Humidity

Chapter 1

My hand is working overtime.

The split-unit conked out at 11:04 and hasn’t come back. Two and a half sticky hours later I’m jerking off on an unscheduled break from REM. Coil smoke inside. Wet concrete and frangipani coming over the Marchetti wall outside. The sheet’s on the terrazzo. Sweat runs the groove of my spine. I spit in my palm for lube — spit, not baby oil, because I’m a sick motherfucker.

There it is. The one thing I own that’s as good to look at as it is to use. Standing out of my fist like a fence post. Worked raw. Nowhere near finished.

Let’s all take a minute to feel sorry for me. Blond, six-one, Minnesota blood, Houston childhood, teenage years in Caracas. Sent to a school with a Latin motto and a per-term fee, full of oil kids and embassy kids. The status wound, in my own words: a diploma in a shiny frame and a mean hard-on for something I can’t have.

The lie goes like this. I’m poolside, shirt off, cracking my thumb knuckle while Tomás plays a voicemail from the weekend. Everybody eats. Fat, thin, ratty, bombshell — makes no difference. All the guys get served and all the girls are sluts.

I’m not a virgin, let me pause to say. Nine minutes in the maid’s bathroom at a party in Los Palos Grandes. My sitting-on-the-toilet technique, the ten-second gunfight, the detonation. Her name was Fernanda and she had her shirt back on before I was done.

I am a useless closer.

But it’s her fault. All of it.

Marion Feuillet.

I know both her names because attendance gets called in second-period Bio and my seat is two rows behind hers, by the door. French. Field hockey. Her skirt is the same grey flat-pleated skirt as everybody’s, rolled once at the waist. Chapstick in the inside breast pocket, Marlboro Lights in her sock. Her laugh comes out in the middle of words instead of at the end of them.

Bent over the lab counter. Skirt up. Legs split around me while she chews her bottom lip.

I call girls chicks.

They’re not women. They’re chicks, sluts, bitches, whores — things. Things that want me. Her nails in my neck while I clap that pussy. She’s older than me. I’m eighteen and four months. My fantasies run toward compliance and I am not wired for daddy’s little angel. I don’t want to spank an ass I saw last Tuesday at Ruby Tuesday. Send your complaints to my therapist. He’ll take it under advisement.

I jack the speed.

There’s a ledge in my lower spine that fits my left hand. Unorthodox grip, unorthodox angle, and it suits the equipment. Can’t turn the volume down, can’t leave my own head, so I groan against my teeth. Sweating. Counting seconds, because I’m raw and there’s school in five hours.

I want it to mean something when I come inside a girl.

We don’t say seed, spunk, spooge, seminal fluid. We say cum, because coming is what I do when she needs the one thing only I deliver, which is BREEDING.

Stealing bases. Walking through wet paint. Getting away with murder. One direction at a speed nothing can hold. The manhole in my lap is a detour. Every stroke rides the Y-fork of vein and what’s at the end of it.

Give me pussy. I’ll accept a surrogate.

My parents are down the hall with their door propped for the cross-breeze. The Compaq is in there. The 8mm is two floors down. So I’ve got the ceiling.

Downstairs, Duque’s chain drags a foot across the terrazzo and stops. He never barks when I come home. I belong here. Dogs understand hierarchy.

I have to keep my mouth shut, and without my mouth I don’t get to thunder the way it needs thundering: wrenched hips, volume up, my hands in the pleats of Marion’s skirt.

Already pissed.

Every girl has a story.

Three years of righteous masturbation and I’m still not sick of Marion’s pussy. The lip-print it leaves down my shaft. The way the thigh-highs sink in and wedge pale flesh up over the Cardiff-blue band.

That mean laugh gets reprogrammed to Please, Daddy.

A parade of images somewhere between PG-13 and Skinemax lines up for the money shot. The Chanel ad with Patricia Velásquez. The Miss Venezuela contestant with the gap in her front teeth. Shakira before the highlights. Zeena Warrior Princess, dubbed, Sunday afternoons. Ivy from Soul Blade.

Faster.

Sweat into my ear. Teeth set. Pillow balled under my hip.

The ugly need to know what my own face does at the end. The only difference between a girl’s finish face and a boy’s is mourning. In the full-length mirror: red thighs bracing a bikini wax, cum sliding out of them into the welcome mat of my trim.

Power is beautiful.

Callus on my palm. Balls drawing up tight. I smash the IUD.

The blue-white burn up the inside of a thigh. A crease of sweat in the hollow behind a knee. Chicks are a-changin’.

The girls on Libertador standing in their slots like pigeons in a coop. The implants my father’s engineers laugh about in Spanish when they forget I understand it, because I’m a gringo and because they’re Colombian and it’s a fair bet nobody’s listening. My own private porno won’t hold their faces, so I imagine every man on that avenue loving them at once. Coins coming up to the surface. Enough for their patent boots on a Friday. Brachiosaurus tits out over the top. A row of eyes lit by the cigarrera and pointed at my lap. Good enough for me. I don’t do faces. I’m too busy with the colors going all over their heels. Eggs in the dating pool. Wombs stretching to accommodate a hat trick. A row of them groaning when I drop it off and signing right back up.

Then the rain comes. Big fucking surprise.

You know what isn’t a surprise? Breeding.

Same old coming. Same old bitch. Except Marion isn’t over the Bio counter now. She’s on all fours on my mother’s bed, half a year gone.

I’m spreading pregnancy kink like Ebola.

Low globe of belly swinging under her. Milk-tits mashed into the duvet. My girl knows how to protect what’s hers — she cradles that sun-spotted stomach with one arm while I rut into her. I brace on the shelf of her hips. Pull her back, drive it deep, give her exactly what she’s been asking for since March. Nine pounds and a virgin.

The groan turns filthy. I get to have my cake and make it.

The orgasm is a bullet point. I roar and bite it in half. Roping the dark.

“Coño.”

Panting. Cum going cold on my thigh. Still hard. Never came that much.

Belly and tits she’ll never get rid of, on a frame that thin.

With a libido like mine it was only ever a question of when the compulsory turned mathematically interesting. Cursed with luck: a permanent erection. Youth is wasted on the regular-cocked.

And now I can’t get the mare out of my head, and I know I’m not going to.

My father has money to spend and no time to spend it. When I was thirteen he took me to Apure. Every horse story has a woman in it, and this one has a quarter mare on a hato that breeds nothing but the best, and a gold-plated stallion kept upstairs in the barn like disturbed royalty. Day trip. Bird-thick shade with the heat sitting on top of it. That’s where I learned what it means to be born hung.

There’s a foal too, an Appaloosa or she will be, tottering under her dam, and the bucket says THANK YOU every time she latches on. I don’t care what the bucket is for. I’m counting the mother’s ribs. I’m watching between her legs. Nobody forgets the smell of an unstripped stall — ammonia, hay, shit. A bull in the minute before the claxon opens the corral.

And a stallion screaming at a stall door. The human male as designed. A man who can’t decide what’s going to kill him first, and the shackling UNFAIRNESS of a cock born too big for the hole it wants.

A stallion with no mares.

Cleanup comes from the stack of identical hand towels under the bed. Cloth with the absorbency of a hospital gown.

Eight and a half, thick as my wrist, vein like a Y-fork in rock, balls that reload in twenty minutes. That’s what I’m looking at when I finish. Hard, the flat head goes shiny, and the skin — Houston, 1980, they took the foreskin and left the rest — pulls taut behind the ridge. I look at it the way men look at engines. Ambition, capability, engineering. Not vanity.

I’m lucky. I could go again right now. Water first.

...short version, my sheet is fucked.

That brook running down the side of my shaft didn’t take everything with it. The sheet is white and I’m a bull who’s done damage. I go at it with one of the towels and do a bad job. It won’t be dry before Yulieth strips the bed.

Downstairs, powder clinks in a plastic container.

She’ll see American cum on a white sheet. I play defensive end on Sundays. There’s a shrinking but not insignificant part of me that wants to know whether she’ll recognize what she’s looking at, and a smaller part that’s embarrassed about not doing my own laundry, and then my prick comes back up at being made to feel bad about it.

Colombian. That’s not sworn testimony, it’s cruel arithmetic. Her Spanish is fast, swallowed, costeño-adjacent, and I barely try. Minnesota-born, but my fourteenth year on earth was one long demonstration of what northeast Colombian vowels do to a boy. They never got me pussy. They got me th where the s should be and eh? hung off the end of my sentences.

Yulieth crossed at Cúcuta with about fifty thousand other people. Nineteen at the time. I know because I’ve