The paint roller blazed a sticky highway of pale green up the smooth gray walls of the Hollingsworth foyer, announcing its wet progress like the lapping of a dozen tiny tongues. Trevor looked up from his perch atop the ladder and watched as his mentor deftly pivoted the end of the extension pole. The pad reached the summit of an unseen mountain just below the coved ceiling before slurping its descent. He watched with satisfaction as Dominic stepped back and reloaded the pad in the tray on the floor, tiny flecks of "Greenmount Silk" spattering his destroyed Jordans and crisp white Dickies as he rocked it back and forth across the grid. It had been several months since Trevor had started his painting apprenticeship, and he had quickly discovered that working with Dominic had more than just an innocent ASMR effect on him.
He shook himself and turned back to his work. "This color is awful," he commented as he flicked his brush against a doorframe and ran a clean bead along the molding like Dominic had shown him. It was by happenstance he was even allowed to apply paint this early in his career. Following the brutal winter, the summer heat had ignited a craze for paint jobs the company simply couldn't keep up with. Apprentices who were normally reserved for scut work like scraping, puttying, and cleaning brushes had been suddenly thrust into learning technique far sooner than usual.
"It's historic," Dominic said to the wall as he began another series of yellowy-green stalagmites. The color was reminiscent of key lime custard. "You don't have to like it. Just get it on the wall without fucking it up or making a mess. And careful what you say. The last thing I need is this lady knowing that a grunt is slapping ninety-dollar-a-gallon paint on her walls."
Trevor licked his lips in concentration. He still got a lump in his throat when he thought about Dominic standing over him, hand on his, showing him the correct angle to stack up the brush bristles in a corner for a clean, sweeping stroke. Trevor had undergone a dramatic metamorphosis since the last summer job he had held three years earlier. A high schooler at the time, he had taken a job with Clarity Carpet Cleaning where he had spent many afternoons behind the showroom, vacuuming and squeegeeing area rugs. But things had gone sideways when he had realized that seeing his boss, Rob, slopping through the suds behind the scrubbing machine in rubber boots day in and day out had somehow sexually activated him. It was as though the right combination of breakers had been flipped in his panel to "boot up" his drive, so to speak. Overnight, it seemed, he had transformed from an apathetic teen into a constantly aroused and frustrated young man. Rob had found him one fateful afternoon wearing his rubber boots, panting on the floor next to the clunking rug centrifuge he had mounted, a dark patch seeping at his crotch. That had been difficult to explain.
Reloading the brush with paint, Trevor thrummed more than burned at the memory, and he found himself adjusting his shorts.
"Are you feathering?" Dominic called over his shoulder. Trevor studied the band of shiny paint that he had pulled down the side of the wall and frowned.
"I thought I was edging."
The damp, rhythmic sizzle of the roller stopped as Dominic turned to him. "You're cutting in, not 'edging.' Jesus, you sound like you're jacking off. I mean, are you pulling your strokes out so that we don't end up with a visible line of paint build up?"
Trevor felt himself flush. "Oh. Yeah, I think so."
Dominic sighed and strode across the harlequin tile floor, extension pole in his hand like a shepherd staff. Trevor looked on from atop the ladder as his mentor leaned in to scrutinize his work, gazing down at the domed top of his backwards baseball cap. He could smell the sweet waft of Dominic's perspiration, but it wasn't his mouth that began to water.
Trevor had found that not only had his untimely termination from Clarity Carpet failed to chasten him, but rather it had whetted his appetite. He had returned to school that fall only to discover that the slick naked torsos of his classmates in the locker room now had the same stirring effect that Rob in his rubber boots had--the "tinkly" feeling, as he had labeled it earlier in his youth, since at the time, tinkling was the only known function of the cock. A full year of pleasure laced with torture and confusion had passed before Trevor finally pieced together why this predilection had sprouted forth like an eager shoot, thrusting its way unbidden through the surface of his mind, branching and snaking its green spaghetti fingers between his legs.
The seed had been sown years before, quite unwittingly by his Uncle Stu. Trevor had been seven at the time. It had been his first and only time on a boat, and he remembered they had been fishing for tuna. It was ridiculous, he had thought, to spend a day in the hot sun looking for something that was already canned in the grocery store and didn't even taste that good to begin with. Why not look for treasure? Or dolphins? What could have been just another day lost to the slow erosion of time, however, instead became a permanent monument on his mental landscape the moment Stu hooked a fish.
"Oh, shit! I got one!" Uncle Stu had cried. He had had his fishing rod attached to his waist with a series of belts--a fighting harness, his dad had called it--and it now arched away from him into the churning green water. Trevor thought it looked like a thick, black fountain of tinkle, geysering from between Stu's legs. As the rod pulsed and spazzed, Stu gasped and leaned back against it. "Fuck, it's a biggie!" He turned and grinned. Trevor had been mesmerized by the sight of his uncle straining against the unseen forces under the water. He had braced his bent knees on the padded edge of the boat, calf muscles bulging, his rubber deck boots squealing with anxiety as they fought for purchase on the wet floor.
"Is Uncle Stu fighting a fish?" he had asked his dad, who had promptly waved him off with a dismissive "not now, Trevor," and had scrambled to join in the struggle. Trevor stood transfixed as his dad took a spread-legged position behind Stu and wrapped his hands around the rod, pulling Stu's waist into his as they grimaced, grunted, and wrestled with the tuna, their tan bare backs becoming slick with sweat in the June sun, the shafts of the rubber boots slapping against their legs. That was the first tinkly feeling Trevor had ever experienced.
"Not bad," Dominic conceded, straightening. A bubble of Greenmount Silk slowly emerged from the end of his roller where it quivered hesitantly, then fell, streaking a pale verdant comet down the inside of his thigh. "Make sure you pull the brush away from the end of each stroke," he added.
Trevor nodded, thinking it would be nice to blot at the stain on Dominic's white pants with his finger. "Sure thing, boss."
Dominic turned away, crossing the cavernous foyer to the half-coated wall. "Christ, it's hot," he muttered. "Can't the Hollingsworths afford any AC now that they've bought this cathedral?" He set his roller in the pan with the pole against the wall and unzipped his coveralls, unfurling them to his waist like he was a half-sucked ear of corn. He peeled a damp t-shirt off over his head and chucked it to the floor. Trevor felt his eyes bulge at the bronze back, which tapered before vanishing into the waistband the same way a stream of thick paint does when it cascades from a pour spout.
Just like that, he was back at Clarity Carpet again, watching Rob plunge his feet into the rubber boots. Back in the high school locker room, seeing his friends emerge with towels wrapped around them, soap suds still trailing down their arms. Back on the deck of his Uncle Stu's boat, his rod quivering out over the water.
Dominic had resumed rolling the wall. Trevor tried to focus on cutting in, but the ache in the back of his throat was now echoed by an insatiable desperation down below. His eyes kept darting to Dominic's rippling arms, forcing the pole up and down in its sticky, even tempo. The heels of his paint-caked Jordans mashed against and raised up from the canvas drop cloth as they would have had he pinned a lover to a wall and was having his way with them. Trevor found himself grinding the ladder, matching the rhythm of the paint roller as it soggily pulled itself along the plaster, thrusting his hips every time Dominic plowed another green trail up the wall. And each time there was a pause so that the roller pad could be reloaded, Trevor pulled back from the precipice, resuming a few more inches of his brushwork.
