When he closed his eyes tight enough it felt like a normal kiss. Hot air, slow progression, short breathes, twitching eyelashes, sticky nostrils and then contact. And wet. Or dry then wet, depending on how anxious/excited the lips were. Slippery exploration. Protruding snakes slivering within opposite orifices, finding saliva and teeth and ragged edges.
And his eyes stayed closed. Tighter still. So tight it hurt the muscles in his upper eyelids, forcing them down so the darkness became spotted with streaks of yellow and blinks of white.
'Open your eyes,' the other man asked. The tone was slight but the demand apparent. He had seen how tight the closed-eyes man's eyes were shut and the suspicion set in. It was in his shaking, trembling voice full of premature anger. He wanted proof of want.
Impossible. It was a lie, like all the ones before with all the other men. Tight eyes. Tight as can be.
'Which do you like more – getting your cock sucked or sucking cock?' the other man asked. It was a hostile question. The closed-eyes man couldn't answer correctly. It was more of an accusation than a question anyway.
'Well…what do you think?' the closed-eyes man asked. He wasn't going to give the fucker the pleasure. He opened his eyes and smiled.
The other man laughed. Turned away. Pivoted back. Pushed his hair back with his right hand. Took a sniffle. Muttered something. And then a crack in the nose. The closed-eyes man didn't even see the fist. Surge of pain into the forehead and a moment of levitation. His feet off the ground and only the whistle of air.
Asphalt burned the back of his scalp. He felt the gray pebbles dig into his head like a clamped-down staple remover through the skin.
'Faggot,' the other man said, spitting in the closed-eyes man's face.
A warm puddle of blood gathered around his head.
'Like a halo,' he thought pleasantly. His eyesight blurred out. Mostly because he let it. Consciousness remained and he was determined not to let it go.
The man walked away, shaking his fist in pain and muttering something to himself. His words were most likely rational little ditties to justify the assault. The eyes-closed man hoped, prayed, the other man's hand was bleeding and that he would be forced to dump peroxide on it when he got home and that he would pour too much and it would burn his hand the way his scalp burned now.
He decided to lie there, on Sycamore, until morning. Maybe he would fall asleep. Maybe even get butchered by some wandering gang member with an axe to grind (literally? He chuckled at the thought and how the potential news story would read) or a drunk driver swerving slightly too far to the right onto the sidewalk at just the right moment, causing his creative decapitation. Fucker probably wouldn't even notice, wouldn't even stop.
The next morning he woke up with another scar under his hair, little bruises on his back and a (most likely) broken nose.
He stood up and tried to stretch. It took longer than the short sentence suggests.
'Fuck me,' was his response to his muscles' painful expansion. He laughed at the loose irony of the statement and walked home.
The man (whose name is Marcus Counter) was forced to search for a bus on Melrose.
Ever since he was a child, around 12 or so, Marcus knew he liked women. Loved women. Was fascinated by them. Their curves and their laughs and the way they spoke to each other and to their male friends and how different they spoke to each sex.
Looking back now, (as he walked down Melrose, too impatient to wait at a bus stop) Marcus was sure his parents noticed the fascination as early as he did, but simply chose to ignore it. Of course, it wasn't as easy for young Marcus, who was never told of the implications that came with staring at a woman's legs or admiring a woman's lips. Soon after he started looking, he found sites on the Internet - on his family computer. His parents couldn't ignore it any longer.
'Son, you are not to look at these photos. They are bad pictures of bad people doing bad things that children, or anyone else for that matter, should not see,' his father George told him as he held his son's wrists close and tight, fingernails unintentionally ('or intentionally?' Marcus thought now) digging into the wrists.
He stopped searching for the photos of the girls.
For a while. Soon he went to high school and learned how to erase search histories and bought an external hard drive (without his parents' knowledge of course) to store his naughty downloads. The act of acting on impulse became the plot of some spy novel he was still too young to read. Rebelling felt good and he did it often.
Towards the end of high school friends began to ask why he'd never had a boyfriend, or why they'd never been out on double dates with him before? Because that's what friends did, right? Went out all together to the movies and pizza and they laughed and stuff like that.
It was then that he began to like men. Because the only reason he had liked women in the first place was so he could rebel against father George and father Eric. However, eventually young Marcus had to accept that he was not gay, just like his fathers.
