I had this one client, tomass202, a Nate twink with an overbite whose teeth looked like shovels. He said he found my name in the bathroom stall in Peguis Central. We chatted for a month before he started asking for shows. He never asked me to dress up, just asked me to talk to him, then take off my clothes slowly, and while I did to describe my body like it was a portrait painting. “This nipple here, this the one that’s extra sensitive,” I’d tease, “and if you kiss me here, on the bits of my thigh that look like Kentucky Fried, well, you’ll just have to find out—” He was bashful, fidgety, inflamed, but coy. He wore a bandanna to conceal his face, and he kept his hair pulled back in two braids that were hidden by his baseball cap. Took me a while to get him to take off that bandanna: “You ain’t gotta hide yourself like it’s a graveyard, m’boy.” There were too few occasions where I could bedazzle boys with that euphemism; I knew it coaxed Nates like the bad magic my kokum used to tell me about.
We corresponded in short bursts for some time. He asked me questions like I was a goddamn psychiatrist and I kept responding long enough to hear that little “ka-ching” noise of more money going into my account.
“Wut iz it lik3?” he typed in the chat box.
“What’s what like?” I responded into the mic.
“Sex,” he typed. “It hurt?”
“Nah.” I paused. “Nah, it ain’t that bad.”
“????”
It don’t hurt as much as the rest does, I wanted to say, but I closed the chat prematurely.
After about a month of little chats and strip shows, we ended up finally meeting. He said he could host, as his roommates were out shopping in the city for the weekend. When I got to his place, he was only wearing boxers and a ratty wife-beater, and wasted no time dragging me to his bedroom. He shimmied out of his shorts and pulled his shirt up over his chest, and I swear I damn near saw every organ in his body, he was that skinny. I took off my clothes too, and then we laid on his bed facing each other, inspecting one another’s body.
We jerked each other off until we got hard, then he climbed on top of me and kneaded his junk against me; he rubbed so damn hard against me that I wondered if he thought our bodies were kindling. “Slow,” I said. “Hold onto me tighter, but be patient, like you’re fishing or something.” He nodded and started to kiss me. His teeth dug into my lip like it was a flowerbed. He kept forgetting to let us breathe so I had to take in large puffs of air whenever I had the chance. I slid his hands over my hips, down to where I needed loving, but he shook his head and lay back down on the bed.
“Can you top me?” he asked. I was taken aback. No one had ever asked me that before, but his face was so goddamn woebegone that I nodded yes. I slid myself between his legs, ran my fingers down his back. When I circled my finger around him, he gasped, and when I slowly slid my fingers inside, he squirmed like a fish on bait. He jolted and I jumped, surprised at how much I could do, but he kept nodding and said, “Keep going.” And we worked around one another like that for a while, his eyes growing large at the little world opening for him down there, and me scared of how much power he was granting me. And when I finally entered him, his whole body shook. He wrapped his legs around me like a basket. I thought, This is it? All of this is the power of man? It took the entirety of two minutes for me to spill myself over him, two minutes of prayer to Manito that I didn’t slip out and fuck up. He finished himself off, a hot sweaty mess, but his body was brown like mine in all the right spots.
“That was, that was—”
“It was,” I said.
We cleaned ourselves up with a tube sock and then sat up in the bed, both of us staring out the window. The night was thick and we could hear frogs croaking out of sync with one another.
“You want a smoke?” I asked and he nodded, probably thinking it was the thing to do after sex, annit?
I got up and got my smokes, with the intention of stepping outside. “Hold on,” he said. “We should put something on, someone will see us.”
“Ah for fucksakes, ain’t no one out there, it’s dark as shit.”
I opened the door and we stepped outside naked, the wind splashing against our skin, pushing our testicles back up inside ourselves. I lit us both a smoke and passed him one. I inhaled as deep as I could, tried to burn out that authority wherever it lay deep down in me. He inhaled and coughed, trying to smoke the cigarette like a joint. I rolled my eyes. “Slow,” I said again. “You ain’t always gotta be rushing everything, m’boy.” And there that phrase was again, “m’boy,” knocking against my gut like a sledgehammer. He took a deep puff and let it out—there, I thought, now you’re getting it. The smoke slithered up into the night sky.
“Do you think I’m sexy?” he asked.
“I think—” I paused to take a drag. “I think you’re beautiful for a boy who lets himself feel.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him everything, didn’t have the courage to say, man, feeling like that’s going to break you if you ain’t careful.
“It’s my first time, y’know,” he said, as if I didn’t know. “I hope I didn’t do anything wrong. Did I make any mistakes?”
“Mistakes?” I tried hard not to laugh. “Well, let’s see, your first mistake was asking that.” Then I put my hands on his shoulders and pressed my forehead against his. “And your second one was you thinking you ever owed me a goddamn thing.”
He nodded, took another drag. “I feel you,” he said.
We went back inside and got dressed, his walk now a hearty swagger.
“You staying over?” he asked.
“Nah man, I gotta go. But this was fun.”
“Yeah, bro, it really was. We’ll have to do it again sometime?”
“Yeah—maybe.”
He looked disappointed. He walked me to the door, then gave me a kiss that was more of an attempt at swallowing me whole than a light peck goodbye.
As I opened the door to leave, he grabbed my arm. “Hey, you got any advice for for someone like me?” he asked.
“Advice?” I paused for a minute, unable to believe any sad sucker wanted advice from me, the self-ordained NDN princess. “Um, yeah. How about this: we all got thick skin, but we still gotta let people in.” I turned to leave, not waiting to see what his response was, because if I did, I knew I’d only see myself looking back at me. Hell, I was never good at tasting my own medicine. I walked home thinking of him and our strange date. For a minute I was convinced his was a body I could love, but I fit into him in all the wrong places. Advice? What kind of bullshit was that? Hell, you want some advice, boy? Here’s some straight from me to you: use those teeth—use ’em to dig yourself out of every ass you eat.