Page 55 of Nights Without Night
“I didn’t say cats were evil, I said he was like a cat that happened to be evil. Please check yourself before you wreck yourself.”
Isadoro starts giggling—no other word can describe the noise—before he sobers again as he looks at the squid. Slowly, he turns to look at me, eyes wide. I know that look.
“No. We are not throwing that thing back in the ocean!” I say. Isadoro just looks at me. “Are you fucking serious? We sit here for hours only to catch the asshole of the ocean and you want to put it back?” I say. Isadoro looks into the bucket and then back at me. “Isa, for real. It’s already wounded. We’ll take this one to the food truck and won’t catch anymore, okay?” I say. Isadoro sighs.
“Okay.”
“You big softy,” I say, rolling my eyes but smiling. He looks at me and then starts laughing again. “Oh, my God!” I say, but this time I’m laughing with him.
We crumple onto a bench, stomachs aching and breath short. I lean against him for a moment and everything feels so wide and open around us.
We kill the squid, wrap it, and pack it in the cooler with ice. When we get back to the docks we clean the boat and then take another shower. The sky is shivering with the suggestion of dawn by the time we’re in bed.
“You still smell like squid ink,” Isadoro whispers in my hair.
“No, I don’t!”
“Hmm…yeah, right here I think,” he says, pressing his lips to my clavicle. “And here,” he says, moving his lips down, biting at a nipple. I laugh, squirming.
He peppers my chest with kisses and bites, playful like he’s chasing a scent. I smile and mock-struggle underneath him until his mouth lowers, tongue joining his lips and teeth. I still, slightly out of breath. He hums against my skin and I shudder, wrapping my legs loosely around him so he can continue moving down. My cock is hardening from the sudden intent in his movement, but he bypasses it, licking at one of my balls before sucking it into his mouth.
I let out a gasp, my hands holding his shoulders as I close my eyes and focus on the sensation. He rubs the pads of his fingers against my hole, just enough to make me shudder at the suggestion of something more. He presses my taint with his thumb, massaging me there, and I rock in his hands, in his mouth. All these sensations are an insinuation of a deeper pleasure, but it doesn’t stop my dick from fully hardening against my stomach.
“Isa,” I plead. He hums back, a buzz of sensation, before moving his mouth to my dick. He licks a line there, up, down, up again, teasing me in increments before sucking the head into his mouth.
“Yeah, fuck, yes,” I say, already pent up.
He works me over slow and deep. It’s a relentless, steady pace. His hands stroke my thighs as my knees lift to bracket his head, then move up to my hips, holding them down. He looks so good there between my legs. He lifts his eyes to meet mine and I shudder all over at the look. It goes straight through my skin and hooks in deep, where he’s already always been.
He moves one of his hands down and pushes the flat of two knuckles against my taint, pressing there again as he rolls his fingers. At the dig of each knuckle, I writhe. The pit of my stomach, the hollow in the bones of my hips, it all melts into a delicious stream of light.
The orgasm hits me from the inside out. His mouth is ruthless around my dick, sucking me down, and I arch into him, against him. A low groan rips from me to join the waves.
I’m panting when the last pulse of pleasure has gone through me. I slump against the bed and Isadoro collapses with me for a few seconds, pressing his face against my stomach. I wrap my arms around his shoulders, running a hand against the bristle of his hair.
He moves up my body to kiss me. I part my lips for him and reach down to grasp his cock in a fist. I love feeling the air of his gasp in my mouth. Love having him so close, here, with me.
I feel all of Isadoro’s pleasure. Feel his shivers, his moans, the way his kiss turns sloppy the closer he gets to orgasm. Feel his eyelashes, the grip of his hands, the want and pull of his muscles. His hot, animal body strains over me, thinking only of me. Feeling only me, and itself, and us together.
He comes in hot stripes against my stomach, my name pressed against my own lips. I lift my hips, pressing us together, and he slides against me, wet and still coming until he’s spent.
We’re breathless and sticky and pressed together. I move my lips to his ear.
“Guess squid ink really does it for you, huh?” I murmur. He laughs against me and that’s good, too.
******
On our last day before we start heading back home, we go to the food truck, bearing gifts. The two women cheer when we show them the squid we caught, laughing as I tell them an only slightly exaggerated version of my successful hunt. They accept the squid from us and insist on giving us a free lunch in return.
We spend the day walking. We avoid the tourist-laden areas and enjoy the sea air that brushes the whole town clean. We get ice cream that melts almost as soon as we buy it, go into a museum about marine life, find a little park where kids are running around. We grab dinner and I order squid again as vengeance. Isadoro laughs at me.
At night, we go to the town square, where a local band is playing in the open. We sit and watch on some stone steps until, to my surprise, Isadoro drags me to dance. I don’t even fake a protest. The noise is all around us, the music and the people, but it’s just us in the moment. We press and sway close together. I rest my head on his shoulder and close my eyes.
**********
The return home is filled with long days at sea. There’s a sense of calm to cutting through water and air despite the noise and the wind. It’s all the openness around us, perhaps, or the lack of people. The space to think or just be for a while, like our lives are frozen somewhere else. But we both feel life thawing as we get closer to it. There’s a building sense of anticipation as we unravel knots in the distance travelled, but it’s not yet enough to shatter the peace offered by the sea.
Isadoro is mostly quiet, but I don’t feel lost to him. His silence feels pensive instead of isolating, and I leave him to it. I have my own sea creatures crowding my head, and as hard as I try to throw them into the ocean, they always come back. I’m followed by the image of his room, the heavy darkness of it, its stagnant air and smell. How being in that room feels, like gravity is pulling you down from the feet of your soul until you want to get on your knees and plead. How small Isadoro looks in that room, like his edges are dissolving and he’s about to disappear.
