Honey Flava

Joaquin bought just about everything I fancied, almost childlike when we got into the car. He’d stuffed the trunk with newspaper-wrapped lanterns. His eyes, dark and sultry with their almond shape and long, thick lashes, twinkled. His mouth, beautifully thick and pliant, was almost always curved in a smile. I told him that he looked like a kid who’d just feasted on candy, and he merely laughed me off before proving his age with an emphatic squeeze of my crotch.

He’d grown his hair out a little since I’d last seen him, allowing it to graze his shoulders in thick black waves. Behind closed doors, stripped naked, he looked so primal and raw. His brown skin was firm and lightly dusted with hair, inviting me to drag my tongue over it, tasting and bathing him.

“You’ll never get tanned, Matteo,” he noted on my third night, when he was assured that I’d gotten over jet lag well enough for a much anticipated fuck. Thank God he only kept one maid, and she slept in a little room on the bottom floor near the kitchen.

He laid atop me, his cock rigid and hot as he stretched me open. I didn’t have to do anything because he liked being in control. I discovered that quickly enough, too, and was more than happy to bottom for him. He had his methods. He knew my body well enough to know what to do with it. His way of driving me crazy was to move slowly, giving me a taste of his impressive control. Looking up at him as he hovered above me, I took in the sight of Joaquin’s flushed and sweaty features, his hair hanging loose around his face, his eyes darker and stormier as hunger gnawed away at him, and he fought it off. I moved my hands over his damp chest and toyed with his nipples as I struggled with my own excitement in a desperate hope of keeping up with him.

I sometimes wondered how much of my insides he could feel, with his dick so tightly swaddled by my muscles, squeezed and caressed and, in time, milked dry.

“I’ve gotten tanned in the summer,” I corrected him. My words were barely a gasp as pleasure arced through me, and I pushed myself against his hips, my body swallowing every inch of his cock.

“I like you as you are—mestizo. I look at you, and I see history.”

“You see colonists, you mean.”

“I see a colonist worth fucking.”

“Be glad that I’m not too fond of the sun…” My words trailed off in a low moan as he ground himself in me, and my eyes fluttered closed.

He pressed down and kissed my chin before trailing his lips over my jaw, his tongue flicking against my ear once he reached it. Another wave of heat swept through me, and I was gasping into the night air, his lazy, thorough thrusting picking away at the frayed edges of my control.

“I want the whole package intact,” he murmured with a mild chuckle against my throat. “I fell in love with an Esperanza, and I aim to keep him untouched.”

My Spanish heritage again—I never felt comfortable with the attraction I had as one of the lighter-skinned Filipinos. I’d experienced some notoriety back in high school, but it was dispersed, for our old Jesuit academy attracted several boys from old-world families. I wasn’t the only mestizo in school.

“And what does it feel like to fuck an Esperanza?” I stammered, my damp skin prickling.

Joaquin’s rhythm increased. “This isn’t a good time for ego-stroking,” he groaned back. His head dropped as he closed his eyes, and all focus, all energy, was directed at his cock as he plowed my ass. The bed’s creaking grew louder and louder, more and more frantic, just as the sounds of skin slapping skin increased in ferocity. Our voices mingled with the rest of the sounds, groans and whimpers dissolving into a spiraling montage till we came, one after the other—Joaquin’s outburst a guttural series of curses while I cried out into the dim light, my stomach tensing as my cock spurted in my fist.

He never liked to pull out right away and kept his dick in me even after he’d emptied himself. I always thought it a damned sexy thing—that thorough claiming of someone else, ensuring that every second of every moment would be stretched out to its limits, whether by that lazy rhythm of thrusts or that long wait inside my body, cocooned in spunk-drenched warmth. In the meantime, Joaquin would be kissing me with an energy that never diminished even after his orgasm. He’d force my mouth wide-open with his, our tongues slick, restless, and sometimes semen-flavored. The demanding attention with which he showered me guaranteed a renewal of my energy and a stirring of my cock within moments of our orgasm.

We visited our respective families a week after my arrival. My cousins, aunts, and uncles simply treated Joaquin like a dear (yet less privileged) childhood friend of mine. His parents and siblings were welcoming, though without the stiffness and ostentation that had always been the mark of Esperanza pride.

“You live in California now?” Mrs. Madrid asked, ignoring her son as he took her hand and pressed her knuckles against his forehead. It was almost odd watching that gesture of respect again after so many months of casual, egalitarian interactions with my mother, who’d also moved to the United States.

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

“You like it there?”

“I do—the diversity, especially. The culture…”

She nodded in a vague sort of way as she beckoned me over to the dining room, where a veritable feast likely awaited me as their guest. “Not in San Francisco? Your home, I mean.”

“I live in the East Bay—Albany, near the Berkeley border.”

Joaquin nudged me with his elbow. “She won’t know where that is.”

“Ah, good then,” Mrs. Madrid called back over her shoulder as she stepped through the dining room door, her voice rising in volume as though she were attempting to talk to a deaf man. “San Francisco’s diseased—too many drugs and too many gays.” She stood by a large narra table that nearly sagged under the weight of so much food. “Come, eat! These are good! All ingredients were bought at the market this morning.” She pressed a plump hand against her chest in emphasis, her chin lifted. “I chose them myself. Never the maids. They always get the wrong things and—how do you say it in America?—fuck up the cooking.”

And she was right. The meal was fantastic.

The frenzied blur of the next several days was a thrill ride. Little by little, as though thick cobwebs were slowly being blown off my memories, ghosts from the past emerged—dulled and faded by time but potent in their effects. The smell of freshly baked bibingka, pervasive and defining as one of those scents of Christmas, dogged me day after day from sidewalk stalls or a corner eatery, luring me back from my American path to weed-choked trails of childhood. Without fail, I’d pull out my wallet and spend more money on a little stack of those sweet rice cakes to take home and to gorge myself sick with, much to Joaquin’s disgust.

“You’re not pregnant, are you?” he asked, watching me with a look both horrified and sickened.

“It’s been too long,” I said between mouthfuls. “I can’t help it. Want some?”

He shook his head and pointedly turned away, raising his coffee mug to his lips. “That’s okay. I think I’ll be off that stuff for a while.”