Chapter Six
Horniness was dragging me to the city.
I’d been sexting with the guy for a couple of weeks.
Innocuous, mildly flirty stuff at first, that escalated with a sense of inevitability to trading photos and videos.
He talked a good game and, judging from the shots he sent, he certainly had the resources to back that up.
Enough, at least, for me to tell my parents I was going to be away for the weekend.
Catherine and Kyle had given me a look that said they knew exactly what my plans were, when I’d innocently mentioned I wouldn’t be around for our traditional Saturday night drinks. I hadn’t exactly lied to them, but neither did I feel the need to spill all the details.
It wasn’t guilt, or even embarrassment. More a sort of shame: not about being gay and wanting to be with another man, but the fact that I was so in thrall to my physical needs, I’d undertake a multiple-hour roadtrip in order to satisfy them.
I didn’t make a habit of it, but then neither was this the first - or the second, or the third - time for such a pilgrimage.
Perhaps perversely, what made it feel easier was that I had no misconceptions that I was driving over for love.
Our messages had been sexy, and funny, and enough to preemptively put a grin on my face when I saw my phone light up, but I knew Conner wasn’t a romantic prospect.
A couple of years younger, doing some job that meant he could send the occasional risqué snap from a meeting room high above the city skyline.
He was ambitious, but also far from ready to settle down.
No, this was entirely sexual, and that was quite okay by me.
I’d crossed myself off the weekend schedule, and hit the road first thing Saturday morning.
The pickup settling into a steady lope; even with my eagerness, the simmering sense of anticipation that kept me half-hard, I felt no real need to compete with the SUVs and sedans which whipped past me with such urgency.
It wasn’t like I could check into the cheap hotel I’d booked until two o’clock, anyway.
It was a reminder, each time, of my very first. Barely seventeen years - and claiming a further two - and my driver’s license freshly tucked inside my wallet. My nerves rattling more than the old truck, as the green line on my phone’s map led me to some motel three towns over.
He’d just been passing through, a sales rep for a company unnamed, and with a trunk full of samples unspecified. Not that I was there for that particular pitch. More interested in his promise to educate me in other fashions, my embarrassing virginity unstated but inexperience implied.
The exact terms didn’t matter, anyway: he’d been more than content to put me on my knees and teach me how to suck his dick. The cheap baseball hat he’d crowned me with flipped backwards, and the drumbeat of his fingers on its brim speeding as I felt his thighs shake in my grip.
He’d pulled me off him, and up, and over the edge of the mattress, and then chuckled as I squirmed from his slyly-digging fingers.
Rolled his eyes when I insisted on a condom - either for my youthful caution, or my naive assumption that he’d dare go without, I wasn’t sure - and then stuck me.
Inelegant and borderline perfunctory, but still sufficient with his groping hand to get me off as he grunted atop my back.
He insisted on my keeping the cap, and I dropped it in the first trashcan I saw. Terrified, beyond rational measure, of having to explain its bland logo to my mom; to craft a convincing story of where it came from.
He’d been the first, anyway, and as tutors went he’d done all I could reasonably require.
Broken me in; shown me that, far from some magical, mysterious thing, each future hookup could be resolute in its physicality.
That while the flirting, and the teasing, and the preamble of over-promising could be fun, at the end of the day all I could expect of this life was friction. Nothing more, and nothing less.
#
I framed myself in the still-steamy mirror, adjusting the towel so that it looked like only luck was keeping it just about hung around my waist, and snapped what I hoped was an alluring shot.
It was undoubtedly a Queer Man Cliché, but then again there was a reason we kept returning to old favorites.
“You’re gonna tell me I’m still overdressed,” I tapped out, adding the photo, and hit send.
I’d been nervous, sharing my first nearly-naked photo with a stranger.
These days, I occasionally wondered about how many phones, and computers, and servers had copies of my exposed flesh saved to them.
Collections of skin-colored pixels, nestled up against all the other nudes the world was so used to exchanging, now.
A perpetually-traded mass of digitized flesh.
My phone vibrated; I scooped it up from the bed. Frowned as I saw the first few words of the message preview, before tapping it open.
“Okay, don’t hate me, but I can’t meet up this weekend.” He’d added a couple of sad-faced emojis, presumably so that I’d know he really was apologetic. “I kinda met someone, and we’re seeing each other now.”
My fingers hovered over the screen, as I weighed my options.
We’d chatted yesterday, full of teasing excitement about my trip; about the things - listed in increasingly lurid detail - we’d do to each other.
Either Conner had been recounting that to-do list while his new boyfriend sat on the other end of the couch, or they’d met and fallen straight into an exclusive relationship on Friday night.
Honestly, based on my track record with gay men, either possibility was equally likely.
Part of me wanted to ask, to find out which it had been. Or to point out that I’d just driven several hours, and paid for a hotel, and yet he hadn’t even had the decency to update me without my nudging first.
Or, I could call him an asshole, suggest he was the very worst example of the godawful ways of young gay men, and list off a few ways by which he could go fuck himself.
I chuckled, softly and without any real humor to it, at the idea.
“Sounds like fun,” I tapped out, instead. “Good luck with that.” And then hit the ‘block contact’ button.
#
He wasn’t “mine,” that was the truth of it.
What weight there’d been to our arrangements, what anticipation had been generated, was by virtue of the distances involved.
Logistics adding a sense of importance that reality didn’t actually inspire.
Conner’s entire footprint in my life amounted to a handful of photos and videos, and a back-and-forth of poorly spelled messages.
If I knew his surname, it was only because I’d pinch-zoomed on the office lanyard hanging from his neck, as he arched his bare ass while leaning over some conference room table.
I had no more claim to him than this new “boyfriend” he’d acquired, and I had no greater expectations for the longevity of their relationship than I’d held out for the length of our tryst. It was just annoying to find the latter had already run its course, having driven what felt like halfway across the state.
I pulled on fresh boxer-briefs and slumped back against the mounded pillows. Fingers already pulling up the usual apps, only this time the list of options was so much longer and more varied than what I was used to seeing.
I’d tried to explain how modern gay hookups happened - well, for some people, anyway - to Catherine and Kyle, one Saturday night.
Unexpectedly, it’d been Kyle who turned out to be the most horrified at the transactional nature of it all: almost as though, in being boiled down to the essentials of preference, attraction, and availability, he felt like some key aspect of seduction had been lost. He’d flushed red when I pointed out that he’d met his last girlfriend while puking on the hood of her car, after eating a questionable gas station hot dog.
Catherine, in contrast, had seemed oddly enthused about the app convenience. “Like one-click shopping for dick,” she’d suggested, and then pouted when I refused to show her my - meager, but still potentially mortifying - chat history.
The nearest options now weren’t exactly surprising. Headless torsos of varying degrees of fitness, billed as belonging to visiting men looking for an evening’s distraction. Judging by the distances involved, I could potentially be that distraction without even having to leave the hotel lobby.
I scrolled further, not quite ready to limit my selection.
I could see how you might get addicted, the deeper I dug.
How the array of flesh on offer - complete with photos, descriptions, and a catalog of kinks and preferences - could become all-consuming, all too easy.
This was the polar opposite of my lackluster selection back home: a cornucopia of men all with, broadly, one thing in mind.
The inbox icon lit up, with a ‘new message’ badge.
For all I’d scrolled past the headless bodies, it wasn’t like my profile was any more illustrative.
A couple of shirtless photos, carefully cropped to avoid the sort of personally-identifiable details that might make home life particularly awkward.
One of me in my boxer-briefs, far from pornographic but certainly promising.
The basics in the description section: six foot (I’d rounded up a half-inch), brown hair, green eyes. Versatile and open-minded.
Hardly encyclopedic, then, but apparently enough to get someone’s attention.
“Hey. Couple here, looking for a third. You interested?”
I tapped through to their profile. “CityShowboy101” was 29, a vers-bottom, with a handful of photos that - though not revealing anything above the neck - certainly suggested he went to the gym plenty.
He’d sent a second message by the time I returned to the chat. “I get fucked, my boyfriend watches.”
I’d not had a threesome yet. And, from the sound of it, that wasn’t what I was being offered now, either.
“He doesn’t get to play?”
A couple of seconds later, and a reply popped up. “We like it when he watches.”
A photo appeared: a bed, with two people on it clearly having sex. The legs of the person holding the camera visible at the bottom of the frame, in a chair watching from across the room.
“That’s hot,” I sent back.
A winking emoji. “He likes to see me take big dicks.”
It was, I figured, an invitation to share. Unlike a lot of people, I didn’t proclaim inches on my profile.
“I haven’t had any complaints,” I sent back. Opening my camera roll, I added the shot I’d taken in the bathroom mirror. Sure, I had the towel around my waist, but it didn’t exactly hide what was underneath.
“Perfect,” popped up.
“You hosting?”
No reply, just an address. It was the sort of efficiency I could see Catherine being delighted by.