Scratch the Surface

I stopped walking and turned to him as he stood there, unmoving, his breathing shallow as he held my gaze. “One what?”

“You know,” he ground out, like it was hard to form the words.

I studied his face to see if he was screwing with me, but all I saw was a stillness in him as he waited. “The entire cheerleading squad will blow you,” I reminded him in case, somehow, he’d forgotten that he was Mer Barrett and could have anyone or anything he wanted. “All you have to do is pick a girl.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, his voice breaking.

“And they won’t charge you.”

I got a nod then. He knew he could have any cheerleader he wanted; that was not the issue.

There was dead silence between us for a few minutes, until I finally understood what he wanted. “Ten bucks, and I don’t swallow.”

“Okay,” he whispered after a second.

I tipped my head back toward the bathroom.

In the last stall, when I went to my knees, the noise he made, a hoarse whimper, was a revelation. It was fast. I sucked and licked, finishing him with my hand, and he spurted on the wall. Afterward, he went inside and got my cash and bought us both a bottle of Pepsi. As tips went, it wasn’t bad.

He visited a lot after that, and eventually, he wanted me to take a drive with him away from the truck stop. He had a Mustang convertible, and he liked to park it behind the church, or outside the wholesale importing business, or near his grandparents’ farm, where, at night, there were a million stars above us. In school, though, whenever he saw me, I was called every disgusting, filthy name he could think of, always acting like a big man in front of his friends and girlfriends. He never put his hands on me, never shoved me, hit me, or knocked me down, and he kept his buddies from physically assaulting me as well, with the age-old ploy that I wasn’t worth getting in trouble for.

On his birthday, he paid me forty to swallow some of his cum. Not all, just enough so he could watch. For fifty, I told him, he could kiss me after and taste himself on my tongue. I was only halfway surprised when he slapped me. I figured the odds were fifty-fifty.

We were done after that, or so I thought. Two weeks later he showed up and passed me the fifty without a word.

“You hit me,” I reminded him.

“You can hit me if you want, so we’re even.”

It didn’t matter. Lots of the truckers had hit me after; it was like they came out of the sex haze and were disgusted with themselves. My mother had always said getting banged up a little was a part of turning tricks, and I had no reason to doubt her. She’d been doing it all my life.

When I rose to my feet that night, showing Mer the coated end of my tongue, he huffed out a breath before he lunged at me. Knocking me back against the bathroom stall, he devoured my mouth, and when I took control, kissing him until he was begging me to do something, I got out the lube packet I had on me and did what a lot of the other men liked; I shoved my fingers up his ass while I blew him again. When he was done, still shaking, sitting on the toilet because he couldn’t stand, he found himself staring at the fly of my jeans. His pupils were blown when he lifted his eyes to mine.

In answer I unzipped, and he leaned forward and took me down the back of his throat like he’d been the one sucking dick since he was fourteen, not me. He wanted my cum on his face, it was in all the porn he’d seen, so I complied. The next time he swallowed it all, but then freaked out, thinking he’d get a disease. We went to the clinic in town—not together—and when I showed him that I was just as negative as he was, he said he was ready for more.

I fucked him in my bed, no charge, because it was my pleasure. And he was the first guy I ever came inside. For the nameless, faceless others, I’d filled the condom, never them. He left school the next day, needing to go to spring training at his shiny new college. Lots of guys on football scholarships did that, skipped graduation, moving on to the next chapter of their lives without even finishing the one they were still in.

Our paths had never crossed again. Whether he came home for Christmas or not, I had no idea. I never saw him. Maybe that was intentional on his part, because everyone knew where I was, doing the assistant-manager thing at Kingman’s.