I woke with a bit of a hangover and the fuzzy-eyeball, where-the-fuck-am-I, feeling you get sometimes after too much to drink.
Then I smiled, remembering.
I hadn't opened my eyes yet, so I listened, felt, smelled, and tasted.
I could hear soft breathing, and when I listened more carefully, I realized it was just one person breathing.
I could feel the dip in the mattress to my left.
I could smell the mixed scents of Jennifer's arousal, semen, and sweaty bodies a bit overdue for a shower.
I could taste the very faint remnants of Jennifer's natural lubricants when I licked my lips to moisten them.
I opened my eyes.
I don't know why, but I wasn't surprised to find it was Mark still in bed with me.
For all of the intimacy of last night, I hadn't really spent much time just looking at him so I rolled up onto my side, propped my chin on my palm, and watched him sleep, taking in my, well, my "husband," or at least my "Husband to Be," and that thought sent a rush through my belly and I felt my 50-year-old cock stir.
I smiled as I looked down his body and thought,
"Damn, that was me 20 years ago."
He was lean. His body was a runner or swimmer, although with his specific gravity, it would be a sprinter. He lacked the relatively light fat pads of a distance swimmer. Basically, of course, it was the body of what he was, an athletic guy who made his living as a high school football coach and shop teacher, leading his students and players by example.
He wasn't heavy-chested, but his pectoral muscles were well defined.
He wasn't a bodybuilder, but his abdominal muscles were well defined.
He wasn't some horse-hung pornstar, but I couldn't look away from his cock, soft now, laying to the left, nestled in the curly thatch of his pubic hair. The lines low on his belly where his thighs met his trunk, the
inguinal crease
to be technical, the
love lines
as I think of them, pointed, hell, beckoned my attention.
But first, I had to tend to hydraulic needs.
I eased out of bed, scooting in slow, careful movements, not wanting to wake him but desperate to take care of business.
I padded to the bathroom, sat to pee wanting to be quiet, and had one of those post-party urinations that are so completely satisfying.
"You know what you want to do,"
Lee, my cousin's wife's voice, one of the women who taught a much younger me, said softly.
"I'm not a damn queer," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. I was kind of shocked to realize I had said that aloud at all.
"What's that got to do with anything?"
she asked,
You're part of this now, and you can't hold back part of yourself."
On some level, the thinking part of myself knew I was just talking to myself, of course. I'm really NOT crazy.
"I'm not a cocksucker," I whispered.
"Oh, don't be a dick,"
she said, and I could see that sneer she would have if I fucked something up when she was "teaching" me,
"You're just hiding behind language now. You're IN this group thing, now go do what you want to do anyway.
I knew she was right but, Jesus, the taboo was so strong. I was straight, dammit. And "cocksucker" was SUCH a purely perjorative term.
But I knew she was right.
So I shook, washed my hands, rinsed my mouth with
Listerine
, and went back to bed.
I wondered, in a vague way, where Jennifer had gotten off to, but right then, well, there he was and, God help me, there
it
was.
I've been in locker rooms, and although the convention among men is that you don't look, sometimes you can't avoid it. And when you're in basic training, sitting on the can taking your morning dump while having a conversation with the guy sitting across from you doing the same thing, well, there's not much body modesty left.
But this was different. This wasn't a "glimpse." This was getting into bed, oh so carefully so as not to wake him, and then moving so my face was about a foot away, studying his cock.
"It's okay,"
I was telling myself as I looked at the way it was wrinkled at the base, soft now, lying nestled in the curly thatch of his pubic hair. I studied the corona of the glans, the odd texture of the skin there. I admired his balls, slightly oversized, lying in the loose skin of his scrotum. I had the urge to touch, or maybe to kiss, the
scrotal raphe
, that line that separated the two halves of his scrotum.
"It's okay,"
I thought again,
"after all, the men in Alexander's army as he conquered the world, or in the Roman Legions as the Empire expanded beyond even Alexander's outsized imagination, the men were hardly wimps and God knows there was plenty of homosexuality in those groups."
I was so focused on what I was doing, well, what I was thinking I guess, that the slight movement in the bed and her words surprised me when Jennifer climbed in.
"It's an amazing feeling," she said, not whispering but her voice pitched low to not wake Mark, "to feel a man get hard in your mouth."
I shivered a little as her fingertips, light as a spider crawling across my back, raised goosebumps where she touched.
"Go ahead," she said in that same low voice, "while I kiss him awake."