Since his address was in Williamsburg, and since he was a white gay man whose photos had all been taken in a locker room, I assumed he would live in one of those hideous high-rises with the cardboard walls and airport toilets and on-site doggy daycare. But though it was only a few steps from the Google store, Drew’s building was old and shabby, as was the apartment he shared with an indeterminate number of other people. Dim, spacious, and strewn with ancient bric-a-brac—Disney’s Ursula vamped on a light switch; dusty artificial vines framed doorways hung with quilts; ironic postcards lined the seams of crumbling corners and open cabinets—it reminded me of the many high-turnover, hand-me-down leases where I’ve lived, sucked, and fucked my way from West Oakland to New Orleans.
His bedroom was too small to be as messy as it was, but his rent was only $800; I congratulated him on his luck. Though we were still dressed, he invited me to sit on his rumpled bedspread, where I avoided eye contact with the cluttered dresser, the closetless rack of clothes, and the standing mirror pitted with, one can only hope, the human body’s natural adhesives: spit, pus, flecks of dried toothpaste. While we chatted, I daydreamed about filling a series of big plastic garbage bags and joyfully carting them to the nearest landfill. There’s nothing more ordering than absence.
It’s shallow, I know, to be turned off by slobs, but I did like Drew, a polite and mild-mannered lawyer around my age. He wasn’t bad-looking, either: big eyes, strong nose, weak hairline, with an upper body that was overdeveloped in proportion to his long, slender legs. In person, he was more effeminate and deferential than his messages suggested. I felt two ways about this—safe and sexless—which is really only one, now that I think about it.
Drew’s tongue was nauseatingly frictionless, but I liked how his face felt in the crook of my neck, awakening my hair follicles and flushing my skin. He wasn’t wearing underwear beneath his jeans, which while not unexpected is a sensory experience I try not to think about. If I don’t wear something under denim, myself, I feel distressingly dirty; I don’t know how gay guys do it. As I had already confirmed, his cock was nice, rising quickly and easily to a respectable length and girth. I went down there as soon as possible, eager for the distractions of old reliable.
He talked to me, stroking my hair, and I began to relax. But when he reached down into my pants, his fingers went immediately to my asshole. Well, shit, I thought. Flattered as I was, gender-wise, by his homosexual instincts, I knew their next stop would be my pussy, even my clit, and the specter of a UTI ruined the mood I was in the process of summoning. The effort of stopping, negotiating, sending him to wash his hands, starting it up all over again—it just wasn’t worth it. I sucked his cock for a few minutes longer, trying to ascertain, by his sounds and shifting tumescences, what gave him true pleasure and what was merely encouragement or good manners, and then I stood up, apologized, put my shirt back on, and left.
I haven’t really been fucking strangers lately. Most men are only as dangerous as you allow them be, but I’ve gotten tired of knowing what happens if you give them an inch; I wish I didn’t, but I do. At the same time, rapidly enshittifying hookup apps seem to have gotten straighter and more violent—especially since January—while my ginger experiments with the men-seeking-men section of Tinder have proven, again, that I’m too trans for dating among normal people. Drew was an anomaly, the fluke alignment of opportunity, hormones, psychosexual conflict, and a paradoxically motivating apathy. It’s for this reason that, despite its interruption, our encounter felt like a success to me, the first I’ve had in months: nothing bad happened, which these days I don’t take for granted.
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