The Pledge

THE PLEDGE


The orgasm took me so hard that my eyes crossed; I couldn\'t see straight. I couldn\'t move; I\'m not sure I could even breathe. They used to call orgasms \"the little death\" and it is clear to me why that is. There is nothing at all left inside me; everything that mattered I had just ejaculated into him.

I pulled out and fell prostrate on the bed. It took all my strength to slide up to lie beside him. That\'s it; my life is now complete. We\'ve been together for over sixteen years, but I don\'t think it has ever felt quite as good as this.

Now isn\'t that ironic?


This mess all started back in May, just over six months ago, naturally. I was on a buying trip to Chicago. It was one of those rare days in the windy city where the weather was fine. Everywhere I looked things were green and in bloom and the air that blew in from the lake felt not raw but energizing. As I left the conference center, it whistled to me that I still had more than two hours of daylight to enjoy.

Most other days I would have settled for a workout and dinner at the hotel, then crawling into bed to page through the latest Clive Cussler novel to see what adventure Dirk was up to. That evening, however, Halsted Street was calling.

Peter and I both enjoyed the occasional trick. It kept things interesting and was cheaper than tickets to ballgames or the playhouse. The deal was that we only had safer sex with tricks so that we could continue to enjoy anything we cared to between ourselves.

Our system had worked for over fifteen years, but this time I messed up.

For a while I just wandered the Boystown strip taking in the scenery, so to speak. Age had not diminished my libido, but it sure had my tolerance for smoke, loud music and drunks. I stopped by Roscoe\'s and Sidetrack but didn\'t last long for just those reasons. Then I thought of Steamworks.

I hadn\'t been in a bathhouse in years.

I paid for a short-term membership, and a single room for a couple hours. Call me old-fashioned, but I like a little privacy for sex. I stripped to my towel and stored my stuff, then headed out to cruise the public areas. My discipline with my gym routine seemed to be paying off. Plenty of guys were checking out the new meat: me.

In the maze of glory holes, I met Chad and Dennis. We all three seemed to like what we saw, so I invited them back to my room.

Oh, and it didn\'t hurt that Dennis was hung like a hippo. It wasn\'t that his tool was particularly long, but it was one of the thickest I\'d ever seen. I\'d think an erection would make him dizzy from low blood pressure, or that he\'d fall forward from the skewed center of gravity.

Chad was young and shaved--or waxed--all over. He had the smoothest skin. Wherever you sucked he slid smooth as butter under your tongue. It drove him almost insane when I took his balls in my mouth and worked them.

I blew Chad while Dennis jacked himself. The boy was lithe and totally H. O. T! I could see why Dennis liked to watch him in action.

The kid was fun. The more he got into being sucked, the wilder the things he said. Soon he was demanding to be spanked barehanded.

That was one wish I could safely grant.

Each smack made him crazier, begging for more and more specific acts. Most of them I knew weren\'t going to happen, but the talk was turning me on just the same.

I guess I wasn\'t the only one because Dennis climbed up on the bed behind me and rubbed his dick against my ass. He held my hips and rocked against my crack, grunting with every thrust. \"What the fuck are you doing to my boyfriend, you pathetic little cocksucker? Do you like to hear little boys scream and beg, huh? Do you like to make them crawl?\"

Dennis slid his hand around and jerked my dick as he whispered worse and worse vulgarities into my ear while Chad continued making obscene demands in front. I was pressed between the two dicks with the sounds of sex in stereo and, as much as I wanted this to last, I knew I was going to lose it soon.

I would have told the kid to hurry up, but my mouth was full of his dick.

I felt the distinctive pressure building in my balls and relaxed into the countdown sequence to blast-off that couldn\'t be far away.

But then I gagged and choked and broke my rhythm as from behind, Dennis shoved it bareback up my ass.

My mind screamed, \"No, I only play safe!\" but my mouth was stuffed full of Chad\'s cock and unable to participate and my overcharged glands were perfectly happy to look the other way.

It felt like I was being ripped in two with the size of that hippo cock. I don\'t think I\'d ever been so full. I knew I should make him stop, but it was so intense and with every movement there was less pain and more pleasure and I was stuck between the two cocks and I was so close; I was so goddammed close.

Dennis rammed it into me one last time and I came in spurts so hard I shot up and over my head.

\"Coming!\" Chad warned, his pretty face congested and contorted. By reflex, I spat him out; he yanked himself twice and came in gallons all over Dennis\'s face.

Dennis groaned and gripped me harder. He thrust a few more times and, with a curse, he blew his load straight up my ass--all the way up to my tonsils I think.

\"Oh man, that was great!\" Dennis said as he tossed my towel to me.

\"You negative?\" I asked, wiping up.

\"Yeah--guess so,\" he said with a shrug.

Fair enough. A useless question yields a useless answer--what else did I expect?

I dressed and left back for my hotel and the bedtime book I should have been content with if I\'d had any fucking sense.

I agonized for all of five minutes about telling Peter. I knew perfectly well I had to. If I caught something, oh well. You make your bed; you lie in it.

On the other hand, if I were to give Peter something, I could never live with myself for that.

We had a huge fight--made worse by the fact that I didn\'t have a leg to stand on and we both knew it--but you don’t make it sixteen years without learning how to use fights constructively. In the end we cleared the air of a lot of things and the only real fallout was that for the next six months my fluids would be treated like biohazardous waste.

I could still swallow Peter or take him bareback, since he had been a good boy, but everything involving my dick was to be wrapped in latex and sprayed down with nonoxyl-9.

It\'s funny, I had no idea how painful that would be. I grew up with condoms as a fact of life--my whole generation did, at least everyone who was still alive and healthy, or they wouldn\'t be by now. Using condoms never bothered me with tricks.

With Peter it was different. It\'s nothing as simple as missing the taste of come or the feel of skin on skin. It\'s more the loss of that intimacy of absolute abandon where nothing is shameful and you are always accepted and safe.

You don\'t think you can be lonely with your lover? Try it some time. Watch his face contract as he jerks away from your pre-cum and then tell me a condom doesn\'t change a thing.

Try knowing that your climax could kill him if the precautions fail, and then see how good sex feels.

I see now it\'s not the sensation that the latex diminished, but the years of absolute trust and sanctuary that we had come to take for granted. Who knew that such a microthin piece of material could throw up such a solid wall?

No matter what Peter tried to say or do to make it better, every moment that we made love was a reminder to me of all that we had had together, and all that we stood to lose.

The six-month mark put us in late November, so I picked the Friday after Thanksgiving to go for the test. It\'s not the best day to choose; it meant I would have to sweat through the weekend waiting for results. To go another day I would have had to ask my boss for the time off, and I couldn\'t think of a way to do that without explaining a trick who was hung like a hippo, so I settled for using the day I already had off.

When the nurse called me from the waiting room, Peter got up and came with me. When she asked me what I was there for, Peter said he wanted a test too.

I had to bite back my annoyance. I swore I had never put him at risk.

\"I know,\" he said, \"but waiting for test results sucks, and I\'m not going to let you do it alone.\"

Christ on a crutch! That goddammed bastard damn near made me cry in the middle of the clinic in front of the nurse and all. I had to look away.

I would have asked him to marry me right then and there but I couldn\'t; we had already married in Canada last year.


After work today, we called back to the clinic. Most negative results were given over the phone. A handful of negative people were told to come back to the clinic to discuss the report--just like the positive people--just so no one would \"know\" they were positive should they get that message.

It didn\'t matter. We both got our results on the phone. I didn\'t realize I\'d been holding my breath until I finally let it out. I was okay. We were both okay.

Probably okay. At six months it\'s still \"probably\".

But hey, how many things are for certain in this world?

\"So, what do you want to do to celebrate?\" Peter asked.

I grinned and backed up against the kitchen counter. Peter dropped down to his knees. I was already half-hard by the time he pulled me into his hand.

When he took me in his mouth it was no different than any other time--but it was. Knowing that this time there would be no stopping ignited some forgotten part of my brain and with the first touch of lips to my shaft I was on fire heading for explosion.

Before I knew what happened, I was screaming some perversion of his name and coming so hard it actually hurt in my groin. I unbent from over his shoulder and removed my hand from where it had cramped around a handful of his hair.

\"Geez, Chris,\" laughed Peter, wiping my jism from his lips with the back of his hand, \"that used up two minutes. So what do you want to do for the rest of the night?\"

\"I\'m sorry,\" I said, wishing my heartbeat would slow back down.

He stood and wrapped his arms around me, his erection easily palpable through the denim of his jeans. He kissed me and pushed my own spunk deep in my mouth until it coated my tongue too. \"It\'s okay,\" he said when he finally broke the kiss.

I would really like to know what it is about an orgasm that induces this sort of thing, because this time I did begin to cry.

\"It\'s okay,\" he said, and held me until it was.

What we did the rest of the evening was lie naked on the sofa eating popcorn and watching mindless TV. Hey, who says it\'s all downhill after marriage? I spent most of the time with my hand between his legs, stroking his thighs and fondling his basket, making him hard over and over again. But he stopped me every time he got too hot. He wouldn\'t let me jerk him off.

\"I\'m saving it for later,\" he said. \"You\'ve got until after \'Will and Grace\' to rest up, then we\'re really going to celebrate.\"

And celebrate we did. When I entered him skin to skin, it felt like the very first time. I was glad I had already blown once tonight already, or I never would have lasted even the two minutes I did the first time. Peter knelt curled underneath me, drawn almost into a ball, choking unintelligible things into the pillow and pleading with me to give him even more. When I felt him come around me, my body finally let loose and every horrible, guilty, lonely minute of the last six months seemed to channel through me and shoot out with my cum.

When we could move, Peter pulled me up into his arms. Where my cheek met his breast our skin pulled and stuck together with a smelly mix of sweat and semen and I don\'t know what else and I didn\'t care. It was a glorious mess and it was all ours. All I wanted was to never have to move again.

I hate this virus. I hate everything about it. I hate it for the friends it has taken from me and the years of life it has taken from them. I hate how the mere unsubstantiated specter of it could come between everything Peter and I have built.

I hate that something so small, so unknowable and so random can have so much power over us.

There has to be a cure. There has to be an answer. Until there is, I swear that I will never, ever do anything else to give it the chance to do this to me--to us--again.

---

December 1: World Aids Day
Until there is a cure…