Free The Grand Ballast by J.A. Rock Page B

room, high ceilings, and detailed molding. Bode
offered to pay half the rent, but Kilroy refused.
    “ What, are you a rich man,
and you’re just not telling me?” Bode asked, grinning as he looked
around the apartment.
    “ I have enough.”
    “ C’mon, you’re joking,
right? I’ll pay my share. I might need some grace time, because I
don’t make much at the theater, but—”
    “ I have enough,” Kilroy
repeated.
    “ Where’d you get it?” Bode
asked sharply.
    “ I told you. I inherited
it.”
    “ From who?”
    “ Bode.”
    “ I’m just saying, you want
to live with me…can’t you trust me enough to talk to
me?”
    Kilroy gazed at him a long
while. “It would be a dull conversation.”
    “ I know
you’ve said you don’t like to talk about…about where you grew up
and everything. I just… Isn’t there anything you can tell
me?”
    “ We are not our pasts.”
Kilroy walked around Bode to examine the kitchen countertops. “I
want very much to make a life with you, where we are free of what
we were and think only of what we’ll become.”
    “ That’s impossible,” Bode
murmured. But Kilroy didn’t look up, and Bode let it go.
    The day they moved into the
new place, Bode spent the whole afternoon lightheaded, his heart
beating too fast as he unpacked box after box. Kilroy didn’t seem
to have brought anything but furniture, while Bode had tons of
junk—knickknacks and posters from the theater, clothes, flea market
clocks and salt shakers, every dance costume he’d ever owned.
Kilroy helped him find places for all of it.
    “ I love you,” he told
Kilroy as they lay in bed that first night, surrounded by strange
walls. He touched Kilroy’s cheek. “You make me feel really, truly
alive.”
    Kilroy’s brow furrowed
slightly. He caught Bode’s hand and kissed the backs of his
fingers. “You do? You love me?”
    “ Let me, um…show you how
much?” Bode scooted down the mattress, tugging the sheet with him.
He was terrified—he always was, at first, when they did anything
sexual. He was embarrassed about his inexperience, and his
nervousness gave him a persistent need to prove himself.
    He knew the way most people
addressed their sexual needs—quick ruts in brothels, in motels, in
the back rows of X-shows. His father had a folder on the computer
full of trashy pictures. Bode never wanted to look cheap, spread
wide, mouth gaping in false ecstasy. He needed to make sure he was
more to Kilroy than a body.
    And tonight, he felt sure
he was. He felt like a gift, and he felt Kilroy had been sent here
to change him, to wake him, to add meaning and depth to the things
Bode created. He wanted to touch Kilroy, to get to know,
intimately, the blessing he’d been given.
    Losing his virginity had
been simple, because Kilroy had directed it. But now Bode wanted to
give Kilroy something undirected, something raw. He studied
Kilroy’s naked body. Kilroy’s cock was simply a part of him.
Another bit of warmth and flesh and blood for Bode to touch. Bode
played with it, alternately using his lips and tongue. Kilroy’s
hands moved across his hair, encouraging, his nails digging into
Bode’s scalp once or twice.
    It was wonderful to have
this sort of power. To know that if he placed his tongue at the
very tip of Kilroy’s cock, he could get him to gasp, get his thigh
muscles to tense into firm ridges. And if he sucked hard, Kilroy
would moan and tug Bode’s hair. Bode laughed with his lips around
Kilroy, using his tongue to press the hard shaft against the roof
of his mouth.
    Kilroy closed his eyes.
“Oh, that’s good,” he murmured. “Whatever’s funny, keep thinking
about it.”
    Bode sucked Kilroy deeper.
It took a moment’s concentration to figure out how to get air with
his mouth this full. But Kilroy ran a hand across his shoulders,
and Bode relaxed, breathing steadily through his nose and pushing
his head forward until the tip of Kilroy’s cock hit the back of his
throat, and he