Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 06:14:57 -0500 From: Timothy Stillman Subject: "A Late Night Walk" A Late Night Walk By Timothy Stillman It was on one of my late night walks when I saw him. He was a kid. He wore a T-shirt, short shorts, no shoes, and was standing crooked against the wall of an empty building down town. The lamppost shone yellowish light down on him. He had thick long blonde hair that was tinted orange by the light. The moon was full. I was in love with someone who would not return that love. I had always been in love with someone who would not return that love. He was slight. He looked like a fawn, not frightened, but skittish. I stood a half block away from him, watching him in that artificial light that altogether bathed the small block of the town. It was so hot and I was perspiring. I took late night walks to kill the day sadness. He was leaning like a sliver of moon next to the building. I could see his chest heaving up and down. I walked closer. He did not notice me. I could hear his voice. He made sounds like an alien makes when he comes to a new planet and is very new and very afraid and very hurt and perhaps hurt for no particular reason, just the all-ness of the thing that does it. He was alone. I have never seen anyone so alone. I walked closer. I stood on the sidewalk, only a few feet from him. His head hung down and I walked up to him, drawn magnet like to him, something I had never done before, that walking up to someone, and I did not feel afraid, but I was always afraid. He was not crying. He was not speaking. He was, somehow, making amends. I saw his face more clearly now. He was young. And not young at the same time. I could hear his heart hammering. My heart retained a steady clip. It should have been, again, the other way around. He looked up at me. As though he knew I was there and had been looking at him, all told, for several minutes. The shadows and light made his eyes furred with black circles, like a raccoon's eyes. He did not look defiant. He did not look scared. He was scarred by life. Not any particular thing. Not any particular person. I knew this. I knew that he had been himself all his life and that he had found someone who had been himself all his own life. We did not talk. The night heat was suddenly comfortable. The season of July did not roar for a while. The lion kept its mouth shut. The pages of memories in my mind stopped. Had stopped when I noticed him, in that quick sharp breathless moment. The love I wanted from the person who would not return it ceased for a time. I held out my hand. His hand was soft and cool as a cucumber as he put it in mind. His fingers and palms soft and spongy. He was shorter than I. Much. He flexed his toes and he smiled a smile that said this is the last one I have in me and I give it away and if rejected the smile will never return and I am lost. He came to me, us still holding hands, as though in a strange dance. He came to me and put his head to my chest, like a baby bird finding its nest finally. I put my arms around his sweaty back. I felt the bones of him, the shoulders of him, the spine of him. It was the most incredibly- He looked up at me and I bent down in a comma to kiss him on the forehead. It was cool and it felt like magic and hope and an end to sadness, and he brought his face further to mine as I bent further down and kissed his mouth, and we were together, and he kissed me hard as though he was falling and had thought he would always be so, till I came along, and that was such a strange thing, and I felt myself harden and he put his hand on mine and drew away from me, this perfect painting of boy, and put my hand on his crotch, and pushed it round so I could feel all of him. We pressed our bodies against each other. Late night. No cars even. We walked side-by-side, hand holding, glorious, and he pressed into my side, back to my garage apartment. We walked as though we could go slowly now, as if we could take our time. There was no furtiveness tonight. There was no fear. There were to be no awkward moments. And in my apartment, I turned on the light in the ceiling and we clung to each other and we kissed, he had such a soft velvet feeling mouth, and I knelt in front of him and was his supplicant. He put his hands on my shoulders and tousled then a moment my, my hands on him all the way, my long brown hair as I had my mouth against his groin and he told me to pull down his red colored shorts. I nuzzled his penis straining outline through the material, then he helped my unbutton him, and his boy penis came out hard and straight, as my own hardened in reference point. He sighed as all the sighs he had ever had came into his voice and he gave himself to me because this was the night he had to make the decision, and I felt his abdomen warm and naked against my mouth. The air conditioner was cold but he was warm now, in counterpoint, and I pulled his shorts down his slender short legs and he was naked from his waist down. He was pink and his penis was a proud device, a living warm soft/hard spongy happy and proud device that I took into my mouth with such deliberation, with such careful delicacy, as though I was prepared to paint the boy on canvass and make him immortal, I touched the tip of his slightly throbbing penis and I looked up at him and he smiled a sweet broken hearted smile as I held his penis and examined it and touched his balls that seemed to send power lines through him, as he came to me in a poem and pushed his abdomen against me, as I took all his penis in as he began moving back and forth. It was sheer penis. It was pale and it was not thick. It was circumcised. It had a small head, but not like a helmet as the pornos say but like a tiny mushroom, looking closed in, like a flower waiting to blossom under something other than his own hand. He sighed and he was not afraid anymore, for he was safe with me, and I was more not afraid than I would ever be in my life, this night, this one magistry of night, and he pulled me them upward and my mouth off him and my left finger touched his right ball in passing as I stood up and he led me to my small narrow bed where I had masturbated each night for love that would never come true. He was a boy of blond and he was a boy of night and he undressed me, with curiosity, for he had not done anything like this before, and he studied me as I studied him as I took off his T shirt and I played my hands down his perfect chest and to his navel as he undressed me completely, and pushed me like a spider web pushed by a small summer breeze down to the bed and he on top of me and our penises were entangled with each other. Mine was of course larger than his and he studied it with his hand, touching every inch of it, as I did his, like we were blind and memorizing it for more than our brain to remember, but for the deeps of us to remember forever as well and never be lonely again. We kissed-the word feverishly has never been so perfectly right-and he ground himself to me as we lay on the bed, and the shy sad boy and the shy sad me had left those things behind now, and I felt him all over and he did the same to me, and it was so tremendously wondrous to be hard against him as he lay on top of me and mastered me and I kissed his ears and brushed back his hair from his eyes and felt his small feminine buttocks. I was so hard and so excited and he leaned up from me and sat on my chest, my penis bridging against him, and we were quiet, sighs were quiet, we never said a word, never knew each other's names or what the other was about, for that would have spoiled it, and I loved him and forgot for a time my other love, and he sat on me and rolled his little hairless balls on my chest and I leaned up and tickled his nipples with my tongue, my penis at his hole. He reached behind and teased it with me. And he giggled silently, almost inwardly, and he pulled himself back further down me to my thighs and took my penis in his hands and smiled up at me, devilishly, and bent over and took me while my hands loved his head and his back and his chest. As he knew what to do to me. Perfectly. As he knew what to do in the realm of senses nobody should have known save in books, and he took me and put the all of me in his mouth and it was me moving, fucking, his perfect pale thin lipped mouth that had smelled of honey and ambrosia when I had been kissing him, and I lay back and my lips arched and my eyes closed tightly and he put his hands on my thighs and he worked me completely and forever. He took Sundays and Fridays and Friday nights when I was a kid out of school, at the grocery store, stocking up on comic books for the weekend, he took the boy of me and made me the boy of me then when I first started discovering masturbation and how happy and fine it was just the feeling alone, for that and nothing else, and he took my love for another boy and he tossed it aside, and he took all the phases of me and I saw I was a pretty complex person after all, that the ways I had been treated before, being a jerk, being a clown, were wrong. And he took the blood inside me and he rushed it to my penis and I rushed out into him and he held and he took and he held and he swallowed and he looked up at me. Knowingly. Kid like. Slyly. Then other expressions I could not define. And I knew there were expressions on my face that neither of us could define as well. I immediately reversed our positions and took his penis in my mouth and it was sweet Christmas morning and it was the one present I had been denied all my life, this boy, this perfection of parfait joys, all kindled in church window stained glass impossibilities and I held his penis and I went down on him and he came quickly, no sperm yet, but he came over and over and my mouth rotated his penis and my tongue licked it just so, and I pursed the right amount of pressure at the right time, somehow I knew how to do this now, to make him orgasm and orgasm endlessly it seemed and his body was an electric bolt and it shivered and he took me and I took him and we were bathed in sweat in spite of the cold room. And in time, after hours of love, not sex, love, the real kind that actually, except in this box like apartment of mine one night after a late night walk with lonely keeping me company, before I walked into the arms of this boy who would be a part of me forever, never existed anywhere else, we drifted naked still huddled together to sleep, and when I woke, it was dawn, and the summer sun was beginning to rise, and I was alone. I was scared for a minute. I panicked. It was all a joke. I have had people play unfunny jokes on me all my life, when they noticed me at all, it was for that reason. Even the boy who vanished from my weary mind last night and this morning and who I had been given brief respite from. In a blissful world. And I knew I would not see the boy again. Though it didn't prevent me from spending my life looking for him. I knew it was not a joke with him. No one could joke like that. That way. I knew that somehow from our disparate world from our own problems from our own lives we had come together and wordlessly had said I love you and you are of worth. It was just so truly splendid. And it never happened again. But a person such as I who had never known love, had just explored the golden heart of it, way lost and free and falling and giddy and surprised and every nerve cell tingly. So had he. In me. And that maybe was the most brilliant feeling of all. Lighting up a million stars in the night skies, to rival the stars already there and now ashamed. And from now on, the lion of night did not roar so proudly on my walks. We had tamed him.