Page 20 of Way Down Deep

Saturday

3.50am

Fucking hell.

In my head, I composed my next reply. It read, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this. It feels so good, but I can’t. I’m sorry. You’re wonderful, but goodbye, stranger.”

I assembled those words, a hundred variations of them, as I sat on the boy’s bed, rocking him, rocking him, waiting for the moans to soften and go silent, for his shivers and shaking to still.

His terrors pulled me from your orbit as I was reveling in each new chime of my phone, jerked me out of the excitement and fantasy of you and into the next room and the sad and frantic reality I now call my daily life.

I thought, what the fuck am I doing? How can this possibly be okay? Where in my reality is there room for this hot, sweet madness?

And then, after I’d sung Past and Pending, and Soldier’s Things, Sugar Mountain and half a dozen other songs, once I was so exhausted I wanted to sob, he fell back asleep.

I carried my restless body and my head full of apologies back to the living room and picked up my phone, and tried to make the words right. Typed them this way, that way, felt lost and deleted them. Had a drink. Scrolled back to the very beginning and read where we first started. Read on and on, and by the time I came to your latest texts, I knew I was wrong. That THIS isn’t wrong, whatever this is.

That this is the only solace and escape and joy I have right now. The only good thing, just like I’d said. So good I doubt I deserve it, but how’s a wretch lost in a desert going to pass up a drink of water, really?

I read your words, and I forgot the despair and the helplessness that eats me alive for hours a day here.

The things you wrote lit me up like a fucking bonfire. All over again, I felt things I haven’t in so long. Desire and hunger and a strange, dark strain of confidence, even.

Confident because, yes, I can be all those things for you.

If I do have a fetish, it’s to be exactly what a woman wants. That’s always excited me more than anything else: to spoil someone, to ruin her for every other man who comes after, to be a slave and a whore and a zealot to her pleasure.

And yes, I want to hear you. More than you could ever know. Whatever your voice, whatever your accent, whatever words might fall from that mouth when I was finally done kissing it.

I want cautious and curious requests—like that, a little more, keep going.

I want demands and orders. Deeper, faster, slower, harder, rougher. Fuck me, eat me, hold me down, say my name, use your fingers, give me that cock, Malcolm.

I want gasping pleas. Don’t stop don’t you fucking stop, I’m so close, make me come.

Have you come? I think you have. What do you think about when you do? How do you touch yourself? Would you teach me every secret or just set me loose, make me learn to play you from scratch?

What do you want to hear from me?

I’m noisy in bed. I earn furtive shushings from shy lovers and angry thumps from neighbors who’ve shared walls with me.

You can have every whisper and mounting moan and grunt and panting breath, every curse, every uncensored thought, be it needy or bossy or pleading or plain old lust-drunk.

I’d tell you kiss me, stroke me, taste me, use me, ride me, suck me, spread your legs, make me come.

I’d be any man for you. Every man. Any man you’ve ever wanted, just tell me and I can be that. You can submit to me, exploit me, worship me, degrade me. I don’t care as long as it leaves you trembling and weak.

Then I’ll kiss your temple, taste the sweat gleaming on that skin. Kiss your lips, taste myself there.

Do you forgive me, stranger, for being so ungrateful, so foolish and naive to have almost tried to end all of this? Tell me how to make it up to you. Tell me who you want me to be, and I’ll tell you exactly what that could look like.

4.44am

If you want to stop, stop.

Because I promise, it’s only going to get worse from here.

This, right now, is me holding back. This is me deleting dirtier things, and putting sweeter things in their place. It’s me censoring myself, in case it’s too far or too much. Oh, I so don’t want to be too much. But the problem is—I’m first seeing fresh water after a million miles of sea voyage.

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