Show-Offs

They’re taking down dead branches over the driveway. One worker’s in an elevated bucket three stories off the ground, brandishing a chainsaw. Conrad paces on my back deck, giving orders. It’s a cool October day. He’s dressed in a Virginia Tech baseball cap, a sweatshirt, jeans, and work boots, but I’m trying to visualize him in nothing but briefs. I’d kill to see the guy stripped down. As it is, there’s a rip in the seat of his pants—seems almost deliberately placed, as if he knows I want him—that reveals teasing flashes of white underwear.

Like most men, I’ve done this all my adult life: peering surreptitiously at someone I’d fuck in a heartbeat given a more conducive state of affairs. When it comes to erotic satisfaction, my circumstances have rarely been ideal. I’m not gorgeous, not charming, never have been. I’ve always been shy, insecure, for the most part incapable of making a pass. I grew up in and have chosen to remain in the Highland South, where many homophobes and conservatives lurk, where there is relatively little gay life or queer-friendly spaces. Finally, I’ve always been attracted to butch men and country boys, meaning the objects of my lust are most likely straight and thus not approachable.

And now middle age has become a handicap. I’m chunky, with a graying beard. I shave my head, the only dignified response to male pattern baldness. Yeah, I’m fairly handsome for fifty-two, if I may say so myself, and I’m lifting heavier weights than I ever have in my life, meaning that my chest, shoulders, and arms are pretty impressive for a man my age, and, thanks to the stationary bike, I still possess a decently defined set of hairy legs. But let’s just say that I am acutely aware of erotic possibility drying up, and that slow recession makes me frantic, the “quiet desperation” Thoreau spoke of. Like anyone with a libido, I want to be desirable so as to successfully attract the desirable, but the seasons come and go, faster and faster, it seems, and I can imagine with ease a day not too far distant when I’ve lost whatever appeal I have left. Doug, my partner, he’s vanilla, while I’m compulsively kinky, a rabid fan of ropes, gags and rough sex, plus we’ve been together for fifteen years, meaning by now we’re more comfortable companions than lovers, and so my erotic interest is more and more directed elsewhere.

Elsewhere today is Conrad. After so many decades of studying good-looking men, up close and from a distance, I’m an expert at calculating what a clothed man might look like naked. I’m good at gauging, despite the concealment of garments, a guy’s musculature, cock size, and body hair. Conrad’s very lean, that’s obvious. My guess is that his chest is lightly muscled, very pale, with light hair rimming small nipples. His cock’s big, like most tall, wiry men. His butt’s tight, white and curved just right, with abundant golden fur in the crack. His legs are coated with hair just as golden.

Distance and secrecy—hiding behind cracked blinds or barely parted drapes—give peepers like me the advantage of staring at prey without being noticed. Believe me, most guys I furtively admire in this little mountain town would passionately, even violently, object to an openly lecherous stare from another man. Not only do I not want to end up in a fistfight, I don’t want to give offense. I was raised with good manners. I don’t want men like Conrad to feel uncomfortable or insulted or regard me as an old lech or pervert. So I ogle them from the shadows.

“Howdy,” says Conrad, smiling. He’s about thirty, with pale-blue eyes, a thin face, high cheekbones and a prominent Adam’s apple. His chin and cheeks are coated with a tasty layer of blond beard-stubble. Curly blond hair covers his lean forearms. Sun glints off his wedding ring.

We confer. I want to hug him, to pull his sweatshirt up to see if there’s any hair on his belly. When he bends to brush sawdust off a boot, the sweatshirt rides up in back just far enough to give me a glimpse of his briefs’ waistband, and above that, a strip of skin.

I get tired of being a human being in a world of law. Don’t you? I want to growl like a hungry wolf, grab Conrad by the shoulders, push him back against the wall and kiss him hard. I want to feel his beard-stubble against my face.

Conrad struggles beneath me as I bind him, but his resistance only excites me more. Soon, I have his sinewy nakedness trussed so tightly he can do little more than flop around like a landed trout. Silvery strips of duct tape secure his arms and wrists behind him; his knees and ankles are similarly restrained.

“Shhh,” I say, cutting another long strip of tape off the roll with my army knife. I press the tape over Conrad’s mouth, wrapping it around his head till he’s silenced with three layers’ worth. “You need to keep very still now.”

Conrad lies there, trembling, as I trail the blade’s sharp point over his hard nipples, along the slight curves of his pecs, down along his flat abs, along a prominent hip bone and into the blond shrubby tangles of his pubes. When I run the edge over his soft cock, it hardens.

“Tell the truth,” I say, placing the tip of the knife against his glans. A few drops of precum have collected there. I wipe them up with the knifepoint and lick the juice off the steel. “You don’t like this, do you? You love it.”

“Beauty broken down. God, I love it when you cry,” I say, stroking the knife along his prick again. Halfway through my fifth excursion from cock-base to cock-tip, Conrad goes taut and releases a strained sob. Wet eyes clenched shut, he cums.

The boy’s short and lean, in filthy jeans. Hard muscles line his tanned, tattooed arms; his chest swells beneath a dirty white tank top. His hair’s wavy and golden-brown, the color of his close-cut goatee. He’s probably in his late twenties and looks country as they come. I move from window to window like a cat would following a hopping robin, watching as the guy works. He climbs up and down the ladder, balances along a scaffold, shoulders packs of roof tiles, and pushes a wheelbarrow of debris across the lawn to his truck. I should be writing; I should be reading. I can’t. I’m transfixed. I won’t be able to concentrate on anything else until the day is done and the guy leaves with his fellow roofers.

The new roof comes with a lifetime warranty. Six thousand dollars, not bad for such a big job. Chalk the reasonable price up to living in southwest Virginia, where the cost of living is low, the mountain landscape beautiful and religious fundamentalists plentiful as fleas on a street-cur. Certainly there are no leather bars around where I might meet a perverse, submissive version of my little roofer, some savory cub aching to spend an afternoon ball-gagged and hog-tied on the floor of his Daddybear’s closet.

Today’s another day I’ll have to forego sex and settle for scenery. Right now Roofer-Cub’s taking a lunch break beneath the Norway maple in the front lawn, while I stand in the shadows of my study, squeezing my crotch, memorizing him for later. He leans back against the trunk, chewing a sandwich and enjoying the shade; he smokes a cigarette and chats on his cell phone, probably to his wife or girlfriend, some lucky buxom blonde who’s likely to bear him several children. In ten years they’ll be living in a trailer, she’ll be fat-slabbed, the children will be shrill and frenetic and he’ll be gaunt, irritable and aging fast.

I see my opportunity for closer inspection when, done with lunch, he gets out an odd implement and starts rolling it over the lawn. When my cock’s softened sufficiently not to be an obscene projection in my cargo shorts, I step outside onto the stoop.

Luke has the kind of voice that always turns me on: low, casual, with thick country vowels, what I used to call “uneducated Southern” before Doug pointed out to me that I sound much the same when I’m drunk, pissed off, horny or high, or when I’m around other small-town Southerners.

“Cool,” I say, moving closer, doing my best to veil my hungry fascination. I’d give anything for a whiff of his armpits. They have to be ripe, after hours working in the warm May sun. It’s all about the senses, isn’t it? The more stimulated, the better. Sight’s been feasting all morning, hearing’s just been titillated, now smell wants something to savor. Taste and touch, they’re snarling with frustration, aching to finger the small buds of those nipples, tiny protuberances beneath his tight tank top, to lap that gleam of sweat on his clavicles, to nuzzle the musky dark between his buttcheeks. Small and compact as he is, I could lift him into my arms and carry him into the house. I doubt that such an enthusiastic gesture would be welcomed.

“Well, I better let you get back to it,” I say. I can’t sustain these little chats for long. Between my innate shyness and the struggle to appear not ravenous but calm, they sap me of energy fast. “Sure, buddy,” he says with a nod, returning his attentions to the lawn.

I go inside, back into my rapt shadow-cloaked study of him. When he leaves the front yard, I pad through the house, checking each window, tracking him like a hunter would a deer. I find him on the roof scaffolding again, just outside the small window of the upstairs laundry room. Good god, he’s taken his tank top off. There are more tattoos on his chest and belly; his torso’s covered with sweat and a dusting of golden-brown fur; his nipples are tiny, brown and erect; and there’s a scar on his back, a shiny swelling where a serious injury might have been, perhaps even a gunshot wound.

I step back, where I can still see Luke but he can’t see me. I pore over the lines and colors of his exposed torso; I grip the cloth covering my cock and squeeze. I keep squeezing. Before a minute’s out, I’ve shot a big load into my boxer briefs. “Thanks, buddy,” I whisper. Chuckling, I head into the bathroom to clean myself up.

The roofers leave at four. I’m relieved. Finally I can concentrate on something else. I catch up on email, then make notes for an essay I plan to write tomorrow. Later I’ll make Doug and me martinis and throw together some dinner; right now I’m going to do my best to retain the “muscle” in “muscle-bear” by lifting weights in the basement gym.

My “Macho Room,” I call it. There are several posters of muscled, half-naked guys; a stationary bike; a television on which to watch porn while I pedal; racks of free weights; a punching bag; and a bench press, with a barbell in the stand at its head and an inclined pad for preacher curls at its foot. Listening to country music, I work through biceps, then deltoids, then biceps again, finishing with triceps. A long shower next, since my husbear is always complaining about my strong body odor. I think I smell sexy and butch; he thinks I stink.

Water runs down my body; it feels like hands stroking me. I close my eyes, think of my little roofer and get hard again. Why can’t it be him touching me, our bodies pressed together in the shower? Why can’t I find a part-time boy who looks like that? The world’s so fucking unaccommodating. Absentmindly, I tug on myself for a few frustrated seconds before drying off.

Luke’s groaning with discomfort when I step out of the shower. He’s stripped, bent over, tied belly-down to the preacher-curl bench. His arms are spread, tautly stretched out, wrists roped to the heavy barbell resting in the stand before him. His head’s bowed; a ball-gag’s strapped between his teeth; drool drips from his mouth, spattering the black bench press.

I snap a leather parachute around the base of his balls, then hang a work boot from it. I slip weighted clamps on his nipples. I take a riding crop to his back and shoulders, then to the snowy curves of his ass, then to his upper thighs. He squirms and whines, yanking hard on his bonds, then, as the blows get harder, thrashes and shouts. The weights hanging from his tits and ball sac sway and jolt. His slobber puddles on the bench. His strained screams shatter, melting into sobs. Soon, tears join his pooled drool.

Nothing moves me like manly helplessness and manly tears. I stop beating Luke only after I’ve covered him with red welts from his shoulders to the back of his knees. He lies heaving across the tilted pad. “Good, good boy,” I say, dropping the crop. “You took a lot.” Kneeling, I spread his blow-heated, crimson-etched buttocks and give his hole a long tonguing. He quivers and slumps; he whimpers and moans.

“Too bad. You’ll get used to it.” I pull out, rub my cockhead up and down his crack and then shove all the way inside. Luke howls. I wrap an arm around his tight torso, press a hand over his mouth, and spear him hard. One minute he’s struggling, shaking his head frantically, begging me to stop; the next, I’m jacking him, he’s bucking back against me, then prick-pounding my fist; and the next, I’m cumming up his ass and he’s cumming in my hand.

Outside, a gray-grim day in mid-December, another set of workers moves up and down ladders set against the front of the house. Last year was the roof; this year we’re having storm windows installed before winter sets in. As usual, I’m mesmerized by a member of the work crew. Once again he’s younger and smaller than I—in his midtwenties, about five-nine—contrasts that bring out the BDSM Top in me, the doting, stern/tender Daddy. He sports wavy brown hair and a close-trimmed dark goatee. His sweatshirts have been close-fitting enough to let me know his chest, shoulders and arms are solid and muscular. Talk about eminently fuckable. He’s very handsome, resembling a younger version of Tim McGraw, my favorite country music star. In the couple of days the guy’s been working here, Doug and I have nicknamed him “Baby Tim.”

Trying to seem casual, I lift my head. When Baby Tim lifts the window frame, his sweatshirt rides up. For a precious handful of seconds, I can see the top of his loins’ lean lyre and a brown line of belly hair leading into his jeans.

“Oh, fuck!” I gasp. I put on an elaborate show of false focus, pointing at something supposedly significant on the monitor, meanwhile watching like a raptor out of the corner of my eye. Once again, the brief stretching; once again, the sweet exposure of Baby Tim’s furry belly. Storm windows are supposed to be about keeping the warmth in and the cold out, but right now it feels like the opposite. I’m the chilly one, separated from all that hairy heat by a pane of glass, a titanium wall of social custom, heteronormativity, several decades and my own cowardice.

Doug’s out of town, so I play the soundtrack to Thor extra loud. It’s flurrying outside; my study’s dark except for the light of one candle. I’m sipping a peaty Irish whiskey, one boot propped up on my handsome human footstool.

Baby Tim’s naked, on his hands and knees. His wrists are roped together in front of him. A leather dog collar and leash are buckled around his neck; there’s a butt plug up his ass and a camo bandana knotted between his teeth. He grunts, shifts his hips then settles back into acquiescent stillness.

“Don’t worry, boy, I have something larger that’s going up your ass real soon.” Taking the leash, I lead him upstairs, where we can enjoy the gas fireplace. I strip, then push him onto the bed, tie his wrists to the headboard, position him on his elbows and knees and enter him roughly from behind. His butt’s small, very tight and coated with dark hair.

“Yah!” Tim growls. His ankles lock behind my back, pulling me more deeply into him. I’ve only managed a dozen thrusts when he goes taut and gasps. His untouched cock spurts, jetting onto my chin and pulsing over his hairy belly.

Chuckling, I rub cum into my beard and lick up the pool on his stomach before pulling out and untying him. “I’m tired, cub,” I say, folding him into my arms, fondling his nipples. “Let’s just cuddle. I don’t need to cum right now. I’ll plow you again in the morning. Would you like that?”

“Uhhhhhh huh!” Baby Tim nods, nuzzles his gagged mouth against my chest and scoots closer. Tomorrow morning, I’ll teach my new houseboy to make buckwheat pancakes. After breakfast, he’ll spend a few happy hours hog-tied in the closet.

The dick-dancer gyrating before me began in a skimpy pair of underwear on the big center stage, but now he’s naked, on a brightly lit dais only yards away. Unlike the other performers, he’s not gym-chiseled. His body is simply a young man’s: lean, with muscle-thick, hairy thighs and some slight definition in the shoulders and chest. His dick isn’t particularly big, and he isn’t much of a dancer. He pretty much just moves his hips forward and back, flopping his soft cock around. But for some reason I can’t explain, I’m attracted almost invariably to Caucasians, and he’s one of the few white guys dancing. I dote on facial hair and body hair, and he’s got a chinstrap beard and the slightest dusting of fur on his torso, while all his fellow dancers are clean shaven and smooth chested. Finally, his pale body is scattered with tattoos, which are always an erotic addition, and he’s wearing black harness-strap boots exactly like a pair I own, making him look like a country boy.

It’s late, and I’m tired. I only came here to please Doug, who relishes such venues. Strip clubs always make me uncomfortable. I feel old, ugly, frustrated, like a supplicant. The contrast between middle-aged patrons and young, well-built dancers is painful, really. I don’t want to want men I can’t have. I don’t want to stare lustfully at someone I can’t fuck, someone who feels my need, finds such need pathetic, yet revels in the ego-food my attentions provide. If I’m going to ogle, I want to ogle while unseen. I don’t want someone to smile at me and flirt with me only because I might give him money. It’s humiliating, one-sided. My desire makes me feel weak, not powerful; ashamed, not proud.

But, minute by minute, this dancer’s winning me over with his limber body and shaggy brown hair. His face is only vaguely handsome, almost coarse, but when he smiles, his features transform: he glows, he’s endearing. He’s a gay farm-boy come to the big city, I tell myself, making a living as best he can, relishing his new life in the nation’s teeming capital but still homesick for Southern hills and fields. If only he found the right Daddy to take care of him. This guy’s the most delicious fuel for fantasy I’ve encountered in months.

Doug’s amused by my interest. He rises—as I definitely cannot, thoroughly paralyzed as I am by my own sheepish desire—steps over to the dancer, whispers to him and slips bills inside the high socks the boy’s wearing beneath his boots. The dancer nods, flashes me that amazing smile and turns his back to us.

The dancer bends over, cocks his rear-end in my direction, wriggles it then slaps his right buttcheek hard. He drops to his hands and knees, still swaying to the music. Light gleams on the bunched muscles of his shoulders, the dip of his spine, the lift of his buttocks. He’s presenting his ass to me like a gift. I can see, as clearly as any beauty I’ve ever adored, fine hairs like gold thread covering the pale mounds of his buttocks.

Dizzy, almost stunned, I sit back. I gulp my gin and tonic, feigning an exterior of cool dignity, but inside I’m feeling like one of those cartoon characters whose eyes bug out a foot and whose jaw drops to the ground like an anvil. The boy slaps his left buttock now, looks back at me and grins, then pulls the mound of flesh aside, far enough for me to see his cleft’s copper hair and his asshole. The tiny aperture clenches and relaxes. “I think he’s winking at you,” Doug says in my ear.

I am, simply put, enflamed. Dry mouth, beating heart. I might as well be a love-struck adolescent. For once, I give over my shame and pride and simply wallow flush-cheeked inside infatuation, gawking at those two low hills, the mossy vale between them, and the tight delight waiting there. That a man might give me such a show, offer me such blessings, and then leave me unsated is simply unthinkable. Obscene, really. What’s right is that I stand up, stride over, beat his ass scarlet and then plow him in front of this room of strangers.

Too soon the besotting butt-show’s done. He stands, turns around, gives me another white smile, fingers his nipples a little, which only maddens me more, and then the song’s ended. He hops off the dais, lopes over and drops to his knees before us. “Hey, I’m Byron,” he says, placing one hand on my knee, the other on Doug’s.

We chat; I do my best not to stutter, not to pounce on him. He’s from Alexandria, just finished college in North Carolina. We have matching tattoos: daggers on our left forearms. He seems innocent, cheerful, friendly, polite. I wonder how much of him is façade, meant to win more bills from us. I don’t beg him to go home with us. I don’t ask him if more money might buy a lengthier, more intimate show back in our hotel room.

It’s after midnight; Doug and I have to drive home early tomorrow. But we stay; I want more of Byron. In a little bit he’s back, this time dancing on top of the bar. He locks one leg around a ceiling pipe, swinging nimbly from it like a tattooed Tarzan. He talks with a hideous Asian man who’s clearly as smitten with him as I am. I feel jealous, absurdly possessive. “Get away from him, you troll! That’s my boy!” I want to shout.

Instead, as soon as said troll strolls on, I gather my courage, walk over and slip a bill into Byron’s sock. He grins down at me, his penis flopping mere inches from my face. All I’d need to do is open my mouth and lean forward, and his cock would be pulsing between my lips. I could fondle him—prominent signs around the club make clear that you can touch a dancer below the knees and above the navel. I could run my fingers over his hairy calves, stroke his mouthwatering nipples, caress his armpit hair. I want to touch him as much as I’ve wanted anything. But why madden myself more? Why open the floodgates further? Instead I ask him about several of his tattoos, slip another bill inside his sock, say, “Thanks for the great show. Really amazing,” and head back through the crowd to my gin and tonic. As soon as the song ends and Byron descends, Doug and I depart.

Daddybear’s harem, I wryly call them, the men my memory’s collected, the ones I make love to in my mind. I plug them into a simple erotic equation (scruffy butch man + bondage + gags + torture + ass-rape) that never fails to stoke me up and get me off. Now it’s time for Byron to take his turn.

It’s a windy evening; I spend hours reading. I look up from my book often to admire my guest, who’s lying naked before the fireplace. He’s silent except for an occasional discomfited grunt as he shifts about on the carpet. Every now and then, our eyes meet and hold. Every now and then, his limbs strain, a struggle as brief as it is futile, before, defeated, he bows his head, sighs and surrenders.

The gas fire has the bedroom snug, so my captive’s suffering isn’t about temperature but about the wicked ingenuity of his restraint. His hands, tied behind his back, are anchored with a short cord to his trussed-up cock and balls, meaning that every time he fights his bonds, he only tortures his own genitals. His hairy legs are bent behind him, his ankles crossed, tied, and tethered to the wooden dowel roped between his teeth, so that any half-hearted attempts at escape only wedge the stick deeper into his mouth. Byron’s been squirming and groaning for a good three hours, giving me a show so beautiful that my book’s gotten only intermittent attention. But now this chapter’s done, and I think Byron’s had enough.

Bending, I stroke his shaggy hair and then free him, leaving only the dowel-gag in place. With difficulty he crawls to his knees, limbs clearly sore from long hours of constriction. Gratefully, he wraps his arms around my waist and presses his face against my belly.

“Good boy. Keep yourself spread. Stay just like that.” I take a deep breath before stripping off my clothes and dropping to my knees behind him. I push my face into that fine copper crevice-fur, breathing in his musk, probing him with my tongue-tip, adoring the glossy pink entrance there. I rim him tirelessly, relishing his ecstatic moans, the way he wriggles his butt against my beard.

“Time for the cuffs,” I say, seizing Byron’s wrists and locking them behind his back. I lube us up and jam in overlapped fingers, prying him open further. Finally, I poke my cockhead between his buttocks and thrust inside, making him wince and yelp. I grip his hips and fuck him with snarling brutality. The bed creaks, bumping against the wall.

“God, what a superlative plowing. Damn, Daddy, I needed that,” Byron gasps as soon as I’ve gathered sufficient thought to unknot his stick-gag. I fetch a wet washrag to clean us up before uncuffing him. Embracing, we snuggle and drowse in the firelight for a long time. Then Byron sucks me hard again, straddles my waist, sits on my cock with a flinch and a sigh and jacks off on my chest.

Fiction, fiction, sadly fiction. This final sex scene’s fact. This last man’s real, not fantasized. He’s horny, kinky, queer and more than willing. He’s versatile, meaning he loves to top cubs but he’ll bottom for some guys, including me if I ask nicely. And he’s my type, I’m glad to say, a muscle-bear, a Daddybear. True, he’d be hotter if his goatee were less gray, more black; if there weren’t those midlife bags under his eyes and lines on his brow; if he could just stop swilling martinis and scarfing doughnuts and lose twenty pounds. But he’s burly and butch, a passion-starved mountain man with a solid set of shoulders and arms, a chest molded by decades of weight lifting; he’s hairy, though the thick pelt between his pecs is silvery, no longer dark, and his thick arms are covered with intricate tattoos.

Stripped to the waist, head bowed, he stands before the bathroom mirror. Now he lifts his head, looks himself in the eyes and begins. When he ties a camo bandana between his teeth, then plasters a strip of duct tape over his mouth, his cock stiffens inside his boxer briefs. His nipples are prominent after so many blessed years of rough play, and on them he hangs clamps. When he tightens the metal teeth, he simultaneously grunts with pain and grows twice as aroused. Now he drops his briefs and takes his long cock in his hand.

More and more, as a mortal ages, desire is sadly unreciprocated, all about looking, not touching. Eyes must substitute for skin, so to speak, and skin grows more and more irrelevant. But this man, he can see and stroke himself, he likes his own looks, he desires that broad-shouldered Daddy in the glass.

Now he drops his dick long enough to twist both clamps cruelly. Pain knots his brow. He throws back his head and gives a long, muffled moan. Seizing his cock again, he strokes himself harder, palm-skin sliding blissfully over prick-skin, subject for once become object, Top simultaneously bottom, Narcissus bending toward the water to kiss himself. By now, his tits are burning, his cock’s a taut sheen, his fist a blur. Lifting one hand, he tugs a tortured nipple, bites down on the bandana knotted between his teeth, locks eyes with the man in the mirror and arches his back. With a hoarse growl, he gushes cum into the sink.

He stands there trembling, panting, relishing the fading frissons of orgasm. Now he gives a baritone chuckle, shakes his head and peels the tape off his stubbly face. Sheepish laughter as he unknots the mouth-moist bandana, a doubled wincing as he eases off the tit clamps. He washes his splattered semen down the drain. Grinning, he studies himself in the mirror, captor admiring captive, Daddy savoring boy. He’s still furry, strong, powerful. He’s virile yet. He flexes his arms and pecs, runs his fingers through his chest hair and caresses his aching nipples. For a few moments, he has no need of any other.