Big Chicago

Big Chicago Part 8...By Samayel


Are there even words for it? Poets think so, but most of them struggled with their own demons or played to the audiences of their times. No whore has any business believing in love. It’s a weakness that is always exploited. Always. A chink in the armor of the soul that keeps you safe from harm and lets your mind stay on the matter of staying alive and sane.

Harry. So quiet and confident. Powerful in all the ways I admire most, not just the ways the world measures. Money? Money is great, but he has so much more than that. In the ancient world he would have been the soldier that became a king. A man who rises aloft on the wings of his own talent. A mind like a diamond and a heart of purest gold. If he had been Alexander, I would have been his Bagoas, quiet at his side, there to comfort him when he was tired of being a king, and only wanted to be a man.

Could anything I say about these feelings be enough? Or would even the smallest confession be too much? I fell into love, tumbling headlong without a net to catch me. I landed in Harry’s arms. We shopped, or rather I shopped and he enjoyed seeing me happy, we dined and drank and laughed, at Tru, the restaurant that defines haute cuisine in Chicago, and we danced in clubs that hadn’t see a pair like us in a long time. The man can dance too. Some say that tough guys don’t dance, but Harry moves like he was born here. People also say that dancers always make the best lovers…and I’ll be testing that theory at the first opportunity.

It’s inevitable that in the places that only the wealthy go, I should run into someone I knew from years ago. My first day out of the house, when I want to exist for Harry alone, and I hear a vaguely familiar voice from across the bar.

“Drake!!! Drake, baby!! Is that really you?!”

Pansy. She gained weight in all the places I lost it, but it’s her. We went to the same private schools, drank at the same parties, and slept with more than one or two of the same boys. Seven years haven’t been gentle on her, but what the hell, right? They weren’t exactly easy on me either.

“Pansy Parkinson, you heinous bitch! It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?” The tone is friendly, but we were never more than shallow, alcoholic, barfly buddies at best.

“Oh…my…God! It is you! You look wonderful! I can’t believe…Dee…I heard you…you know…over that guy you were seeing. That was the last anyone heard about you. We’d written you off as dead, sweetie. What happened? Wait…come with me…we sooo need a chance to powder our noses in the restroom. Like old times, sweetie!”

A hand is on mine and Harry is giving me a bemused look while I get dragged off by a girl I obviously know. He probably finds it amusing, because he’s sweet and very secure in himself…while I discover that I hate being away from him for more than a few seconds. I want to be grafted to his skin…or worn like a permanent accessory, like a tattoo. But no…I’m headed for the unisex toilet with Pansy, in a bizarre flashback image of a hundred bar nights years ago.

She’s shouting over the stall while I wait outside, just like then. No couth, my Pansy. None at all. She’s dating a construction company heir, husky but handsome, good at going down on her, but no finesse when they fuck. Her parents finally divorced after twenty seven years of marriage, acknowledging that they pretty much hated each other for the last twenty of them. Not many of the old school crowd are still around. Most of them moved East or West, headed for the Ivy League or Silicon Valley. Daphne married a lawyer and they have three kids and a summer house in the Keys. On and on. She’s wired. I can tell. I wonder how many lines she’s done just before she pops out of the stall.

“It’s your birthday tomorrow! I never forgot. Remember the Sweet Sixteenth you held while your parents were out of town! God, that party is still a legend. I racked up sooo much blackmail material at that party that I didn’t have to buy my own drugs for two years! Speaking of which, here you go, baby doll! Just for you. ‘Cause I still love my Dee-Dee!”

It’s a vial. There’s almost a gram of coke in this. She gave me a gram of coke as a birthday present. I don’t know what to do, so I shove it in my pocket
and pretend to be mortified until I can figure it out later.

“Jesus, girl! You’re not doing bad if you can throw that around. Thanks, but just keep it out of sight, okay! Paranoia is your friend, remember?”

“Aww, you were never such a stick in the mud back in the day. I know for a fact you used to snort it right off your boyfriend’s dick. Which reminds me! Who is that man you’re with? He looks like a nice piece of work. Just a random beefstick…or is he the new beau? What‘s he do for a living?”

Harry was right to brief me before we started this, but I didn’t think I’d be giving pat answers this soon.

“Harry is my everything now, Pans. He’s in plastics, hovering near the top. You know…seven figures a year. Just my style too. Tall, dark, handsome, cock that won’t go down until the sun comes up. Sweet, sane and generous. I’m keeping this one, and he only swings my way. Don’t even think about working him. He won’t budge.”

“I’m wounded! I would never do anything so scandalous…and admit it to anyone’s face. Don’t you want to try your present out before we head back out there?”

I do. I really, really do. Badly. My heart is palpitating. I can hear my pulse in my ears. It’s coke, and Pansy would only have the good stuff. I need privacy. I can’t do this in front of anyone.

“Maybe…just one toot before home. Cover me from outside.”

She’s by the stall, and I can hear her heels clack on the way to the sink and mirror. I’m sitting in the bathroom stall of a club whose cover charge is higher than most people pay for a meal for two, with a gram of coke in my hand. I know what I want. I want to snort it. Coke always made me so horny. I could huff this now and ride Harry’s dick for hours afterwards. Coke is mildly anesthetic, and discomfort is your least concern after a little sniff or two of it. It makes you tense and full of energy, and in my case, that translates into a desire to be distracted…by serious deep-dicking. I wanted coke and a trick for my birthday a couple nights ago…but…

I want Harry. I want him so badly that I feel like I’ll die if I can’t have him for my own. It’s sickening, but it’s true. He’d know. He’s smart. He’ll figure it out. The chemical taste on my breath, or a stray fleck of white crystal on my nostril. Maybe he’d sense the sudden tension, or the nervous edge of my voice. He’d know…and he would be angry. The rules included no drugs in his house. I could do it here, now, and say it was just a hit with Pans for old times. I open the cap. The faint scent is as intoxicating as I remember. Chemical mind-spice to scour away the ugly edges of reality.

I pour it into the toilet, white powder spilling down between my thighs, dancing across the surface of the water, taunting me. I dump it all, amazed by my own temerity. I won’t lose this…this feeling I have. Not for this. Not for a little vial of goddamn powder from Latin America. Harry is the only thing I want, the symbol of everything I was ever looking for and lost along the way. I hide the vial behind the toilet so no one will see, and so Pans will think the rest is in my pocket. A quick flush and I’m done and gone. Pansy is missing. That whore! She’s already headed for Harry. I just know it!

I’m right, of course. She hasn’t changed at all. I mentioned that the man I’m with is good and she’s all over him like ugly on an ape. Harry looks marginally amused. She’s getting nowhere, and it’s obvious to everyone but her. I make a calm entrance, chat politely, and finally steer my way to a goodbye that hints for Harry to get us out of here and headed for home. He’ll never know how close I came to losing it over her gift. Not if I can help it. I could admit the whole episode and fish for compliments, but it would cheapen what I just did. That wasn’t his struggle…it was mine and mine alone. The only one who ever needs to know what just happened in that toilet is me. It’s off to another bar, and a different dance floor, and more drinks so I can forget what I just did. Or rather, what I didn’t do.

A week ago I would have been quietly weighing options while I pretended to be interested in just one person, secretly keeping tabs for a better opportunity in case one wandered in. Now I’m blind to everything, everyone but Harry. Others can sense it, and no one even tries to get between us in the age-old, classic maneuvering of gay bars everywhere. Not because Harry is dangerous, but because a single glance our way could make it clear that we exist in a world with only two people in it…me and him.

He isn’t blind. He can see the shift in my behavior. He knows I’m not thinking rationally, or shrewdly calculating the odds of every move. He could tell by the long silence in the car, after the words that changed my world. He could tell by the quiet way I move a hand into his, or by my sudden inability to maintain any sense of distance. Maybe he isn’t comfortable saying what he feels all the time, and the truth behind his actions slips out in small moments of clarity like the one in that little German deli, but he glows the way I do because he can tell that his words were heard, and that everything that lurked unspoken behind them was understood.

He was right. It’s hard to grasp it all, but I can feel it in my heart. Potential. I stopped believing in myself so long ago that I’d forgotten what I am…what I’m capable of being. I have talents and gifts I’ve barely used, scrambling to be seen as beautiful, judged only by my surface and by my ability to be attractive to men. He wants me to wake up and live the way I could…not just the way he wants me to. A lifetime spent shaping myself to fit the expectations of others. My parents, the media, my classmates, and eventually my dates and tricks. He wants the substance, not the image. He wants me to set my own expectations, and all he wants is to see them become real. I can give him that.

How many people ache to be loved for who they truly are, even while they strive to be something they aren’t? I’ve been given the hope that there is more possible than just meeting a man’s expectations. I’ve been given back my life, and the will to do something with it. I don’t know what I’ll do…yet, but I won’t go back to rolling with the punches and waiting for opportunities that never come. I will make my own.

I can’t stop kissing him. We never got around to it until today. Everything was so new, and neither of us were pushing the other toward action. The chains have slid away and I care about nothing. I’m spilling my soul into him, and I believe he’ll be gentle with it. Ron is probably mortified up in the driver’s seat, but I can’t think of that for more than a split second. I have to crane my neck when we’re in the club, because I’m still in boy clothes and I’m not wearing heels. He smells like world class cologne and even the faint scratch of stubble pleases me and makes me hungry to be closer. If it were anyone but Harry, I’d have been gauche and hauled him off to the bathroom so I could taste his come, and feel the shudder in his body with sweet satisfaction, but I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t soil this with anything so tawdry. It can wait…just a little longer…until we’re home.

He tastes like scotch and fire, and I’ve had a few cocktails between extended rounds on the dance floor. Poor Ron has to drive despite the way we’re entwined behind him, with me almost comfortable in Harry’s lap, except for the starved hunger that makes our necks twist while we savage one another’s mouths. He whispers words that melt my mind. Sweeter than cocaine, more heady than Ecstasy. I want him so badly that it genuinely hurts. I want to drown in him, be filled by him, let him drive out the air in my lungs while I float into oblivion in his arms alone. All that I’ve endured, and still such a passion can overtake me? So be it.

I am drunk on raw emotion and completely alive when we reach the penthouse, and it’s only by the slenderest of margins that I haven’t pulled the clothes from him in the elevator and dragged him to the floor. I can feel his hardness through his clothes, and only because he mercilessly pins me to the wall and holds my wrists above my head does he escape from being exposed in the hallway. Maria and Therese have already gone to bed hours ago, and the way to his suite is clear. He murmurs something about originally planning something different, about taking it slowly. Fuck slowly. Never mind that! Fuck ME slowly! Or quickly…but just for the love of God please FUCK…ME…NOW!

I probably just ripped the button off a shirt that cost more than the salesperson made in a week, but I’m not sorry. Tailors can deal with that another time. I’m almost past the point of sanity when I can finally feel his skin on mine. Some of the time, he lets me explore him, with mouth and hands, enjoying the way touching him pleases me, but he also commands, just as I knew he would, prayed he would. He pushes me back, plunders my mouth, dominates me effortlessly, reminding me that he is wonderfully, potently male. At moments like that, it is so very easy to surrender completely. Like a roller coaster, where you know that there is nothing you control, and you let go and scream until your lungs ache, and you can only be a helpless passenger until it’s over. I always loved roller coasters…and at this moment I feel like I’m dangling on the precipice of a plunge that won’t ever end.

He relents long enough to let me finally take hold of what I want. Unlike that abyss we were trapped in, here I can make myself comfortable and approach from the right angle. I’m not contented lapping the head or hastily stroking him to completion into my mouth…I want it all. I devour him, like a serpent’s meal, stretching my throat for every inch until my breath is only faint puffs and a few small motions are enough to leave him groaning. I can’t sustain it forever, but I can try again and again, pulling away only for convenient air before I pull him into me again. I learned to deep throat in high school, sucking off college boys at parties I shouldn’t have been at, and it’s a skill I’ve never regretted acquiring. Looks like Harry’s glad I picked up the knack for it too.

The surprise for me is that he has the sense of self left to shift positions carefully, taking my stiffened prick into his mouth, and I have to pull away enough to gasp, because I’m not used to being touched that way by anyone. I remember being more ticklish than this, but it evaporates in the face of a desire so violent that nothing else could matter. I try to make myself busy, but the shudders of pleasure throw off my rhythm, and I can’t concentrate when my head is spinning hard and my pulse is thundering in my ears. When a fingertip brushes across my entrance, I lose it. I can feel a thumb pressing gently in just the right spot, and then I’m exploding, dying, shouting his name while my come slides across his tongue and down his throat.

He doesn’t stop. He pulls away while I’m flaccid and stunned in the aftermath of orgasm, and finds a better use for tongue and fingers than even before. My knees draw up almost instinctively, and a much more familiar hunger is still alive inside of me. He kindles it, feeding it with soft manipulation until it rages again, insatiable and out of control. I sound piteous, I’m sure, and for a second I wonder if Maria and Therese can hear me, then I remember that I don’t care, because what Harry is doing between my legs is enough to merit crying out while blinded by tears of joy.

I’m hard again before he’s done, but while his mouth has shifted back to the erection I used to put so little stock in, his fingers are teasing me cruelly, pressing against places that haven’t known a gentle conquest in years. I keen, I whimper, I bite my lip until it bleeds and I don’t care. I don’t even remember where the small bottle in his hand came from, but I know what it is. The good brand. The slick stuff that makes everything so very, very easy, and then vanishes in the night without a trace. No greasy slime for prison or gutter trash, this will make his passage into me as comfortable as if he’d belonged there in the first place.

I’ve missed that feeling so much. The clean slickness that presages entrance, that makes me inviting and accommodating, that strips away the pain of entry and makes it a mere matter of pressure and time. His cock is stone hard and hot between my thighs, even through the latex of a condom, and I’m already pushing myself open against it, wriggling back against the sheets, before he can even ready himself. Most of a month without sex isn’t enough to forget how to make it easy, and as soon as we’re both moving toward the other, his progress into my body is swift.

I’m delirious, rambling, with words I can’t control spilling off of my tongue. I’m not face down and holding bars or a sink…I’m on sheets that kiss my skin and I can savor every second as I please. Stretched…filled… opened utterly and fused with him. Legs twined around hips that are in motion, the languorous slide of body against body while he pleases me more than he can possibly understand. Every touch, every caress breathes respect and desire and hunger to make me his. I am a treasure. I am valued. I am worthy of these feelings and I know it like I never have.

He is crueler than I imagined. He knows that I’m hanging on the edge, so close to the kind of orgasm I haven’t been allowed in years, and yet he tethers me, keeping me from it with a deliberate desire to tease me until I’ve lost any semblance of dignity. He strips from me even the faint shred of self control I held to myself with Flint, knowing that I was just an actor playing a part, making him the audience. Not here, not with Harry. I weep because I’m begging aloud, because I care about nothing but feeling him within me, harder, faster, deeper and in just the right spot.

My surrender is complete. A dam has burst inside of me, while my legs tremble and my breath stops, eyes clenched shut while I tumble and let go of everything but the feel of him. He has my measure, and knows me for insatiable. The positions change, but the meaning is always the same. I have him in every way we can manage. Seven years is erased in his arms. I am alive and nothing compares.

I wake, sore and replete, curled against his sleeping form. I drag him back to wakefulness with a gentle insistence that overcomes slumber, and make him sate me again, this time slower, this time within and without, on my knees and half upright, speared upon his lap, his hand slicked and working around my cock while I grind myself in just the right ways around the swollen flesh inside of me. The soreness means nothing next to the terrible feel of emptiness when he withdraws.

No bath this morning. I drag him into the shower. We clean one another so carefully, with the greater part of out attention paid to one another’s mouths, until I can’t stand it anymore and I bury my face in his lap, letting hot water roll down my back while I pull another orgasm from him, this time shamelessly pulling away and letting his seed spatter across my face and chin, sliding down me as the shower pulls it away. Ours is paradise, but there is no innocence here.

My twenty-fifth birthday single-handedly makes up for one of the worst decades on record. Therese makes a breakfast that went largely unappreciated, mostly because I deliberately showed up at the table smirking indolently…wearing Harry’s pajamas in spite of finally having my own. We didn’t make it through more than few bites before I was waving goodbye to Maria over Harry‘s shoulder and giggling like a schoolgirl.

Control of the bathroom and the giant mirror is turned over to the giddy queen trying to get ready for a day on the town, and Harry showed his patient side, since it took hours to figure out just how I wanted to look beside him. For all the world will know, the woman at his side will be a suicide blonde that makes every man wish that he could be Harry just for a minute. They’ll go home with jealousy in their hearts, furiously beating off to the memory of Dee, never knowing that Dee’s lover peeled back his thong and gave him stellar fucking head in the bathroom that morning while freshly applied nails were scratching their way across Harry’s shoulders because I’m still not used to coming in a man’s mouth. Women will hate me just for being nearby, making myself a rude, living reminder of every tiny inadequacy they frantically shop to forget.

And I’ll enjoy every second of it…because that‘s the kind of bitch I can be.

I’d describe our behavior as cloying or sickening…if I weren’t lapping it up like ice cream. We hit the museum district. Art, history, science and the Aquarium, which is arguably among the best in this hemisphere. I’m finally beside a man who appreciates all of the above. My hand is always in his, but we whisper, comparing impressions of things like so many other couples do. It hits me then…that I’m not different. Not really. I’m in love, the way everyone wants to be, and I act like everyone else who knows how exquisite it is to be completely intimate with someone who doesn’t care a damn about the things you see wrong with yourself, but who wants all of you, as you are, quirks and petty flaws included.

I call myself a cynic, and maybe I have the right to, but it doesn’t matter now. Gay or straight. Man or woman. Rich or poor. This crosses all boundaries, all colors and creeds, every age and every way of life. At the end of the day, I’m just a human being, and I’m in love, and I like being that way, even with all the crap that comes with it. The wind comes off the lake here, and it carries away everything that is foul and wrong. You can hear gulls calling, because Lake Michigan is so huge that it might as well be an ocean, and because where people dwell, trash offers a steady diet for the local birds. Chicago is beastly hot in the summer, but when the wind is up, there is no place better to be than here.

We hit Narcisse, which has been remodeled since I was able to hit town this way, and it’s as decadent and stylish as ever. Everything costs far more than it should, but the money pays the price for being in a place where only wealth can take you. They know what to do with a drink here, and the caviar isn’t the cheap swill that finds its way around everywhere.

The great irony of America is that you can get nearly anything anywhere. Every town has a superstore of one kind or another that frantically tries to cater to every whim, but most of what you can get is sheer garbage, dumbed-down, cheapened and mass marketed to rake in the largest amount of cash with the least amount of effort. You have to get things imported before you can get much of anything that’s been crafted with a sense of artistry or passion, and our Customs people hate imports…especially food.

I’ve long suspected a conspiracy to prevent Americans from discovering the bitter truth…food that hasn’t been engineered, irradiated, genetically altered, preserved, flavor-enhanced, frozen and reconstituted…won’t kill you. In fact…it tastes better and isn’t carrying more chemicals in it than a toxic waste dump. If real, natural food were that bad for you, the human race wouldn’t have survived eating it for thousands of years, but if we figured something like that out en masse…a few dozen chemical companies would go bankrupt before the year was out. Thus, the bullshit spin and hype. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t store it carefully, wash your hands and clean the surfaces you prepare food on…it just means that the odds are against our being killed by sweet corn that came from a local farmer instead of Mega-Fucking-Super Corp. International.

I get tipsy all over again. I’m pretty well behaved when intoxicated, considering, and I always have been. Good champagne always makes my nose tingle, and it’s tingling now. I tease Harry mercilessly, despite trying very hard to maintain a sense of decorum while the fuzzy warmth of alcohol makes me utterly comfortable and vaguely horny all over again. I deliberately whisper provocative comments in his ear at inopportune moments, promising every act I can name when he least expects it, and hinting at acts of public debauchery that probably would scandalize him…if he weren’t every bit mine and helpless before the strength of my wiles. I want him, again, any way I can have him, and I finally make it clear that I’m ready to leave. No one is fooled, except regarding my gender. They all know that the man I’m leaving with is getting laid tonight, because the air between us is electric with mutual desire.

Poor Ron. His neck is scarlet in the front seat, but he’s a pro. Bet he wishes there was a tinted glass barrier between the front seat and the back right now. He probably can’t see low enough to catch any action anyway, but he just has to know what it means when my head disappears from view entirely. It’s my birthday. I want what I want, and I’m getting exactly that. I don’t feel the least bit ashamed of enjoying myself, and maybe it seems common to some, but I fill my mouth with Harry’s sex because I want it there and I love the knowledge that it pleases him every bit as much as it does me.

I don’t make it a quickie either. This is as much my present as it is his. I can make it last and last, teasing until a man is blind to everything but the hunger to finish, and I haven’t had the leisure to use those skills in a long time. I use them now. When I let him come it’s because I want him to, and I can feel the gratitude radiating from him alongside the relief, while I lap away the last sticky evidence and neatly tuck his cock back into place. After all those hours on the town, behaving myself, I desperately needed that, and in spite of being stiff inside my thong and eager for the night to continue at home, I’m relaxed and happy curled against him, and I love the wicked gleam in his eye when he kisses me and his tongue darts across mine, stealing just a little of the taste of his orgasm along the way. It’s hard to believe he’s so comfortable with his sexuality, and still so powerfully, intensely male. Maybe it’s that, when life and death are on the line, bullshit becomes meaningless. Harry knows exactly what he wants…and he likes it…and I just happen to be it.

He drags me into a detour on the way to the bedroom suite, and whispers happy birthday to me when he swings open the door of the room that holds the piano. There is a shelf that wasn’t there before. Music notation. Chopin, Mozart, and so very many more. Simple pieces and complex ones alike. All for me. Hundreds of them. I’m not wrong to feel the way I do. Not at all.

His lips on my neck are a poetry of the senses. I shake off the clingy, little, black number I’ve been wearing today, and I quickly ditch the bra and the small, fake breasts that maintained my illusion during our time on the town. Now I’m just slim and pretty, in a tiny thong that makes it absolutely clear that I ache for him, and if sprawling myself across the sheets and begging him to peel that thong off of me and fuck me senseless is a bit sluttish, then so be it, but it’s my birthday, and he is what makes me happy. His teeth are on the thong, and I can feel the heat of his breath while it slides down, and my entire body is shaking with anticipation…when his cell phone rings.

“Fuck!”

He’s off of me and snapping it open, erection flagging fast from irritation.

“Yeah, what is it?! I just got back from the last one a couple days ago, Goddamn it! Now?! Yeah, yeah, fine. I said fine! I’ll be ready, just get Ron back here in a hurry.”

The phone snaps shut, and he’s furious. His face is red, and he looks like he wants to hit something. I know what I should say.

“It’s okay. I understand. I’ll be waiting for you…when you come back.”

He practically deflates. The anger evaporates when I say those things, and he looks at me with a wounded pride and a gratitude that is so very real that it hurts. He places one hand on my chin and his thumb is brushing across my cheek. I lean my head into it and sigh.

“I knew it. I knew I was right to bring you here. I have to go. I have to do what I do…and you understand. Even though it’s your day…you understand. You’re perfect, you know that? You never belonged in there. You belong here. You deserve everything I can make happen for you, but this is the price I pay to have so much. Thank you.”

I said I understood, and he’s grateful, and he knows he made the right choice gambling on me…but I lied. He kisses me, dresses and kisses me again, and with a few whispered words and a promise to return, he’s gone. I’m on silk sheets, alone, on my twenty-fifth birthday, and all I have left is the lingering scent of him on my skin, and the last faint memories of his come slithering across my palate. I understand that this is what he does, but I’m selfish and greedy and full of bitterness because he’s gone, and there’s no way to know for how long.

This is my paradise. Sitting alone in a huge suite, pining away in the night for a man who has a terrible job to do, painfully aware of the empty place between my legs that he should be here to fill. I’m surrounded by luxury. It’s so beautiful here. I fell into love, tumbling headlong without a net to catch me. I landed in Harry’s arms. Aren’t I the lucky one?

TBC!!!