ADULT

Natty Soltesz

 

 

 

 

 

Sess Roberts wiped a glob of bluish-white cum off of the wall and tried to recall the allure a porno-clerk job once held for him. There was more cum on the floor of the stall (or “buddy booth,” as they called the enclosures) but he let that go. He had nine more to clean and he was tired.

He could hear obscene wet sloshing coming from dedicated regular Lloyd Donahue’s stall as he zipped past. Lloyd had given up approaching Sess after the fourth or fifth week, for which Sess was thankful, but it was better to avoid contact if at all possible, especially since they were the only ones in the store. At least he wouldn’t have to clean up Lloyd’s load until tomorrow morning; all the better to let his germs dissipate a little.

It wasn’t like he’d ever held illusions about the job—he’d known what he was getting into. For nearly a year before he applied for work he’d been adding his own DNA to the wealth of genetic material on the arcade walls, when it wasn’t being guzzled down by the minivan-and-wedding-band set, that is.

He dumped the pail of scummy water in the back room sink and stepped outside for a smoke. The dark highway lay before him, stretching out in both directions. Maybe it was silly, but the highway was part of what drew him to the job. It was four A.M., that netherworld between night and morning. Every other minute or so a car would fly by in a red and white streak, leaving a lonely sound in its wake. Who were they? Where were they going? He was just a blip, a speck on a point on a map. But even in the smallest of places there were huge things happening, whole worlds nobody would ever know about.

He snubbed out his cigarette in a coffee can nailed to the shelter that hid the front entrance from the highway. He heard a motorcycle—a Harley—approaching. It slowed as it neared the building and turned into the parking lot.

Sess ducked inside, behind the counter. The bell rang as the biker walked inside, then turned toward him and smiled. That was unusual. Most patrons slithered behind the shelves and never made eye contact. The biker’s grin was big and handsome. If Sess hadn’t been so taken off guard he would’ve smiled back.

“Howdy,” the biker said. He was in his forties. He was hot.

“Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” he said in a gravelly voice, resting his golden brown arms on the counter. “Do you know how far it is to Cleveland?”

“Cleveland? Jesus—no. I think at least three hours, maybe four?”

“You ever been there?”

“No.”

The biker stretched, raising his arms over his head. His leather jacket and black T-shirt rode up, exposing a thick, tan stomach.

“Oh, well,” he said. He reached into his pocket. “Ten tokens please.” Sess poured the tokens into his hand. “Long night for ya?”

“Long enough,” Sess answered.

“Tired, huh?”

“A little.”

“I’m gonna get some relief myself,” the biker said. He winked, then vanished into the dark arcade.

 

Sess had known about the porno store since he was young; everyone in Groom did. It was on Route 428, right on the edge of town. The sign alone screamed sex; pitch-black letters on a lit-up yellow background that simply said ADULT. Mothers would try to shame ingoing patrons by honking their horns as they drove past, and concerned women had led campaigns over the years to shut it down. Still it stood, a monument to the elephant in everyone’s rooms. The women knew what went on in there, or thought they did. The point was that they thought about it.

What Sess hadn’t known about was the arcade. He’d found out about that through a website, cruisingforsex.com, staring in open-mouthed wonder at the computer screen to see that here, in the tiny nowhere town of Groom, Pennsylvania, there was not one but two places listed where people could go for anonymous gay sex.

He’d tried the other place first—Promised Land State Park, which was just up the highway from Wal-Mart. He spent some time hanging around in his mom’s Cavalier and later on the playground swings, dragging his feet on the ground. One guy walked past him. He wore a windbreaker and had beady eyes, and as soon as Sess made eye contact he knew. The guy hung around the parking lot, but Sess didn’t know what to do so he ignored him. He was relieved when the guy left.

Being underage, he’d had to work up some nerve to try the porno store. He walked there the first time, fearful of someone spotting his mom’s Cavalier. It was a good twenty-minute walk from his house, along a backcountry road that ended right at the highway, the porno store about fifteen yards from that. To stay out of view, he crept along the sharply sloping hillside behind the store, twisting his ankle and slashing his arms on thorny branches.

The lot behind the store, shielded from the highway and ringed by the woods, was a world unto itself. Yellow sodium lights had kicked on in the waning evening light, illuminating at least five cars, four with men sitting inside. Their eyes followed Sess as he nervously opened the back door.

The adult store, inside, was both thrillingly alien and disappointingly mundane, mainly white shelves lined with videos and DVDs. The boxes displayed colorful pictures of pink holes and engorged organs. The fluorescent lighting made it look like Rite-Aid, only with dildos.

The overweight guy behind the counter (the owner, he’d later find) looked at him as he entered. Sess braced himself for the worst. But the guy just smiled; an icky smile that let Sess know exactly what he was thinking.

Sess had never considered himself a good-looking kid. He was tall and gangly, with flat, black, boring hair and a jaw that sloped into his neck rather than jutting out. But it didn’t take long to sense that here he was the belle of the ball. Had this been a cartoon the clerk would have had a thought bubble of a steaming, freshly cooked chicken hovering over his head. He didn’t card Sess, didn’t say anything but, “Have a good time,” and handed him his tokens.

 

Sess thought about heading into the arcade to cruise the biker. Sex on the job was expected, even encouraged by the owner, who’d addressed it during his interview.

“Just do it in the center booth and keep the door open a little so you can see if anybody’s trying to steal shit,” he’d said. He took Sess on a tour of the place, principally to corner Sess in a booth and take out his cock. It was impressive and would’ve been intriguing had it not been attached to such a repugnant person.

“It’s nice,” Sess demurred, then pushed past the guy. He may have been naïve but he was not about to blow a big-titted greaseball for a porno-shop job.

Sess heard Lloyd shuffling around in the arcade and hoped the biker had sense enough to turn the old troll away. Truth was, he wasn’t sure about the biker. He’d gathered a good deal of experience with cruising in the past year, but something about the biker threw him off. He seemed too confident, too self-contained. Sess wondered if he was straight.

He feared rejection. A few weeks after Sess had started coming to the arcade, he’d screwed up enough courage to approach a hot college guy around his age, a rarity in the place. The guy sat there, looked him up and down, and simply shook his head as though Sess was one of a choice of entrée selections that he didn’t care for. The sympathetic look Lloyd gave him on his way back to his booth only made it worse.

So the biker went about his business in the dark and Sess kept behind the counter, watching the goings-on in the back lot via a black-and-white monitor mounted under the counter. The owner didn’t care if people cruised out there, but he liked to keep an eye on things. Sess watched a car drive in, poke slowly through the mostly empty lot, and continue on its lonely way.

 

The porno store became a refuge for Sess during his last year of high school, a safe house for some beleaguered central part of him that most everyone—his asshole Catholic parents especially—wanted to ignore. The store was his burning secret, the sly smile on his face when he walked down the chaotic halls of Groom Senior High. The sexuality that had lain dormant and unacknowledged since junior high was now alive and kicking and powerfully real.

He didn’t have any friends in high school, just acquaintances. He wore black and listened to Nine Inch Nails and cultivated a personality that was above and beyond humanity. He got harassed a lot, even early on. It was like they could sniff it out. By his junior year people were harassing him in class, coughing “fag” under their breath. They practically knew before he did.

The worst was Dan Frye, running back for the Groom Bobcats and Chief Asshole of the school. He’d hone in on Sess in the hallway, approaching him slowly, getting closer so that the minute their sides touched he could slam hard against Sess’s shoulder, knocking him off balance and spinning him around. He’d put his lips to Sess’s ear and in a throaty snarl he’d say the magic word.

Dan wasn’t like the others. He didn’t need a crowd or an audience; he wasn’t making fun or provoking laughter. That was what made him so dangerous. For him it was personal. It was serious.

Which made it all the sweeter when Sess fucked Dan’s dad just prior to graduation.

 

That day had started out with frustration. His parents were gone for the weekend, and the lilting promise of unquestioned hours away from home had been crushed hard by an unusually desolate Friday night in the arcade. For what felt like hours he fed tokens into the TV, nobody but Lloyd and the usual suspects cruising past his booth, hoping for a bite. Then a new guy passed his booth. For a split second he looked in, caught Sess’s eye, and that was all it took.

Sess had noticed Dan Frye’s dad before. It was sort of impossible not to. The guy was built like a battleship, exhibiting his body with impunity in tight polo shirts with buttons undone, the smooth hard mounds of his cleavage eclipsing his wife’s, his beefy butt encased like sausage meat in his jeans, a healthy crotch packed tight up front. He was a stud, plain and simple, and had the same air of cocky assholery as his son.

Sess crept up to his stall. The sliding door of the older man’s booth was open and he stuck his head inside. Tom Frye was sitting on the small bench across from the TV, watching straight porn. He looked at Sess (he didn’t seem to recognize him) and grabbed his crotch as an invitation. Sess stepped inside and slid the door shut. He thought he heard Lloyd’s dejected sigh.

Sess knelt on the floor. He unbuckled Tom’s pants, revealing stylish black bikini briefs. The older man was completely hard. Sess took it out. Tom drew air in through his nose, his head back and his eyes closed. His cock wasn’t all that large, but that wasn’t the point. His pubes were trimmed to a neat crew cut; his balls were shaved. Sess wondered if Dan’s cock was similar.

He slid it down his throat. Tom didn’t make a sound. A pass, another pass, and already Tom’s legs were tensing up, so Sess backed off. He tapped Tom under his arms, and Tom got the message and stood up. Despite the guarded, hostile air Tom gave off in public, he was pliant and accommodating inside the booth, in the moment. He let Sess turn him around and strip the briefs from the firm mounds of his butt. Sess caressed the ass like it was a crystal ball. This was an absolute coup.

Eating a guy out was something Sess had only fantasized about. He went for broke, burying his face in Mr. Frye’s butt. Tom couldn’t suppress an overwhelmed whimper. He leaned his head against the wall, supporting it with his arm, and keeping his eyes shut tight. Sess tongued Tom’s crack good but the asshole never truly relaxed. It remained tight and tense, even when Sess wormed a finger inside.

He grabbed lube and a condom out of his jeans pocket, took his pants down, and got himself ready. Tom said nothing, just kept his ass backed up as Sess mounted him and worked the head of his dick inside, probably being rougher than he should have, but Tom didn’t object.

The porn on the monitor lit up their sex in shifting phosphorescent patterns. Sess, a kid who wasn’t even a blip on Tom’s radar—but who loomed large on the son’s—was now inside a shrine to masculinity, defiling him, using him like a whore. He barely noticed when Tom climaxed, the cum spilling out of his untouched dick and pooling on the bench. Sess came soon after, inside the condom, inside Dan Frye’s dad. He might as well have been erecting a flag on the surface of the moon.

 

Graduation passed and his eighteenth birthday came and Sess applied that very day and got the job. The fact that his parents hated it made it that much sweeter. They threatened to kick him out of the house.

“Do it,” he said, eating his Frosted Flakes, knowing they would never. He was their only child, the buffer for their anxieties in a loveless marriage, and without him they’d collide and fall apart.

His shift was from eleven P.M. to six A.M., during which time he sampled from a wholly exhaustible succession of cocks, mouths, and assholes. Only recently had it grown stale, all the secrecy and shame and cum for cum’s sake. When they were done they zipped up and got out, went home to their wives and their beaten-down lives, their throats raw from sucking him off, their hands cramped from milking his precious elixir, for wasn’t he the fountain of fucking youth? Couldn’t his cum restore them to a life of promise and vitality, a time before children and mortgages and exercise equipment that collected dust in the basement rec room?

His cum was a truth serum for those living a lie.

He wiped it away every shift, wasted potential spackled to the stalls and drooling off the walls. How long did it take for sperm cells to die?

 

The biker spent half an hour in the arcade. When he emerged he looked almost hurt. He walked up to the counter.

“Nice booths you got there,” he said.

“They’re okay.”

“I guess you’ve seen enough of this place.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

The biker looked down at his boots. He raised his head. “I’m Ron,” he said, holding out his hand. Sess shook it. It was tough and solid. It had integrity. Sess introduced himself.

“Cleveland, huh?” Sess said.

“Yep. Thought I’d make it there tonight but guess not. Maybe I oughta crash here—is there a motel nearby?”

“Yeah, there’s a Best Western about ten miles west.”

“Care to join me?” he said.

“I’m working,” Sess said, laughing. Ron brightened. He’d cracked Sess’s armor.

“When do you get off?”

“Six.”

“Hmm…don’t know if I can hold off that long.”

“You didn’t do anything in the booth?”

“I mean hold off without sleep. But no, I didn’t do anything in the booth. I was hoping you’d stop by.”

“We could still,” Sess said, already walking around the counter. Ron stepped up to him. For a moment Ron let the sizzling space between their bodies be. Then he took the younger man in his arms and kissed him. Sess had never been kissed before. Sex, yes. Passion, no. They broke apart and Ron shot him a widescreen grin. Funny, Sess thought, how you never notice the absence of things.

They went into the arcade. Lloyd was still in the center stall so they took a back booth. He wouldn’t be able to monitor the front, but he was past that. Ron reached down to feel his package and looked at him in surprise. He’d found Sess’s secret weapon. They massaged each other through their jeans for a while, making out and staying so, so close.

Ron went down on him. He had technique, taking Sess’s cock in slowly, savoring every inch, letting it fill his throat before sliding back up. He kept his eyes on it, massaging Sess’s balls, then hungrily going down on it again, and Sess felt it in his toes. Ron breathed heavily through his nose as he worked Sess’s dick, his tongue thickly slathering the underside.

He heard the bell ding on the door and realized Lloyd had left. Ron stood up and freed his cock. It was fat, stout, perched atop two hearty balls under a nest of dark hair. Sess took it in his hand and dropped to his knees. It was a suckable cock and Sess took full advantage of its party size. Ron was a leaker. Sess liked that. He licked it right off of Ron’s cockhead, hot and fresh.

He felt Ron’s body, tight and smooth with a smattering of hair across his chest. He tweaked Ron’s nipples and the biker moaned. The moans cut through the silence of the store. Normally you didn’t make any noise, but it was just them, just now.

Ron turned around and dropped his black jeans over his butt, which was smooth as an egg and nut brown in color.

“You’re so tan,” Sess said.

“I like to ride naked whenever possible,” Ron said. He kicked off his jeans and widened his stance, revealing a buttcrack lined with fine hair that ringed around his pink asshole.

Sess ate him out. Ron’s butt was clean but sweaty from a day spent on the road. He tentatively touched a finger to Ron’s hot hole, trying to gauge his reaction. Ron reached back, took hold of his hand, and pressed Sess’s finger inside of him. He was tight and hot.

“You wanna fuck me?” Ron said.

“Sure,” he said. Ron smiled.

“You got a rubber?”

“Definitely.” Pants still around his ankles he shuffled into the store, coming back with supplies. Ron laughed.

“I’ll need to sit on it first,” he said. Sess got on the bench and let Ron lower himself onto his cock. He was facing him as he did it and Sess watched his expression, the hot flash of pain as Sess’s cock first pierced inside, then a gradual letting go until he was bouncing up and down on Sess, his hard cock bobbing in time.

“How do you want me?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“How do you wanna fuck me? From behind?”

“Okay.”

So he fucked Ron doggy-style. Only then did he realize they were in the same booth in which he’d fucked Dan Frye’s dad. The same thing—fucking—but it was completely different. Where Tom had been stiff and scared, Ron was loose and free, backing up to meet his thrusts, reaching back to grab Sess’s ass and pull him in deeper.

Sess had yet to bottom with a real dick. And though he’d experimented with whatever phallic-shaped object was lying around the house, he thought that anal sex wasn’t something a guy with a dick up his ass enjoyed—it was being dutiful, an act of martyrdom. For Tom Frye it had been a chore, a dirty deed. Ron got fucked right up into a higher plane of existence.

“I’m gonna cum,” Ron said, and his hand clenched around Sess’s asscheek. He found Sess’s hole with his finger and pressed it tight. Sess cupped his palm in front of Ron’s dick and caught his load. He brought it to his tongue and it tasted good. He lapped it up as he power-fucked the biker, swallowing it as Ron’s finger pressed into his ass and he started losing it himself. His knees went weak as spurt after spurt of jizz filled the condom in Ron’s ass.

Ron kissed him again when they broke apart.

Sess got some paper towels. “Thanks,” Ron said, as Sess wiped the lube from his butt.

“Just doing my job.” He got dressed and scanned the store. No damage, no foul.

“Let’s talk,” Ron said as he swaggered out of the arcade, still buckling his belt. “What are you doing these days?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m headed west. On my bike. There’s a place in California, just south of San Francisco. A little beach town, some friends of mine have a community out there.” Sess looked at Ron. “There’s room on the bike,” he said, smiling. “I think you should come with me.”

“Right now?”

“If you want. But I need some sleep. Tomorrow, then. Early.”

“I have to work tomorrow.”

“Not really,” Ron said. “You don’t have to do anything except eat and shit and live and die, right?”

“I live with my parents.”

“I’ll pick you up there.”

“I only have a couple hundred bucks.”

“That’s enough,” Ron said. Sess shuffled his feet. “Give me your address,” Ron said. “I’ll stop outside tomorrow. Nine A.M., so don’t sleep late. I’ll honk the horn and if you don’t come out I’ll keep going.” Sess wrote his name and address on a receipt. “Sess. I thought you were saying Seth. My last name’s Wood; friends call me Woody.”

They shook hands. Ron put a hand on his shoulder and looked in his eyes.

“Don’t think about it,” he said. He leaned forward, gave him another kiss, and took off. The sound of his Harley faded as it cruised down the highway.

Sess looked at his empty store. He knew what he wanted to do in his heart, but that was such bullshit. People said, “Follow your heart,” like it was an easy thing to do. There was a lot of space between your heart and your brain, a lot of bundled up nerves and connections that didn’t always carry the message.

He thought about his dog at home, Cougar, so loving and loyal. The minute Sess walked in the door Cougar would wrap around his legs in ecstatic circles. He’d curl up next to him in bed as he slept, whether it was for a couple of hours or until late afternoon.

He thought about Cougar and he started to cry, right there in the store, because his bags were already packed. He was gone.