SOFT

I. It’s That Time

The door clicks shut behind me, and the whole day goes with it.

Nobody in the apartment. Nobody for the next twelve hours. That’s the first sensation, before any skin is even bare: the feeling of being looked at lifting off my shoulders, the way it does when the lock turns. My jaw unclenches. I didn’t know it was clenched. Twenty-six years in this body, and it always is.

Okay, the voice in me says. We’re alone now. We can be a body.

I click the lamp on the nightstand, the low one that turns my skin the color of tea in a glass. The overhead is off. The window’s still got that blue dusk bleeding through the blinds, that cold wash, and the two kinds of light mix on my floor.

I’ve known since about two this afternoon. Every guy knows the feeling, even if no one says it out loud. It shows up in the middle of something ordinary, a meeting, an email, the line at the coffee place, and it doesn’t leave. A low, patient itch. The body clearing its throat. It’s that time.

Usually I’d have the phone propped on the pillow by now. I’ve done it plenty: ten minutes, done, lights off, like brushing your teeth. Not tonight. On the train home, I made myself a promise. No phone. No hurry. Soft first, and feel every stage of it.

Sure, the voice says. We’ll see how long that lasts.

I start with the collar. Two fingers, one button, the little pop of it giving. The air finds my throat, cooler than I expected, and my throat notices. It’s the noticing, the sudden awareness of a place that had gone numb under cotton all day. My neck is a place. My collarbone is a place. The shirt comes off over my head, and for a second my face is in it. The day caught in the cotton: coffee and sweat and me. The fabric drags across my shoulders, a good rough scrape of weave. Then the air is on my chest. My nipples tighten without asking me, two quick hard points, and I feel each one like a small cold coin pressed into me.

There it is, the voice says. Feel that, Donny?

The belt next. The leather’s warm where my body has been heating it all day. I unhook it and pull it through the loops, and the sound is obscene in a quiet room, that long shhhh of leather sliding. The waistband gives. My gut relaxes a half inch, and my breath comes deeper on its own.

The button. The zipper, the toothy rasp of it going down. The fly opens. Cool air rushes in where it’s been close and humid all day, and my pelvis wakes up like a room with the window thrown open.

I hook my thumbs in the waistband of my jeans and boxers and push down, bending to pull them past my knees. The fabric peels off my thighs with a faint tacky sound, a hot line of friction where it separates, and my legs are bare… BARE.

Good, I think, standing up straight. Just that. Just standing here. Just be in your skin. Enjoy it, feel it.

The mirror on the closet door has me from the shoulders down. The old reflex is to look away. I don’t.

Socks last. I sit on the edge of the bed to get them, and my bare ass meets the cool sheet, and I actually flinch, a full-body shiver, and laugh at myself a little out loud in the empty room. Peel the first sock. The air on the sole of my foot is so specific it’s almost ticklish. Second sock. The floor under my bare feet is cool and slightly grainy, and my toes curl into it.

Then I stand up in the middle of the room, naked, and just let it happen.

II. Nobody Watching

This is the part before anything else, the part where I’m just naked, unaroused, standing in a room, and I can feel all of my skin at once for the first time all day.

The air moves. The fan in the corner, low, a slow turning. It pushes across me like a wide soft hand: over my shoulders, down my chest, into the hollow of my navel where it pools and cools, and along the tops of my thighs, and between my legs. Between. The air gets in between my legs, across my balls, causing them to draw up tight and high against me. The skin there is so thin it feels like a layer’s missing.

My hips (I don’t know how else to say it) feel exposed, the bone of them, the flat planes of my pelvis, the soft slope down into the crease of my groin.

And the soft thing hanging between my legs just hangs. That’s it. That’s the whole event. It’s heavy in a way you forget, in underwear, when it’s supported and held and packed away. Take the support away, and it’s loose, unbothered, moving a little when I shift my weight, swaying against the top of my thigh when I turn, and I feel every one of those tiny movements in my gut.

You’re soft, the voice says, fond of me. Look at you. Completely soft. Nothing happening. Nothing needs to happen.

That’s the sensation underneath it all, if I’m honest, the one that makes my chest feel wide: nobody’s watching. My cock is soft, and it’s mine, and it isn’t for anything yet.

It’s not long. Maybe two inches, which is under average. Yes, I’ve looked it up. It rests on the curve of my balls. The shaft has a slight curve when it’s like this, a soft banana tilt to the left. The head is tucked in against itself, hooded, shy, that wrinkled cap of skin over the tip, the tip peeking out in a neat slit. The skin is darker there than the rest of me, always has been, a dusk color. The vein along the side is barely there when I’m soft, a faint bluish river you have to look for.

I look at it for a while. I let myself look, which is a luxury.

The sheet is cool, and it’s the good kind of cool, the kind you only get in a bed nobody’s been in all day. I lie down on my back, and it’s everywhere. My shoulder blades. My heels. The back of my skull. My spine sinks into it. My ass flattens into the mattress, and the mattress pushes up, warm and patient, against me.

I stretch. Arms overhead, toes pointed, my back in a long arch. It pulls my belly flat, my ribs wide, my groin taut, and the soft thing between my legs lifts away from my body and then settles back down, plop, against my balls, and the contact is a soft wet kiss of skin on skin that goes straight up my spine.

Oh, I think. Hello.

I put my hands behind my head, lie there, and let the air work on me. Legs apart, knees fallen open, everything loose. The room is dim and quiet, and the fan keeps going around, a soft tick on every turn, and the blue light from the blinds is laid across my legs in stripes.

My breathing slows. My belly rises and falls, and my navel fills and empties. Slowly, without decision, the temperature between my legs starts to change, warm and aware, and I can feel the blood starting to head south.

Not yet, I tell it. Let’s stay soft a minute.

And it does. That’s the good part. I lie there soft and warm and aware, and it’s like sitting on the edge of a pool with just my feet in the water.

III. That’s One

The first touch is almost nothing. Two fingers, the pads of them, down along the inside of my thigh, dragging up. Not toward anything. Just up the soft hairless stretch of skin there where it’s thin and pale and sensitive, and the friction of my fingertips on it is loud somehow, a bright fine tingle that follows my hand all the way up.

Up. Past the crease. And then the backs of my fingers brush the side of my balls, and it’s so light that my lower belly jumps and my breath catches and… nothing. Nothing else. I take my hand away.

That’s one.

Back down. Up the other thigh. The same jolt when I brush my balls, half scare and half good, and this time there’s a tiny answering tug in the base of my cock, a pulse of interest, and it lifts maybe a quarter inch off my balls and drops back.

That’s two.

The third pass, my fingers find the shaft.

Just the shaft. Just the soft, soft body of it lying there, and I pinch it lightly between two fingers near the base and drag, slow, all the way up to the head, feeling the loose skin move over the shaft underneath, that slide of it, loose as a sleeve. The head is the last thing. My fingers find it still hooded and soft, and I push the skin back off it with my thumb, and the air hits what’s underneath.

Ahh.

It’s a shock of cool. My hips lift a fraction, and the whole thing twitches hard once, and I feel the base pulse between my fingers. The head is soft still, but it’s changed: that little bit swollen, that little bit plumped and glossy, and when my thumb circles the ridge of it, the nerve endings under there light up all at once.

That’s the switch, the voice says.

IV. Small Weather

I make myself ease off. Soft first.

And it’s still soft. Sort of. It’s soft the way a pillow is soft, not the way a rope is soft. There’s something starting under it now, a new density running up the middle of it, warm and steady. The skin over it is still loose and movable, and I can gather it in my hand, roll it, slide it, and under my fingers, the thing is becoming less like skin and more like me.

Now a part of me has its own address. Its own weight. Its own small weather. It lies across my belly now instead of on my balls. Skin on skin, warm and humid, and every time I breathe, it rides the rise and fall of my stomach.

I can feel my own heartbeat in it. The pulse is in the shaft, at the base, a soft thudding against my hand when I cup it. Faster than it should be.

My nipples are hard. When I cup my balls, they sit snug in my palm. The skin of the sac is wrinkled, tight, and goosefleshed, and when I run my thumb over it, the touch is almost too much, a hot, ticklish pull that shoots straight up through me.

Come on, the voice says. Just a little. Nobody would know.

I would, I tell it.

So I pull my hand away and lay it flat on the sheet beside me, not touching it. I just watch.

V. Without Me

It keeps going without me. It doesn’t need my hand for this part. The blood just keeps arriving, slow and steady, and I can feel the shaft lengthening along my belly a little at a time, the head creeping up toward my navel like the minute hand on a clock. The loose skin I was rolling between my fingers a minute ago draws in and smooths out. Then taut. Then tight and polished. The faint blue vein I’d looked for earlier stands up along the side now, thick as a cord.

And then the weight changes. Soft, it was heavy the way a sleeping thing is heavy. Now it’s heavy the way a held breath is heavy, and it lifts. Off my belly. A half inch of air between us, then an inch, and it stands up off me, angled back toward my navel, the head swaying in a slow circle like it’s deciding which way to point.

Look at that, the voice says. Nobody asked you to do that.

The curve is gone. That soft leftward tilt has straightened into something that means it. The head has come all the way out on its own, the hood pulled back and gathered in a soft ring under the ridge. It’s swollen, smooth, and dark, nearly purple, the skin stretched so thin and shiny it looks wet even where it isn’t. There’s a fullness at the root, deep behind my balls, a pressure like a fist made of warm water, and when I flex the muscle down there the whole thing jumps in the air, once, hard, and slaps back down.

I do it again just to feel it. Flex. Jump. Slap. It’s ridiculous. I’m grinning at the ceiling.

And then, out of nowhere, the old reflex. I catch myself in the closet mirror, and for a second it isn’t me; it’s some guy flat on his back, grinning, making his dick jump for the fan in the corner. My face goes hot. I actually glance at the bedroom door. Empty. Of course it’s empty. I look back at the mirror, and this time I make myself keep looking. Flushed chest. Knees open. Hard and a little ridiculous and twenty-six. It’s just me. Nobody else gets to see this.

Hard is a different country. Soft, I could forget it was there. Hard, I can’t think about anything else. It’s the hottest part of me. The fan air doesn’t cool it; it just slides over it and makes me aware of every inch of the surface, especially the underside, that tight seam running from the base to the head, so sensitive that a breath of air along it makes my thighs tense.

I wrap two fingers around it, loose, not stroking, just to measure. Grower, not a shower. Thank God. It’s thick in my grip, and it doesn’t give. Under the hot skin it’s solid all the way through, and it throbs against my fingers, and the throb is answered somewhere low in my belly, like a bell rung in another room.

Now, the voice says. Now you can have it.

I spit in my palm. Not elegant. Just spit, and I wrap my whole hand around the shaft and slide up.

VI. The Whole World

The first wet slide is the best slide.

Friction shifts from dry to slick in one stroke, and the difference is enormous. The hand just glides now. Up the shaft. Over the ridge. Over the bare, swollen head. Slick and hot, and the sound is faint, a wet shk only I can hear, and the sound alone does something to my chest.

Up. The skin gathers at the top and rolls with my fist. The head disappears into the fold. Pushes through. Pops out dark and gleaming, and I feel the pop all the way down, a little flare, a little hey.

Down. The fist slides back, and the skin follows, and the shaft rolls inside my grip, and there’s a pull at the very base, where it’s anchored into me. Deep and good. It tugs on something in my core, and my core answers. Contracts. Tightens. A warm rush runs from my groin up through my gut and out into my legs.

Oh, I breathe. Oh, that.

Down again. Up again. And now there’s a rhythm, and the rhythm is the whole world, and my hand knows the way and doesn’t need me anymore. The wrist turning a little on the upstroke, thumb dragging across the slit at the top, gathering the clear fluid that’s beading there and spreading it down. The bead comes back. Faster each time. Warm, and mine, and every stroke slicker than the last.

My hips start moving. Tiny rolls, meeting my hand, fucking up into my fist a half inch at a time. The sheet drags under my ass. The mattress dips. My heels dig in.

Yes. Yeah. There you go. There you go, Donny.

It builds like something being wound.

The building is in my gut: a tightening in the low belly, right above my cock, a hard slow knot drawing closed, and every stroke draws it tighter, and the base of my spine draws in with it, and the backs of my thighs, and my balls ride up tight against the shaft. My toes curl. My jaw sets. My breath grows shallow, fast, and loud in the quiet room.

The sound has changed too. Wetter, quicker, a steady rhythm I can hear over the fan. If anyone were in the next room, they’d know exactly what I’m doing. Ten minutes ago that thought had me checking the door. Now it does the opposite.

The muscle floor down there, the one I can’t see, is fluttering. Involuntary clenches, three or four a second. Each one sends a pulse up the shaft. I feel it reach the tip and then leave again. The ridge stands out hard, the sharpest, brightest, most awake line on my entire body.

Don’t stop, I tell my hand. Don’t you dare stop.

Faster. And the faster is not better, exactly; it’s deeper, it’s taking me further down a road, and there’s a fog coming in at the edges of my thinking. The room dims. The fan goes quiet. The only things left in the world are my fist and the knot and the long slick column of heat running up through my groin. I can’t think in whole words anymore.

There. There. There.

I slow down at the top. Deliberately. Squeeze and hold, and count, and see how long I can stand there.

The knot is right there, wound to the last turn, and with my grip tight at the base the whole thing holds and holds, and the pleasure doesn’t fade; it just sits there, brimming, and I can feel the exact lip of it, the exact edge, like standing on the last step of a staircase in the dark and knowing the floor is one inch down.

One. Everything holds. My fist is clamped at the base, and I can feel the charge of it backed up behind my grip, pressing, patient.

Two. My breath stops on its own. The fan passes over me, and I feel it on my wet chest, on my lips, on the slick head, and every one of those touches is the same size now. There’s no small anymore.

Three. A clear drop wells up at the slit and sits there, trembling with my pulse. I can hear my own heart in my ears. I can smell myself, warm and salty and close, and the smell alone nearly takes me over.

Four. My fist slips. It slides up before I can stop it, and my thumb drags across the underside, that V of skin under the ridge, that tight, thin band, and a hot white burst hits my pelvis. My hips buck. A sound comes out of me that I didn’t plan.

God. God. Okay.

I’m sweating. Chest and throat and the backs of my knees. My thighs are trembling, a fine, fast shake I can’t stop, and my mouth is open, my breath ragged.

Almost, the voice says, sounding far away now. Almost, almost, okay, okay… Told you.

And I let it come.

It doesn’t happen in my cock. It happens behind my cock, deep at the base, in my core, and then it arrives.

The first contraction is huge. A single hard clench from somewhere deep inside all the way out, a grip closing inside me, and it grabs the pleasure and wrings it. The first spurt comes out of me with a force that surprises me every single time. It lands high, up near my navel, and I feel the whole journey of it: the build at the base, the push through the shaft, the tight squeeze as it passes the grip of my hand, the release at the tip, every inch of it, felt from the inside, and then the hot splat of it landing on my own skin.

Ohhhh F U C K.

The second one follows a half second behind. Another clench, deeper, lower, pulling all the way down into the space behind my balls. This one is the best one, the one that empties the coil out, and the pleasure comes with it in a long ringing wave, my legs going straight, my heels digging, my back arching clear off the sheet, my mouth open and nothing coming out.

Third. Weaker. Fourth. Fifth. Each one softer, still wringing out another pulse, shorter than the last but still good, still part of it, still mine.

And then it’s over, and my hand is still moving, and the sensitivity has gone from a pleasure to a test. Every stroke is almost too much. The head is raw. I have to let go, and the letting-go is its own kind of relief, and I fall back flat on the bed, chest heaving, and the room comes back.

VII. Nowhere to Be

The fan. The blue stripes on my legs. The lamp.

I’m lying in a wet mess of my own, and it’s cooling, and the cooling is nice. The load on my belly has started to slide slowly into the hollow of my navel, thick and white and pooled. I run two fingers through it. Slick and warm. It strings between my fingers. I bring it up and smell it, and it’s me, sharp and faintly sweet. Most nights, I’d grab the T-shirt off the floor, wipe up, and be done. Tonight I leave it.

My cock is still half hard, lying across my hip, glossy and dark, and every few seconds it does a dying twitch, a last aftershock, a tiny clench down low that sends a ghost of the pleasure back up through me.

Good, the voice says, quiet now, sleepy. Good. Good.

Shut up, I tell it, a full minute late. I’m smiling at the ceiling.

And then it starts going soft. Slowly, the hardness draining from the tip back toward the base, the head shrinking back into itself, the curve coming back, that lazy leftward tilt, the whole thing settling back down onto my balls with a soft wet weight and a small warm plop.

Soft again. Two inches of it. The tip hooded over and shy. The vein along the side, a faint blue river.

And here’s the last sensation, the one I like best and never tell anyone about: the emptiness. The knot gone entirely. Everything deep down unclenched. My balls dropped low and heavy and contented in their sac, warm and slack. My legs loose. My jaw loose. A big dumb softness through my whole chest.

I wonder if other guys do this. Not the jerking off. Everybody does that. This part. Lying in it afterward. Paying attention.

Guys I’ve known since high school. My brother. The guys at work. We’ll talk about almost anything, usually loudly, and never once about this. Not what it feels like. Not whether anybody else takes his time, or lies there after and watches it go soft, or likes this part best.

Maybe they all do. Maybe every one of them has a night like this and keeps it to himself, the way I’m keeping it. Nobody talks about it, so I’ll probably never know.

That’s the difference, I think, lying there with my hand on my own belly. Soft, and then soft again, and you can’t tell them apart from the outside. But you can from in here.

I pull the sheet up over my legs and let the fan make its slow rounds across my face.

I’ll be soft for hours now. I’ve got nowhere to be. Good.