8:45 p.m.
The passing of time clings to us like syrupy resin, and when the sucking on my balls finally quiets down I feel – no matter how hard I feel more tired than turned on – no matter how hard I am. The umpteenth body lifts his face up from my crotch and looks at me intently, while picking tiny hairs out of his teeth. After a beat of silence, he interlaces his fingers with mine, presses his cheek against my collarbone, then begins massaging his anal sphincter around my hard cock. I passively gaze out over his shoulder, through the outward-opening balcony door, into the summer evening. Now the heat is omnipresent. It used to only whirl around in the air above our heads, but the longer I stay quiet and use others for warmth instead of myself, the more fanatically it settles on top of, over and inside of me. Like a tumour. A laburnum in bloom.
His lordship is riding me with increasingly sharp movements, as if someone were chasing him, and the terminal hair around his nipples chafes bitterly against my protruding ribs. Although I try to take comfort in it, in just as many different bodies as people, I rarely manage to be satisfied with my own. In a sense, I’m hoping my skin will fall away from me like wood shavings; that with every thrust I’ll sink deeper into the wild streaks of blood and frayed edges my roots are replete with. Perforate me, I think. Bite my cock off. Break these bones in half and make some hearty broth out of whatever – whoever? – remains.
8:57 p.m.
By now everyone outside should be able to hear my squeaky bed, as well as the mind-numbing moaning and groaning, the pornification of what it sounds like to have a cock up your ass.
I hold tightly on to the quivering flesh in front of me and count the hot-air balloons flying by, in order to bridge the stretch of time between me and the neighbour across the street, who tips open his window each night around nine. And as the church bells start ringing in the distance, I do in fact detect the sound of oak creaking across the street.
Holding my breath, I examine the shadow behind the slowly opening blinds. I imagine a taut rope, suspended over the road; my ear pressed to one of two tin cans, the fur covering my neighbour’s heart against the other – padam padam – and I shiver as he flicks a dark strand of hair from his face. It’s as if he is chucking himself off of himself, to be more present for a while. I’m convinced I need it, him, here, now, and crane my neck a little more. Someone already said it better once, but there are only two types of people in the world: those who lean back without worry, and those who lean forward, arduously and eagerly. I have always belonged to the latter group.
9:04 p.m.
My neighbour briefly scratches at his sideburns – even drenched in sweat they’ve held on to their curliness – and then places his hands on his neck.
The evening sun is licking at the hair underneath his armpits, on his chest, and at the treasure trail meandering from his outie downward. Everything about him glistens like liquid honey.
Instinctively, I increase the pace. My neighbour turns around and my gaze slides across his back, a labyrinth of muscles and tendons, and down. The soft fur above his tailbone continues underneath the waist band of his greyish white briefs. Just like yesterday and the day before and all of the days that have already passed me by, a sense of homesickness wells up inside of me. For a season in which I still believed that cross-pollination between two men involved the delicate friction between an erect penis and a pair of buttocks. That it was painless, and pure – no penetration, no anal douching or fibre-rich foods.
And just like yesterday I bite my tongue in an attempt not to fling myself off of the balcony. Into the future. Out of the future.
‘Stop. Stop. I’m coming. Stop, or I’ll cum,’ somebody moans in my ear. I’d almost forgotten about him, the writhing body in my bed, the anonymous face so close to mine, this advanced aquaplaning, and react passively. The sticky sperm squirts and trickles through his fist, which he has wrapped awkwardly around his cock, and flows into my belly button. ‘Sorry,’ I whisper.
9:23 p.m.
The floor trembles as the door falls shut, and I curl my fingers around the hot balcony railing. My neighbour across the street, who is clearly delighted that I’ve crawled out for the first time since we’ve started this whole back-and-forth, waves at me.
I know: even this day, this summer, shall pass. Maybe I’m old enough to believe in things that are soft. Old enough to no longer bury the outgrowths I am burdened with, the blood that keeps rushing into my erectile tissue, inside other people’s cavities.
To secure a rope in between myself and whatever feels safe, even when what feels safe never lasts forever.
So I wave back. Our eyes transform into barbs, and as the corners of his chapped bottom lip curl up, my neighbour pulls his briefs down his rock-solid legs. Then he stretches the skin of his flaccid penis out over his stomach. A playful gesture, with which he doesn’t merely expose the dark fold running from his shaft across his low-hanging sack to his anus, but above all himself.
Now it’s his gaze traveling amicably down my body. I follow his face and am shocked to discover my cock is no longer hard. The initial embarrassment – why else would I have this colossus, if not to impress others – is quickly replaced by a lump in my throat. For the first time, someone has managed to recognise a human being inside all of these incoherent chunks of meat. To undress me in places, in ways, that count.
With my flaccid penis and my rapt attention, I place an imaginary tin can to my ear. My neighbour follows my example. ‘There you are,’ he mouths.
I nod and actually start laughing. No, the both of us actually do. At once our cackling bounces off of the walls, building by building, city by city, from here to yonder to tomorrow.
At last time is flowing, and I brace myself.