The Strange Haunting Of Johnny Feelwater
An excerpt from chapter 19 . . .
Johnny was aware that Brian was looking at him.
“Shame you’re not bisexual,” said Brian, a sudden and unexpected whispering of his thoughts.
Johnny turned his head and their eyes met.
“Forgive me, my friend, but I’m no longer inclined toward the fairer sex, even to these frequently available young girls. I would consider myself inappropriate for them anyway. But now I’m in bed next to a man, quite an attractive man I might add, and it occurred to me that a little mutual affection is nourishing for the soul.” Brian shifted to his side and faced Johnny, bracing himself up on an elbow.
Caught off guard, Johnny glanced down at his companion’s torso, a candlelit display of shoulders and a chest thick with muscle, of dark hairs mixed with gray that curled about a pair of nipples and ran a wide path toward a sunken navel. The glance ventured downward, over strong hairy legs, then upward, fixing on genitals flaccid in the warm air, dropping with generous weight from a dense swath of salted pubic hair, fleshy and splayed atop a muscular thigh. It was no more than a glance, the entirety of which lasted the bat of an eye, though it sparked the fires of adrenaline.
Oh, the power of such a visual to set one’s imagination stirring, Johnny realized, not much to his surprise as he twisted his head upward and returned his gaze to the shadows. It all came rushing back as if the image had opened a floodgate of memories from his confused youth. Those fleshy organs—were they not an anomaly of the male form, peculiar in shape and so much darker than the rest of the body? Were they not an inconsistency in the fluid contours of muscle and limb, hanging from the body at the apex of one’s legs like something alien by virtue of their odd design? Perhaps it might seem, but for that inborn consciousness of their purpose, and in being male with the same fragile effects, accompanied always with that sublime awareness of their ever changing weight. Oh, those daunting colors, dark and purposeful, like magnets drawing one’s eyes, like streaking meteors that suddenly exclude all other thoughts. And those masculine odors lingering in the air with his own, born of errant drops of urine and yesterday’s sweat and last night’s involuntary seepages from that tiny hole, mingled with those living with aromatic vibrancy between damp gluteal cheeks. He was thinking about all of this as he stared at the ceiling, his face fixed with a dreamlike gaze, thinking there was even more to resist: the warmth of a man lying so close, the warmth he could feel on his face, the feel of that same man’s breath on his ear. What was it, but a universe of two men, a symphony of maleness within the parameters of a small space, offensive perhaps to some, though more akin to euphoria for two certain men on a warm Kenyan night.
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