I Can See for Miles

Marshall Moore

Amazing, what you can find in thrift shops. The ones in Berkeley and San Francisco can be disappointing, as thrift stores go, because the prices are high and everyone even halfway hip shops there. The ones down in Hayward have provided some of my best finds. I pick up half of my clothes and two-thirds of the shit in my apartment in places like this. People who live that deep in the suburbs demonstrate yet again their resounding lack of style and taste by getting rid of the good stuff (Martha, what’s a “Prada”? Why did Billy send us these things when he was on vacation in Italy? He should have sent us pasta instead. I know what that is. But I’m not wearing this shirt out of the house.)

“Check this out,” Colin said. He’s the one who unearthed the thing first.

My first reaction when he showed me the overhead projector was mild surprise. Schools don’t part with audio-visual equipment easily. Not even the semi-well-funded ones within commuting distance of Silicon Valley.

“I doubt it works,” I said. “It can’t possibly.”

“Plug it in,” said the clerk, eavesdropping.

Colin and I exchanged our What an asshole look. I hoisted the overhead out of its bin and handed it over. The clerk, a swarthy, bearded man in a turban, surveyed us both for a second before undoing the rubber band around the power cord and stooping to find an electrical outlet. I turned away to avoid seeing a terrible case of plumber’s crack. A bright rhom-boid of light shone on the wall behind him.

“Too cool,” Colin said. He looked as if he was about to dance a little jig or jump up in the air to kick his heels together. Colin is a seven-year-old hiding in a thirtyish body. Despite his age and the three years he’s lived in the States, he still sounds like a plummy-voiced British schoolboy. “You want it?”

“What the hell am I going to do with an overhead projector?” I asked him.

“You’re an intelligent lad, Jacob. You’ll think of something.”

“Why don’t you buy it?”

“There’s no room in my flat. If I buy one more gadget my roommate will call the building inspector and have the place condemned.”

“Good reason. What the hell—I’ll do something with it.”

We forked over cash for our purchases—some clothes, a few books, a small bookcase for the apartment I had just moved into—and left. Colin was driving today: fine with me, let him deal with the constipated traffic on 1-880. Once the bottleneck eased up, he punched the accelerator and swerved into the fast lane, his Audi accelerating effortlessly up to 85 mph.

“Maniac,” I told him, turning down his loud hip-hop to make sure he’d hear me.

“No, it’s just that we’d need another hour to get to Ikea at the rate we were going. I’d like to get back to the city before dinnertime. The Bay Bridge’ll be a bitch.”

“It’s always a bitch.”

Colin turned up Dr. Dre instead of replying.

I just bought an overhead projector, I thought. How stupid is that?

That’s how it started.

Three weeks earlier, I had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a mid-rise elevator building in lower Pacific Heights. Descriptions like that amuse the part of my mind that’s still anchored in eastern North Carolina, where the only buildings over six stories are some dormitories and the medical school tower over in Greenville, a college town forty-five minutes east of my hometown, Wilson. The descriptions contain more information that may be obvious to the uninitiated.

For example: In San Francisco, one-bedroom apartments are a scarce and therefore expensive commodity. Your name can languish on a waiting list for months, and depending on the neighborhood, you can expect your monthly rent to be at least $2,000. It’s insane. If your credit isn’t immaculate, your job prospects gleaming, and your trust fund well-managed, forget it. That I can afford a place correctly suggests I’ve done well for myself.

Saying I live in a mid-rise elevator building cracks me up because the part of me I call the secret hick still grooves on the idea of any residential structure too tall for stairs to be a comfortable means of getting to my apartment. I’m on the sixth floor and have a pretty good view of the Financial District high-rises. On clear days I can see a sliver of the East Bay between some of them. I grew up in a three-bedroom ranch house in a subdivision named Windermere Estates, and my parents had a big station wagon. Now I live in Babylon by the Bay in a still-mostly-unfurnished apartment with a decent view, and I drive an old T-top Porsche 911.

And that view. But I’m getting to that.

Saying I live in lower Pacific Heights gives folks from out of town the idea that my neighborhood is somewhat swankier than it is. I could also say I live in Japantown or the Western Addition, but Pacific Heights sounds better. I aspire; therefore, I am.

Now for my favorite part: the view. Not the high-rise office towers, not the fog as it drifts in off the Pacific, swallowing a block at a time. Yes, I can see all that. On a clear day, I can see for miles. But I want to talk about the view of the apartment directly across the street and one floor down. This guy lives there. My bedroom faces his. After sunset I found I could sit in my apartment with the lights down, and if I looked at the right time, he would get home from work—I thought he might be an attorney—and change clothes. And do other things. It was beyond belief. Not the kind of thing you’d see in Wilson, North Carolina. Never in a million years, and I loved it. Love it. I wouldn’t say I got obsessed with him, but hell, you take your perks where you find them. Either he didn’t realize he could be seen, or he didn’t give a damn.

I thought, Maybe he’s an exhibitionist.

Hell, who am I kidding? I fucking know he is.

I spy with my little eye.

And with my binoculars, I magnify.

Hot doesn’t even come close to describing this guy, but other adjectives do. Chinese, for example. I walked across the street my first week in the apartment and checked the names on the door buzzer panel. The building itself is a bit odd: only four units per floor, and the other surnames listed (Jones, Mkele, Suydam) suggested non-Asian ethnicities. T. Xu was printed on the card in the slot I deduced was his.

His hair, in a ponytail by day, hung down to his shoulders, perfect obsidian black.

Wide shoulders, a sculpted body, narrow hips....

Cheekbones to die for. The kind of face meant to be photographed.

I’d love to know where he works out, to get a body like that.

Handsome, uncircumcised dick. Big. Anyone who says Asians aren’t hung hasn’t slept with enough of them. I would watch him jack off with the lights on as if he knew I was across the street with my binoculars in one hand and my own cock in the other, keeping time with him. Sometimes we would come at the same time. Sometimes the towels we used to clean up with were even the same color.

I fucking love San Francisco.

By now you’re getting the idea I’m not the kind of guy content to do nothing but watch. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Xu put on a hell of a show. Nothing demure about him. A white guy with red hair and a nice build either came over a couple of times a week, or lived there. I couldn’t tell. Whatever their arrangement was, I watched them rut like barnyard animals.

One night I sat there with a glass of wine and tortured myself with the visuals as long as I could, binoculars in one trembling hand, the other wrapped around the glass to keep from beating off. T. Xu and the red-haired boy shed their clothes as if they hadn’t seen each other in months, as if one of them was just back from the war. Black blurs of tattoos on T. Xu’s smooth skin. Glint of light reflecting off a nipple ring. The white guy had a pierced navel. Down on the floor, 69ing, T. Xu’s foreskin visible from here, sliding up and down as his boyfriend alternately jacked him off, sucked him off, then took the head of his cock in his mouth to do both at the same time. Jesus wept.

Both mouths crept lower: the rim-job version of 69.

Crawling across the floor like two dogs sniffing each other the first time they meet, the boyfriend ate T. Xu’s ass, face buried between those perfect tan globes. T. Xu’s face contorted, a mix of raw pleasure, with a stripe of amusement in the mix, as if he was getting off on the goofiness of what they were doing as much as the sensation itself.

I drained my glass and forced myself to walk to the kitchen for a refill. If I touched my own cock—if I even stared at it long enough—it would blow. The weight of my gaze felt like a mouth. I couldn’t look at myself. I couldn’t touch myself. Yet I wanted to prolong this.

When I returned, they were fucking. I got over my pang of disappointment that I didn’t see the preliminaries—T. Xu putting on the rubber, greasing his boyfriend’s ass, plunging in. That first thrust. The wince on the white boy’s face as T. Xu’s cock slid home.

Timing is everything. I sipped wine, trembled, took out my dick when I saw their rhythm increase. An internal voice said Thank God when I had my hand wrapped around myself.

Slowly, slowly....

As T. Xu’s mouth opened and his eyes shut, and his body convulsed, flooding his lover with come, I sprayed my own load across my window.

T. Xu looked out at the night as if he knew he’d just given a performance. I set down my binoculars and offered unspoken thanks. Something passed between us. I couldn’t name it, but it was there. It was.

Back to the present. I lit a cigarette and studied the overhead projector on my bedroom floor as the sun sank toward the horizon. The crane-like shadow cast by the neck of the overhead projector lengthened, the air itself seeming to deepen in hue like denim fading backward. With only three pieces of furniture (bed, nightstand, chest of drawers) in my room, I felt a sense of space, of possibilities waiting to be revealed. No clutter. No baggage. Smoke curled in the air overhead, silvery but tending more toward white in the dimming sunlight.

The street lamps switched on.

The walls of T. Xu’s bedroom were painted cream, the trim and molding a dramatic pink. T. Xu’s furniture was black lacquered stuff his grandmother might have brought over from Shanghai. In the solemnly attired Financial District, T. Xu dressed dramatically, black and anthracite and stark white at times, and from the way he carried himself, he knew how good he looked. I’ll confess to seeing him on the street one day and following him back to his building. Hell, while I’m at it, I’ll also confess to arranging sightings, just to see him order a sandwich in a deli or dim sum at this terrific place in the Rincon Center that I wouldn’t have found on my own. I watched him eat and felt envy for the food that he put in his mouth. I wanted it to be my come he was swallowing.

I had an idea as I looked into his room the night I brought the projector home. Two pictures I had seen on his walls convinced me that the thought coalescing in my head just might work. I didn’t recognize the photographer—couldn’t get a close enough look, even with my binoculars, because the angle was all wrong—but T. Xu had at least two black-and-white nudes. I could see them from about the navel down: both were men, muscles bulging, cocks like fire hoses, Hercules and Patroclus.

T. Xu has a taste for visuals.

I almost became an electrical engineer. Halfway through undergrad school (NC State), I decided to switch to computer science. Still have a knack for circuitry and wiring. You can have my soldering iron when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.

My idea: I could modify the overhead projector.

He dug visuals? I could supply visuals. He had provided me with enough of them—I thought it was only fair.

If you wanted technical details you’d be reading Popular Mechanics. It’s enough to say I needed a stronger bulb (halogen instead of incandescent), a couple of extra mirrors, some wires, blah blah blah, and naughty pictures to project into his bedroom.

I went to work every day with an extra spring in my step until I had the overhead projector finished. The train ride down the Peninsula to work seemed quicker. I’d stare off into space imagining what I’d download off the Net and print on transparencies to beam through his window in the middle of the night.

It never occurred to me that he might object. I mean—he’s a gay guy. What gay man with blood in his veins is going to object to unexpected offerings of pornography in the middle of the night, when he’s lying there with a midnight boner, trying to decide whether he’s awake enough for a wank?

Took me about a week of tinkering and testing until I had got the range and resolution right.

My first test took place just after midnight. We live on a fairly quiet street, so there wasn’t much concern about distracting a driver and causing a wreck if he or she looked up at the wrong time. I live in a corner unit, and across the street from my living room is a retirement home for Japanese people. The building is painted off-white. It was the perfect canvas. I calculated the distance to be about the same as that between T. Xu’s bedroom and mine. There was no moment of introspection before I took the fresh transparency out of the new Epson printer I’d picked up (new, not used) for this project, no contemplative staring at the marble-statue manscape I’d downloaded from one of the porno websites I’d found. No last-minute soul-searching. Of course I was going to do this. Hell, I hadn’t been this turned on since I was thirteen and walking around with a permanent hard-on, whacking off every time I had the chance.

I hope I don’t give some random, retired Japanese lady a heart attack, I thought, flipping the switch.

Beautiful. A cock like an elephant’s trunk unfurled on the white façade of the retirement home, out of focus at first but coming sharper as I fiddled with the knobs I’d recently lubricated. Pubes resolved into view. I felt very proud of myself, and somewhat terrified at the same time.

Heart racing, I stared one more second to confirm for myself that I was, in fact, gazing out the window into a gigantic dick and that the dick was, in fact, easily recognizable as such. Then I shut off the overhead.

“Christ, I need a beer.“

I needed something else, too. Once the shock began to subside, I noticed that restless, sort of itchy sensation—almost external, the way the urge to get off comes at me sometimes. I shut my eyes and saw an enormous penis swimming in the black-red space behind my vision. Was there a towel nearby? Unlikely. What the hell—I needed to wash a load of laundry. I stretched out on the sofa and unzipped, took myself out, picturing T. Xu’s hand around his own cock when I would project image after image onto his bedroom walls. I knew what the sweat on the palm of his hand would feel like, and I knew how it would taste if I were to lick it: pungent, salty. He fingered his asshole for me, in my mind, sliding a finger inside while his other hand worked his dick. When I came, the sensation ripped through me like a shotgun blast, leaving me out of breath the way it did when I was a teenager and could still count the number of orgasms I’d had on the fingers of the same hand I used on myself. Come spurted across my T-shirt. I took it off and used it to wipe up, then went to the kitchen for that beer.

If I wanted this to work, I had to keep track of the border between novelty and nuisance. Interrupting his sleep with dazzling images of nakedness and copulation wouldn’t get me anywhere if it turned him into a furious, sleep-starved bastard and he called the cops. Out of necessity, the San Francisco police have a sense of humor. I didn’t want to find out how far it extended. Nor did I want to find out how a criminal record would affect my career potential. If I waited until a few minutes after he turned out the lights, and kept the image only long enough for him to notice it before I switched off the overhead, I felt sure this project of mine wouldn’t be too intrusive.

Don’t get me wrong: I knew I was skating on thin ice with this thing.

The first night, a Tuesday, I hurried home from dinner with Colin, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend to be ready when T. Xu went to bed. They noticed I was distracted, and I gave them an excuse about too much work and too little time to finish all of it. Silicon Valley people always swallow that one. In any case, I believed they were going to have a threesome later, so they couldn’t have been too sorry to see me go.

At home, I had downloaded and retouched several images already:

The cock and balls I’d beamed onto the wall of the retirement home across the street, elephant-like in proportion to the guy they belonged to;

A black-and-white shot of a naked skate-punk guy with the kind of body I figured (guessed, hoped) T. Xu would dig: lean and muscular, not over-developed;

A man meditating in the lotus position, a red gerbera daisy between his teeth and a tremendous erect cock jutting up from between his legs;

A male couple having sex, all curves and skin and flesh, both with long black hair—intriguingly difficult to discern where one guy ended and the other began.

There was no particular order to these. They just appealed to me. The photographs all had a bold quality, but were tasteful at the same time, artistic. My criterion for selecting an image to beam across the street was simple: Would I object to seeing it appear for a few seconds on my own bedroom wall in the middle of the night, initial shock notwithstanding?

In the bedroom, I slid the first transparency across the glass window of the projector. My hands shook. I focused the image on the outer wall next to T. Xu’s window, took a deep breath, and moved the beam of light to send the same anatomy into the bedroom.

I counted out loud: One, two, three....

Then I switched off the overhead.

In the dark of my bedroom, I crouched beneath the windowsill, heart racing like a greyhound. I peered out to see if anything would happen. Dim light in the previously dark room: He had turned a lamp on. I saw his outline in the window briefly. Gloriously nude. What a chest. Developed but not too much. No hair whatsoever. Cock visible, but detail and proportion impossible to discern. No matter, I already knew what it looked like, had already committed it to memory. He disappeared, then reappeared in his window wearing a robe. Could he see me? I froze. He seemed to be looking right at me. After a few seconds of this, he closed the curtains.

I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

Called in sick the next day. Promised my boss I’d work from home. You can get away with that in Silicon Valley.

Wednesday night: The naked skater boy appeared on T. Xu’s bedroom wall. The same thing happened. He switched on his lamp, put on his robe (I guess he had stowed it by his bed this time), and checked outside the window. Could he tell where the image had originated? Was he grooving on this, or was I pissing him off? There was no way of knowing, but my gut told me it was the former. Probably.

This time, I didn’t have quite the adrenaline-terror rush. Testosterone took over; I needed a towel five minutes after I switched off the overhead. My cock almost burst through the front of my jeans. In my imagination, T. Xu wrapped his legs around my shoulders as I slid my cock inside of him, meeting little resistance at the point of entry, which I’d have already explored with my tongue and a finger or two. But it was the look I imagined crossing his face, his look of mind-blown pleasure, that sent me over the edge. He said my name. We blew like mortar fire and lay still, drenched in sweat, panting.

If T. Xu objected, he did nothing to interfere with the pictures I sent. He simply had to close the curtains, but he didn’t. After a few nights he quit turning on the light after I switched off the projector. Questions proliferated: Was he used to this? Did he give a shit? Was he grooving on it as much as I was, lying in bed doing the things I hoped he was doing, even half as turned on as I was? Had I lost my fucking mind?

Colin noticed my haggard, lack-of-sleep attitude at work right away.

“What’s his name?” he asked me, following me down the hall. “You’re getting laid, aren’t you? Come on, ’fess up, nobody walks around with that grin on their face and those bags under their eyes if they’re not getting any.”

“You’re a sick man, Colin. I think you need professional help.”

“Bite my ass, you warped bastard. I know something’s up, and sooner or later you’re going to tell me what it is.”

“OK, fine, you’re right, something is up, and sooner or later I’m going to tell you all about it. But not today.”

“Soon, then?”

“Soon.”

I created more transparencies from Internet sites there seemed to be no end of, and beamed pictures across the street for a week before the obvious thing struck me: If I was doing this because I ultimately wanted to meet him, he might as well know what I looked like.

It was time to buy a digital camera and pose for my own pictures.

The thing I haven’t addressed until now is what I look like, and whether an attractive man would give me the time of day. In theory, what was stopping me from just approaching T. Xu on the street, introducing myself, asking if he’d like to join me for a coffee after work sometime? This had crossed my mind, but to be honest, I am incompetent when it comes to approaching men. My tongue ties itself in a knot and I get this heavy, queasy feeling in my guts. It just doesn’t work.

There’s no sane reason for this. While I wouldn’t say my existence is going to give the Matt Damons and Ben Afflecks of the world anything to worry about, I’m a good-looking guy. Photogenic, even. I have friends who flinch when they see pictures of themselves, but shots of me always turn out looking pretty good. Ethnically I’m kind of a mutt, Baltic on my mother’s side and Mediterranean on my father’s. The result is olive skin, dark brown hair, light blue eyes. I could have done a whole lot worse. And I work out four times a week. I’m pretty well-built, to tell the truth: stomach flat, muscles all present and accounted for. Below the waist I got lucky but I’ve never gone so far as to take a measuring tape to it. Sleep with enough guys and you figure out where you stand before long. It’s long and thick, more than a mouthful. If I fucked you with it, you’d remember me fondly the next day. I’m not egotistical about the way I look, but I know I get noticed. This is San Francisco. Both women and men turn their heads.

Doesn’t mean I have the talent for approaching people, though. I don’t. Men I’m attracted to are like the citizens of countries I’ve visited, where I don’t speak the language and can’t decode the alphabet. Like being stranded in Burma or Armenia and not knowing how to ask for the restroom. What am I supposed to do, other than flail and look desperate? Maybe if I had become a different kind of engineer I’d know how to bridge the distance without taking approximately nine thousand pictures of myself in varying states of undress and sitting up all of one Saturday night trying to figure out which one(s) to beam through T. Xu’s window.

T-shirt and jeans. Black T-shirt, white T-shirt, couple of logo T-shirts to see how they’d look.

Brooks Brothers suit with white shirt and subtle, tasteful anthracite tie with a pattern of little wishbone things he wouldn’t be able to see.

Jeans, no shirt.

No jeans, no shirt, just boxers.

Boxers?

That was about as sexy as a goddamn gunny sack. I took them off and looked down at myself. Jacob, you are fucking nuts. But at least you’re fucking nuts with a pretty good-sized dick.

I shot pictures of myself anyway.

Put boxer briefs on. That’s better. There’s something sexy about having Calvin Klein’s name circling your waist on a band of elastic, especially when your abs are visible, your package bulges, and you haven’t got so much body hair you look like someone stapled a carpet to your chest. I’ll admit I can see why people get into this look.

Stretched out on the bed looking as smutty as possible, my hand in my underwear gripping myself.

Standing on my head against the living room wall, nude, dick hanging down toward my navel. Don’t ask where I got that idea, and why I didn’t break my neck trying it out.

Finally I narrowed the field down to four, and that Sunday night I beamed the first one into T. Xu’s bedroom: me in jeans with no T-shirt.

Somehow this was the scariest part. Kind of like I was asking him out on a date and scared shitless he’d say no.

The light went on again this time, but he never came to the window to look outside.

He couldn’t know it was me he was looking at, and not some nameless stud I’d downloaded out of cyberspace.

Monday night: me in the suit, but with a twist. I’d opened the fly and pulled my dick out. Little bit of a non-sequitur, there—the business attire and the penis. Very Mapplethorpe.

The room stayed dark.

Fuck.

Tuesday night: me, nude, standing in the doorway separating my bedroom and my living room. I liked this shot, because it looked less contrived than the other ones.

Wednesday night, the same shot, but written in magic marker across my chest on the slide: MEET?

The lights flipped on and stayed on this time.

I could see his outline against the window.

Then he closed the curtains.

Thursday was rough. Colin looked at me funny all day, and offered to call 911 when he caught me staring out into space.

“Go home,” he told me. “Beat the traffic. And tell this bloke you’re losing sleep over I’ll beat the shit out of him if he doesn’t...I don’t know, stop whatever he’s doing so you don’t look like you gave too much blood at the Red Cross.”

Thursday night: a different nude shot, me again, sitting Indian-style on the floor of my apartment. I’LL STOP IF YOU WANT, I wrote on the transparency. I sat on the edge of my bed after I switched off the overhead, smoking one cigarette after another.

The phone rang, and I jumped off the bed and shouted in surprise and shock.

“Hello?”

Static and a dull background roar told me somebody was calling from downstairs.

“Is this the guy with the overhead projector?” asked a man’s voice.

A wave of panic broke over me, and I said nothing.

“You are, aren’t you? You don’t have to answer, because I’ve known since the second night who you were.”

Oh Jesus. I heard an Asian accent. It was him.

“I’m downstairs. You want me to come up, don’t you?”

Without saying a word, I pressed the 9 on my number pad to buzz him up.

When the knock came, I opened the door without looking through the peephole first, and when I saw the man standing there—a white man with red hair and green eyes, the ostensible boyfriend of T. Xu—I staggered back as if I’d been gut-punched.

“Can I help you?” I finally asked.

He stepped inside without invitation and closed the door behind himself.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Thomas’s roommate,” he said, extending his hand. “My name’s Anthony, and it’s really nice to meet you. At last.”

Anthony looked like the stereotypical boy next door, more or less, but with that buffed look and the updated duck’s-ass haircut half of the gay guys in the Castro seem to have. Not bad looking at all. He wasn’t Thomas, but I wouldn’t have pushed him out of bed. Was I wrong about this, though? My panic escalated. I’d been thinking he was like Thomas’s boyfriend or something, and he was here to kick my ass, or at least try....

Thomas?

I had never known what the T stood for.

“OK, here’s the deal,” he said. “I’m going to cut to the chase because I know you want to know what the hell I’m doing here after he called from downstairs. Thomas is just starting to come out, OK? This is a little too intense for him. We switched bedrooms a few days into your video projection project because he dug the shit you were projecting onto his walls but dug being able to get to sleep on time even more. So I’m the one you’ve been serenading for the last week or so, if you want to call it that.”

My legs wanted to drop out from underneath me. I started to stammer an apology but Anthony held up a hand to stop me before I could utter a word.

“You probably don’t need me to tell you that what you’ve done isn’t legal,” he went on.

I shook my head No. Like a masturbating Catholic teenager, I made a thousand guilt-crazed promises to God in my head just then.

“That had crossed my mind,” I managed to say.

“So you can probably appreciate the precarious position you’ve put yourself in,” Anthony said.

I nodded.

“And you probably would appreciate a chance to convince me not to press charges, or file suit, or whatever,” he continued. “Because I will, if you give me reason. It’s what I do for a living, and I’m really good at it.”

I didn’t nod this time, but I felt my eyes widen.

“I guess the question becomes, just how much do you want to avoid having to tell a few of San Francisco’s finest what you’ve been up to for the last few weeks?”

“I have money,” I said.

Anthony shook his head No. “Wasn’t quite what I had in mind,” he told me, grinning like the devil. “Why don’t we have a seat on the sofa. You can pour us something to drink, and we’ll see what we can agree on. I know you’re an intelligent guy, Jacob. You know a good deal when you’re being offered one.”

I poured Glenlivet over ice for us both, drained my own glass, refilled it, returned to the living room, sat at the opposite end of the sofa as if I expected him to lunge at me.

“This is extortion,” I told him.

“I’m an attorney,” he replied, unzipping his jeans. “I’m familiar with the concept. But you probably don’t have anything to worry about. If you have any sense, you’ll get to know me pretty well. I can keep my word if you’re willing to live up to your end of the deal.”

Anthony took out his cock and looked at me without saying a word.

I set down my drink and moved carefully across the sofa. I had no choice, really. I took him in my mouth and told myself I liked it. After a second or two, I got lost in the taste of him and didn’t need further convincing. He had a big one, and had just taken a shower, from the smell. Soap is not the best aphrodisiac, as it turns out. Blackmail is better.

As I sucked him off, Anthony explained his terms, and gave me until ten o’clock the following night to consider, although I had made up my mind before he left my apartment. Hell, I had made up my mind before he blew a load across my face. He forced me to kneel before him to receive it.

I think he knew I’d accepted his terms, too. I accepted his come willingly enough. Licked some off my fingers, just because.

What the hell, I thought when the door closed behind him, even if I change my mind and decide I’m not into it, and it’s just for two weeks, the same length of time I was projecting those pictures across the street. I suppose at some point I must have wondered what it would be like to be some other guy’s fuck toy—Yes, Sir, whatever you want, Sir, absolutely, I’d love to lick your ass again — and it can’t be much worse than getting arrested. Who knows? Maybe I’ll like it.

I licked his salt off my lips and went to the kitchen to refill my glass of Glenlivet.