Ben

Yesterday I learned that Ben is dead. I keep thinking that if I repeat it to myself often enough, the words might finally start making sense. Lung cancer. Ironic, given that I've been smoking since I was thirteen while Ben never as much as touched a cigarette, as far as I know.

There's a lot I didn't know about him, though. I didn't know that he was sick, for one. I didn't know that he got married. The obituary mentions two daughters, Lily and Becca. I didn't know about them either.

Apparently it's mutual. Otherwise I'd like to think that someone would have called.

For a couple of years there, Ben was the most important person in my life. I always meant to get back in touch with him and now I never will. It's a weird thing, grief. I haven't seem him in years, but I liked knowing that he was out there, that we could get together again if we wanted to, that we probably would, at some point.

Now he's gone. And I'm sitting here with a head full of memories and a box with all the stuff he left at my place and never got around to picking up, and no idea of what to do with either.

I guess you might say we were friends. It was back in the late nineties. I was twenty-four, he a couple of years older. We met through a mutual acquaintance who was trying to get a gaming group together. The guy's ambitious Vampire campaign broke down at the same breakneck speed that Ben and I hit it off at. I prefer to believe that the two weren't connected.

We started hanging out. Then we started fooling around. There were rumors about us, but we didn't give a damn. He was dating this sharp, wickedly funny tax accountant from Berkeley who liked to keep her options open, and I spent my weekends playing games, getting drunk, and hitting on girls way out of my league. Some of them even followed me home.

Thursday nights were our regular game nights. It sounded innocent but in truth, it was anything but. It wasn't the games we played that made it special. Soul Calibur, Munchkin, racing games, poker, good-old-fashioned rock-paper-scissors. Whatever. The real fun came afterward, when the winner got to take it all.

I remember the first time. We were wrestling, and he had me pinned under him, trapped between his body and the floor. We were sweaty and breathing hard, closer to one another than we'd ever been before, and he noticed the bulge in my jeans almost before I did. He held my wrists over my head with one hand as the other traveled down the length of my body.

"You like this," Ben said, sounding pleased and surprised as he stroke my erection through the coarse fabric. "What is it that gets you off? The wrestling or the losing?"

Before I could answer, he kissed me hard. I loved the way he left me no choice in the matter. He told me to get up on my knees. I obeyed. For a moment he looked taken aback, and I worried that he'd only been joking around, but then he caught his stride and told me that since he'd won, he was going to fuck my face, and I was just going to have to take it. And that since I'd lost, I'd have to swallow his cum and thank him for letting me have it.

I wasn't gay then, no more than I am now. It wasn't about sex. It was all about power, wielding it, and surrendering to it. The thrill of being at the mercy of another. The tension in the air, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways the dynamic between us shifted. We never knew, from one week to the next, who'd give the orders and who'd be on his knees. We liked to tease one another, to taunt and to threaten. We'd use our victories as a way to pay back earlier torments and humiliations, and the knowledge that everything we did or said as winners would be used against us the next time we lost was a twist neither one of us wanted to be without.

The first time I topped him, I made him beg to suck my cock. Unlike me, Ben had slept with men before and he gave better head than any woman I'd ever been with. I'm not ashamed to say that my knees buckled.

As a reward for a job well done, I slapped his face and called him a dirty faggot. He grinned up at me and asked me how it felt to have my cock sucked by a queer.

The next week, he tied me to the bed and fucked me for hours, slow and hard, filling me up in a way I'd never imagined possible. Somewhere around there he hit a winning streak, and week after week Ben fucked me. In the shower, bent over the kitchen table, on the bed or the living room couch. Once or twice we went out for a beer, and he led me to the restroom and pushed me down on the filthy floor, making me take his cock so deep in my throat that I choked on it. He loved to say that he was breaking me, turning me queer like him, making me his personal cocksucking whore. Officially, I was waiting my turn and plotting my revenge, but in truth I relished my bad luck. I may even have thrown a game or two.

I don't know if Ben's girlfriends ever knew. There was a couple of them, during the two or three years that we had our arrangement. I suppose it was cheating, what he did with me, but I never thought of it like that. What we had was different. It didn't concern anyone but us.

It ended when he got a job overseas. We talked about visiting, but life got in the way. I didn't know he'd moved back until yesterday when I saw his name in the paper. One of the first things I did was to google him. His Facebook profile is still there, still active, and it choked me up to realize that for the last five years he's been just a thirty minute drive away.

I could have seen him. I could have told him -- God, I don't know. Weird as it sounds, it hurts to realize that he's been living this whole other life that I had no part in. Even though I know he could have said the same about me.

I can't make sense of this. What do you do, when someone who used to fuck you dies? Should I send my condolences to his widow? I knew her, vaguely, as a friend of a friend. We met at parties. We never talked much.

When he moved away, I remember feeling relieved. I enjoyed what we had, but I couldn't come to terms with what I did for him and how it made me feel. It was like an addiction, a craving that went beyond anything I'd ever exeprienced, and after two years of being called a cocksucking whore while I knelt with a cock in my mouth and a raging hard-on, I got scared that he might be right.

After he left I set out to prove to myself that I was straight. It wasn't hard. Ben's the only guy I've ever wanted. I just wish I could have told him that, if nothing else. That I did want him. And that no one else has ever touched me like he did.