Curtis
9:45 a.m.
He swore last year he would never look for ass while he was high.
This time he had smoked a joint and a half and couldn’t think straight he was so horny.
Just one good fuck. A quick one, no conversation, no chat.
But bouncing from thread to thread was harder than he thought, had asked much of his concentration. The clear winner was a narrow-waisted soccer player with thighs and ass so bright they almost shone orange. Past chats always ended when the cherub-mouthed cutie asked a personal question – place of work, kind of work, political party.
Curtis was having none of this, his irritation at filters on the app blazing more than his blunt. “Interests,” “Music,” “Movies,” an “Intro” section—who gives a shit about this when the goal is to get off? Pretending to be interested in these answers was a straight man’s burden, and tonight he wasn’t trying to be one.
The other window had an older cat with fewer words than a headline in his profile
DL, big pipe to the front of the line, if I’m on I’m lookin right now
It took Curtis two minutes to ignite his dilemma.
Pics?
Yeah.
The ass shot dominated the phone screen, canceled everything around it. The geometry of the ass was so perfect, a roundness reserved only for planets. To Curtis the hole was mesmerizing, maybe because the high had slid deeper under his cheekbones, or maybe because it was somehow shaped like the small, short-branched crucifix hung always on his Pastor’s neck. Curtis dove in.
Damn. wya?
Salvia hotel
You take dick?
How big
9
Come thru
He tried to look up the address on Maps, but it took him so long to make out the tricks the phone played on him. Saliva Hotel. Saliva Hotel, he asked himself. Saliva? What the fuck… Then the buzz sound, like a sci-fi stun wand taking somebody down. The app made it several times, and the messages were all from the first guy: You busy working / what you watching on tv / how you like Kanye. / Are you coming this time? Come on man
Too many questions.
Curtis pulled down the Maps window and tried Salvia Hotel again. Three miles. Not far.
Then the younger dude surprised him. He sent,
You can just come by and let me have it. Fuck me until you cum and just leave whenever. I won’t say a word. I promise.
Now Curtis had dropped like a hard beat into his dilemma. He had been wanting the young shiny-assed boy for so long, wanted to choke his waist and pull the ass hard into his dick. He had ghosted on way too many questions and read way too many words, some he didn’t want to know: marginalization, diaspora, cisgender. He deserved to fuck this boy for way too long.
But the full stop ease of the older dude made Curtis feel free. He texted.
Yo ass ready now
Yep. I’ll leave the door propped. You come in and fuck and leave.
Word?
Yeah. Brb
Curtis was good with this. Bareback was cool because his dick was invincible. But he opened the pic again and stared at the ass. It had power that could stand up to his dick. He needed to see nothing else. He stared and studied the ass in detail, imagined what it might feel like, pushed his erection toward it on the phone. This went on for four minutes that felt like marathons.
He needed to send another text to the wordy guy, postpone it. Hold him off a little longer.
Yo you know what dude
Not back yet.
Not back where? / Where / Yo?
Why was this boy tripping? Didn’t he just invite him over with no strings or words? The ghosting didn’t add up. He had been waiting another eternity, he was sure
Sorry about that. Salvia Hotel.
Curtis froze. He was clear. He had not changed the window of the app once. All of this was the older dude.
You still comin
Yeah Salvia hotel here I come
When you get here let me know and I’ll give room number
The high did not stop him from driving. L.A. looked alive and well, as detailed as an animated film noir. He was tripping. Then he wondered if this dude was masculine. Bass in the voice. Etc. He tried to pull the phone out and realized texting was too much to handle.
Curtis pulled the car over on La Cienega and put the hazards on.
Can I call you man?
He waited, the high dragging everything out like a caution tape. The reply came thirty seconds later, but Curtis felt it as five minutes and was just trying to figure out how to turn the car around on this hill.
Yeah. Give me your number since you driving.
Curtis did and the phone rang.
“Yo.”
“Hey bro whassup. You on your way?” The voice came at Curtis with a lot of baritone, depth he could feel past his ear and through his skull.
“Yeah man. I just wanted—” Curtis stopped talking when he realized he didn’t know how to say that he wanted to make sure that the guy wasn’t “gay.”
“You sound alright.”
“Huh?” Wait, was the guy speaking Curtis’s mind?
“Your voice. I only deal with dudes,” the guy said. “Not down with that faggoty shit. You sound right.”
“Oh.”
“Text when you get here.”
The guy hung up the phone.
Curtis’ dick pushed on his jeans so fast he had to drive with it out. When he made it to the Salvia Hotel, he parked on the unlit back side of the hotel.
What room
312 The door is open. Come in.
The door was resting on the chain. Curtis pushed it open with caution with a whiff of sobriety, long enough to take in the room. He hurried in, closed the door and locked it. This third world hotel had a foyer entrance big enough to stand in without being in the actual room. He could not see the bed right away, only the bit of light coming from the nightstand.
He walked in and saw that ass. The dude was standing near the bed, the silhouette of it. Curtis sank back into his high, while the curves came at him. It wasn’t until he started to smell must of the dude that he realized he had walked over to him. Handsome dude, black and something else he could not place in the low light.
Before Curtis could touch him, the dude walked around him with careful steps, climbed on to the bed and bent over on all fours. It was the picture from the app having come to life. It too rushed at him somehow and Curtis fell to his knees like a person ordered by an executioner. With no idea how it got there, Curtis felt the taste of ass on his tongue, on his lips. He slid it in, trying to push the moan out of the dude.
There wasn’t one. But he felt the smooth hair around the hole, tasted the must the dude’s cheeks made from being cozied up.
He grabbed the lube sitting on the night stand and oiled his whole dick.
The dude on the bed was still.
Was he alive?
Curtis tried not to laugh, a weed tangent. Somehow that thought was funny as hell. Then he pushed his dick in like a truck entering a station.
The dude exhaled slow.
He pulled back, then pushed back in, two feet an hour.
Curtis felt extra wet heat on his dick, juice. It made him dig further in. The dude told his pleasure to the pillow, some deep exclamation in some other language.
This made Curtis’ dick harden, grow bigger, push open the walls.
Another slow stroke from halfway out to further in.
He heard more baritone into the pillow.
He felt extra wet heat on his dick. When he pulled it out he saw the white foam.
Now the asshole was slippery. Curtis shoved his dick all the way back in it. Again and again. He heard the messy kiss of his thighs on these perfect cheeks and when he closed his eyes it sounded loud.
Thwack… Thwack…
The dude shook beneath him. Curtis plowed faster.
Now the dude was moaning louder, higher. Foam cream crept to the edge of his asshole and Curtis got harder. The dude was bigger in stature, and Curtis guessed his dick matched it. Curtis reached around and grabbed the dude’s dick. He was right. He felt the hood on it and stroked it.
The thick dick became a joystick—Curtis used it to pull the dude’s ass further back.
All the way back.
Curtis felt his dick crawl deeper into the dude he was sure came from some island. They stayed locked like this for a few seconds that Curtis’ high dragged into ten minutes of profound feelgood.
Then Curtis banged him.
Thwack, thwack, thwack.
The dude’s head bobbed around like he was drugged, going with the bang, enjoying it.
Curtis’ balls and the tops of his thighs kept kissing the dudes ass, pulling more foam to it every time.
Thwack, thwack.
Now foam was spurting everywhere, creamy white foam coming out around the Curtis’s dick every time he pulled it from the juicy asshole.
Curtis closed his eyes and felt like a hand made of warm gooey cream had grabbed his dick to yank the cum from it.
Thwack, thwack, thw-
Curtis came. He came forever. He came hard into the dude’s ass.
For a moment everything was still except the heavy breathing of two men. Curtis felt the cum on his fingers and knew he jacked the guy right. They were quiet except for the breathing. Deep breathing. Curtis’s knees relaxed, his hand still on the dude’s dick, his own still locked deep inside.
He started to ease it out. But the dude pull himself away and stood beside the bed. He opened his phone and looked at something, put the phone down and looked at Curtis’s resting dick.
Handsome dude. Very handsome. Brown paper bag eyes.
“Wait where is it?”
“What?” The dudes voice was jarring and Curtis tried to focus.
“The condom. Where is it?”
Was he loud or were his ears just sensitive with the weed? Curtis did not understand the question about the condom, even when he saw the dude look at the bed where the lube and condoms were. Through the haze of after cum, Curtis started to understand that the horror on the dude’s face was about the fact the condom sitting there, unused.
“I thought you said, I thought—”
The sentence did not get out before he felt himself falling into the wall, away from the bed, a sharp sting on his cheekbone. The realization of being backhanded had not sunk in until after the dude connected his fist to Curtis’s stomach, which sent him to the floor.
“You didn’t ask to fucking cum in me, bitch.”
Now Curtis could see the massive size of the dude, his body towering, the light behind it casting shadow. He had just enough reflex to roll over and miss the foot coming toward him. Curtis tried to stand, but tripped over pants he forgot were still at his ankles.
When he looked back, he saw that the attacker also tripped. Maybe he was high too.
Curtis fought to get alert so that he could fight to get clear.
The guy groaned for a second and then reached for Curtis leg, used it to climb, to pull himself.
They struggled on the ground.
Curtis used the cord of the landline to yank the hotel phone off the table.
The dude made his way further toward Curtis’s neck.
Curtis felt the weight of the dude’s upper body fall on him.
Then the shaking.
Violent seizure. The entire body on top of him shook, even as consciousness seemed gone.
No, no, no, no. This is not going down like this.
Curtis turned the guy’s head on his side, took the phone receiver off the base and put half of it in the dude’s mouth.
He got up. He looked around for something, not sure what it was.
He started to dial 911 but he could not explain this and did not want this out. He would lose his job if the police showed up. He had to contain this.
Curtis squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to focus.
He ran back to the bed and grabbed the man’s phone. It had not locked back yet, a miracle. He scrolled through the open windows and found the jack’d app right where the man left it, in a thread with somebody. Curtis could not think straight. He could not get to a solution. He saw that the private picture did not look like the guy on the floor.
The guy on the floor had stopped moving. Except for a small rise and fall of his chest, he had stopped moving.
Then the knock at the door. Light, but there.
In panic and sloth, he took his jacket and used it to tie the dude’s arms behind his back. He made a fishing knot that would be near impossible to escape, and then dragged the dude’s heavy body into the closet.
Then he thought about the knock.
He had to get it. If this dude was invited over here, it meant he wasn’t necessarily leaving.
Curtis hurried to the dresser to see if the phone was still unlocked, if he could get the rest of the jack’d thread.
It was locked.
Knock. Knock.
Curtis pulled his pants up and walked over to the door.
He opened it to see a dark dude with smooth thick lips and almond eyes.
“Yo,” was al Curtis could muster.
“Hey.”
This dude came in with authority and Curtis did not have the nerve or sobriety to react.
“Don’t want people out there to hear, man. I keep it low.”
And this is when Curtis realized that the brief increase of pace that helped him for the fight, the rescue effort and the body drag was adrenaline. It was over. He was now caught in the muddy crawl of his high.
He nodded, which was all he had.
“You look better than that pic man,” the guy said.
Curtis just stared.
Then he remembered that he was supposed to do something with this man. He was impersonating a dead guy who had…forgotten to cancel on this dude?
He took two steps toward the stranger and touched his hip.
Now he trembled, mostly because he worried. What if the dude wakes up before he can get this guy out of here? Was that knot right?
“You alright man?”
“Yeah, I just—” Curtis tried to focus. Horny, scared, high, he struggled to come up with a lie. “I never messed with a dude.”
He looked at the closet and then commanded his head to come back to the guy.
“Cool.”
The feeling of tongue in his mouth helped.
The feeling of this man’s dick against his thigh let him know right away that he had to get it off. He was not prepared to take it, and he was too drained to give it.
He would have to suck it.
Curtis shoved his hand down the guy’s pants and felt the dick. Maybe he could jack him off and call it a day—the guy already felt hard enough to bust.
When the new guy, the sexy guy, put his mouth on Curtis’s tattoo, he was surprised. He did not know it was possible for this spot to feel good again – he got the two apples burned into his neck just to make sure nobody could ever gather his temptation the way those two negroes did for years. No weak spots. None.
Except now that these dark lips…is it the weed? Fuck that feels good…
A noise came from the closet.
Paranoia. The dude was out.
Curtis still took no chances. Rather than fight the high, he used it to suck. He licked all the skin he could get to on his way down to the pipe, hard as a club. When the dude backed away, for a second, Curtis worried about the shirt – was there something on it, like blood?
He took it off.
“Did you hear that?” the guy said.
Curtis hoped not. He wasn’t sure what was real anymore.
He started blowing the new, dark dick in front of him.
The moment it all went wrong was not clear to Curtis, except that the dude in the closet started to move around. And that the new guy looked horrified. Some weird instinct Curtis couldn’t place wanted the new guy to stick around to help, as if maybe the knot-bound dude in the closet would be more lethal now than he was before. Curtis was DDF but didn’t have the presence of mind to say it, nor the comfort to use it when it could have worked, nor the sobriety to know that it would not have mattered. But he felt some kind of comfort in this dark, warm guy who was fleeing the scene.
He had to choose – keep the new guy or prepare to fight off the old one. Both was not an option.
Or he could leave. He could leave and figure it out later, hope that the guy could never track him down. If he got a head start, the guy would not be able to catch him.
But the car keys were in his jacket pocket near the bed. And if he took off on foot, and the knot did not hold…
Curtis needed more time for all these thoughts and for his high to go away.
The dude continued to struggle to move out of the closet. Curtis planned to knock him out cold, buy himself some time.
A phone never felt so heavy. When the dude to get his head out, Curtis swung the phone down. The dude turned his head side just in time for his temple to connect with the blow.
He fell instantly in a slump, halfway out of the closet.
But Curtis could not see any movement in the body. Not even the rise and fall of the chest.
Now he was very afraid.
“Yo.” It was a plea, not a question.
No response.
“Hey. What the fuck?”
Curtis moved over to him and slowly reached his fingers to the throat. Pot paranoia replaced pot desire. He expected the guy to jump up and grab his 5’9 frame and throw him across the room.
He kind of wanted him to.
This was worse.
There was no pulse.
He searched again. He felt the wrist, the neck again, the other wrist. There was no sign of a pulse.
He checked again.
And then he checked one more time.
No pulse.
Curtis sat, almost catatonic, and tried to figure out what to do. After 10 minutes, he had a loose, weed-soaked plan.
He would use something to prop open the door.
He would find a laundry bin.
Then he would call a Lyft.