’Til My Last Breath: A Halloween Story Read online

  No. His hand rose, caressing the back of my head. It would not be the last time tonight that his hand touched the back of my head, but it was most tender time. His other hand pressed between my shoulder blades, until our chests touched, and my shirt began to mop the sweat from his skin. Something possessive in that, some kind of transfer: I will smell like you now.

  * * *

  When he kissed me, it was unexpected. Does a rough beast like this ever kiss? It seemed more forbidden than anything else in the world. The very mouths we use to speak and breathe, pressed against one another. When I felt his tongue outlining my lips, I did not know what to do. I had kissed boys, of course. It had been decades since that fraught sixth-grade dance, and in that time I had grown into the semblance of an adult, with all the fumbling and unbuttoning and sighing that implied. But I had never been caught at the end of the world with an aggressive, mysterious stranger, and his eagerness to part my lips seemed like a moment of decision I was not prepared for.

  * * *

  I had, of course, already made the decision, when I offered to let him stay. Or perhaps the decision was letting him in at all.

  * * *

  Or maybe I had asked for this, when I first stepped out from my hiding place behind the ATM.

  * * *

  In any case, whatever happened here was my fault, my responsibility, and I had to own its consequences.

  * * *

  His tongue tasted like beer and coffee. He kissed me with an urgent tenderness, if such a thing exists, gentle and driving at the same time, a soft implacability that melted me, that made me feel safe. Maybe for once in my life I had not made a mistake.

  * * *

  When our lips parted, his hands were on my shoulders, and it seemed natural, inevitable that he would exert a light pressure on me. As much a part of dancing as anything else, this signal to sink down onto my knees. I did not know what to do with the tendril of disappointment that coiled through me: Oh, this again, it said, even as my lips ached to kiss him.

  * * *

  It sounds so civilized. Perhaps a repugnance based on class: This is not the sort of thing that our sort of people do. Prior relationships, the half-laughter, no really, it’s okay, I’m just not into oral, shuddering at the very word oral, its connection to dentists and surgery and anatomical models. Playing off the fear, keeping a careful lid on the boiling emotions underneath, the way that desire and terror mix, become the same. I always ended up doing it for them, I always opened my mouth, you know you want this--who told me that? Was it me telling myself that?

  * * *

  I knew I wanted this. I hungered for it as much as it scared me. I could feel each tooth of his zipper ticking through the mechanism as I sought to release him. The evidence of his hunger for me (for me!) already apparent, the outline of it making a topographical map, a jutting peninsula of need stretching down his pants leg.

  * * *

  He wore nothing underneath his pants, the uncivilized beast. How did he not worry about zippers, about chafing? He didn’t worry about anything, I understood. His hand with the certainty of long practice reached down, extracting his thickness from its prison, presenting it to me. For your consideration...

  * * *

  When I read about these things happening (and I do read about them, there’s so little to do here but read, and wait, and read, and wait, and I find my favorite stories have undergone physical transformation, the corners of the pages softer from frequent touching, flipping back and forth between favorite paragraphs), so much attention is paid to the texture and color of the cock, although in my experience there are only a few types: The smooth pink bullet, visually unimpressive but often achingly hard. The ragged veiny brown root, like something dug up from the garden, often softer than you expected, as though the plant had not been watered. My mysterious stranger had the third type, thick but not distended, hard but with a pleasing amount of give, a cock that reminds you of its vulnerabilities and power at the same time.

  * * *

  His slit was wet, and I took this as a compliment: He was becoming hard for me, he was leaking precum for me. His hand still around his shaft, he guided his cock head, tracing the edge of my lips, his precum surprisingly cool against my skin. I licked the center of my upper lip. By accident, by design, the tip of my tongue touched his slit, and I tasted the salt of him.

  * * *

  There is this moment I have always cherished when first on my knees before someone, this moment right before things become serious. A moment of possibility, when anything might happen. I might suck this cock into my mouth. I might bite it. I might stand up and walk away. Though the outcome is known, to the point that I feel the gravitational pull of fate letting me fall towards him, in this moment I am free, in this moment I have the power, more power than I’ve ever had in my life.

  * * *

  I use the power. He wants me to suck his cock. Instead, I consider his balls. They hang heavily, unprotected, a contradiction in a soft, bumpy sack: The true seat of all that mystic power of the male, the fountain that produces the testosterone that drives him forward, and yet the most vulnerable spot on him, unguarded. I feel him tense as I nuzzle the skin where his sack meets his pelvis. His balls move of their own accord, alive beneath the silken skin. I pull one of them into my mouth with long-practiced care. The sound he makes is a high whimper, pleasure and fear combined. He knows I have the power now, however briefly. I am like the high priest of some ancient and ravenous sun-god, with the heart of my enemy in my mouth, stealing his energy, his authority.

  * * *

  When I let his ball slip from my mouth, the skin of his sack held gently between my lips, my teeth safe millimeters away, he exhales a long breath, as though we had just been on a dangerous journey together, but have arrived at a spot on the map he knows and understands. A transfer of power. An understanding that the transfer was an illusion all along. Even with his balls in my mouth, he was still formidable, capable of summoning great thunderclouds of punishment should I actually use the power I had so tentatively held.

  * * *

  In his mind, then, we are back to business. My lips are wet and parted from sucking on his sack, and he introduces the head of his cock to my mouth. I am obedient. No, I am eager, because he wants it, and I want it too. To serve someone greater than yourself is a perverse joy. The head of his cock is fat and hot, heavier than I might have expected, as I weigh it on my tongue.

  * * *

  We speak of sucking cocks as though suction were the point, as though what men desired most was physics, a lesson in negative pressure. I did not suck his cock. I fucked it with my mouth, getting it wet and bathing it with my tongue. Feeling the soft give of those thick veins, taking in as much as I could. My hands rose to his hips to steady myself, but one hand could not help but travel up, to run fingers over him, a kind of possessiveness on my part. You’re mine now. I could feel the muscularity of his ass. His entire body was tensed, coiled, ready, and I understood his readiness.

  * * *

  When he touched the back of my head again, it felt predestined. I could have predicted it to the second. First, the caress, his fingers slipping through the short hair, then firming up his grip, then the pressure.

  * * *

  With other men--the weaker ones, the emotional and understanding ones--we would often have a talk, long before my mouth traveled their bodies.

  * * *

  I can’t go too far down, I’d say. It’s scary and uncomfortable.

  * * *

  They’d nod and proclaim their understanding.

  * * *

  There’s this thing in my past... I wouldn’t explain, not right away. In fact the explanation was the reward, stored away for those who could resist the urge to go deeper, although I would never tell them that, would never mention that I had every intention of keeping this secret to myself. They would have pried it out of me. They would have asked, and asked, and asked, until I couldn’t withstand it anymore. So
I told them when they were hot, when they wanted me so badly they would promise anything, and didn’t care too much for an explanation. Sure, I understand. Then, with the inevitability and implacability of the tides, the hand would come around the back of my head, the hips would press forward, and they’d try to fuck deeper into me.

  * * *

  I couldn’t have that talk with a man like this. A man used to ownership, used to taking whatever he wanted, because everyone so eagerly offered it up. His cock slid back, past the point my tongue could control it, the softness of his head against my soft palate, it sounds so gentle to say it like that, so soft, but in my perception his cock had swollen large enough to choke the world.

  * * *

  I tried to be good. I knew the tricks: Breathe through your nose. Swallow frequently. Don’t panic. But when I tried to breathe through my nose, it felt like all the oxygen in the room had gone away. I swallowed, but that just seemed to make his cock grow even larger.

  * * *

  I panicked. A thin high noise of fear, pulling my head back, forcing his hands away.

  * * *

  Maybe this didn’t happen to him. Maybe people were so grateful to have him, the thickness of his cock down their throats never mattered. Maybe they were afraid to say anything.

  * * *

  I fell back onto my haunches, gasping for breath. Without looking at him I moved over to the couch, slipping the pulse ox onto my finger, pulling on the air tube. Gasp, gasp, gasp, absurdly conscious that hyperventilation would use up my ration faster.

  * * *

  When I was able to look up, he was standing in the same spot, turned now toward the couch. Arms loose, cock still hard and jutting, slick from my spit. Concern on his face. Not sympathy. Concern. Maybe he had wandered into the nest of a crazy person. I could see him measuring likelihoods, considering his options.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this must seem ridiculous. I wish I could explain.”

  * * *

  Before the world began to end, there was a sense of possibility with every word spoken, specifically, the sense that everything you said was a branching point, the universe expanding with each possible reply someone could give. In one universe, a man like this would argue with me. In another, he’d pull up his pants and walk out. There was one where he came to the couch and put himself back into my mouth.

  * * *

  That sense of branching possibility had changed during the Big Choke. Now the range of plausible outcomes seemed smaller and smaller, to the point that it made perfect sense when he walked to the couch and slumped heavily on it, a careful distance from me, his naked cock still pointed toward the ceiling.

  * * *

  He pointed at the pulse ox. “High enough?”

  * * *

  “93,” I said. I pushed the air tube toward him, remembering for a brief moment watching smokers outside passing cigarettes back and forth.

  * * *

  “It’s all bullshit,” he said. “The air tubes, the plastic bag dome, all of it.”

  * * *

  I could tell from the way he said it, that he was returning to a favorite theme, one he was not able to share often enough with listeners.

  * * *

  Too flustered from my recent panic to argue, too fearful, I remained silent.

  * * *

  “You think I’m crazy,” he said, “but I’m not. It doesn’t make any sense. It never made any sense. We breathe oxygen. The oxygen is still there. It didn’t go away just because there’s more of the bad stuff in the air.”

  * * *

  There’s this thing in my past... My brain was still working on excuses, apologies for how I’d responded. There wasn’t room in my head for listening to conspiracy theories about how we weren’t going to die.

  * * *

  “Before the news went off the air,” he continued, “they had this scientist who said it would take way, way more carbon dioxide than this, to be lethal. So why did they put the city in a dome? Why all the police? You ask yourself, who profits off that?”

  * * *

  There’s this thing in my past. A guy. A man I respected so much, who had the answer for everything. I could listen to him talk for hours, and over the course of days and weeks and months, all that listening turned into attraction, into a hunger for him I was too shy to express. Then one day he said to me....

  * * *

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “I think they herded us all in here like cattle, so they could do something else with the land out there. Something they don’t want anybody to know about.”

  * * *

  Then one day he said to me, you have the prettiest mouth, did anyone ever tell you that, how pretty it is, I have been watching you sitting there reading, watching your lips, I hope you don’t mind, the way you breathe, the way your teeth touch your lower lip while you read...

  * * *

  I arrived back at the present, tense. Memory made me ready to defend myself. Regretting my tone the minute I spoke, I said, “So they put every city in the world under a big plastic bag so they can do...what, exactly, with the land?”

  * * *

  He shook his head. “Who says it’s every city in the world? They do. What if they’re lying? What if it’s just us? Cut off our phones, cut off the internet, who’s going to know?”

  * * *

  I couldn’t sit still. I dropped the pulse ox monitor on the table and walked to my kitchenette. I poured myself a glass of water. At least there was still plenty of water to go around.

  * * *

  Sometimes memory makes it hard to be in the present. You feel stretched between three distinct points in time and space: The past, when the events you are remembering happened. The present, inside your head, tangled in this memory. The present, outside your head, the events actually happening around you. It makes you feel dizzy. It makes you feel like there’s no air in the room.

  * * *

  I gulped the water down. Where does the water come from? I thought, then pushed the thought away. Conspiracy theories. Where was the water-works? Was it outside the dome? Who worked there? Did anybody work anywhere anymore?

  * * *

  “There’s nothing to that dome,” he said. “You could cut through it, if you could find the right spot. Take a while, but you could do it. That’s the only way I can think of to prove it. I know where you could get the equipment. There’s a place that used to sell hardware--”

  * * *

  I set my glass in the sink. The CD had ended, and I walked over to the player to slide another CD into its place. “I don’t want to talk about the end of the world,” I said.

  * * *

  Intoxicated, that’s how I felt. Such a useful word. Drunk, poisoned, it can mean either thing. I held on to the counter.

  * * *

  He wasn’t supposed to pick up on my distress. He was insensitive, wasn’t he? Wasn’t that part of his appeal, a rough, primal selfishness that you had to give yourself over to? Whatever I expected of him, it was not his rising from the sofa, his cock now soft, swaying with every step. His hand on my shoulder, face close to mine. He didn’t ask if I was okay. His version of sensitivity had its limits, or maybe he just understood that conversation has its limits.

  * * *

  You know how placid the public service announcements are. They’re meant to calm, at the same time they are describing a situation that should drive the population into panic. Citizens are reminded that oxygen rations should not be traded or sold. What seething black market lurked beneath that announcement?

  * * *

  It’s the same way, trying to talk to someone about the past. If you tell it as a story, it loses its power--not over you, of course, because the nightmares and breathlessness don’t stop just because you tell it. But there’s always some visceral detail that gets left out. Some bland comfort that is added in the translation of trauma into words, so you won’t hurt your listener.

&nbs
p; * * *

  Even the word trauma is softer than it should be. Efficient, psychological, the sort of word you use when you’re denoting something that is understood and under control.

  * * *

  At least if you’re silent about it, no one can misunderstand. No boy with care in his eyes, thinking he has comforted and healed you by his gracious act of listening. None of that sinking feeling, seeing his confidence, knowing you have to help prop it up now by acting comforted and healed.

  * * *

  We’re at the end of the world. I don’t want to lie anymore. Explanations are just lies you tell to make people think they understand the truth. I don’t want to explain anymore. I don’t want to tell this story.