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.
As his eyes moved about the ceiling, his thoughts of Africa and the Maasai and Cassandra Mott lost in flight, his mind traveled back to his first days in high school, where he first saw the dangle and sway between the other boy’s legs. He had snatched glimpses of the side-to-side bounce as they strut from the showers to their lockers, and he had watched those darker colors yawing about with the vigorous blotting of a towel. How he had perused his own at length, turning this way and that in the mirror, learning the sensations of a well place grip; but not until that first day in the gym had he discovered, by seeing it dangle between another’s legs, the undeniable flights of fancy that came through the eyes and flashed through the body like comets on a midsummer night. And that boy across the hall in the college dorm. How timorous they had been with their awkwardness and naiveté, and that awful fear of getting caught. What would he do now—he had contemplated a hundred times since—given the opportunity to have one more night with him? What would he do but savor that maleness with his eyes and fingertips and tongue? What would he do but devour him and lock the memory of the night among his most private thoughts forever?
So had Brian’s proposal fallen pleasantly upon his ears? It might have, to be sure, had the stirrings inside his body not been displaced by the nervous dampness of his hands brought on by guilt. He had suppressed for a decade those thoughts born in adolescence, which had blossomed into a physical tryst in college. He had buried all of that permanently on his wedding day, and he had endeavored to ignore it every day since, save Julian. But that was not his fault. Not his choice or his doing—that had been Cassandra Mott’s mystification. Only the power of her curse could have awakened these forbidden urges.
And awake they were. This time without curses or drugs. Facing yet another dilemma, another thorn in his fragile peace-of-mind, Brian’s proposal brought on a new and different kind of tension, in that he, a professor, was simply a man, albeit an extraordinary man, but a man nevertheless, devoid Julian’s supernatural ability to bring this tingling across his skin. Could he truly deny his bisexuality, Johnny wondered, considering his indiscretions with Julian, considering this attraction now creeping into his soul for the man lying next to him? Could he deny it, considering the odors swirling through his nose were utterly masculine and stimulating the sweetest of physical reactions? Could he ignore the instantaneous ache or the irrefutable messages from the most sensitive parts of his body?
His breath had become shallow. Perspiration dampened his neck and warm feelings settled inside his thighs, a warmth not caused by the hide covering them. What, just this moment, could be more agreeable, or more likely to bring about a memorable night than placing his hand aside Brian’s face?
