometimes at night before he fell asleep, damp with sweat and itchy with mosquito bites, the boy would fantasize about drinking ice-cold glasses of water, one after another, like counting sheep.

  The man squinted at the boy, not meanly but not nicely either. “I’m a sailor,” he said.

  “Is it safe to be drinking and driving?” the boy asked. His mother had always told him the two didn’t mix. She’d been killed in a car accident while coming home from a late-night shift at the grocery store where she worked. She’d forgotten to turn on her lights, or so the other driver had claimed. His aunt said the man who hit her deserved to be in jail. The boy didn’t care either way about the man’s fate. It didn’t change the fact that his mother was dead.

  “We’re going pretty slow,” the captain speculated. “The reaction time to avoid hitting something out here is a few hours at least.” He let out a terrific yawn, like a lion, and took another sip of beer. The boy watched him, had been watching him for days now. Trying, in his own way, to understand this man who claimed to be his father.

  “Why don’t you take a turn at the wheel?” The captain stepped aside, offering him the helm.

  “I’m nine years old,” the boy said, indignant.

  “Never too young to learn.”

  The boy came over and climbed onto the pilot’s seat so that he could see over the curve of the wheel. The mainsail was full and blocked most of his view, but the captain pointed to the digital compass on the dash and told him where they were aiming—south by southwest. The boy gripped the polished wooden spokes in both hands and carefully steered the rudder, keeping the outline of the boat pointed at the tiny green arrow. The captain supervised him for a while, nudging him this way or that when necessary, drinking his beer and belching quietly.

  “Take over for a while,” the captain said with a clap on his back. “Yell for me if the sails start to flap.”

  The boy preened that he should be trusted with such an important job (at only nine years old!) The captain fell onto the couch behind the cockpit. The boy’s gaze was riveted on the compass and the sail, back and forth, back and forth, making sure neither faltered.

  Behind him, the captain’s snores were as rhythmic as the waves jostling the boat’s hull and the snapping of the ropes in the wind.

  9

  the finances

  It was springtime in New York City. The slog of winter had finally departed, and new growth was everywhere. Flowers seemed brighter, foods more delicious, my lover most sensuous.

  We spent a lot of time in my apartment. Lazy mornings bled into idle afternoons until one of us would surface and discuss the need for a proper meal and exercise. We read, wrote, made love, and philosophized, not in any particular order. Arden seldom wore more than a silk robe tied loosely round his narrow waist. It was something he’d found in the back of my closet, and on more than one occasion, he gave the workers across the street an eyeful. He was a nudist by preference and an exhibitionist for the thrill of it, neither of which bothered me one bit.

  My appetite for him was voracious, to the point that if we’d gone more than a couple of hours without my hands on him, Arden would seek me out for gratification. I spent a self-indulgent number of words in my diary describing the way the afternoon light played upon his skin, the aperture of his mouth when he was moved to ecstasy, how he held his breath when he was about to come, and then after, gasped as though just surfacing from a near-drowning.

  We exhausted my supply of condoms, then shared our most recent test results and agreed that if we were both taking PrEP, and if Arden was safe with his clients, then the risk was manageable. The first time I fucked him bare I thought the stars would fall out of the sky. I wished, fleetingly, that he were a woman, so that I could bury my seed inside him and see what might grow. It was the first time, too, that I began to think about family and our future and what it might look like to share it with someone else. With him.

  And then there were the days when he was gone, sometimes for a modeling job, but more often for reasons we did not discuss. Those days were dim, and I kept myself busy with cleaning my apartment or running errands or catching up with friends, usually with a mask of cheer because part of me was always with him, worrying about his
safety and hoping he was being treated kindly. Those days were to be tolerated and soldiered through. Not to be lived and certainly not to be dwelled upon.

  “You could move in with me,” I said to him one afternoon. He was lying with his head on my chest as I dragged my fingertips down the valley of his spine and over the fleshy hills of his ass. Here was my favorite landscape. Arden loved being touched like that, gentle affection with no other purpose. It was how he fell asleep at night.

  Then I thought of where I’d fucked him last, still slick with lube, dripping semen onto my sheets indiscreetly.

  “What about my things?” he asked.

  “I’d make room.”

  He shifted so he could look at me. “What happens when you get sick of me?”

  “I won’t.”

  Arden hummed. He rarely argued, mostly distracted and demurred. I didn’t know if that was how he’d managed his father’s temper or a strategy he’d adopted to minimize danger with his johns, but on occasions such as this, it frustrated me. I wanted a straight answer. And if I didn’t like that answer, I wanted the opportunity to persuade him.

  “It would save you money,” I said, knowing it was a sensitive topic.

  “My rent is affordable. My landlord gives me a really good deal.”

  I hated myself for thinking it, but I suspected there was some exchange of services for Arden’s “really good deal.”

  “When’s your lease up?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I never really signed one.”

  My fingers drifted into his hair. He was still looking at me, innocent. He wasn’t a native New Yorker, to which I attributed some of his naivety. And he hadn’t really been indoctrinated as a youth into the industrial complex of our society—one of the reasons I loved conversing with him. Despite his life experience, he wanted to believe the best in people. We were opposites in that way. I assumed the worst at the outset and offered people the opportunity to prove me wrong.

  “That can’t be good. What if your landlord decides to kick you out?