Drew Smith - Arcade

He had told me to close my eyes at the start, so I didn’t see when he took his shirt off. But I could feel the hair of his chest brushing against parts of my back when he reached over me.

Later, I flipped over and he saw that I was hard.

“I think I’d feel more comfortable if you took your pants off too,” I told him.

I was somehow able to shed all my inhibitions with the little league coach. It was even better than it had been with the cop. I let him do whatever he wanted. We kissed and kissed. Once, he got up to check his phone to see if his wife had called him, but she hadn’t. That made him happy when he came back to bed, and he laughed and snuggled me. There was no rush.

“If my wife calls, I’m going to go to the other room and speak with her briefly, then I’m going to come back here and be with you. I don’t want you to worry about it.”

“I won’t,” I told him.

I didn’t think about the cop. I only thought about the little league coach.

We’d get close to climaxing, then stop. We did this several times, each time slowing down and stopping before crossing over the edge. It was dark out now. A couple of hours had passed.

His phone rang. He got up to look at it and said, “This is what I told you about earlier. I’ll be back in a moment.”

“Okay,” I said.

He went to the other room and shut the door. I lay in bed thinking, and for the first time I thought about the cop. I tried not to, but there he was. It was a little scary finding that I could have forgotten him at all.

I was glad when the man returned.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said.

“No problem,” I said.

“Do you have time to stay a bit longer?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

He got back into bed, still naked, and he put his arms around me and squeezed me like he adored me, like he was so proud of me he couldn’t even put it into words.

“Boy, I’m lucky tonight,” he said.

“I am too,” I said. And I meant it, even without knowing how truly lucky I had been, how rare those sorts of connections are.

We played until we got close again, and we stopped and kissed a while.

“I want to ask you if you’d be willing to try something,” I said.

“Ask me.”

“You don’t have to say yes if you don’t want to.”

“I know that.”

“How would it be if maybe…when we decide to finish, maybe we could look at one another and say, ‘I love you.’ Would that be okay? I know it’s really weird.”

The little league coach smiled at me. “I don’t think that’s weird at all, I think that’s nice. We’ll do that.”

“You sure?”

“I’m one hundred percent sure. You know I’ve never said that to another guy before.”

“Really? Me neither,” I said. “At least, not like in a romantic or sexual situation or whatever.”

“Right. That’s what I meant too.”

After that, we started again, kissing more passionately, moving towards our goal. At the last moment, he said, “Are we going to?”

“Yes.”

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you,” I said.

Then we said it again. And again. Then we lay there a while longer just breathing and being against one another. Then he stood up and got the damp towels from the bathroom for us to clean up with.

“That was great,” he said.

“Yeah, I can’t tell you how much I needed this.”

I met with him the next day, and we did it all again. Without discussing it, we looked into one another’s eyes and said that we loved each other.

The next day he went home to his wife and kid.

I got one last email from him.

“Hey Squirt. Made it home. In a cab now. Hope you’re okay today. Wish I was still in town.”

I RARELY WONDERED WHY I WAS ATTRACTED TO THE MENwho most appealed to me. What mattered was that it was such a powerful feeling. It was a thrill connecting with a man who had the exact thing I liked. It was a thrill getting to put my hands in his pants. I couldn’t believe my luck when it worked, that we both happened to want one another.

There were men who made me feel great about the way I looked. They told me how sexy I was, how I was exactly what they wanted. And I could tell it was true by the way they kissed or touched me. They felt lucky being in my presence. That meant something to me. I felt better about myself because of it. I probably remember every compliment anyone ever gave me about the way I look, which is embarrassing.

I’ve always despised people who have self-assurance and pride, especially about their looks. I can’t imagine why anyone should get to feel good about something they have so little control over. Like the guys at the arcade who were so proud of their dicks. The bigger his dick, the prouder he’d be, as if he had made the wise choice of being well endowed, while the rest of the world’s morons chose average and small dicks for themselves.

You could tell that a guy was going to have a big cock by the way he’d remove himself from his pants, as if he were pulling back the curtain on the most fantastic stage show you’d ever see. By the way they undressed themselves, men always disclosed what they liked best about their bodies. When he loved his chest, the first thing he’d do after entering a booth was take off his shirt and hang it on the hook. The guy would ask you to touch his chest, to play with his nipples. You see these men on the running trails all the time. It’s freezing out and though he might be wearing long pants or even insulated leggings, his shirt is off. If there is an excuse in the world, it’s always off. If a man at the arcade loved his legs, he’d wear shorts, or he’d have his pants around his ankles as soon as he could get them there.

My aversion to pride and self-satisfaction is life-long. In college, I had an incredible hatred of the Greek system, the world of fraternities and sororities on my campus. I complained about how disgusting it was that people became friends on the basis that they had wealthy parents, how they all dressed alike and talked alike and projected an air of superiority even though they seemed to everyone else to be such complete assholes. What bothered me most was that, even if they had been able to grasp how they appeared to the rest of the campus, they wouldn’t have cared. What mattered to them was their insular club of moneyed, privileged kids born into something luckier even than a big dick or a nice chest. They felt proud of themselves for nothing.

It was the same for all sorts of pride. American pride, pride in your college team, pride in our soldiers, black pride, gay pride. Being from Texas, I heard a lot about being a proud Texan. Everywhere I saw bumper stickers boasting “Native Texan.” But how can this type of pride be explained? It’s not as if they sat surveying the options and chose to be born in the United States or Ireland or Afghanistan or Belize, so how could anyone be proud to be from those places? You could just as easily have been born anywhere as anyone. I’ve always felt repelled by those people who discover with such satisfaction that their bloodlines can be traced to the American Revolution or the Mayflower. It’s like being proud of a roll of the dice. Not even a roll you made yourself. A roll someone else made hundreds or thousands of years ago.

The Apologizing Man was the counter archetype to the Big Dicks. “I’m sorry about my stomach,” the Apologizing Man would say glumly. “I’m working on it, believe it or not.” God, I found them endearing. They appeared not to know that there were men on the internet making videos of just their stomachs, rubbing them, and feeding themselves constantly to make them continue to grow so that their fans would continue to watch. The guys in those videos—“gainers” they call them — could be seen stuffing themselves, eating enormous meals, entire pizzas, downing three liter bottles of soda, stroking their enormous, engorged guts, which look as if they have somehow become impregnated, their owners saying over and over again to the invisible viewing audience, “You like that? You like that?”