Drew Smith - Arcade

The pattern was familiar at the arcade long before Bruno told me he was coming out from behind the counter. I’d see some guy in the store pretending, like me, to flip through the DVDs, and we’d be looking at one another. He’d smile a little or nod toward one of the hallways. Or he’d grab his crotch as if adjusting himself.

I’d feel myself becoming attracted to him almost against my will, just because the sexual tension was so gripping. But when the acceptable time limit for pre-booth courtship had elapsed, he’d stop pretending to look at DVDs and start signaling towards the dark hallways. The longer I stalled, the weirder I appeared. I’d come off as a tease or someone who didn’t know what he wanted.

I couldn’t just go into a booth with him. I had to build up to it. It wasn’t enough to be attracted or interested. I had to feel overwhelmed and controlled by irresistible lusts in order to finally give in.

The false alarms surprised even me. I’d follow the guy into a hallway. I’d be walking behind him. I’d watch him go into a booth. It was understood that I was right on his heels, that his door would creak open in two seconds, and we would be alone together. Sometimes something in me would let me go. I’d follow him and we would be in the dark booth together. But other times, at the final moment I’d veer off in another direction. When later I saw him outside in the store, I greeted his bewilderment with cheery blankness, as if encountering him for the first time in my life.

I waited in Big Tits until Bruno came out from behind the counter. He made like he was going to get a soda, then ducked into the area next to Cum Shots — a category which long confounded me, because I’ve always understood pornography to be an industry growing ever more granular, appealing to smaller and smaller segments of idiosyncratic perversion, and here, one of the biggest sections in the store was basically devoted to sex itself, or sex endings.

“Come here,” he whispered.

I went over to him. He reached down and undid my belt and opened my pants. “Someone’s going to see us,” I said.

“Who cares?”

“Let’s at least go behind this shelf.”

“Stay where you are,” he said. “This is the only place in the store where the cameras can’t see us.”

“Oh!” I said, excited by this bit of insider knowledge. “Is it being recorded or something?”

“Yeah, and the owner can see all the cameras live from his house.”

He took my dick out of my pants. “Does he do that? Watch from home?”

“Sometimes,” he said.

I undid Bruno’s belt and his pants. It was the first time I’d ever touched him, apart from the curled fingers. It was exciting the way it was happening with no warning.

All the arcade’s customers were in the booths or in the hallways. I kept thinking someone would walk by. I didn’t know where things were going. I thought we’d have to stop soon, but Bruno didn’t seem to be slowing down. He got on his knees in front of me.

“We can’t do this,” I said.

“Just let me taste it.”

I let him, then I stopped him again.

“Someone’s going to see us,” I said. “We have to stop.”

“I don’t care if they see,” he said. “They can watch if they want to.”

The idea sent a rabble of shocks up from my hands and feet, flooding into my chest and stomach. I was surprised he didn’t care. I was surprised about the whole thing, but I was surprised about that especially. I would have expected him to view it as a potential threat to his authority to be seen blowing a customer on the floor of the store. At the same time, it was kind of amazing to think of being seen with him that way. The idea made me harder.

At that moment, someone did exit the hallway nearest us, and I let go of Bruno’s head and let him draw me into his mouth just in time for the guy to glance over. When he saw us, I could feel myself surge towards the edge. I had been nowhere close, and then I was right there. I stopped Bruno again with my palm pressed against his forehead.

I looked down at him.

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t stop.”

I let him go again. His hands were gripping my ass, as he pulled my entire dick into his mouth and throat. Several feet away, the man watched us, stopped in exactly the spot where he had been when he first saw us, like someone trying not to disturb a woodland scene he’d happened upon.

I could feel myself getting close again, rocking my hips towards his mouth. I wanted to come in his mouth, but I was afraid to for some reason.

“We have to stop,” I said. “I don’t do this stuff out here.”

Bruno pulled back, and my dick rested against his chin as he looked up at me.

“You really don’t want to finish?”

“I can’t, man. Someone’s watching.”

Bruno didn’t even look around to see. He didn’t care. He just smiled and shook his head and rose from the floor. “Your loss.”

I put myself away, and he reached and touched me through my jeans. Then he started to put himself away and let me touch him too.

The guy who had come out of the hallway was still watching the two of us. He went to a nearby shelf and pretended to look at DVDs. Someone came in the front door, and Bruno went and bought a Coke from the machine and returned to the counter as if he had only popped away for a moment. The guy bought some tokens and went into a hallway. The man who had seen me with Bruno followed the other man.

It seemed wrong to hit the hallways after that, so I went to the counter.

Bruno smiled and said, “I knew you were full of shit.”

“You think I do that with everyone?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Oh, right. What about you?” I said. “How often have you done that?”

“That was a first, man.”

I didn’t press it. I didn’t want to think of him sucking off a bunch of other guys just like me. I didn’t want to feel jealous, and I was afraid I might have, as irrational as it would have been, given that I had no interest in having any kind of romantic association with Bruno beyond our recent encounter, or maybe another similar one.

We joked about when we might have a chance to finish what we’d started. I went home after that, twelve tokens in my pocket. I fantasized about it for a few weeks, and I didn’t run into Bruno in that time. I thought I’d see him again and we’d go back to the place between Big Tits and Cum Shots and give the guys a show if they wanted it.

When I did finally see him, it was on a busy night. We were barely able to speak at all, and there was no opportunity for him to leave his post.

After that, I never saw Bruno again. It was too bad. I liked him. Now someone else was learning to run the arcade. The new guy was a bouncer type in his forties with a big beard, long hair, tattoos across his knuckles. The heavyset clerk who usually worked overnight was training him.

I had earphones in my ears, as I often did. And, as always when in public, I wasn’t listening to anything at all. I heard them discussing the procedures of the place, how everything worked. I wondered where they had advertised the job. Craigslist, I assumed. I wished I had known about the opening. Maybe I would have applied. Although I already had a hard enough time explaining my job at the motel to friends and family without extended disclaimers and excuses and feelings of inferiority and shame.

Swept up in a daydream about a peepshow career, I missed when the clerks’ conversation transitioned from arcade protocols. As I stood pantomiming looking at DVDs, I gradually realized they were talking about me.

“I don’t know much about any of them, frankly,” the heavyset clerk was saying. “That guy usually tips at least, which a lot of guys don’t do.”