Page 46 of A Long Con

It was the lowest point of my life.

The man I loved had just lost his mentor, his father figure—and I say that now in the kindest way. More than that, he’d lost him in a truly bizarre and frightening manner, one that’ll stick to the insides of your eyeballs for at least a few lifetimes. The image even started getting to me as we rode to Socorro, what I’d figured was the best way to get home. I kept seeing Waterman’s black hole of a mouth, the skin peeling from his fingers like the tips of wooden pencils, his shiny Santa-red fingers reaching up to Berkeley. I’d seen a lot in my WWE years but that took the cake. It was the stuff of nightmares, I supposed.

But I wasn’t one to fear much, so instead as our Road Kings purred along at a legal fifty-five, I thought about the loss of the painting and the rug. All we had left was the bearer bond, which lately I’d been carrying on my person, smooth against the small of my back. I would’ve cashed it much earlier, but with the lolo way things had been going, it was safer not to.

I thought about Phineas Gage, the original traumatic brain injury victim. In 1848, Gage was the foreman of a railroad crew in Vermont. He used a tamping iron to pack powder into a hole and it detonated. The forty-inch-long iron shot like a rocket into his cheek, tearing his brain, and exiting his skull. He was blind in his left eye, but he never lost consciousness, and he told the doctor, “Here’s business for you.”

What a guy, right? But a few months later his friends declared he was “no longer Gage.” There was no gateway between his intellectual and animal propensities. He swore, got sidetracked, and showed no respect for others. The railroad wouldn’t take him back on the job. He died aged thirty-six after a bunch of seizures.

I wondered if the iron had pierced Gage’s amygdalae, the area of the brain where I’d been injured. If, like me, he had no more fear response, why wouldn’t he treat others like garbage? Was I destined to die of seizures? Worse, was my damaged brain responsible for my sexy fantasies about Berkeley?

Before Waterman had been buried—for he had been murdered, no doubt about it, and cops were out pretending to track down the mystery killer—Berkeley had pledged himself to me. Only now could I confess to myself that Waterman was a cool drink of water. I could see him dominating Berkeley, and I had to keep pushing away images of “my boy” slurping at his dong. That was what I wanted from Berkeley, and I had to hold myself back from acting on it for a long, long time. Now was not the time.

Berkeley waved me to the side of the road. A faded banner shaped like the ever-present eagle proclaimed this was Pie Town Motel. The single-story fifties roadhouse was so sunbaked I wondered if it was open for business, but a couple of SUVs were parked out front.

Berkeley parked near them, so I followed suit. He killed his engine and took off his lid. His eyes were red-rimmed, and it actually pained me to think he’d been crying. He wasn’t used to this sort of shit. I was.

He tossed his head. “Let’s get a room.”

I paid for the room and Berkeley immediately jumped into the shower. I went to a roach coach out front and ordered the predictable ten tacos. While I waited, I jammed my hands into my pockets and stared at the faded eagle sign. My man was clearly sliding into depression. I had to do something different, shocking, to lift him out of the dumps. Otherwise he might even blame me for Split’s demise. Why not? We wouldn’t have been arguing if I wasn’t protesting their manhandling of each other.

We’d had to admit to the cops that we knew Split, since Berkeley was sobbing, but we gave fake names and vanished. Berkeley said he could get ahold of Split’s sister in New York to have her claim the body. Now Berkeley wanted to give up, to return to Rough and Ready with only the bearer bond, the one we technically should’ve given back to Rodriguez Jimenez, Prop., because he hadn’t received any product for it. As it was, it was made out to Doug Lookinland, who I supposed was Pothole’s real name, and we’d have to dye Berkeley’s hair and get a fake ID so he could cash it. But Jimenez’ henchmen had tried to kill us, so I wasn’t racing to give it back, either.

I was waiting for Twinkletoes to hack Ira Hogshead’s cell network. Then we could get his full location history and where he currently was. No doubt he’d zoomed back to Lake Havasu to give the artifacts to his boss, whoever he was. But there was a small chance in hell he stopped off somewhere first.

These were the mundane thoughts spinning around in my head, fermenting, when I opened the hotel room door and was attacked.

A buck naked Berkeley whipped the taco bag from my hand and flung it across the room. He body-slammed me to the wall and clamped his mouth over mine. He kissed me deeply and fully, his tongue licking my upper palate. As I relaxed into the kiss, my hands slid down his velvety back until they cupped his shapely ass. He rolled his naked erection between our pubic mounds, although he had to stand on his tiptoes to do so.

I massaged his skull with my fingertips, enjoying the fuck out of every nuance of the passionate kiss. I love you. I wanted to murmur that aloud to this sweet chiseled Apollo, but I still didn’t know where I stood. More than likely, right now he just wanted soothing after losing his mentor.

“Oh, Berkeley,” I muttered, back to calling him by his chosen name as I squeezed his delicious ass.

For his part, Berkeley’s hands worked a mile a minute. He stripped me of my tank top and man, you’d better know the feeling of our naked chests crushed together was nearly enough to make me ejaculate. I licked his lush lips as I rubbed our stiff nipples together. I wrapped my broad hands around his ribcage and tweaked his nipples with my thumbs, making him suck in air. His fingers worked at my belt buckle and I didn’t miss a beat as I stepped out of my boots.

Once Berkeley yanked my jeans and boxer briefs down to my knees, he shoved me to a chair. He’d placed two armless desk chairs face to face for some reason, and I thankfully sank down on one, pulling off my clothes the rest of the way. Berkeley plunked down into the chair opposite me.

“Mein Gott im Himmel,” I muttered. I’d never seen Berkeley this fully nude before, and he was a sight to behold. Vague shadows of a six-pack were his stomach, and the silken line of hair arrowing down from his belly button to his Mound of Venus made me want to dive right in. His tall stalk of a penis emerged from a thick, satiny bush of black hair, and his balls fairly pulsated with lust.

But Berkeley spoke the words I was thinking. “You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever been with, hands down. I’m not giving you up just because we got off on the wrong foot.”

Hadwe gotten off on the wrong foot? But I thought our adventures had been, for the most part, fun.

Berkeley lifted his feet, placing them over and around my hips so we sort of dovetailed, butting up against each other. The erotic result was that our hard-ons both faced the ceiling, side-by-side. Instinctively I reached out with both hands to squeeze them together. The comparison was fascinating. We were both a little dark-skinned, my dick a burnished copper as Berkeley had often said, Berkeley a little olive-toned. A pearl of semen glistened at the tip of my lover’s taut, mushroom-shaped crown. I knew I was nimble enough to bend down and lick it off, which I did, lingering to suckle on the hot glans for a few seconds, to swirl my tongue-tip about the slit.

Berkeley pushed on my forehead. “No—no—no—” he insisted, hissing in air.

I straightened up, looking at him. “What?”

He grabbed a bottle of some sort of lube from the chest of drawers and drizzled it over our cocks like he was decorating a cake. Now he had a devilish look in his eyes.

“Frottage.”

I didn’t know that word. It sounded French. “What’s that mean?”

He put the bottle down. His palm was broad enough to encompass his dick and half of mine. It was exquisite the way they rubbed together slickly with the oil, and I added my hand to the mix. Now both our cocks were bundled up against each other and any sort of squeezing of our fists created the most exquisite rushes of lust through my pelvis. If I pumped my hips like I was fucking him up the ass, the friction between us was electric.

Berkeley grinned. “Not sure. We call it ‘frot’ when two men masturbate their cocks together.”