Gossip by Christopher Bram Read Free Book Online Page A

first time. I can only rehear it, not comprehending what’s there until a second or third listening. Surprised at how much I’d enjoyed the first hearing, I reassembled him later, when I needed to know what made Bill O’Connor so damn enthralling.
    “No tattoos?” he said, pleased with what he saw.
    “Too permanent. And I’m too hairy.”
    “Hmm. But not too hairy.”
    He took my hand, pulled me to my feet and led me down the hall, as if to involve more of the apartment in his tryst. He turned on a lamp in the bedroom—it was getting dark outside—and we resumed making out on a very solid, king-sized bed, rubbing and rolling in our underpants. I postponed the electric moment of complete nakedness, often the high point for me of first encounters, not because their cocks proved disappointing but because getting the other guy bare turned out to be all I really wanted. Then he peeled me and I peeled him, and we did not disappear behind our dicks but became acquainted all over again.
    The sex was not wild and frantic, but more like ballroom dancing, each of us taking turns, taking our time, enjoying our excitement yet remaining friendly around it. He took me in his mouth without fear. When I went down on him, I stroked his chest with my free hand. I could not touch enough of him. A body can be so three-dimensional with a hard-on. His was wide, almost double-barreled, his balls nearly flush underneath. The hair of his genitals, armpits and scalp was different grades of the same smooth corn silk.
    He kept smiling at me and I couldn’t help smiling back. So many men treat sex as work or theater, but this guy gleefully accepted it as something natural as eating.
    Covering him from head to toe, holding his face and gently rocking our cocks, I broke off kissing just to see his smile again, a breathless, blissful grin. He ran a hand over my bristles—his fingers were in love with my skull—and said, “Can’t remember—the last time—enjoyed this so much.”
    “You sure know how to enjoy yourself,” I said admiringly.
    There was no mention of condoms, no suggestion we fuck. I don’t like fucking, even with someone I know; it is too deliberate and final. I prefer to exhaust the other variations. Sooner or later, one of you just wants to make the other come, although that wasn’t happening here. Each time someone got close, he stopped the other and we touched something else. I was enjoying this too much to want to finish yet, there was no place I had to be, and nothing else I wanted to do with this fellow. He seemed to feel the same about me. We moved out of the routine arc of sex into a daze of flesh and hormones.
    We were sitting up, our legs around each other’s waist, his hand holding us together and slowly pumping, when he took his tongue from my mouth to whisper, “You have dinner plans?”
    “Want to have dinner together?”
    “Oh yeah.”
    It would mean calling Nancy and telling her I wouldn’t be dropping by. She could guess why. It would leave me open to her teasing, but that seemed a small price for the chance to prolong this and maybe get to know this guy whose desires were such a perfect fit with mine. “Okay,” I said.
    And he threw his head back and grinned. His hand had tightened its grip and quickened its strokes and he was moaning behind clenched teeth. I did not want to end yet, but his frantic rise in pitch and the slickness against my cock were too strong. I let go, clutching him with my knees while we shamelessly groaned in each other’s ear and squirted in his hand.
    I fell back on the bed, gasping, my legs still wrapped around him. I clutched his soft foot and pressed the sole against my face like a telephone. I did not want to break contact. It was only sex; but sex for its own sake, with no consequences, no future, out-of-town sex with somebody else’s boyfriend, had been thoroughly satisfying.
    He reappeared overhead, straddling me on extended arms, grinning. “Yow,” he said, then