Couplings

"Couplings"

by

Timothy Stillman

I fancy you," Julian said to me. He smiled down at me, raised in bed, elbow supporting him, hand cupped to his cheek. I smiled at the long ladder of him.

"We've fancied each other three times tonight, Jules." I smiled that devilish grin I am known for so, world wide.

He bent down his long lanky chest and neck and leaned his head down to my mouth and we kissed passionately for a time.

Then he pulled back.

"None of that malicious stuff, right, Joel?"

"None of that," and I pulled him to me and we hugged naked for a while. His legs scissored me and we held closely, our cocks hardening again.

""You won't think of him again?" Jules asked, his Brit voice with that little bubble of mirth in it.

"Which one," I said stroking his dick with mine, our bodies on this too warm winter night, on this well loved and well made love in bed.

"You know."

"All the boys in the world, and you had to find this ass to slip your dick into." And I rubbed his creamy butt that jutted out just so perfectly. I stroked his cleft. He fingered my nipples and sucked them hard again.

Jules mouth was next to mine. He blew on my check soft and warm whispers. I think that turned me on the very most.

"Oh," I said. "All the boys. Names forgotten. Lips left kissed with my memory. Brazen me. Laddering from lad to lad to lad. They crushed and ruined into runes because they can't cast me up before them yet again. Not one more time."

Jules and I made love some while now. We loved the taste of all of each other in the other's mouth. We believed in closeness. We believed in experimentation. We believed in magic. And we were the top magicians.

He was on top me now. I was in him. And he pushed and pulled himself up and down and did all the work while we experienced friction. We experienced the heft and slim weight of the other.

And we came to our own Cordura. And we bucked and he placed his hands hard on my sternum and he used me and I used him and we were sweating like wet dishrags. And it was all quite loamy and wondrous and incandescent and his legs were beside mine and I pushed into the interior of Jules. And I dwelled therein. And there was nothing more than the continents of each the other, sliding of the plates of the earth and falling into sexual nimbus. While the ceiling lowered and lowered and we were the earth again, gravitated to itself, one more complete explosive cum time.

We gyrated. We were muscle sore moths. We were the dizziness of sex. We were pervasive. And we shot almost equally. He came on my stomach. I came a moment later or two inside him. My cum ran out of him down to my abdomen. He squirted and squirted. And he rolled off me. The night was young. So were we. So was a life itself. Cooked up kin the miasmal swamp that was our secret passion.

And we lay there for a time. Our hearts pounding. Our stomachs breathing deep. Our sweat a glory of ours.

And after a long deep sleepy time, Julian said, in his bubble giggle voice with that Brit lilt I loved so much, "Joel."

I nuzzled into his neck with my mouth. I bit the whiteness of him. The alabaster of him.

"Sleep now." I said to him, our breaths slowing down. Our hearts beating keener. Tomorrow was ours. And the day after that. What more could anyone wish, I ask you?

"How did he--" Julian started.

I put a finger to his lips. "Not again. Please. Don't wreck it."

Julian sighed. He sighed.

"I can't compete with him, can I?"

Oh Jesus. "You are a nut, Julian."

He laddered his tall body out of the bed. He got himself a cigarette, lit it, by the small dim lamp on the table beside us. Ours was a rickety apartment in the darker confines of London. Our love was incandescent. So the queen could keep her bloody palace. We had our own right here at home.

He smoked for a time. He flicked the ashes in he ash tray.

"How I love you," I said.

"And I love you too Joel."

I leaned over to him as he sat on the bed with his back to me. I stroked the shiny velvet of it. Followed the dragons teeth of his back bone step case.

"I never tire of saying your name," Jules told me. And then he was weeping. Just a little.. Just a mist of it. He tried to keep it hidden. Soft and silent. But the softness and the silence of the tears I knew of him so well.

He stopped weeping. Smoked the last of the cig. Put it out.

Then he said, "You remember the movie `West Side Story'?" he asked for the millionth time in our endless relationship.

I didn't have to say anything. He knew what he and I meant.

He tried to sing and that was when his bubble voice lost control. " All the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word'"--and before he told me my name said aloud was like music playing' and said softly `was almost like praying' I came to him and put my chin on his neck.

"I built you Joel."

"And I built you Julian."

"We made each other at the beginning of time."

"And its been worth the life of rhyme to find you finally..."

Then we both said...."Just as we always knew you would be."

It was an old song between us. Pardon the doggerel. But never pass the love.

He smiled and then we laughed and he tumbled me into bed again. We held so tightly I thought we would break each others' rib cages.

He didn't say it as we held each other. He didn't say it as he brushed my lips with his, the slight stain of nicotine on them inhaled by me, perfume from my love it was.

"I'm just a mope."

"A dope, " I said.

"He wasn't better than I was he?" I pushed back from him, untangled myself from his sexy encumbrance. I sat on the edge of the bed now, my back turned to him.

"It's a game, Jules" I said, somewhat petulant that I had to tell him that again.

"But it wasn't a game. It isn't. He was, he is real."

I hunched my shoulders. I felt like a box again. I felt the room small round me. And shabby and Julian was knock kneed if you want the truth of it. And my right eye was a raw wound out of which I could only see little white circles like boiling see throughable stew on the kitchen stove . And he wouldn't let go of the dream. The fancy. He had to know it all again. I felt his decreased penis against my back.

"Make it hard for me again, would you kind sir" he said. And I could do nothing but turn round and oblige.

We slept for a time thereafter. The morning light came later and later as the month came on deeper and deeper. We hated the light. I because it found me half blind and dull and ugly again. He because he could not be the sprite he felt himself at night, so he said. Though he was beautiful in any kind of dark or light.

We woke up with the street cleaners machine noise coming down the road. The village in our hearts was bound tightly with rings of silver and rims of mornings.

I had dreamed of Stefan again. I had dreamed he was Julian and I was Mandy. And I had dreamed other names as well. And contemplated the chambers in which each of us, Jules and Joel became all the others, real, fancied, read about, seen in movies, test cases for each other till we found ourselves.

But it was Stefan Julian wanted to think about.

Because I could never quite forget Stefan. I could never quite forget the game. Or imagine it real enough at all. No matter the times we made love, had sex, fucked each other silly, pained each other and gave pleasure as rich reward in return.

He went away far too quickly, my Stefan.

As did Jules' Mandy.

Jules was locked in lost love of Mandy.

I was not locked in lost love with Stefan.

Jules refused to accept this.

I kept trying over and over. We both did. And failed. And failed..

The winter sun was now casting through the grimed narrow bedroom window a thin parquet of wavery sunlight.

We lay for a time, our arms round each other. Until we had to admit to ourselves and the other that we were ostensibly awake.

"I don't miss him, Jules," I said. My voice was reflective. A play back. If not a throw back. If not a throw rug we constantly tripped on because Julian would not believe me.

"He went away. But he never left." Julian said plaintive song voice. Again and again. Like they never stopped making stereo recorders. Like it was in that crack of groove over and over again until someone would lift the arm bar and let the music play onward again. Instead of backward, at the wrong speed.

"Stefan is gone" I said, not unkindly. "As Mandy is gone." Again, not unkindly.

"What though..."

And it comes again, and I tightened my muscles and clenched my jaws waiting for those words one more time, rawer and more stew bubbling then in my deformed disfigured right eye.

"..could we be them? Could we be time machines? And be them and us at the same time."

I pushed upward from the bed and walked naked to the window. I cranked open the speckled thing and the wind was nicely cooler this morning. I knew, I hoped he was looking at my naked back side. I have a fairly good one if you want the truth of it. Jules never fails to compliment it. He never mentioned my right eye. Never has. Not one single time. Not even the first time we met. Never even seemed to notice it. Then god the horror--maybe he never really did notice it.

"I am NOT MANDY. YOU ARE NOT STEFAN."

I turned to him. I was hoarse from yelling that. I had sworn never to yell or get mad at him again for that, and of course I had failed, and I had.

He slunk down into the bed, in the gropy shadows of gloved night boxes that refused to let go just yet for the morning light was still so weak.

"What do you want, Jules? Do you want me to eat him into me? Is that it? Do you want me to recast you as him? Do you want to fake our lives like mechanical, Machiavellian contrivances in some half ass science fiction story?..."

Jules' voice, stop it please, muffled, almost not said, not even deserving of quotation marks.

""I don't dream of him. I dream of you. You never see me. You always see him."

"It's easier." Julian sighed and held his arms out trembly scarred and battered like the Frankenstein monster just learning how fleeting love is and how long is memory. And how knife in the wound painful it is.

I scratched my pubes. I would not look at him. I remembered his mouth on my dick and balls and how he loved my "Little Johnny" as he fancied to call it.

I mused. I said, "What if you are not Julian? What if I am not Joel? I mean literally, objectively. What if you are Stefan? And I am Mandy? And we've cooked up this Joel and Julian disguise because we never knew anyone by those names, and we were scared we would lose each other forever if we admitted we really are Stefan and Mandy? So we kept them in the closet of our hearts. And kept them prisoners. And we developed new bodies and new faces and new names and new histories? What if we don't go to Cambridge at all? What if we go to Harvard instead? What if we are not in London but in New York and what if we are not at Yale at all but at Notre Dame and what if Paris is in Madrid? And we've taken our real selves whose love was too fragile to last and put them in our fake knockabout bodies? And what if we've moved the whole damned world round just to accommodate those selves we love, each to the other, because we will risk anything to pull them out of our hearts secretly at night in the dark when we have sex make love and then put them back in our hearts after the sun comes up or tries to? And you are Stefan and I am Mandy and we are so damned fragile so damned scared of losing each other, so we lather all this phoniness----" I stopped. I had never said it all this way. Had never said the worlds full form like this before. I was shaking. My shoulders trembled. I was terrified I was right..

Jules was silent for a long long time, then he started singing in that bubble voice, that had a sort of torn broken toy voice behind it, a voice I had not heard before, a back ground sound, that sounded so awfully so frighteningly familiar, and I knew what he was whisper singing because Stefan and I often sang it when we had a row, fights we tried not to have, and kept them muffled and inside till it ate into us--the song I could not hear Jules singing, I now joined in singing with him and a rickety much loved shadow of old toys deep in the open me now heart, the heart that would be opened, the soul that Jules would open in me and I would open in him, sometimes a little cracking door inch wide of it, maybe a little more, something we promised to open each to the other some day full tree summer leaves this or next or the year before or the year after, again...

As I stood there, stroking my chest, feeling my heart beast so fast, so hurried. As Jules lay in bed signing by not really sounding the worlds of words at all....

"It's a Barnum and Bailey world/just as hollow as it can be/but if you believe in make believe/then please believe in me."

And I turned and went to him, slowly, languidly, and he reached up for me, equally as slowly and languidly, and he pulled me to the bed and I put my mouth and face and heart and home to his shriveled penis and I kissed the tip of it, that had a slight white scar of moon crescent stark on the pink tip to the left upper quadrant of his piss hole. That scar he had told me had come when he was ten years old and he was just getting out of the bath when his bastard mean older brother, rushed in laughter suddenly into the bathroom and shot a BB gun right at his little brother's dick causing him an immense amount of pain, and leaving that crescent reminder. Jules had told me that..

Or was it Ricky? Ricky? Who the hell was Ricky? Our thoughts were sliding over each other again. I traced the scar and I knew he was as frightened as I was at that moment.

So I rushed up his ladder tall chest to his mouth and we kissed and felt and loved and held.

As tightly as we could.

And the world outside us, under us, inside us, wherever it was, whatever it was, wherever we were, whoever we were, we held onto each other for dear life.

My eye was a cauldron of stew about to bubble over.

the end

B Keeper silvershimmer@earthlink.net