Read Online Studs: Gay Erotic Fiction by Emanuel Xavier Richard Labonté - Free Book Online Page B

enough. Apparently. Unbelievably. Not enough.
    He didn’t stick around. He went back into the woodwork.
    I’m sure he has reasons, but that doesn’t do me much good.
    I want a man with staying power.
    I want a man who feels like home.
    I want to fuck again and have it mean something.
    I want all of me to be in bed with the guy, my guy, and I want all of him in there too. The good, the bad, the hard-core ugly, and the healing radiance of love. I want it all, with tons of laughter on top. Corny stuff. Beyond corny. The cliche that refreshes the whole world.
    I want it.
    I want Dimitri.
    In our last conversation, Dimitri confesses, as casually as possible, that he has demons he must face before he and I… unfortunately, that sentence never gets finished.
    “Yeah, well, I could probably name your demons right now.”
    “Yes, you probably could.”
    In the moment, I’m thinking of the usual suspects: ego, low self-esteem, fear of intimacy, guardedness. Later on, when I was alone, I got to reflecting that Dimitri might be one of the best human beings I’ve ever met, but he’s still only human, and that’s a demon or three right there.
    He’s male. That’s at least one more.
    He’s American.
    Gay.
    Black.
    While we’re on this winning streak, let’s add in a violent childhood. Incest. Rape. Gangs. A shot in the chest before he even got to his teenage years (thank god it didn’t kill him, thank god it only left him with a totally butch scar that I would have been happy to kiss day after day). All of which Dimitri has mentioned previously, briefly, minimally, with the least amount of emotion possible.
    It’s a miracle he didn’t turn into a criminal. Hell, he doesn’t even dress like a thug. He’s an upstanding, life-affirming, tax-paying, San Francisco leatherman.
    I want to suck his dick till the day I die.
    I’m not sure that’s how the story is going to end, though. I’m not sure I like my chances. Every day without a call or an email seems like a day in which this bright beautiful light of real happiness fades further and further into a dark forest.
    I know these woods. This unhappy place.
    The thicket and the brush of my stupid thoughts.
    The dry twigs I smoke to forget. The smelly swamp of depression. The worm-riddled logs of negative self-esteem. The loneliness of the territory and the night. The rocks of anger picked up along the path. The isolation as the forest closes in.
    Fuck yeah, I know it.
    Pretty soon, it’s not so easy to see your way clear. You can’t recognize the most familiar landmarks.
    You forget you were ever on a path.
    A familiar fog settles in.
    Quicksand everywhere.
    Desperate days.
    Last-ditch efforts.
    I don’t know what to do…except the only thing I know how to do.
    Write.
    Get busy, get it down and send it out. All this.
    Everything. (No, not everything, not really, not by a long shot; I left out some important bits and pieces. Like my failure in bed with Dimitri that one time. My health problems. The fact that I’m no longer clean and sober. I omitted as much of the buzz-kill stuff as possible. Neuroses. My neediness. The shit that doesn’t get anyone’s dick hard. I did my best soft-shoe razzle-dazzle around all the issues and baggage and fucked-up indelicacies that we log on to craigslist.com to forget about in the first place. And if I could have made my story cleaner and hotter and more suitable for pulling your putz, trust me, I would have.)
    Dimitri did say, freely and unequivocally, I could write about him. He said I didn’t have to change any details, or hide his identity or anything. He said he would be honored to have me write about him.
    Okay.
    Tomorrow I will do a copy and paste of this little document, and send it to him. I don’t know what else to do. I already used my second-to-last gambit: the invitation for him to join me at the Warfield for the Iggy and the Stooges reunion tour. He was momentarily speechless, then stoicly excited, when I originally