This Blue

Blurb

In a shanty in Johannesburg, South Africa; in an attempt to forget his first love, Anga gives his virginity to a man he picked from a hookup app.

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ANGA

I was only seventeen when I discovered how enlivening even a minute with one's destiny was. Even in villages one wouldn't find on any map. Sometimes, big and bright and free came to hills and valleys.

In the form of strangers' beds in some cases. A dude pissing on the side of a footpath in mine.

I couldn't see his cock, approaching him from behind. The proof was in the pool and stream he'd made in the ground, was making in the ground—and judging by the way things were going—would carry on making in the ground. His had to be droolworthy too, mixed-race.

Lost in the fantasies he'd kindled in my head, I didn't see the end of it—snapped out of my brain when he turned around.

Against my will my sight remained all him. Averting my eyes when there were his now—swimming with curiosity, alive with desire—the lips that thinned into a smile, it was impossible.

This might still be a dangerous dance. But I let myself close the gap between us.

In my face he quipped: “Have even the hillbillies become this free?”

I melted.

“All this”—the hands I moved in circles at his crotch—“is the reason why it no longer rains.”

“But you didn't even see the size of it.”

“But I've got a nose for these things. Eyes of the mind.”

Eyes of him twinkled with humor. “So you've done this before.”

“I've always been a ‘hillbilly.’”

“But you aren't dead to these things, are you?”

I shook my head sadly. “Never felt this red-blooded. All I need is a man like you.”

“Aah”—he gave me that grin. Devilish. “A man like me can be arranged.”

One moment we were there, the next we were at his rondavels on a hill by the Indian Ocean. And he was at home lying on his back on that king-size, knees on his cheeks.

Somehow I feared never seeing him again.

If there would be no repeating him, I needed to etch myself on his skin.

His directions caresses in my ears, I nuzzled his ruck porn-style, lapped and tickled it; sucked his low-hangers into my mouth and licked the precum forming on that crack. My aim to please louder than my inexperience, I gave him the warmth and wetness of my throat, got him curling his toes, claiming the back of my head with his hands, little swearwords on his tongue.

Didn't take long for him to cum in there—no warning.

Spitting it all out, a stranger to it, was one option.

I decided to familiarize my system with it. Chose not to hurt his feelings.

His feelings. On my own bed at night I wondered if his heart was of the breakable or hardboiled kind. Yes, he'd been a gent all the way and had blown me too—no blowjob there but art and the promise of hotter things.

But that alone couldn't tell me anything. What I knew for sure was that no one had ever made me feel that good. Built a fire in me. Fire I wanted alive always.

Sadly, when I knocked on his door the next day he had to be on a Greyhound at this point. Having remembered his Johannesburg. Where one could “gather even a thousand men of our kind into one place in record time.”

Five years later, I too had moved to the Johannesburg metropolis. A district of it he probably didn't even know existed. Name your worst fear and it lived on the alleys of these shanties.

These past two years I'd been working to the bone, empowering myself out of this place the aim. A pity that some things were impossible when there were people who jacked off to the switchblade one carried in his pocket, the shanty he lived in. And he was too lonely to break away.

The part-time jobs I did and the school of journalism took most of my time. It was at night when even this place slept that the emptiness of my existence confronted me.

The need for a life brighter than this was what caused me to download that app, rewrite my diet because strangers one met on the internet weren't the most patient of people.

Zero them down to the ones looking for love, the ones who were my type—everything that man had been, to be honest—and I would die bitter.

I unchecked some of those filters. The one on my back would cancel the one in my head out.

A handful of back and forths later, with people who ended up ghosting me and the ones I felt shitty ghosting myself, I was ready to tell myself the world put too much stock into sex and relationships.

Just when I was about to log out forever I found myself clicking on the profile of a man who called himself Good With It, found myself wondering how much this Afro-Brazilian dude—a dangerous man until proven otherwise—cost.

The idea of a man renting his cock out, an Afro-Brazilian one at that, on a hookup app at that, made me cackle.

However, if his profile was anything to go by, my quilt would melt.

I asked for a catalog of his services.

The Boyfriend Experience would leave a dent in my bank balance. But there had to be nothing like whimpering under his weight like the middle-aged man in the video he sent me.

Actually, if he came with more than the cock in this man's throat I might give him my heart there and then.

If he didn't, I'd move like the best thing that had ever happened to him. In a few months I'd be leaving all this behind. All I wanted was someone to share my new start with.

When the agreed-upon night arrived, I readied myself for him, topped me with thermal pants and a tank top.

Despite the summer heat going on, I needed to feel his hands as they grabbed the branded waistband and peeled the tightness of it all away from me.

In my sex dreams, the only man I'd ever loved lifted me onto his waist as I opened the door for him after all these years, went to town on my virgin body right there at the doorway, threw me onto my bed before grabbing me by the waist and spreading my legs.

A lover unselfish in his selfishness.

In my inbox the drug smuggler or sex trafficker or whatever he was had also asked if I had kinks I wanted dealt with.

Answer: a hand-over-laughing-mouth emoji.

And then “no” as I opened the door for him, stepped into his orbit. The eau de toilette. The smile.

But that was just a friendly smile. Nothing else was said.

Our mouths met for a kiss, which developed into something thirstier, wetter, heartier. Clothes at our feet on the floor, he groped my butt, spread the cheeks apart. I felt his cock swell in my hand, stiffen in his briefs. If he didn't see a repeat of me, then he wouldn't.

Time to make things happen. I got down on my knees. Held his hand when he tried to take back his job. Because I'd “put those bills on your crotch for this.”

“Please yourself, pleasing me then.”

I pleased us nuzzling his cock and tantalizing its head with my mouth, the fabric of his briefs.

When he dropped said briefs to his ankles, stepped out of them in response to my mouth, it was his bush that I nuzzled this time. The length of his cock that I stroked with my stubbled jaw; got leaking, twitching.

He teased my nostrils with it, patted my lips with it, put it in my throat. His fucking my face was my wrapping my hand around my cock.

I took him out when I gagged.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“It's alright”—I knelt at the foot of the bed, dug my elbows into its edge so I could stick my ass out to him.

My ruck winked as he lubed us up, jiggled my rump.

“You a strong man?” He asked.

“I'm a straw man.”

“Where there's pleasure there's pain.”

Gentleness where there was the finger he eased into me.

I wondered if he was like this to everyone.

Then I felt his cock on my ruck. Felt it breach that muscle, make me wince, clutch the quilt. Hands on my waist, he rolled my eyes to the back of my head.

In my imagination I was the dirtiest talker he had ever met. Here with him it just wasn't in me.

But because some of the people he'd ever fucked had made him feel like the man, I found myself all “Ooh daddy, fuck daddy, aw shit” at the very edge of that bed. My throat in the crook of his elbow. Heightening pleasure.

When he took it out, my ruck gaped for it and I put it back in. The second time this happened and it was he who thrust it back in, my thighs bucked and my cock exploded.

“Masterful is the word,” I said.

On the bed and I was lying on my back now, he licked and sucked my cock back to life. Something he seemed to relish.

Something that got a kiss from me. A lip-to-lip dance from us and my cock stroking itself on his abs.

But it was he who came, fucked it back in.

The next time he came his cock was in my mouth.

I loved him for taking my chin by the beard, capturing me with a thorough kiss.

When we parted I beamed: “Look who's good with it indeed!”

“Either that or I watch my pudgy landlord make things warm for me.”

He left the bed for his clothes.

“You're a superficial man then.”

“Because when it comes to landlords, superficial is the way.”

I laughed.

Which stirred my loneliness.

“Hey”—I left the bed for the sideboard. “A little wine before you leave won't kill you.”

“Unless it's poisoned.”

“It's not. Yes, I've got a high body count, but you're just not in that number.”

He played my game. “Are you telling me I did nothing to you?”

“I'm telling you that a certain body found itself snoring and drooling right in the middle of you.”

“What?” A twinkle came to his eye, brightened his entire face. And mine when I put the wine in his hand and he had the graciousness to sit on the edge of the bed for it.

But he swigged it all down.

“A refill?”

“No, thanks. Goodbye.”

“Nice life!” Because I'd tried.