Prototype

Early evening bounced blue in the alley through my window, crowning her blond hair at the end of my bed in an icy halo. We sat cross legged facing each other like awkward middle schoolers sharing secrets. The less coherent she got with her words, as want and intention got tangled in her thoughts, the more she’d laugh to get any sound out. This was the part when I’d scoot in. When I’d tilt her chin lightly toward my lips and kiss her. But this time was different. She clutched my arm and pushed up my sleeve, running her fingers along the curves of my muscles.

“I want to inspect you,” she said, lifting my shirt from my waist. I obliged and pulled it over my head, then leaned back onto the white sheets. The vent blew cool air from the ceiling and tickled my chest hair. Thus began the search of flesh with flesh. Her fingers slid through the bristles of my buzzed hair like an aircraft flattening the paths of a corn maze. They worked seamlessly down to my ears, flipping the helixes forward then back. She brushed a thumb over the tips of my eyelashes. Continued the stroke down the bridge of my nose, to the divot above my lips, then out to each end of my closed mouth. She pinched my chin as though holding a pocket mirror to look at herself. Then traced the jawline up to my earlobes and traced back.

I peered at her with amusement and reached toward her face to return the touch. Without thought, her head shifted gracefully with the sole purpose of keeping her gaze on her task. I dropped my hand back to my side, assuming the position of a circus performer waiting in a lit cannon.

Her fingers never stopped. They left ghosts of a cold sensation down my neck. Glided across my collarbone. Jabbed into the notches where I could hold a quarter. Squeezed my shoulder bones and the muscles encasing them like pomegranates. One arm at a time, she held a bicep, and with the other hand drew lines past the elbow and forearm to my palm and knuckles, shifting ligaments and cartilage in her firm grasp. I felt like a sword being studied by a master blacksmith. She laced her fingers in mine with scientific poise. She bent them back, eyes on the tendons in my wrist to see the hidden work they’d do to resist. She lifted my arms up, twisted a pinch of armpit hair, leaned in to smell the wintry lavender deodorant I applied shortly before her arrival. She grabbed my pecks. Moved her head to my nipples, blond strands falling over her ears. She licked one hard. The other remained flaccid, despite her tongue’s persistent flicking.

She snapped upright and said, “This one’s shy.”

“It’s probably your hot saliva,” I said.

Then she said something I’d heard her say before─ “You should have tits.”

My reply, the same as last time─ “When you cut yours off, I’ll wear them.”

A little smirk, then she was back to business. Moving down to my belly, poking my ribs. Nudging me to flip over. Brushing the tip of a nail along a shoulder blade and down the vertebrae, making pitstops at flecks of birthmarks and overgrown skin. The things that make me me, not only a man. She clutched the belt of my jeans, so I ripped it from the loops and tugged everything off, down to skin and hair. She held my hips, clinched my thighs, pressed the meat of my calves─ “Mine are bigger than yours.” “’Cause you’re six foot and carry that backpack with your life in it like you’ll run away without notice.” “I’m not six feet.” ─pinched my achilles heel, pushed the bulb of my foot, combed the hair on my toes, poked the extra webbing between my second and third ones. A thing that makes me me, not only a man. I flipped back over. She ran her hands up my legs. Warm now from movement, their collision with the chill on the surface of my skin awoke storms under it. My scrotum tightened and I got hard. Seeing the new weight of my extension tip it sideways, she grabbed it with both hands and veered it straight.

“I just want to inspect you,” she said, moving it from hand to hand, probing with each finger separately to collect a full analysis.

“Get the oil,” I pointed to a bottle on the windowsill, where a cerulean haze still splashed our bodies, curtain open for a view of the sundrenched world only the curious could peer back from. Because the dark can see, more than the light, what’s in the dark. She grabbed the coconut oil then got back to procedure.

The first time she gave herself attention in this scene, an intimate interlude, she massaged the liquid into her hands, coating every crevice in blazing wet. Her body appeared more foreign to her than mine. When she resumed hold of me, my dick shined with detail. I tilted my head back for a punch of breath to escape me. More often than she stroked, she leaned the shaft from side to side, like a gondolier with their oar, fumbling, looking. She slid her index finger over the slit and my hips jerked. She repeated this, my reaction unchanging, and said, “That’s so cool.”

Not once during this moment did our eyes meet. As she caressed me, she lowered herself to observe closer, then sat up kneeling to watch from further away, and bent forward to crop her view again. I watched her watching. Her head slanted with a cat’s interest. Or the interest of someone wanting to be what they saw. Even when I picked myself up, still in her grip, so that our faces met, her gaze remained where her hands moved. I cupped her cheek. Her eyes still pointed with her chin, low, even as they closed with the kiss. Her attention on the thing she wanted. The thing she wanted to have, to experience, to own, in a way she hadn’t all the previous times. We kissed again. And a third time. A strange smile cut across her face, as if she were a burlesque star getting into character, leaving some sort of truth behind. She dipped her head and tasted me, the current of yearning she authored when she merely meant to cross a river, from the land of who she was to the valley of who she was born to be.

The rest played out like a cassette tape wound pale. I was fond of the soundtrack. But I’d listened to it enough to finally read the writing on its case. I want to inspect you. In truth, she wasn’t seeing me. She was seeing herself in me. And I wanted to be seen for what made me me. Not only a man.