This John pops the zits on my back while I fuck him. His long legs hook around mine, and his hands move from my butt to my shoulders finding the spots that need attention. Scabs are scraped off, rough patches are rubbed smooth, stray hairs are plucked. While he finds his bliss, he grooms me. He comes, scratching at the base of my spine with his thumbnail. The warm wetness he pumps against my belly thrills and comforts me.

“That was good,” he says.

“You liked that?” I don’t know why I ask. He always says the same thing.

“Yeah.”

While I recover on my back beside him, he browses my body, finding the imperfections. He pinches the inch of flab on my belly. He traces the purple birthmark that looks like Italy over my hipbone. He kisses each mole on my chest. There are fourteen. He has counted them. One night he named them.

“Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,” he told me, touching each one, scattered around my torso, with his lips. “Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen.”

It was summer, but Christmas is his favorite season.

“What do you call the other two?” I asked him, putting my hand on the back of his head, pulling his mouth back to my skin. I was already hard again, even though I had just come up his ass. He has a very sweet mouth.

“Bambi,” he said, kissing the mole beside my left nipple. “And Pegasus”. He licked the one over my right collarbone.

“That’s a horse,” I said. All the other ones are deer.

“He’s different,” this John said, continuing to kiss and lick at my neck. “He’s my favorite.”

This is not my first John. I’ve had a few. My first one was selfish. He never kissed me. He saved that for his wife. I was never even really sure if he liked me at all. He liked my dick up his ass, though…at least when he was drunk. And he was drunk a lot. We both were. We were just out of college. We had stupid jobs that we hated. When we weren’t working, we drank and fucked. For awhile that was enough.

My second John was a Junior. He went by his middle name, Mark, because his dad was called John. I never fucked his dad. I did fuck his brother, but he was named Luke, so he doesn’t count. Maybe if there had been a Matthew in there somewhere, Luke could have been important. But as things turned out, even Second John didn’t mean that much.

“Get your ass out of bed and fix me something to eat,” I tell this John. It’s late morning. I’m hungry.

“Go fuck yourself,” he says. He is nuzzling Pegasus.

“I’m all fucked out, baby. I need nourishment.”

“Then suck my dick.”

I pretend to be the one in charge, but the truth is I’m whipped. I’ll do whatever he wants. Immediately, I am tonguing his dick and hardly even have him in my mouth before he comes. He tastes sweet, like eggs with syrup. He calls this a light breakfast.

First John tasted like garlic, Second John like grass, or hay. This is better.

It’s Sunday, and we’re both off from work, so we can fuck all day if we want to. One Sunday we fucked eleven times. We fucked until neither of us even had any juice left—just painful dry spasms. But we couldn’t stop. The next day we both called in sick to our jobs, and even though we were sore, we somehow managed another four times.

But that was when we first met. That was almost a year ago. These days we settle for once or twice a day—maybe three times on Sunday.

When the phone rings, he hits the speaker button so I can witness his interaction with his mother. She scolds him for so many things I lose count. I doze with my face in his neck. I dream snippets about chasing a wild animal into a cave and drowning. Sunday dreams are the strangest. When he agrees for the two of us to meet her for dinner on Tuesday it somehow fits in. I dream of the three of us covered with mud.

It isn’t that she doesn’t like me. We actually get along pretty well. We should. I’m closer to her age than I am to his. I was already jacking off by the time this John was born. So his mother and I usually find common ground listing our favorite songs and TV shows from two decades ago.

But mothers are always difficult. First John’s mother wanted to pay me to report to her about her son’s activities. I almost accepted this proposition, because we needed the money, but it was just too weird.

Second John’s mother tried to have me arrested, although he was 24 years old when I met him—old enough to take care of himself, even if that isn’t what he wanted. After that she made a pass at me. Then she left her husband and moved to a lesbian herb farm in Kentucky. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out the rest of that story.

Once, after a few brunch Mimosas, this John’s mother divulged to me that when she was pregnant with him, she prayed that he would be gay, because a gay son would always love his mother. And he does. I think she is afraid that I will take him away from her. I am his first real lover. I’m sure that after me, she will ease up a bit.

“Your future boyfriends should thank me,” I tell him.

But he has hung up the phone and is dozing now too, so I’m not sure that he hears me. It’s hard to tell—he usually ignores my comments like this. His breath is even and warm against my face.

I decide, once again, not to think too much about the future.

I met First John at a college graduation party. He was dressed in black and stood alone outside like he was too important to actually mingle. At some point we wound up making out on the stairs. I loved him at once, because I thought he was too good for me.

At his wedding, I wasn’t even the Best Man. I lurked in a corner and watched everyone else having fun. He seemed so happy, and he wasn’t typically a happy person.

A week later, in my bed, he told me he was sorry. That was the first time he ever said anything to me that resembled actual emotion. After I fucked him that night, he said, “Damn, I’m gonna miss this.”

A few weeks later, he found me at The Morgue, and I fucked him in the parking lot behind a Dumpster.

Still, he went back to his bride. We went on like that for a few months until I just couldn’t take it anymore. One night, in frustration, I hit him in the face. Hard. My knuckles split. His face was bloody. After that, things were pretty sour between us.

I didn’t hear from him for awhile. But, after his wife divorced him, he called me a few times, hoping to start up with me again, but I was with Second John by then.

To be honest, Second John was just something to do while I gathered my senses. I barely remember him. Every now and then I think about calling him to find out if things are going well, but the truth is, I’m really not interested.

This John is like an assault.

“I want to be with you,” he told me the first night I met him.

“You don’t even know me,” I said.

“I will.”

I move my hand up his thigh. I find that moist place I like so much. He’s still slick from before. I’m inside him without even thinking about it. This will probably be it for today, so I take it slow. He has a volleyball game at the beach in a few hours, and I promised to hold his watch--an expensive gift from his mom that he trusts only to me.

I think I’m special. I will sit in the sand and guard this watch like it’s the fucking Holy Grail.

“You love me,” he says as I thrust into him.

I push his arms up over his head and bury my face in his armpit.

“You love me. You love me. You love me,” he says.

I pull his right leg up so I can bite his knee while I shudder into him.

First John thought he was Jesus Christ. He wanted me to worship him. Second John thought I was Jesus Christ. He thought I could save him. I never even knew what I was supposed to save him from. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t do it.

I can’t even save myself.

I am lost. I am Christopher Columbus and this John is America. I am discovering something I didn’t even know I was looking for. His heartbeat tells me things I never knew I wanted to hear.

His hands rub smoothly over my back…there’s nothing more to fix today. I can feel myself glowing from his attentions. I have never looked better in my life.

I die another little death, exfoliated, trying not to allow myself to believe, or even to hope, that this John will be the last one.

 

© 2006 Denmark de la Croix - Contributor's Bio