Free Studs: Gay Erotic Fiction by Emanuel Xavier Richard Labonté

told him I had two tickets for us to go. I reminded him of it, in an email, a few days ago.
    Nothing. Not a word from the guy I wanted to call my man.
    So I don’t have a lot of hope.
    I mean, Iggy. Chance of a lifetime to see the original Stooges. On Iggy’s birthday. It’s gonna be crazy and it’s gonna be sublime.
    Didn’t get a rise out of my buddy, though.
    Anyhow, this is my story, this is my truth; this is all I’ve got, what I’m down to, my very last dime.
    Come on, Dimitri. The forest is closing in on the path, demons are on the move, and night is gathering.
    And if some other dear reader sees me a few months from now sucking some stranger’s cock, have a heart, will ya? Say hi, say something funny, put a hand on my shoulder, throw me a lifeline.
    I might be drowning in an ocean of Come, after all.

ORANGE
    Lee Houck
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Step one: Pick a moment in your life. Press your finger down onto it, holding it like you would the first loop in a square knot. Step two: Find a moment that represents where you are now, something separate, current and different, and touch another finger to that, too. Step three: Measure the distance from one to the other—in lovers lost, furniture stolen from street corners, estimated electric bills paid, early morning phone solicitations, car accidents you witnessed. Band-Aids on fingers. Step four: Figure out how the hell you got here now from where you were then.
    Sometimes the first moment I choose is my cheesy orange fingertips in the propped-open back end of a station wagon parked on the tire-tracked sand of a crowded Florida beach. I must have been three years old. I don’t remember it, but I have seen the photograph of me sitting there—blue and yellow tub of Cheese Balls between my diapered legs, hand stuck inside. Blond hair, just like now. When you look at pictures of yourself doing things that you don’t remember, the image freezes and becomes part of your history, even though it seems invented. A memory that forms who you are without you knowing it. Like genes, unconscious but familiar.
    Sometimes the moment is foamy orange Circus Peanuts melting on the dashboard of a pickup truck. We were driving there without any place to be, or any place in mind to end up in. He bought a Mountain Dew because it was my favorite. I should tell you about the way his hands moved when he talked. The way words seemed to burst out of his fingers. The urgency, the way he made even garbage seem like quantum physics. But it all gets screwed around in my brain. Memory serves only to fuck things up. And photographs can lie to you, because if you have a picture of someone, and he goes away, dies or disappears, the photo becomes the only thing you remember about him.
    How did this start?
    Shredded carrots at a salad bar, on some school trip in a shopping mall?
    A completely mediocre, but still your favorite, orange-tinted album cover?
    The smooth spine of an unread paperback book?
    Other times, like this time right now, right here in this guy’s bedroom, it’s greasy orange cleanup wipes, the kind that he rubbed up and down his arms before climbing up behind me. “Do you like to get fucked?” he says.
    A giant of a man, six foot plus something. Huge, but not alien-looking, still handsome, still attractive. A tiny line of mustache. He’s bulky like a sack of flour, his body dense, smooth like rising dough. Forearms thick as a coffee can, covered in what I guess is car grease or engine grime, a shiny ultraviolet glimmer. Smells like steel. Skin brown underneath.
    His lips are drawn on so beautifully that I can’t help but look right into his mouth when he’s talking, and not into his eyes. He kisses my hand.
    He’s holding a white plastic tub. Tearing off the lid, he pulls out a strip of creamy orange-colored cheesecloth. A powerful knock-your-ass-on-the-floor kind of scent. The most fake, plastic, outer space, movie-smelling orange. Good though. The orange-powered grease