Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

dick for a custom suit. When I started to get hard, he looked up. “Are you okay?” he asked.
    “What does it look like?” I said.
    He grinned and popped the other five buttons.
    I said the first thing that came to mind: “You remind me a lot of a scoutmaster I used to have.”
    “Oh, yeah? Did you guys do stuff like this?”
    “Oh, hell, no,” I said. “He was straight as they come. He took us to the Everglades once, and I saw him in his boxer shorts. I never got over it.”
    I felt the brush of Jake’s beard against my thigh as his tongue swabbed its way along my dick. This is not his first time, I thought. When he was finally free to speak, he gazed up at me intently.
    “You got any?” he asked.
    I wasn’t sure what he meant.
    “Boxer shorts,” he explained.
    I smiled. “Yeah.”
    “Want me to wear ’em?”
    “Sure.”
    He hopped to his feet. “Where?”
    “Straight back and to the left,” I said. “Second drawer from the top.”
    He was gone less than a minute. When he returned he stood in the doorway for a moment, legs apart, to give me the full scoutmaster effect.
    “Very nice,” I said.
    It wasn’t a faithful reproduction of Mr. Ragsdale, but it was close enough.

    The sex was pretty much as advertised. Mostly he went down on me, and that was nice, I have to say. He was a good kisser, too, though he seemed less interested in that. I felt kind of selfish, to tell you the truth, just lying back like a sultan, so I moved my leg up into those boxer shorts, thinking that a little pressure there might be appreciated. My leg was promptly redirected, so I returned to my passive state and took the rest of my cues from Jake. He wanted to see me come, he said, so I jerked off while he worked my nips with the efficiency of a seasoned safecracker. I left my load, as directed, on the front of his Nature Conservancy T-shirt. “All riiiight,” he growled. “Good one, buddy.”
    We lay there side by side, limbs overlapping, until my breathing had subsided and I felt called upon to break the silence.
    “Do people always ask you—?”
    “—what my name used to be?”
    I laughed. “Guess they do.”
    “I never tell them,” he said.
    “Why? Was it Myrtle or something?”
    It was a calculated risk, but he did crack a smile. “It’s nothing to do with the name.”
    “You just don’t know that person anymore.”
    “Right,” he said. “Close enough.”
    “I hear you,” I said.
    “You ever need a hand, by the way?”
    I wasn’t sure what he meant by this.
    “You said you were a gardener, right?”
    “Yeah. Sure.”
    “Well, if you need help…I’m really into horticulture.”
    “Great.”
    “I grew up on a farm. I don’t mind a little work.”
    “I’ll remember that,” I told him. My usual practice was to hire one or more of the Mexican guys hustling for day labor down on Cesar Chavez, but it was like buying a pig in a poke, as my mother used to say. Lots of the guys are incredibly hardworking and sweet, but others can be falling-down drunk or homophobic or both. I don’t speak a bit of Spanish, but the word maricón has a way of leaping out at you, believe me. I’ve heard it so often on the job, you’d think it was a species of plant. Who the hell needs that?
    Jake reached into his jeans and handed me a crumpled card with his cell-phone number. The card was khaki-colored and JAKE GREENLEAF was written in dark-green letters intertwined with ivy. Below, in smaller letters, it said: New Man.
    I thought that was cool and told him so.

    By mutual choice, Jake and I never played again, but several weeks later I asked him to help me with a job near Buena Vista Park. He was all I’d hoped he’d be: dependable, cheerful, and not too chatty on the job. Best of all, he seemed to enjoy tackling the tougher stuff—digging out roots, say, or hauling flagstones, or working in the rain. Heavy labor was apparently a kind of fulfillment to Jake, a necessary stop on his path to completion—if not completion itself. I could hand him the nastiest job in the world and feel almost noble about it. Ours was a match made in gardening heaven.
    One day at lunch, when we were both eating yogurt in a client’s backyard, I noticed how the hair on my arms had grown and realized in a moment of shivery solidarity that Jake and I were probably both shooting testosterone. We’d never really talked about his pharmaceutical requirements, but this seemed like a logical opening, so I showed him my lushly