Best Gay Erotica 2008

SNOWED IN WITH SAM

Every dream must have a setting. This one’s snow.

Late January 2005, dusk in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. I park my pickup and stride through deepening white toward the house, a ramshackle old place isolated among oaks. Against the stairs, I stomp my boots to dislodge snow from the treads, and I know Sam must hear the pounding. Because this is my world, the world I’ve made, what he feels is not dread but delight in knowing I’m home.

Inside, I shoulder off my leather jacket, toss my backpack in the front hall, and head for the kitchen to pour us both a drink. Sam’s where I left him, where I’ve dreamed him to be. He looks up at me. He grins around the rubber ball strapped in his mouth. I take off his cowboy hat—Resistol, black straw, bad-boy signifier—kiss his bald spot, tousle his thinning brown hair, replace the hat, and pour out a tumbler of Bushmills Irish whiskey. The chair creaks as I sit in it heavily, as I lean back and take that first welcome sip.

His name isn’t really Sam, but, for the sake of avoiding lawsuits, let’s call him that. Not that, outside of my head, he would ever read this story, this book. The guy’s married to a beautiful, talented woman, they have several beautiful children. In my heart I’m a criminal, God knows, but my sociopathy isn’t translated into action, simply because the legal repercussions would be too great. (And who knows? Like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, I might not be able to bear up under the weight of guilt.) And so, outside of this tale, Sam would never find himself here, bucked and gagged on my kitchen floor. But today that’s not his choice, that’s mine. I create what I can. In fantasy, at least, at last, the laws of probability have no power.

Today he’s here, and he’s happy to be here, happy to be my hopelessly helpless boy. Along with the signature cowboy hat, he’s got on faded jeans and black cowboy boots. And a slave collar: a short length of chain padlocked around his neck. He’s shirtless, needless to say. For me, his hairy chest possesses the power of a religious icon, so of course in my world he’s perpetually bare-chested. And tied. A man as beautiful as he is, according to my peculiar leather aesthetic, should be bound almost constantly, and very frequently gagged. Don’t ask me why I feel this way. It’s as much of a mystery as the constellations’ silent revolutions, the sticky bud scales splitting in the spring. Some of you, I know, understand. To use the vernacular I share with my mountaineer brethren, I cain’t hep it.

Bucked and gagged? For the vanilla boys out there, it used to be a Civil War torture/punishment. Sam’s sitting on the floor. His hands are tied together in front of him. His booted feet are tied together. He’s folded up in a hot and hairy package—early Valentine’s Day gift to myself—his arms wrapped around his legs and held in place by a wooden dowel roped between the crooks of his elbows and the crooks of his knees. If this weren’t fiction, I never would have left Sam tied that way all day, while I taught, sent out poems to magazines, called my partner, attended a committee meeting, and gathered material for my second-year tenure review. Much too uncomfortable a position to endure for long. Once my buddy Everett tied me this way, and I made it to three hours. I was whimpering by then, I who pride myself on how much pain I can take. He kindly ass-fucked me before he untied me.

Outside, the snow is gray with nightfall, a hue I’ve seen on surf-smoothed shells at Daytona Beach, where my partner John and I occasionally visit his parents. Somewhere, out in all that cold, a mourning dove musters its sad coo-coo-coo, sound made over the grave of some Celtic warrior—Diarmuid, maybe, or Tristan—who’s died for love. The whiskey feels like rolling oak embers around my tongue. I look down at Sam looking up at me in the last of the light and know that if anything will redeem my petty rages and flaws, it’s how deeply I love beauty.

We sit together in the dark’s deepening for a while. It’s very quiet, the sort of blessed silence snow brings, erasing the world I do not want, which is to say everything outside this room. Sam sighs, as content as I. He rocks a little in his bonds, bites down on the ball in his mouth, and looks up at me, eyes as dark as mine—and isn’t this what I’ve always wanted, to adore a man this beautiful and talented, to control and protect him and see in his eyes that adoration returned? He settles his chin on his chest, the brim of his hat cocked over his eyes. I take another swallow of whiskey, then reach down to stroke his goatee.

His chin’s wet with drool. After only a short time, a man with a ball-gag in his mouth starts to drool. Any of you who have read other erotica I’ve written know what a fetish this is for me. (I cain’t hep it.) It certainly is arousing now, with the man I find most desirable on the planet stripped to the waist and roped up at my feet. I rub his goatee, get my fingers good and wet, scrawl my initials on his cheek with his spit. When I bend to kiss him, I bump my forehead on the brim of his hat, so off it comes—placed carefully on the kitchen table at my elbow—and now my beard’s brushing his lips, his moist-furred chin, my tongue’s running over the ball, over his mustache. Nothing much hotter than kissing a gagged man, especially Sam, feeling him press his mouth against mine, listening to him groan with frustration as he tries without success to work his tongue around the ball—it’s buckled in too tight—as he tries to push the gag out. What he wants is his mouth filled not with rubber but my tongue’s meat. Soon enough. I lick the tip of his nose, then straighten up and take another sip of whiskey. Smiling, I sit back and nod, and Sam takes his cue. He bares his teeth around the ball and chews on it. He growls and shakes his head from side to side, works up another mouthful of slave-slobber that brims over the corners of his mouth and drips onto his belly. He tugs hard at the ropes holding him in place and growls some more.

Sweet boy: he knows I like to see him struggle. He obliges me, grunting and writhing at my feet. He takes a short break, panting around the ball, breathing heavily through his nose, then starts fighting again, the muscles in his bare shoulders and arms straining with the effort. I watch in silence, and the windows fill with lavender twilight.

After a good ten minutes, Sam’s armpits are musky-moist—damn, he smells good, like spices and forest loam. His chin, chest, belly, and crotch are wet with sweat and drool, and both his cock and mine are thick in our jeans. Exhausted, he surrenders, hangs limply in his bonds. I reach over, place my hand over his hairy chest, and feel the racing of his heart.

Time for his reward. I pat him on the head, kiss him on his sweat-streaked brow, and then gently unbuckle the gag and pull it out.

“Thanks!” Sam whispers. I wait while he works the stiffness out of his jaw. Tipping the tumbler of Bushmills to his lips, I let him take a sip. Sam slurps greedily at the liquid gold, and a little spills over, joining the saliva in his chest hair. I wipe up the whiskey with a forefinger, run my finger around a nipple, then push my finger into Sam’s mouth. He sucks on it for a second, then I pull his head back by his hair and press my mouth to his.

Sam groans and opens his mouth to me. This time our kiss is untrammeled. Tongue to tongue, beard to beard. It goes on for a while, the kind of passion I thought I could no longer feel or find. Pretty soon my face is smeared with his saliva, and we’re both grinning and nibbling mustaches and lips. Every now and then I take a sip more Bushmills, give him another nip, and then we’re off again, filling one another, probing mouths scented with whiskey. What bliss he brings me. In this word-world, what bliss I bring him.

We’re both a little buzzed. The snow has thickened considerably during our tongue-fest, lining the limbs of the maple outside the kitchen window. Time to get dinner on, or we’ll never eat. I swig the last of the whiskey, hold it in my mouth, then kiss Sam a final time, pushing the liquor between his lips. He sips the burning from my tongue, swallows hard, and closes his eyes.

I reach for the gag on the kitchen table and am about to buckle it back in when he opens his eyes and says, “Wait. Wait, please.”

“Yep?” I kiss his shoulder, the gag hanging from my hand.

“Why am I here?” He opens his eyes and looks up at me, yearning, confused, as if he’s just forgotten something momentous.

“Because I’m imagining this.” Between his goatee and his sideburns, a few days’ worth of beard-stubble darkens his cheeks, and I brush it softly with the back of my hand.

Sam licks his lips. He kisses my hand, then turns his head and stares out into the snow. “Go on,” he says quietly.

“Because this is the only way I can have you. Because, if I had the power of a god, this is what I would most want, out of all the world’s erotic permutations and possibilities. Because you’re my Muse.”

Sam nods. “I understand.” He gazes out into the snow a moment longer, then looks at me solemnly and says, “Please, would you gag me again?”

Tenderly I push the ball against his lips. He smiles—wistful, I think is the word for that expression—and opens his mouth, takes the black ball between his teeth. As I buckle it behind his head, Sam mumbles “Thank you.” I sit there beside him in the dark for a while. Sam leans his head against my knee, and we listen to the wind come up, splintering the snow-silence that’s prevailed until now, thundering the tin roof, lashing the windowpanes with snow.

We’re both Southern boys, country boys—Louisiana, Virginia—that’s part of the attraction. So I know without asking—delicious how he’s in no position to speak, delicious the muffled replies he’d manage if I did ask—what kind of meal he’d relish on a cold night like tonight. I like to cook for my roped-up boy. First, some music: I slide A Celtic Tale into the CD player. Then a little more whiskey. What a combination of the perverse and the domestic: a drink in hand, a handsome, goateed slave, snow making parlous the roads, and a big down-home meal of barbequed ribs, cole slaw, kale, and cornbread. Hell, I’m the architect of my own paradise.

You’re missing a fine time if you haven’t been in Sam’s boots, if you haven’t been tied up and cooked for by a man like me. The sauce I simmered yesterday, the greens I cleaned this morning, and pretty soon the ribs are in the oven, the slaw’s shredded, and the kale is simmering with fatback. I sit at the kitchen table by a reading lamp and read a little of Seven Viking Romances. Every now and then I pull the gag out long enough to give Sam another sip of whiskey. Every now and then I run my fingers through the hair on his chest, flicking and tugging his nipples till they harden and the front of his jeans swells, till he closes his eyes, throws back his head, nods with pleasure, and groans gratitude into his gag. The furnace cuts on with increasing regularity—I have the heat up so Sam will be comfortable shirtless—which tells me the temperature’s continuing to drop. Tonight, Sam and I will have one another, flannel sheets, and my great-aunt’s homemade quilts to keep us warm.

We’re both really drunk now, and my intoxication is quadrupled by his bare torso, his handsome face, the smell of his armpits, his quiet submission. This fiction is what I’ve been waiting for, an excuse to have Sam, not a substitute, not a surrogate. And this is the miracle this little story allows: he’s both willing and eager. He’s not some distant, famous Nashville star who doesn’t know I exist. This, I think, rolling one nipple between thumb and forefinger till Sam groans, must be the sweet comfort the full-fledged psychopath enjoys. What good is the present state of virtual-reality technology if it can’t give me this, a weekend snowed in with Sam?

Every fantasy is a monologue, and since Sam and I are both happy with him gagged, it’s a monologue he gets now, as I sit here, lights off again, a few candles lit, wind hammering the house and tossing the line of pines against the horizon back of the house. Sam leans his head against my thigh, I stroke his chest and his brow, I talk and he listens.

I tell him about attending his Charleston concert last fall, standing in that packed civic center with thousands of sex-crazed women, young and old, whose screaming shenanigans made my passion for him seem moderate in contrast. I saw him pull off his sweat-drenched shirt after the last song, when he was halfway down the corridor leading backstage. I watched his smooth, broad, bare shoulders receding into the distance and disappear around the corner and I wanted so badly to follow him, to make love to him in whatever Kanawha Valley hotel he was staying in that night.

I tell him about “The Quality of Mercy,” the novella I wrote last spring, in which my protagonist, an obsessed ex-convict named Sean, fictionalized version of Jeff, kidnaps West Virginia country singer Tim, fictionalized version of Sam.

I tell him about the little Sam-shrine I have in my office: the baseball cap with his name stitched into it, the little ceramic tile with that hot picture that graced the cover of his last CD. Sam in black cowboy hat, black coat, black shirt open to his solar plexus, revealing the meaty curve of his left pec matted with dark hair, a maddening glimpse of nipple if you look closely enough.

I point out the photos of him stuck to my refrigerator, tell him about the Sam calendar on the wall by my bed, where he and I will be sleeping together later. In my closet, there are T-shirts with his name on them, “Sam-wear” I bought at the online fan store. There’s a black cowboy hat a lot like his that I wear with my drover when the weather warms up. Sometimes I see it on the table in the front hall and can pretend that Sam just took it off, that he’s around the house somewhere, that we live together, that he’s my lover. There’s a Sam sticker on the rear window of my pickup truck. And, of course, I own all his CDs and even play some of his songs on the piano and guitar.

I get a little worked up, explaining my ardor. “Nothing better than driving mountain roads in my pickup, listening to your CDs! The way you say cain’t and thang, just like me, makes me feel at home. Some of those songs, hell, I get so excited I start letting loose with Rebel Yell yee-haws of delight! Your voice, it’s like you’re there, you know? Like we’re travel buddies. I listen to your music and look at your photos, and think, Shit, this is crazy, his voice is right here with me, so why cain’t his body be? Why cain’t I touch his body the way his voice touches me?! Y’know?!”

Sam sits through this mumbled worship, grinning moistly around his gag, occasionally rolling his eyes but clearly impressed with, flattered by, my fanaticism. I can tell by the serenity in his gaze that he realizes that I’m no threat. He’s no more in danger than a god in the presence of his priest. What this confession, these relics, indicate is not insanity but passion. I’m in love. I’m just like all those hysterical women in the Charleston Civic Center last October, dreaming of a passionate, deeper, more fulfilling life, craving what they can never have, longing for what they find most beautiful. It’s the common lot of humanity. Some of us are just more honest than others about what we want. Some of us are just more enamored of the inaccessible and the perverse.

The timer goes off; the ribs are done. I pull them out to cool, mix up cornbread batter and pour it into a heated cast-iron skillet, and in half an hour we’re ready to eat. More music, the soundtrack to Rob Roy. Don’t want to embarrass Sam by playing his CDs all evening, and besides, we both have Irish blood, so I figure we’re predisposed to like Celtic music. The wind’s still rattling the roof, and now there’s the weary scrape of a snowplow on the road down the hill. I like the sound. It emphasizes the cozy isolation Sam and I share.

Great advantage to being a bondage top in fiction: no awkward fumbling with knots, no tying and untying. Simple shift of a paragraph, and now Sam’s bound in an entirely different manner. (What is good kink but working some variety into the demandingly tight constrictions of fetish?) He’s sitting beside me on a kitchen chair, within arm’s reach so I can feed him easier. He’s barefoot now, still shirtless, in a pair of black jeans with ragged rips in the knees and thighs, revealing the brown hair on his legs. His wrists are crossed behind his back and knotted together. There’s a good bit of cotton rope wrapped around his torso, securing his arms to his sides, cinching his elbows together. The white cords make his chest-pelt look even thicker and darker, his pecs even meatier. The gag’s different too: his mouth’s bisected by a thick bit—nothing much prettier than the juxtaposition of that goatee, the tender bow of those full lips, and that rubber rod between his teeth.

Around the kitchen I light more candles. I reach over, gently tug the slave chain around his neck. “Time to eat,” I say, unbuckling the bit.

I feed Sam with my fingers, just as my protagonist did the man he kidnapped, in the novella my yearnings for Sam inspired. Good to be doing it myself, rather than through a fictional persona. He’s as hungry as I am, eagerly taking from my fingers the rich bits of barbequed country-style ribs and buttered cornbread. I lift spoonfuls of kale to his lips, he slurps the pot liquor. We’re drinking Bud Light, his favorite beer, and, as much of a beer snob as I am, I have to admit that the clean taste works well with spicy barbeque sauce.

“Damn, this is good,” he sighs. “Kinda food I grew up on. Fighting your ropes really worked up my appetite. Gimme another swig of that beer.”

It’s a messy meal, and soon I’ve got a barbeque stain on my white T-shirt. At Sam’s request, I shuck it off. Now we’re both bare-chested in this warm space, grinning drunkenly, happy to be together, while the blizzard rattles the window-panes and the silhouettes of trees waver in and out of white. When Sam gets sauce on his furry chin, I laugh and lick it off. When my mustache gets buttery, he leans forward grinning—“C’mere”—and licks me clean.

“Pretty awkward,” Sam says at one point, as he angles his head to tug meat off a bone I proffer him.

“You want me to untie you?”

“Hell, no!” He flexes his chest and arms in their web of rope. “This feels great. Keep me this way as long as you want.”

“You really are my creature,” I say, tugging the meat off for him and slipping it in his open mouth. Pygmalion must have felt like this.

“Guess so!” Sam laughs. “Jeff, dribble a little of that honey on my cornbread, okay? And how ’bout a shot of hot sauce on those greens?”

We’re too busy eating to talk much, and by the time we’re done, it’s late. There’s a pile of cleaned bones on our plates, half the cornbread is gone, we’re belching softly, and I’ve unbuckled both his belt and mine. The snow shows no sign of slowing.

I lift Sam to his feet, wipe his mouth with a paper towel, and wrap my arms around him. His bare chest against mine is warm, moist, and soft with hair. We’re just about the same height, and I rest my chin on his shoulder, clasp his roped wrists between my fingers. “So, if such an idyll were real, if you and I together could ever come to be, what do you think we’d talk about?”

He grins. “Hell, you’re the author. You tell me!”

“Country living, country music?”

“Fathers. How they hurt.”

“Pickup trucks, motorcycles…”

“What would we do together? Maybe drink some beer, eat some chips and dip, watch some football?”

“Sounding good!”

“I could play the guitar while you sang?”

“Yep, whatever you want. That’d be fun.”

“Hmmm, guess I don’t know you well enough to put convincing words in your mouth,” I say, unzipping his jeans and tugging them to his ankles. “Think I’ll skip the dialogue and fill my mouth instead.”

His nipples are soft and hard at once, anointed with leftover sauce. Tonight, in this snowstorm, in this sentence, at last I lick them, softly at first, then, at his urging, harder. He’s made to like it rough. I take his pecs in my hands and massage their meatiness hard, just this side of being brutal. I suck his areolas, bite the very tips of his nipples till he’s groaning, wincing, hissing with pain and with rapture. I range a little, my beard-fur mingling with the wet hairiness between his tits, with the crest of fur along his belly, then I’m back to his nipples, brushing them with my cheek-stubble, lapping and teeth-tugging them raw, like some hungry god taking his turn at a bowl of ambrosia.

When Sam starts to make little sobbing sounds, I finally desist. I take a long pull of beer, give the same to him, and drop to my knees for the next course. I’ve been wanting to suck his cock for years now. Last fall, standing in that crowded civic center as Sam sang, I watched him lift his shirt every now and then to give us teasing flashes of bare belly, and I knew that his chest, his cock, his ass were the ones, of all men’s on earth, that I most wanted to devour.

I tease us both by chewing and licking the swell in his boxer briefs for a minute or two before peeling them down and letting the heft of his cock pop free. His dick’s long and thick, the kind that lean, rangy men like him tend to have. I drip honey on the rosy tip, delicately lap it off, then slide the whole length in—sword sliding into the scabbard meant for it—till I choke. I back off a bit, chew on the head a little, then start a regular rhythm along the shaft, with occasional tongue-swirls over the head and into the piss-slit. A man like me’s well-practiced, and in no time at all Sam’s getting close, fucking the back of my throat hard and fast. He’s making a lot of moaning music, good excuse for me to grab bondage tape and a bandana off the sideboard.

“About time,” he growls. He puts up a few sweet seconds of mock-resistance, just the way I like it, before I force the bandana between his teeth and knot it tightly behind his head. One, two, three, four layers of tape over his mouth, around his head, the end cut off with a kitchen knife. “Mmmm mmm,” he says, nodding, blinking at me as I smooth the shiny blackness over his lips.

The dishes go flying beneath my forearm. They hit the floor and shatter. Licked and gnawed rib-bones scatter over linoleum. But—the convenience of fiction again—no one needs to clean up. The fragments disappear with the sound of their shattering.

Table’s cleared now. I spin Sam around, bend him over the table, and spread his ass cheeks. They’re softly hairy, and the cleft is a puff of black smoke. I knead his buttocks, brush one fingertip between them. When I reach his hole, he tenses beneath my touch. I drop to my knees, bite one cheek, then the other. He grunts, clenches and unclenches his bound hands. The height of fantasy, a universe in which we both want me inside him.

His ass tastes as good as it smells—black walnuts, buckwheat honey, orchard grass, granite. I tease his hole only briefly, then push my tongue in as far as it will go. Beneath the muffling layers of tape, he’s shouting. He pushes his ass back against me, his hole spreads open a bit more, my tongue moves further inside.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God.” I think that’s what he’s saying. It’s hard to tell.

“Time for bed, Sam,” I say, abruptly rising to my feet. Obedient, the candles snuff out one by one. Crooking one finger under the chain of his slave collar, I grip his arm and pull him off the table and to his feet, then help him step out of the ankle-manacles of his peeled-down jeans and briefs.

He stands quietly before me, entirely naked now. Lean, muscular, furry—I can’t imagine a man being more desirable. Sometimes God does such fine work. Damnation, how long have I wanted him like this? Stripped, roped and taped, waiting for me to touch him again. I take his nipples between my fingers—gently now, because I know they’re raw. Our eyes meet. What other reward could the afterlife offer? How can there be a paradise without the flesh, its ardors and appetites? Sam hangs his head and presses it to mine. For a long time I simply stand there, soothing his nipples and kissing the top of his head.

In reality, despite my regular weight-lifting, I doubt that this next move would be possible, certainly not for very long—plus, at age forty-five, I have to watch my back, and lately a tendon in my left forearm is screwed, despite the glucosamine I pop like candy. But none of those quotidian concerns matters here. Loving Sam makes me feel manly and strong, young, dominant, protective. Wrapping one arm around his back, another under his knees, I lift him into my arms.

“I’ll take care of you,” I whisper into his ear. Sam nods. “Mmmm mmm,” he murmurs. I can feel the tension leaving his muscles. His head nestles in the space between my shoulder and my jaw.

I stand there in the dark for a full minute, feeling his breath against my neck. There’s a pattering against the window-glass. Sounds like the snow is shifting to ice. With any luck we’ll be snuggled in here together for days.

I carry Sam into the bedroom and lower him gently into flannel sheets. Blinds pulled down on the soft tick of ice, candles lit around the room. Sam’s eyes look moist in the candlelight, glistening like volcanic glass.

Off come my lumberjack boots, my jeans and briefs, and now I’m stretched out in bed beside him. Sam shivers—suddenly the room’s chilly—so I pull the sheets over us. We lie there together, listening to the ice, to the snowplow’s distant scrape returning. “You all right?” I ask, kissing the tape over his mouth, once, then twice. Sam rubs his face against my chin, against my lips. He nods. He’s still shivering, though, so I pull him close, our bodies stretched out together, chest to chest, belly to belly. He closes his eyes, then I close mine.

We’ve been dozing, I realize. The ice is still clicking, only yards away in the darkness. I reach for Sam, and he’s there, back to me now, rubbing his ass against my cock, his roped hands tugging on my belly hair. I wrap one arm around his chest, cup a pec, squeeze. With my other hand, I work his hard cock for a while, till he’s groaning and squirming in my embrace.

One fingertip up his ass. “Yeah? You want this, right?” Sam nods and keeps nodding, pushes back until my finger slides entirely in. A second, then, very carefully, a third. He’s still wet from the efforts of my tongue, so only a little spit’s needed. I work his hole gently—he’s very tight, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s never been fucked before, he’s been saving himself for a man who loves him as much as I do.

“Slow, slow, please Sir, slow?” I’m sure that’s what those tape-trammeled noises mean.

He’s ready now. “Slow, you bet, sweet boy,” I whisper. I grip his furry pec hard. It’s wet with sweat, forest moss after a rain. The smell of him washes over me—his pits, his crotch, the musk of his slowly opening ass. Freeze us here, in eternity, like the lovers on the Grecian urn, like the golden birds of Byzantium.

I pinch his nipple hard. Sam grunts. I slide my bunched fingers out of his ass, then push them in again. I slide them out a final time, bite his earlobe, whisper, “You ready to be fucked?”

More nods. “Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir. Please, Sir.”

My cockhead, all of its existence up till now far from him, beyond him, outside him, exiled. Pressed now against his hole. And now…and now…just the head inside him. Inside his tightness, his volcanic flesh. Home.

Very slowly I slide farther inside. Sam’s groan is continuous now. “All right?” I ask, shifting one hand to his hard-on, clamping the other over his tightly taped mouth. “Yes, Sir.” I can hear him inside my head, hear him begging for all of it. Sam rotates his hips, bucks back, and his ass swallows my cock whole.

He’s whimpering a little, hurting a little. “Easy, Sam, easy. Relax,” I soothe, licking the back of his neck. I hold him hard in my arms, keeping very still till he grows accustomed to being filled with me. We’ve waited all our lives for this, one man’s body inside the body of the other. This is the rightness of rain reaching the dark thirst of root hairs deep in the earth, the inevitability of sunflower fields shifting hour after hour toward the sun.

When Sam nods, I begin a slow fucking, pushing as deeply into him as our bodies’ laws will allow. I work his cock, I torture his tits, I grip his taped mouth and pull his head against my lips. I lick the sweat on his scalp, bite his neck and shoulders till they bruise—I want him marked tomorrow. I roll him onto his belly, spread his thighs, and mount him that way, my heavy ardor stretched out along his naked length. Then Sam’s on his back with his legs over my shoulders, our eyes interlocked as I shove inside him again and again, bending down to nip at his chest and lap the tape across his face. Then, finally, back onto our sides, jerking his cock with my spit-wet fist, his tightness maddening me. Before I know it, I’ve lost all control, I’m growling, he’s roaring, I’m pounding his ass as hard and as fast as I can.

Far too soon, my hand’s dripping with his semen and my semen’s filled his ass. We lie there, sides heaving, sweat-slippery, catching our breath. For a long time I stay inside him, letting my cock slowly soften. Meanwhile, I lift my hand to my mouth and lick off every pearl. The furnace hums on again. I pull the sex-rumbled blankets over us, pull Sam against me.

“You comfortable like this?”

“Mmmm mmm.”

Of course he is. Fiction—hands tied tight behind him, but no numbness, no aching shoulders. He’ll be fine roped and taped all night.

“Lots of ice out there. You’re gonna have to stay awhile. How about buckwheat cakes, maple syrup, and bacon for breakfast?”

“Mmmm!” Sam snuggles even closer. For the time we have left, we want no space between us.

I hold Sam till his breathing slows with sleep. Again I cup his hairy breast in my palm and feel his heart beat. I kiss his hair and whisper many things to him in the fitful candlelight. How much I wish him and his family well outside this room, how much pleasure it’s given me to listen to his music, admire images of him, love him from afar. How welcome the longing that star-worship allows such ciphers as I, what a surprise it’s been to find another Muse this late in life, albeit far-distant and likely never to be met. He sleeps peacefully on, while outside the snowplow scrapes by again, and the silence left in its wake says that the ice has stopped, our isolated idyll is ending, and the roads will be open soon.

Snowbound silence is more eloquent than most speech. Tonight it tells me that I am aging, that some lovers are lost before they are ever found, that some things—the things wanted most—are irremediably unreal, never to be possessed. The silence tells me that no one can escape the mundane, that tomorrow I will wake sober and alone, back to an existence where the greatest beauties remain intolerably far from me.

I slip from bed, careful not to wake Sam. I snuff the candles, then stand by the window and stare out over the fallen snow. The blue shadows thrown by the limbs of oaks are splayed fingers, arms thrown wide for an embrace. I sit on the bed-edge and savor Sam’s sleep, his dark eyebrows, his beard-stubbly face, the sound of his slow breath. The same world that almost always denies us what we most desire gives us this consolation, to imagine down to the tiniest detail what raptures our realities will never allow. Gently I touch his goateed chin and the black tape over his mouth. What I tell the silence is that these words are bonds, knots. To hold us together—two men who will never meet, whose passions are irreconcilable—to hold us here. What I tell the silence is that I will make my own miracles, make the moments that Fate will not.

The winter night does not reply. And so I sit here, studying my beloved in his sleep. Outside the snow stretches on, without mark or flaw this late at night, blank as what is left of a page after the story ends, after the mediation of syllables stops and there are no words left to stand between the writer and the world.