Bastards and Pretty Boys Read online

  The slow pump began. My fingers tightened and did their part of the job. The thumb of my fisted hand drew along the underside cylinder of that beautiful rod as my tongue tripped over it. Booker clutched my hair. I paused at the succulent head, taking time to appreciate it—its summit and smooth slopes and low ring of foothills, and the tender band of skin that lay in their shadow.

  Spasms rocked Booker’s hips to and fro. Each coarse exhalation terminated in a muted whimper. A bead of precum fell onto my tongue. I took in the length of him again, drawing deep, and pumped my own cock more forcefully.

  After a sharp intake of breath, Booker let go, his release accompanied by choppy, guttural groans. I loved feeling the pulsations of cock in my mouth. I loved the results even more.

  As soon as the mild tang of Booker’s cream hit my tongue, I bucked into orgasm, blissfully unaware of how much cum I was swallowing or how much I was shooting or where it was landing. When Booker’s jerking subsided and my own tide of pleasure began to ebb, I swiped my wet hand against my mouth, reached for my lover, and pulled him toward me.

  He didn’t need any prompting. Our lips met in an eager, open-mouthed kiss, an exchange of passion and affection and each other’s sticky essence. We tasted wonderful together. We tasted like a reduction of salt and lime and margarita.

  “Would you like … to see … some of my work?” Booker asked, holding my face and tonguing my ear.

  Although I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant—my mind was still filled with climax lint—I said, “I’d be honored.”

  With both stood and hiked up the clothing we’d lowered. Booker left his robe hanging open, which added a compelling element to the porch’s décor. He led me to the inner door. Like everything else in this place, except the resident himself, it was older. The varnish layered over its solid wood had bubbled. A short, plaid curtain, faded on one side, hung over its window. Booker opened the door with a gentle shove. The heat and humidity must’ve made it swell.

  I had a fleeting vision of Booker’s cock in my mouth. Damn. When opening an old door made me think of giving head, I knew I had it bad.

  Chapter Seven

  An impression registered as my eyes adjusted to the cottage’s dim interior. The room we entered wasn’t set up like any garden-variety, contemporary living room. Parts of it seemed lifted straight from the 1950s. The rest looked like a warehouse loft. A spiffy iMac flanked by rows of books sat on an old walnut office desk against one wall. Papers, many covered with fanciful drawings, littered its top.

  “My dad and I built a shop onto the south side of the cottage,” Booker said. “You can’t see it from your place, and I doubt you’ve driven past it.”

  “No, I haven’t,” I admitted. I’d only come down the dirt road three times, including this weekend, and only as far as my own property. All I could really see when I pulled into my driveway was three-quarters of the front of his place. If I had glimpsed the addition Booker was referring to, I’d probably just assumed it was part of the house.

  “The shop is where I do my ‘dirty’ work,” he explained. “Hoisting, cutting, welding, securing. And painting, if I decide to color a piece.” He motioned to one side of the living room. “This table’s for finishing touches, the more delicate work.”

  The table. Okay, he obviously meant the long worktable opposite his desk. It was situated beneath a wide, north-facing window. I realized it was the window from which he must’ve seen Kenneth and me standing beside my deck. I scanned the table’s surface. It was littered with hand tools and soldering irons, as well as terra cotta flowerpots full of all kinds of crap Booker obviously found useful—broken toys and broken jewelry, glass and pottery shards, pieces of hardware, spools of wire and twine, lengths of rope and other binding materials. In one corner stood the knotted mass he’d scavenged from my beach. Seeing it made me smile.

  Little by little, I began to understand what I was being told. Hosea Booker, my handsome parolee lover, wasn’t just an artist; he was a builder of art.

  “You create things out of this stuff?” I asked, just to make sure.

  “Yep. But what you see is only a fraction of my stash.” Booker slipped his hands into the pockets of his bathrobe. “I call the finished pieces ‘junktures.’ I’ve done more traditional sculpture, too, although the process kind of bores me. Besides, I’m not set up to work with the usual metals. My only bronzes were done at Holyard.”

  “Where are your finished pieces?” I hadn’t seen any, just the raw materials.

  “There’s one in the kitchen,” Booker said, leading me toward the rear of the cottage. “But I keep most of the completed work covered up in a spare bedroom. It’s all spoken for. Either sold already, or headed for a gallery or auction.”

  “A gallery where?”

  “I sell through a few places. In Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Wow, Booker. I’m impressed.”

  He glanced at me with a pleased, self-conscious smile as we entered the kitchen. “There it is,” he said motioning toward the table. “It’s not my best, but it’s my personal favorite.”

  “It” was a merciless, tight tornado of wire, all kinds of wire, and witch-finger twigs and different kinds of screws. The twisting funnel, an artful chaos, looked like it was about to spin off the table and drill right through the roof. It had a stark, brutal beauty.

  “I did a whole cyclone series,” Booker said. “That piece and the wreck on the wall are the only ones left.”

  I followed his gaze to the erupting waste bin beside the stove. At least, it looked like it was erupting. Just above it, hanging from the faded wallpaper, was a compound fracture of beaten, broken fencepost and rusty barbed wire, wound with red ribbon and white gauze. I looked closer. A luminous, multicolored glass butterfly was tucked within the splintered wood.

  “You made the butterfly, too?” I asked incredulously.

  Booker nodded. “Go back to the table and reach inside the funnel,” he said. “Don’t look first, just carefully stick your hand inside and then look.”

  Walking back to the table, I let the tornado swallow my hand. I did feel something inside. As I began to smile, I withdrew my hand and peered into the interior. Near the bottom, a bird’s nest with three eggs.

  “I didn’t filch the eggs,” Booker said. “I made those, too.”

  “Incredible.” I was starting to see him in a whole different way, as if I were rotating a multifaceted gemstone. “May I see what’s in the spare room?”

  “Sure.”

  Booker led the way and I traipsed after him like the fan-boy I was fast becoming. I resolved to buy one of his creations. But as I watched Booker and thought about our time together, I suspected the man himself was his own greatest work.

  My respect and affection for him swelled.

  The storage room contained five or six humped forms covered in white sheets. The smaller ones sat on makeshift tables.

  “I’ll show you the two I’ve sold.” Booker carefully unveiled one piece. “This is one of my bronzes. It’s called Atlas Shrugged.” He gave me an impish look. “You should find it appealing.”

  It featured a stylized, nearly abstract male figure, beautifully executed, with a globe balancing on…

  “Is that his dick?” I asked, glancing at Booker.

  “It’s a phallus, Charlie,” he said with mock hauteur. “On a bronze or marble sculpture, a dick automatically becomes a phallus.”

  “I stand corrected,” I said with a snicker.

  Something seemed to be dangling from the foreskin of the titan’s titanic penis. I leaned over to have a closer look. A miniature human form—female, judging by the looks of it—hanging on for dear life. I pointed at it.

  “Ayn Rand,” Booker said. “It actually does look like her, too.”

  I burst out laughing as Booker recovered the figure and then pulled the sheet off another. It was one of his junktures, about six feet tall, and it looked like a cross between Neptu
ne and a sturgeon … with a bit of Jeff Goldblum from the end of The Fly. It was both hideous and delightful, a fairy tale monster in scrap metal, and intricately constructed.

  “Manfish here,” Booker said, fondly patting the mutant, “allowed me to pay off my legal fees, fines included, and gave me a year’s income. Of course, I don’t need much to live on.” He draped the sheet over it and turned off the light.

  I ambled into the living room and dropped onto the lumpy, worn couch. “Wow,” I said in wonderment, watching him as he closed the door.

  “Wow what?”

  “You’re really full of surprises.”

  He smiled. “You’re just easily surprised, that’s all. I think you’ve led a sheltered life.”

  Still, something wasn’t jibing. I pondered the issue before I opened my mouth, because I didn’t want to offend him again. “There are still a few things I don’t understand,” I said.

  Booker sat down beside me. “Like what?”

  I could tell from the look on his face and the sound of his voice that he took my concerns seriously.

  “First, how did you manage to sell your art and build a reputation while you were in prison? I mean, you just got out two months ago. And second, if your work commands such high prices, why did you have to sell pot to make money?”

  “My pieces didn’t start commanding high prices until I was in prison,” Booker said. He didn’t sound offended, just resigned to answering my questions. “I can thank my older sister for getting my career off the ground. Rachel always believed in me. And she happens to have a lot of PR savvy. That’s the business she’s in. When I got sent up, she took care of our dad and put my work out there. Had to postpone her wedding to do both.” Booker got up. “She finally got married last month and moved with her husband to Vermont. And my dad has a live-in girlfriend now, an LPN named Lana, who looks after him. God bless ‘em, they both got their happily-ever-after.”

  Staring at Booker, I realized how deeply he loved his father and sister. And I wondered if he felt he had his “happily-ever-after.”

  Shucking off his robe, Booker tossed it onto the couch beside me. I was tempted to pick it up and bury my face in it, inhale the scent woven through its fibers.

  He leaned over me and tugged at the waistband of my jeans. “Strip down to your underwear, Charlie lark. We’re getting you acquainted with the lake today.”

  It was as if showing off his art, and seeing my awe, had somehow empowered Booker. Maybe my apology and his revelation of his past had something to do with it, too. He was relaxed and confident. And that made me ready to face my phobia.

  We walked over to my beach, since it would be my usual point of entry into Cloud Lake. I needed to feel comfortable with the look of the lake from here, the feel of the bottom.

  “Sit down facing the lake,” Booker said, “with your legs stretched out.”

  He was certainly winging it, since he surely wasn’t a trained psychotherapist, but I trusted him. Or maybe I was desperate enough to trust anybody willing to help me. So I did what he told me to do.

  “Closer,” Booker said.

  I slid toward the line of pale foam.

  “Closer.”

  I looked over my shoulder at him. “I hope you realize I’m not going to slide my ass into the lake just because you keep saying ‘closer.’ You’re not a hypnotist, Booker, even though you have eyes like one.”

  “You think so?” he asked curiously. “You think I have creepy woo-woo eyes?”

  “I think you have breathtaking woo-woo eyes, but that’s not the point.” Shit. What was the point? Now I was thinking about his eyes.

  “No one’s ever told me that,” Booker said, sounding touched by my opinion. He laid a hand on my right shoulderblade. “Come on, at least get your feet near the waterline. Say, six or eight inches away. The lake’s like glass today. You won’t be swept away by a rogue wave or anything.”

  My heart revved into the tap dance that often presaged a panic attack. Fear slowly shredded my trust in Booker. Anybody who’s never experienced intense, uncontrollable anxiety can’t begin to imagine how horrible it is. The hyperventilation and dizziness. The cold sweat and nausea and loose bowels. It’s like lying crippled on death’s doorstep.

  “Don’t worry, Charlie,” he said gently. “I’m right here.”

  It was enough, for the moment. I crept toward the water, reminding myself that the man who stood over me had made it through thirty months in a county jail and state prison. Moreover, he’d had the balls to risk a humiliating slapdown by coming on to a near-stranger.

  Booker sat behind me, his bare legs crossed over mine and his arms twined loosely around my torso. I felt the press of his chest against my back. One of his hands played idly over my left nipple; the other caressed my abdomen. He rested his chin on my shoulder, its scruff poking at my pores.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” he murmured.

  His voice sent a gentle vibration into my back. When he turned his face and kissed my neck, I leaned my head into his soft storm of hair.

  “Scoot forward. I’ve got you.”

  Shifting from one butt cheek to the other, I inched toward the water. Booker didn’t let go. He shifted along with me.

  “Imagine us being in it together, facing each other, hugging. The water moving like silk against our cocks. Imagine kissing with water-slick lips.”

  While running the tip of his tongue from my shoulder to my ear, Booker nudged me forward. My heels touched liquid. I flinched … then relaxed as Booker’s lips feathered over my earlobe.

  “Go ahead, get your feet in. I won’t let go, but I won’t shove you, either. Set your own pace.”

  His voice was low and molten—every bit as persuasive as a hypnotist’s voice. I held the hands that held me and felt secure. Into the lake I eased, watching Booker’s feet get swallowed along with mine. Twenty toes broke the surface, ten stitched with blonde hair and ten with black.

  I grinned. I felt good.

  “Want to keep going?” Booker asked.

  “A little farther,” I said. If we continued to move as one, I felt I could scuttle to the center of the lake like a crawfish.

  This close to shore, the water was bathtub warm. I didn’t mind bath or spa water. It wasn’t cold and murky. It didn’t harbor dark, mysterious depths where muck swirled and fish burbled. It wasn’t writhing with hidden currents that could snatch me like octopus tentacles.

  It couldn’t drag me down and fill my lungs. Or throw a sheet of blue ice over my flailing limbs and burning eyes.

  Cloud Lake’s warmth was almost as soothing as Booker’s voice. Soon, we both had wet asses. Sand worked its way into my briefs. I didn’t care. The sun poured over me and my lover’s tenderness and strength trickled through me, both like a benediction. I hadn’t gone far, but I was in.

  Then something attacked me. I jumped and yelped, my knees jerking out of the water. Booker chortled against my skin.

  “Those big, bad, two-inch fish nibbling your toes?” Booker asked. “Look. They’re just little guys. They don’t have teeth, sweetie.”

  Sweetie. That diverted my attention. I peered into the water. There they were, a small school of small fry, darting at our tantalizing feet.

  My coach and I sat there for a while, up to our waists in Cloud Lake, and let the baby bluegills or whatever they were think they were feeding. As I watched, I suddenly thought of the shoeprints still on my kitchen floor.

  “Let’s stand up,” Booker said. “Want me to keep holding you?”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  I would’ve felt like a freakin’ invalid. Phobia or no phobia, it was time I started disengaging myself from Booker’s comforting embrace. But I was undeniably apprehensive. Booker slid his hands to my waist and lightly rested them there as we rose to our feet. The reassuring touch was all I needed. No more, no less.

  Standing in the lake felt strange and unnerving. A prickling sensation shot down my legs, threatening to weaken
my muscles and unlock my knees. Booker must’ve read the anxiety in my face.

  “Touch me,” he said quietly. “Please touch me, Charlie.”

  At that moment, it was his face and voice and near-naked body that made me weak, not fear. I held him close, reveling in everything about him. At least, everything I’d so far had the privilege of getting to know. We swayed in short arcs as we embraced … and, before I knew it, had moved into deeper water. It was level with my lower ribs.

  “You’re smooth,” I murmured against Booker’s mouth.

  “No. Selfish.” His lips flexed against mine. “I wanted to feel your arms around me.”

  I began to realize, just a little bit, how it must feel not only to make love with a man but to fall in love with one. A whole new prickling went through me. Not good. I silently warned myself not to fall prey to romantic delusions. It was way too early for me to have a realistic fix on my feelings.

  We made our way back to shore with our arms around each other’s waist. Had I been out there alone, I probably would’ve frozen up by now. Even better than Booker’s calm patience was the fact he’d never once seemed self-conscious, or concerned about somebody seeing us. Not for a second had he ever quailed from touching me. He’d been completely at ease with our closeness.

  “Tomorrow we’ll go farther,” he said. “All right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I’d like that. I don’t know how to thank you. You’ve been wonderful. Most people don’t know how to deal with this kind of crazy shit. Most wouldn’t want to bother.”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  We looked into each other’s eyes, touched each other’s face.

  I was smitten. I couldn’t have played Happy Couple with Kenneth if my life had depended on it.

  “I saw something in my kitchen last night,” I said. The prints had been bobbing in the back of my mind since those man-eating fish had started swarming around our feet. “And please don’t be offended that I’m mentioning it. Just try to understand why I’m mentioning it. Okay?”