Free Studs: Gay Erotic Fiction by Emanuel Xavier Richard Labonté Page A

cutter is pasted into the spaces of the cheesecloth. He rubs his hands, detailing the knuckles, the cuticles. And the smell of it hangs around through the entire act. Through the rough fingers, unclipped nails tugging at my warm knot of skin, before he’s climbing up behind me.
    Once again, I end up on my stomach. And I realize that when he reaches his arm around my face, around my neck, and grabs on to my shoulder with his hand—starting to really fuck me hard—that I’d better get fucking control of myself. I start to flatten out. In my head, I mean. I start finding that preaware, rocklike place where I can concentrate. I go to the place where everything is flat. I’m inhaling, looking for that sugary ashy smell, and suddenly, uncontrollably, my brain begins its hyper-journey back to twelve years old. Memories hijack my neurons. Memories of taste, of touch, of fake orange, and when I place my mouth on this guy’s arm, it all becomes clear. I’m no longer in this place, in this bedroom. My head, my brain, myself, it’s all somewhere entirely different.
    We’re pushing our bikes up this giant hill, and the bugs are swarming around our heads. Hot Southern summer, with salty beads of sweat around our brows and upper lips. Slapping our necks with our dusty hands, smashing black gnats. Sometimes one will fly into your mouth. But we don’t care when they do. And when we get to the top of the hill we find a beat-up old cassette tape, cracked open and spilling its threads of sound onto the pavement. And we unwind the tape, a huge, hundred-foot string. And we snap it in half at the middle, tying the pieces onto the seats of our bikes, and ride back down the hill, watching the glittering of who knows what on cassette flowing behind us like a tail, like a stretched-out wish, like a thin brown destiny.
    We’re driving a beat-up white car through a rainstorm at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of Mississippi—or maybe we’d made it to Alabama without seeing the sign, or maybe we were still in Louisiana. And the rain is coming down so hard that we can’t see the street in front of us. And we’re both thinking tornado warning for upper and lower Alabama , but we don’t say it out loud. So for three hours we travel what adds up to be forty-two miles on the low-shoulder freeway. We pass a few cars parked on the side, determined to wait it out. And in those three hours; the loud, wind-shaken hours; we don’t speak. I squint, my eyes low along the top of the dash, and he drives, tapping the gas pedal, not braking, easing on, rolling back toward home. Then, crossing the state line, we see the brightness of the morning. I look over at him, he stares ahead.
    And when he loosens his grip around my neck, around my head, when my mouth breaks free from the inside of his elbow, the awfulness of the present returns. This guy, this orange-smelling grease monkey, barks in my ear about how he wants to tie me up. Haven’t I heard all this before? You would think it was tattooed across my forehead: TIE ME UP, TIE ME UP!
    He knots my hands to the bed frame, rope made of something natural, cotton I think. Blocks my legs apart with a short two-by-four. So I’m spread-eagle on this bed, on my stomach, of course, and the knots rub raw places into my wrists. And I know that if I didn’t tug so much on the rope, then it wouldn’t rub so much. But he asks me to struggle a little, and I don’t know how much is a little. So I do it until he starts going, “Yeah, yeah.”
    We used to take drives out to nowhere on weeknights. He’d smoke and we’d put a mix tape on and take turns talking. About what we wanted to do when we grew up, even though we were sixteen and didn’t know what we wanted to do when we grew up. And didn’t really care. And what we wanted to do would change every few miles, every few minutes. And we were grown up already. We’d pass rusted farm machinery, crumbling frames jutting out of the browning grass,