The one on the right pulled the foot in his hand up to his mouth and wrapped his lips around his friend’s toes. He’d never imagined doing anything like this before, but now that he found himself here, it was quite possibly the most erotic experience of his life. He pushed his hips forward against the foot of his friend. The threat of how much pain he could cause him with the mildest of kicks excited him further. He was at his mercy and he liked it.

The one on the left was happy. So was the one on the right.

It was nothing like any night they had ever imagined having together.

And yet…. It was perfect.

The shadows danced. The house creaked. The men acted like boys as they waited for the other wolves to chase their tails home.

The Twisted Glory of Ganymede

“HOW OLD were you when your parents thought you were deaf?” my therapist asks again, looking at me calmly over his glasses.

“I’m trying to remember. I don’t know, twelve or thirteen.”

“Why do you think they thought that?” he poses, cocking his head slightly to punctuate his question.

“I stopped talking to them.”

“You were angry with them?”

“Not really with them, with myself. I don’t know, yes, with them, with what I had become.…” I concentrate on twisting the frays in my jeans between my thumb and forefinger.

“What you had become.…” he prompts, and I look up at him. I’m too smart for this game, but we’ve also had far too many sessions to think he’ll let me cower into myself and not unearth these memories for him. He wants me to lay them on the glass coffee table between us like a bleeding mess to politely examine. After all, that’s what I’m paying him for. Or rather what my parents are paying him for.

“I thought for a while that he had made me this way, this way that I am. I mean, I was so young. If you want to talk about nature versus nurture, this kind of makes it all fucked-up. I mean, how can I really know if what I am today was inside me all along or if he created it, cultivated and grew it? I wasn’t deaf. I was just looking for escape, I guess, or my mind needed to escape. I don’t think it was ever a conscious decision, really.”

“Did he make you feel special?”

“At first, yeah. It was like escaping to another world. He gave me attention. I wasn’t really getting it anywhere else.…” I recounted, realizing with sudden nausea that, like it or not, I was about to get my money’s worth for this session.