by Tripp Reade
(03/01/06)

Afterward, he blamed it on the late hour, the toe-tapping shoegaze of The Grapes of Plath as they hit a sweet groove onstage at Local 506. He blamed it on the potent ganja he'd been toking since late afternoon, which always made him agreeably horny, on the way Lana's T-shirt puckered between her small breasts. Not that Ransom regretted what happened -- he didn't. Just that it took a harmonic convergence of factors to bring it about.

"I'm a haiku man," he'd said when she revealed those breasts mid-way through their first date, years ago. Backstage during a Man or Astroman? show, awash in spacey surf chords and alternate-universe bass, she turned to him and her top vanished like a feat of prestidigitation and there they were, dark nipples and all, buoyant almost to impertinence. "Epics have all those unnecessary couplets," he managed after a caesura full of astonishment and gratitude.

"Are you comparing my tits to a small poem of seventeen syllables?" But smiling when she said it, thank God, and unzipping his pants for him, which seemed like a good omen.

"Sure. Or maybe I meant to say limerick." Brushing an index finger across either nipple, he recited as if for a 19th century schoolmarm: "There once was a man who got lucky..."

Date after date they flouted convention by not growing bored with one another, not having the silly sort of arguments that escalated to relationship doomsday, and not shying from the fact of their exclusivity. They got married at their favorite nightclub, with reception music by May Cause Itching, and honeymooned, and set up house. When not even domesticity could kill them as a couple, they knew it was eternal love.

And so now, time, music, drugs, tits, plenty of reasons why he said yes there amid the wicked sonics of those acoustical Grapes, but nothing packed the explanatory power of their games. Their games were why the two of them worked so well together.

The bassist pulled a chord sequence out of Bootsy Collins' trick bag, just an allusion, a nod to the P-Funk, but it was enough. Ransom literally saw the notes smolder in Lana's heart. Nothing moved her more than music, and he wondered if this moment would appear in her review of the show. She guided him to the back of the club, a booth just vacated by three frat boys who maybe had been expecting a night of classic rock covers.

"How much do you love me, Ransom?" she asked, the question signaling a round of their favorite game.

He hit the blunt deeply, nodded for her to continue, implicitly agreeing to fulfill any condition she might set.

"Would you suck cock for me?" she asked. "Would you take a thick one in the ass?"

Fired by the hungry look in her eyes, he released a breathy yes along with heavy coils of smoke.

"Prove it," she said.

Of all their games, and they had many -- My Little Pony, First In Show, Maxwell House, String of Pearls, Rollover -- Prove It seemed the least prone to collapse or ennui, being remarkably protean.

Most recently they'd been addicted to Manifest Destiny, where Lana would appear dressed in beaded headband and feather, fringed doeskin miniskirt, and thigh-high moccasins. In her best Parker Brothers voice she'd intone, "It's time to play Manifest Destiny, the Game of Imperialist Rape Fantasy," and he'd throw on his Seventh Cavalry duds and chase her through the house. Eventually he'd catch, bind, and fuck her, always a great victory for the forces of civilization.

Sometimes they'd gender-bend it and he'd wear the doeskin dress, and maybe they'd play the Noble Savage as Hostage variation, where he'd spend most of the night bondage-cuffed to bed or refrigerator or chin-up bar. Being sporadically sucked off or commanded to rim your Custer-clad wife -- her gabardine trousers dropped to reveal non-G.I. and anachronistically crotchless panties -- every time she opened the fridge for a beer or some yogurt could really drive a man wild with lust, it had to be admitted.

Manifest Destiny was great fun as long as the ratio of sex-happy hormones to historical common sense was tilted in favor of the hormones, which became less the case over time. Nothing could filet a boner and turn a wet cunt into Death Valley like the thought of Sand Creek or Wounded Knee or smallpox blankets given as gifts, and that had been the end of Manifest Destiny.

But Prove It just kept going strong. They'd been playing it for years now, and neither had flinched from the demands made by the other. As soon as his high wore off, though, long after the Grapes last encore, he blinked. What had she asked him to do?

By avocation an unreconstructed Skynyrdist and a Foucault fetishist, but at work a children's librarian with an impressive collection of hand puppets and an acrobatic voice that brought any story, whether Peter Pan or Hobbit or Captain Underpants, to electric life, Ransom was rolling his portable theatre out of the Easy Readers section after another SRO performance when a man walked along the aisle of picture books and stopped.

"I caught most of your show," the man said as lapsitters and toddlers were herded this way and that by moms and nannies. "I never knew how fraught with peril 'Eeyore Has a Birthday and Gets Two Presents' could be."

"You've got to sing the Cottleston Pie song like Vincent Price or it simply doesn't work." Hazel eyes, wavy hair, and trim as a clipper ship, the man could turn heads, that was for sure. "Do I know you?"

"My manners!" He held out a long palm and lovely tapered fingers. "Victor, Lana's friend from work."

She covered music for a local newsweekly, but had she mentioned a Victor?

"You may know me better by my stage name, Lickable Vic, which Lana takes an inordinate amount of pleasure in abusing."

"Oh right! You assemble the arts calendar at the weekly and then dance at -- at--"

"Sweet Cheeks, three times a week. Lana thought we should meet before I come over tonight."

"What's happening tonight?"

His smile was built for spotlight and stage, hinting at secrets and daring you to come close enough to hear them, and Ransom figured he made a killing at the strip club. "She said you might not remember the Grapes of Plath show last week, and swore me never to reveal if that was the case. So this is me, not revealing for a change." Victor nodded to where patrons hovered, lost in the Dewey Decimals. "I think you're needed, but before I go, I have to tell you I think you and Lana are the absolute. Prove It totally rocks."

***

Lana handed him a wine goblet and a joint when he walked in the door, and asked him how was work.

"Okay, what's up?" He took half the joint in one puff. "I met Victor today. Lickable Vic. Did we play Prove It last week?"

She smiled and nodded. "Did we ever."

"Are you going to tell me what I agreed to do?"

"Not just yet."

"Will it involve me in some publicly humiliating act, like with those jugglers at the mall?"

She assured him no jugglers would be involved, nothing public, and fluffed a chair for him.

"So suspiciously solicitous." He sipped at the wine as she finished preparing light salads for them both. "And all week it's been salads. I guess I didn't get the memo about our new ruminant diet. Are we going to milk each other at the end of dinner?"

She laughed and shook her head. "The way I love you ought to be a crime," she said finally.

"In some states it is, shweetheart." Marlowe by way of Bogart, which he knew she loved, but then stopped. She'd turned serious, aiming those gorgeous grays at him like a pair of Saturday night specials.

"I'm retiring from Prove It after tonight. I'll still play your challenges, but I'm out." She poured another spicy curl of red into her glass. "I won't be able to top this in any case."

Just as he opened his mouth to ask once more what her plan was, the doorbell rang, and Victor could be heard helloing from outside. Getting up from his chair, Ransom murmured, "Threesome?" in Lana's ear, but was reminded that he'd issued that challenge last year. He wanted to point out that the third had been female, not male, a grad student from Duke who was researching "the disbursement of power in non-traditional relationships," but Lana was already at the door.

"Has he remembered?" Victor said. He looked dashing in a black T-shirt and linen pants. "Has it come back to you yet?"

"Not yet," Lana said, "but any minute now I think we're going to see a lightbulb."

"Hey, thanks for my new floss, by the way." Kissed her cheek. "I'm wearing it now, in your honor."

Lana clapped her hands and asked how long until he needed to be at the club.

"I don't go onstage until eleven, so we've got three hours," Victor said. "Pretty certain I can give you two full shots in that amount of time."

Just like that, the vital synapses connected, and Ransom said, "Oh hell. I promised I'd suck cock for you, didn't I?"

Lana and Victor beamed at him as if he'd completed a quadratic equation at the blackboard.

Victor unbuckled, revealing a shimmery red G-string from Cockholsters, Lana's favorite online store for men's intimate apparel. Ransom had a number of interesting specimens in silk and leather from the same place. She once told him that sex should be like Christmas, where you got to unwrap colorful and mysterious packages, and indeed they'd spent many hours tying up, and then unwrapping, each other.

Stuffed into the straining triangle of cloth was what looked to be a penis of formidable girth. "No more weed for me," Ransom muttered, and then took another long hit. "No more after tonight, that is."

He pushed a hand through his hair. They'd run all manner of freaky scenarios, but this was still a stretch for him. "The whole nine yards?" he asked, settling to his knees. "Speaking figuratively, of course."

"Good to the last drop," she said.

So swallowing was part of the bargain.

In future years, when their yet-to-be-born children asked about the danger inherent in this act -- unprotected oral sex, oh my! -- they'd explain that trust was the defining element of Prove It. Both agreed they should answer any question posed by these future offspring, so long as the time felt right, but it was Ransom who pushed this policy.

Ransom's parents had decanted into him their belief that sex was bad and dirty and only performed within the cleansing framework of holy matrimony, with as little imagination as possible, as quickly as one was able, and only to procreate, and it'd taken him years to lose that familial luggage. When he had his first non-missionary orgasm, a drencher onto the face and neck of his second serious girlfriend, he swore that the trainwreck of his family's Christian mores ended with him.

He didn't need to ask if it was safe, he would tell his children, because their mother would never let anything hurt him.

Still, as he peeled down the soft fabric, and was startled by how far up Victor's corrugated stomach the cock sprang when free, he flashed back to a Sunday school lesson from years and years ago, when he'd been a boy.

Kneeling, focused on a sweet blue vein that rivered its way along Victor's penis, Ransom hoped for a modern reprise of the Abraham and Isaac story, hoped that as he prepared to fellate she'd say, in Biblical paraphrase, "Victor, Victor, do not raise your cock against this man. Because he has proven his love a thousand times over I will shower him with golden showers later tonight, and we will rejoice, and his sperm shall flow in number like the stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore."

Wow. Strong weed, it was turning him apocryphal. Not to mention desperate, because of course she said nothing of the kind, never having been herded to Sunday School in her youth the way he had. He licked his lips and faced his task. Please don't let cottonmouth strike.

Cottonmouth struck. His mouth was as dry as British humor, and with an exasperated sigh he took a gulp of wine, letting the soft, buttery acids ignite his salivary glands. He turned back to Victor.

Damn it was big, both long and thick, but his lips now slid easily over the head and he cautiously circled it with his tongue. Emboldened, he pushed farther, but felt his mouth filling too quickly, and he was still so far from the base. Breathe through your nose, he thought. A ripple of pleasure, sensed by fingertips and mouth, traveled the length of Victor's body. Lana rarely made it all the way to the base of Ransom's cock, so he'd just go as far as he could. He could do this, he could. He was the Little Blue Engine of fellatio.

He took more but soon gagged.

Once, during a game of Swap, where each revealed some gender secret to the other, Lana told him that moaning could suppress the gag reflex. He tried that now, and found it quite helpful. So much for the lessons of Sunday school.

"He's a natural," Victor said. "Vigorous head action, occasional whisper of teeth as a memento of danger, and he's already throwing in some hellacious torque. This won't take long."

Lana ruffled the hair on his bobbing head. "My sweet man has always been a quick study."

Victor had marvelous thighs, against which Ransom steadied himself, and just as he was figuring out how to really bring his tongue into play, flicking it against Victor's glans, his mouth filled with come. When he and Lana played Money Shot, he'd licked his own come off her belly and ass, but hadn't everyone done that? This was much warmer, creamier, being recently mixed, and not the cooled and congealing spunk he was accustomed to. Still swabbing cock with his tongue, he reached down between his legs to finger his clit and then remembered that he wasn't Lana, that he had a penis and not a pussy, and thought, Wild, I'm not just in her shoes, I'm in her porniest lingerie. Really kick-ass weed.

Back on his feet, then sitting down, he accepted a glass of red wine, and was toasted by the others. "To Ransom the adventurous!" Victor, though tucked back in, did not put his pants back on, but stood by a plant rack full of freesia and ivies, sipping with one hand and idly massaging his cock with the other.

"Um." Ransom gulped the rest of his wine and poured another glass. "Aren't we done?" He looked from Lana to Victor and back to Lana. "We're not done, are we?"

Lana finished her wine, and Victor said he'd be ready for round two in just a bit, if Lana wanted to make the preparations. She took Ransom by the hand, kissed him, and, while unbuttoning his shirt, whispered that he was her fierce king of come. So he had that going for him, at least.

But there it was. Two shots, Victor had said. Round two. He was going to get fucked in the ass. No other conclusion was possible.

"So that's why we've been eating salads all week," he said as she unbuckled his belt and slipped off his pants, his Batman boxer shorts.

"Don't want a burst of sex gravy to spoil the moment, now do we." She guided him into an all-fours stance on the bed, and began anointing him with oil as if he was a celebrant in some ancient mystery religion, working it around and into his sphincter. "And sending you into the bathroom with an enema kit at this point would kind of change the mood."

"Very thoughtful. Is there any of that joint left?"

She passed the lube to Victor, who was now directly behind Ransom. For a second, Ransom shivered, imagining how thoroughly fired from his job this sort of behavior could get him -- look what happened to Paul Reubens, and he just had his cock in his hand at the movies -- wondering if philosophers would classify this as immoral or amoral. Foucault wouldn't have a problem with it, but Ronnie VanZant sure would. Could he ever listen to "Gimme Three Steps" again?

Ransom felt Victor lining himself up, tip pressed against anus, and like that the spasm of conventional thought passed. In that thought he recognized the narrowness of his parents, of a society that wanted undressed Britney -- the War Barbie, as Lana called her -- to sell soda pop, but needed to vilify sex in its purer forms. It was double-standard and hypocrisy, a sham, and so he dismissed it from his life forever.

As Victor pushed in, Ransom ascended levels of abstraction, beginning with, So this is what it feels like, and soon arriving at a place where sex became differentiated only in its varied configurations of flesh, of cells, here a cock, there a pussy, over here an ass, an open mouth. He saw Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed -- or was that Gilgamesh? -- daisy chained together, saying that as long as people were generous with one another, and not cruel or coercive or manipulative, which parts were going where was immaterial.

Still, for all that, it felt like an umbrella opening inside of him, and the breath whooshed out of his lungs.

Victor had a hand on each of Ransom's cheeks, rocking in and out of him, and was telling Lana that this was an incredibly spankable ass, tight and round, and Lana was acknowledging how joyful it was to do exactly that, and this conversation, talking about Ransom as if he wasn't there, proved immensely arousing. His own cock hovered in the air, quivering, pre-come turning it shiny. Breathing raggedly in time with Victor's thrusts, he reached down to grab himself, and shot Whitman-esque limpid jets at first touch, micro-seconds before Victor came too. Ransom sagged to the bed, feeling full and sticky.

After Victor was gone dancing for money, Lana cleaned Ransom up and then cradled him against her. She hummed softly while she worked, content, and that made him happy. One small, red-shaded lamp illuminated the room. Horn lines from a jazz trumpet softly ribboned along the hash-scented air, and through a window they saw constellations whirling across the sky. She grazed fingertips across his bare chest while he worked his hand lazily through her hair. "Well," he said. "That's it. Time to think up a new game."

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