Object of Desire. William J. Mann

on the opposite wall. A small bathroom and medium-sized walk-in closet completed the casita. “Perfect for in-laws,” our Realtor had said—or, in our case, our boy toy from L.A.

      I leaned over the bed and gave Ollie a quick kiss on the lips.

      “Happy birthday,” he said.

      “Thanks.”

      “I got you a gift.”

      Indeed, at the end of the bed sat a small box wrapped in blue- and green-striped paper. A white ribbon was tied around it in a clumsy bow.

      “You shouldn’t have gotten me anything,” I said.

      “Well, I saw it at the mall….”

      Ollie worked at a Ritz Camera at a mall in Studio City. He’d worked there since he was eighteen. He was twenty-six now.

      I opened the gift. It was a cinnamon-scented candle in a glass jar from Yankee Candle.

      “I don’t know if you like cinnamon,” Ollie said. He remained propped against the pillows, turning the remote over and over in his hands.

      “Oh, I do. I do like cinnamon.” I opened the lid and took a whiff to be polite. “It’s very nice. Thank you.”

      He smiled.

      I put the candle aside. There was never much small talk with Ollie. We didn’t have much in common, really, other than liking the way my cock felt in his ass. We had met online, on ManHunt, or maybe it was Adam4Adam. Or Connexion. One of them. That first night, he drove all the way down to Palm Springs in his ’04 Toyota Corolla, and Frank and I took turns fucking his scrumptious ass. Afterward, he fell asleep between us in our bed. The next morning Frank fried bacon and eggs, while I fucked Ollie one more time. And that, we thought, would be that. Sweet ass not withstanding, Ollie wasn’t one of our more memorable tricks. Awkward silences took the place of conversation. Ollie didn’t get our jokes and didn’t make any of his own. He was either painfully shy or incredibly dull, Frank deduced, and yet, for some reason, I was moved to stay in contact with him, getting his number and his e-mail. In the last year, Ollie had been back down to see us half a dozen more times, and I still didn’t know much more about him other than where he lived, where he worked, and that he liked getting plowed.

      “Where’s Frank?” Ollie asked as I slid in next to him on the bed.

      “He’s beat. He’s got to finish getting ready for his classes. You know they start this coming week. So he’s going to bed, and he told us to have fun out here.”

      “Oh.”

      I had a feeling Ollie wasn’t too disappointed. I knew the reason he kept coming back out to the desert had more to do with me than Frank. I wasn’t being arrogant. It was just obvious. Ollie would kiss Frank only if Frank made the first move. He would suck Frank only if Frank maneuvered his cock in the direction of his mouth. On the other hand, he was all over me. Frank and I had never discussed this. But I was sure if I’d noticed, Frank had noticed, too. I felt bad, and a little guilty. But I didn’t bring it up. There was, after all, the slightest chance that Frank hadn’t noticed.

      Of course, Ollie’s apparent disinterest might have been the reason why Frank, the last few times, had chosen to drop out of the sex and simply play the voyeur. He’d sit at the foot of the bed, watching and wanking as Ollie and I sucked and fucked. I’d try to lure him back up, but he’d resist, staying right where he was, shooting his load before we did. When Ollie and I would shoot soon afterward, Frank would be right there, waiting with a towel, like a dutiful butler offering his young masters a cum rag. It broke my heart.

      Frank was fourteen years older than I. In five years, he would be sixty. Once, age had mattered very little between us. But increasingly of late, the disparity in our ages had begun to weigh heavily on me. I saw myself becoming Frank a few years down the road, moving slower, my body settling, shrinking, withering. It frightened me.

      I touched Ollie’s smooth, unlined face. He was handsome, in an all-American kind of way, with sandy hair and blue eyes. We kissed. His lips tasted like wintergreen breath mints, and his little tongue darted in and out of my mouth. I moved my hands up and down his back and over his arms. His was the typical body of a twentysomething white boy who never went to the gym. Not thin, not fat, though his waist was starting to get a tiny bit squishy. Largely hairless, except for a happy trail leading up from his crotch to his belly button. Too many hours spent laboring inside an air-conditioned shopping mall had left his skin pale and pasty. He tasted like deli meat—bologna, maybe, or a salty ham. Leaning back into the pillows as I kissed my way down his torso, Ollie let out an almost inaudible moan. Talking during sex was not for him. No “Yeah, that’s it” or “Fuck, man, that feels good.” I only knew he was enjoying himself by the rock-hard six-inch cock that stood straight up in the air, perpendicular to his groin, from start to finish.

      I unbuckled Ollie’s belt and slid down his jeans. Sure enough, his cock was spearheading his gray Hanes briefs. I got everything off him, jeans and underwear, then flipped him over to showcase his most impressive attribute, that incongruous bubble butt. I was quickly naked myself, dry humping the deep cleavage between those two delectable mounds. And in the process, I caught a glimpse of what we were doing in the mirrored closet doors. Absurd, really. Two grown men, naked, rubbing body parts all over each other like a couple of dogs in heat. I couldn’t help but smile.

      That was a mistake.

      Because in my smile, I saw what I no longer recognized. Myself. The man in the mirror looked nothing like me. I felt as if I were in a Twilight Zone episode, where the face looking back from the mirror was someone else’s, a doppelgänger from another world. What was it about my appearance that had changed over the last few years? I no longer looked like photographs of myself. I couldn’t put my finger on the difference. I hadn’t lost any more hair, and Just for Men had kept the gray at bay. There weren’t any new wrinkles on my forehead or around my eyes; Botox had taken care of that. So what was it that was different? Why did my face no longer look like me?

      Ollie had wriggled out from under me and was now sucking on my cock. Leaning back into the pillows, I looked down at his body, so white, so soft, so unmarked by time or love or pain. A body not unlike the one I’d once had, before I’d started lifting weights and using creatine and protein and finally testosterone cream to replace what I was losing, a little bit more every year. Hair grew in my ears and fell out from my head, but my body remained hard and toned and supple. The skinny little boy who’d hated taking his shirt off in gym class had buffed up considerably by his late twenties, spending his thirties on the dance floor with friends, reveling in the glances of strangers, if never fully believing they were glancing at him. But, of course, they were: for an intoxicating nanosecond, I had actually been beautiful. And for an equally fleeting moment in time, I had believed it.

      Ollie was moving up from my cock to my stomach, licking the outline of my abs. In a moment like that, I could close my eyes and believe that the years hadn’t moved so fast, that I still had a couple of decades ahead of me, that time wasn’t running out, that like the young man who had danced on the box in his thong, I still had plenty of time for sex, for love, for life. Plenty of time left to savor that necessary fiction of youth—that happiness was one’s due. But I didn’t close my eyes. Not that time. I kept them open and fixed on Ollie’s body, a body that I craved, that I needed, that I kept bringing back into this house even when Frank seemed indifferent to it. I grabbed Ollie’s butt with my hands so hard that I’m sure it hurt him. I hoped, in fact, that it did.

      I flipped him over. Fumbling for a condom and lube on the floor beside the bed, I felt the blood surge to my cock. This was going to be fast. I felt the heat building up in my body, the pressure growing inside my head. I was going to have him—have every last bit of him—his body, his mind, his soul, his youth, his future. I pushed my cock inside him and clamped my lips over his. Above us the sun shone like a benevolent god, and the waves crashed against the sandy coast of Venice Beach. The brine of the sea was so strong, I tasted it on my tongue. Sand was creeping up my bare legs, scratching its way into my ass, but I didn’t care. I loved him—I loved him so much, I felt as if my whole body would explode, arms and legs strewn