Free The Men from the Boys by William J. Mann

not at all like the night we met.
    â€œHey,” Lloyd said to me then, from somewhere behind a haze of dirty blue smoke.
    We were at a cheesy club just outside Boston, one of those suburban wonderlands, where Millie Moon and her Pumpettes were trying very hard to be offensively funny. “I’m the Kmart queen,” she sang in her stiletto heels, but half these queens were too: so what’s the joke? I was there for only one reason: to trick. I was newly separated from Robert, the boyfriend who filled the gap between Javitz and Lloyd—very prettily, I might add, but the poor thing hadn’t a thought in his Waspy head. Tonight, I expected the pickings to be easy. At least that had been my experience here before. Lloyd’s approach seemed to justify my expectations.
    â€œHey,” I said in return.
    He was cute. A little shorter than I, dark blond hair, green eyes, a chiseled jaw, the requisite sideburns for that summer. He wore a white ribbed tank top and I noticed the cut of his body right away. When a potential trick is this cute, you don’t look beyond him and make believe you’re uninterested. That’s a strategy that works eighty-five percent of the time, but not when they’re this cute. Guys like this might think “Fuck you” and go on to someone else. I take many risks in my life—I use too much salt, I ride in cars without air bags, I suck without the use of condoms—but I draw the line here.
    Rick Astley was the rage that year. Lloyd remembers that I did not look at him once the entire time we were on the dance floor. It drove him nuts. But I knew I had him then: there was no need to carry the attention to extremes. We spoke little: the script was a late-eighties minimalist experiment. New wave queer cinema, and in the very last scene we shake hands and go home alone.
    How very eighties.
    Yet it took me by complete surprise. “Maybe we can get together sometime,” Lloyd said.
    â€œWhat about right now?” I asked, a smile tricking my lips.
    He smiled back. “Maybe some other time.”
    And I was snared.
    That was the thing: I hadn’t caught him, as I’d thought. He’d caught me.
    The elevator doors open. I turn to the cute guy beside me. He stares straight ahead. His loss, I say to myself. I step out of the elevator and head down the corridor to Javitz’s room.
    Lloyd and I finally made love on our fourth date. It was a record for me to wait that long. I arrived on time, ringing his doorbell, a clutch of daisies in my hand. “Come on in,” he called. “I’m upstairs.”
    I could hear water running. He was down on all fours, testing the water in the bathtub with his hand. Mounds of suds had accumulated. Candles were lit, suffusing the room in a flickering pink light. “What are you doing?” I asked.
    He said not a word. He stood and kissed me, his lips like the flowers in my hand, sweet, soft, and delicate. He took the daisies, kissed each of them, then plucked off their heads and dropped them into the tub. Hey, I thought, those cost seven bucks. Then he unbuttoned my shirt, gently pulling it out from my pants. He unfastened my belt, unzipped my jeans. “What’re you ... ?” I asked again, laughing, but my voice sounded cold, incongruous to the scene. I tried to relax, but this was not part of any script that I knew.
    â€œUndress me,” he whispered.
    I obeyed. I hadn’t yet seen his body fully. I’d felt it through his shirt, and had been impressed. Now, paring him of his clothes, I felt a rush of blood into my face, my fingertips. My dick stiffened, lengthened. He was beautiful: every soft curve, every defined cut. Shorter than me by a couple of inches, he looked up at me from half-lidded eyes. I didn’t move with the grace he had: I yanked and husked, rending every last stitch of clothing from him, even his underwear. Lloyd stood before me naked as a nymph, and I embraced