Saint Valentine Was a Martyr, You Know

Simon Sheppard

“I want to kill you and fuck you and eat you,” I said, and I meant it, sort of, because it was true, sort of, and he looked up at me with that smile of his and I put my hands around his throat and squeezed and he closed his eyes, opening his mouth, his beautiful mouth, for a kiss, which I gave him, my tongue going as far down his throat as it could, my knee pressing into his crotch, where his dick stood stiff as a soldier, and when he sighed I squeezed his thin throat harder, stopping the kiss so that I could watch his face, which got pink but not alarmingly red, so I squeezed still a bit harder and then backed off, and that’s when he threw his arms around me, pulling himself up against me, his nakedness against mine, his chest against mine, two heartbeats, his ear near my mouth, my mouth that whispered, “Kill you and fuck you and eat you...in that order,” which made him shiver with pleasure, hearing what nobody had ever said to him before in his short life, and when he replied that he figured being dead would mean he wouldn’t enjoy the fucking very much, it was with a tone of bemusement and peace, not irony or fear, so I answered back in the same tone, quiet, confident, the tone of a man, I hoped, very much in control, “Maybe not, but I’ll enjoy it,” and hauled off and slapped him across the chest, a slap that landed with a resounding whap, a dick-hardening noise that made me want to do it again, so I did, I slapped him again, and then a third time and a fourth, each time a little harder, at each blow his face expressing, not astonishment, since neither of us was the least bit surprised, but a genuine pain, that look of pain that made my heart race like a truck driver on bennies heading home, like a dog smelling his own piss on a tree, like a desperate man who’d finally spotted what he was after, and I would have dry-humped his crotch, his hard-on, which was always glossier than mine, more insistent, but he was already straining that shiny, purplish, hard thing against my belly, leaving generous trails of pre-cum on my flesh, and I slapped him a few more times, on one naked place, then another, till I saw it in his face, that look that says, “You’re reaching my limits, you son of a bitch,” a look that I’d gotten used to seeing on his improbably lovely face, an expression that sent affection up my spine, so I stroked his cheek, softly, softly, with one hand, while my other hand squeezed his little nipple hard, really hard, and that face I was stroking just beamed, a child on its birthday, just beamed, what a happy kid he was, which made me want to make him even happier, go even deeper, so I grabbed hold of his pec, a handful of flesh that I twisted, my grip refusing all compromise, his face reflecting something like love, something wordlessly real, or at least something that seemed real, and that made me want to kiss him again, made me want to sink my teeth into him, into the meat of his chest, his viral flesh, into his heart, like some Hannibal Lecter of desire, and I remembered when we first met, he and I, on Easter Sunday, late the night before really, at some tired sex club, when he looked at me and figured out that, of all the guys there, I was the one, the only one who could take him all the way down, as deep as he needed to go, though then he really had no idea, neither of us did, how long and how low that would be, and we left the club, with its masses of gayboys fucking as blindly as those fish who live in caves and, never seeing the light, have no need for the eyes that they’ll never in any case possess, and we went off together past good people headed for midnight mass, we headed off toward some hunger that would terrify those good, pious folks, would terrify most people, sometimes even terrifies me, and now I looked at him, into his eyes, and punched his chest, not hard enough to crack a rib, not nearly, but hard enough to make him wince, probably hard enough to leave the bruises he craved, and he just nodded, and I said, “Yes?” and he said what he always says at times like that, two words, “Church bells,” just that because no more was needed, and I punched him right in his gut, not hard enough to bust something, and when he turned his happy-kid face upward, I kissed him again, mouths locked together as if in some apocalypse, the two of us drinking each other’s spit for a long, long time, me still flailing away at him half-ineffectually, until at last I grabbed his head in both hands and pushed it down, further down over my body till his lips reached my cock and I said, “Eat this, motherfucker,” as he, not really needing encouragement, gulped me down, and while he sucked me, my straining hardness, down his throat, I asked him, “So what if you knew that my cock was the last thing you’d ever taste in this world?” and as I said that, I slid my hands around his throat again, which made him moan and suck even harder, his face starting to turn red again, red as meat, as blood, a valentine, a simile for God knows what, the cape before the bull of life, whatever, and his dick, when I let up on his neck and reached downward, was slug-slippery with his juices, and I gave it a hard yank, as if I was going to tear it from his body, something I never would really do, I don’t think, but it made him suck all the more hungrily, muscles in the back of his throat working my dickhead, so I had no choice but to hit him again, slapping his pale shoulders with a satisfying collision sound of flesh against flesh, which is, after all, what life on earth is all about, flesh against flesh against flesh against flesh, church bells indeed, and I wondered if I actually could kill him, kill anyone, and really there was no answer to that, hypothetical oblivion, except to grab him by his wrists and drag him to the floor, and he had that look then, that look he gets when he’s so far out, so far into himself, that there’s fuck-all he can say, not that he’s ever very verbally adroit, but he has compensatory virtues, as I’m sure you know by now, he really does, so I have him pinned by his breakable wrists, which if they snapped would make a sound like church bells, I guess, and he’s into this fucking absolute zero state where nothing but lust is in motion, the fucking silence of the fucking Lamb of God, and I did, at that moment, a big chunk of me wanted to kill him and fuck him and eat him, in that order, the procession of desire, the urge to own, to destroy, to incorporate, and to be destroyed in turn, as though Shiva ruled the world and not some watery naked blond on a cross, which is when he broke the silence and asked, “Fuck me?” two words like “church bells” is two words, and I said, “Fuck you,” and I reached over to the lube and got my hand as slippery as his cock, which, smaller than mine, was also almost always even harder, purple as bad prose and twice as overreaching, and then two of my fingers were inside him, three, four working around his yielding guts as if I was kneading bread dough, and his ass, which is amazing, opened up for me like Heaven is supposed to open up at the End of Days, and after twisting and prodding for a while, I slid my hand out, and his hole, remarkable fuckhole that it is, stayed all the way open, so that I could see into him, actually into him, and I thought, “Red, that’s what red really is,” and I wanted, with all my soul, to fuck that bread dough, and if I did put on a condom, it was to save myself, not him, and if I did slap his face when I slid my cock inside him, it was because he wanted it, and if I did pump my desire into that soft red meat, it was because that was what was meant to happen, easy to tell because, though some guys’ dicks don’t stay hard when you fuck them, his did, riding tight against his damp belly, and if I didn’t kill him before I fucked him, it’s because most gods whom people worship are merciful gods, and I was a merciful god, too, and if I wouldn’t eat him that night, it was no guarantee I never would, and what most people don’t know is that there are supposedly not one but two Saint Valentines, good Christians I guess who got martyred in Rome, two people, like he and I are two people, though they might, we’re told, have just been one single martyr after all, and I wished at that moment, as I sometimes do wish but not all that often, that I could just have stupid sex, like almost everybody else does, mindless and untouched by the knowledge of God or hell or whatever, smug and happy as salvation by faith, but hey, you play the hand you’re dealt, and I guess I hit him across the face hard enough to split his lip because now there was a new shade of red, and then I pumped and pumped and pumped while he grimaced, till I came, hard, gasping, like a fish out of holy water, and when I looked down he’d come, too, wet on his belly, and when I kissed him, I tasted his blood and figured I’d probably get away with it, though there are some things you can’t get away with, but he wasn’t one of them, and then we wiped up and went to bed, to dreams, to be devoured, him in the dark, in my arms, like two dead saints.