Merrit's Merits

The following story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people, living or dead, and events, present or past, is strictly coincidental. None of the story's contents are designed to libel any particular people or groups.

No rights are claimed on any of the real songs and lyrics sung or heard by characters within the story's narrative. They belong to their respective artists and labels. However, intellectual property rights are claimed upon lyrical parodies and upon the perceptive alterations by which these lyrics and music are observed, narrated and sung by characters and narrators.

Unfortunately, no homophobes were harmed during the writing of this work, with the possible exception of minor paper-cuts.

* * * * *

It was a ridiculous situation, there was no denying that.

"Why'd you stop?" came a young man's voice, dejected.

The reply came from a woman's lips, "Waitin' for da next song. Y'know I can't do tis ta ya wit'out sum good beats."

The auto-tuned guitar instrumentals of a pop song blasted from a stereo behind the two nude silhouettes that occupied the shadowy room. Vocals broke out, with the voice of Alecia Beth Moore, better known as 'Pink' to her fans.

And of the two people listening, the woman, who stood behind the man, sang along,

"Right, right, turn of the lights! What's the deal, yo?"

When she sang, he could scarcely detect the Jamaican-American patois with which she normally spoke. He grunted as something hard and wet continued to slide in and then out of him with every other downbeat of the song.

"

I love when it's all too much!"

she sang with a crisp, alto voice. It harmonized in a flawed, human way with the tuned-to-perfection sounds that came from the stereo,

"Five ehh emm, turn the radio up! Where's the rock 'n' roll?"

It was not 5:00 A.M. though; rather, it was 11:34 P.M.

Her hips rolled in long, deliberate thrusts, dark buttocks clenching.

His body was bent over, leaning down from where they were pressed together at the hips. His back glistened with sweat in the moonlight that poured in through the window. Following it, a chill breeze leaked in, meshed by a screen, and wreaking erratic foreplay upon his skin. It tickled him with soft, cold feathers.

Her hands rose from their place on his lower back, and she air-guitared while dancing into him.

"

Body-crasha, penny-snatcha!"

she sang, as the harness of the strap-on, which had cost her more than a pretty penny, rubbed snugly against her snatch while their bodies crashed together.

"Call me up if you a gangsteh!"

His flaccid, dangling penis twitched beneath their congress. The glans was a pale pink. There was quiet moaning from his lips, nearly inaudible over the loud music. It had been thirty seconds since she'd resumed, and all he could think was:

I prefer the Darren Criss cover version from Glee

.

"

Don't be fancy, just get dancy!"

she bellowed, while giving him a brief double-paced set of thrusts.

"Ughh," this made him groan louder than she'd yet managed, and in a way that made them both wonder if he was truly enjoying himself.

"

Why so serious?"

she continued to sing along with the stereo.

"St-stop!" he requested.

The stereo was alone in singing,

"So raise your glass if you are wrong!"

as a dark-skinned, long-nailed hand reached deftly for the volume nob and turned it down so that the song and its lyrics became barely audible. Meanwhile, her hips slowly withdrew from him, and the sparkly strap-on popped out of his lubricated sphincter with a moist, puckering pop, a sound which made her smile.

"I'm sorry, Keisha," he apologized. "You know that I --"

"Look, don't sweat it, champ," Keisha told him, while resisting the urge to reach for the half-finished glass of rum and coke at her bedside table. "I understand. Y'had an itch to scratch, and I can't be tha one ta scratch it." Then, she spoke more quietly, "We both know I kin relate," while her right hand absent-mindedly tweaked one of her bare nipples.

From on all fours, he rolled over onto his back, looking up at her from upon her purple flannel bedsheets. He tried to ignore the quieted song as it became more upbeat and sang something about "dirty little freaks", which probably wouldn't have agreed with him the first time around. His pale, white body lay comfortably, still breathing hard, legs dangling over the edge of the bed. He was completely unaware of the manner in which his companion was looking at him.

A split-second later, she turned to look out her window, eyes following the silhouette of a tree. "I've nevah seen ya dick so small."

He chuckled, ignorant of Keisha's disappointment. "Me neither." It was tense. He was tense. Pre-ejaculate drooled from its shrivelled foreskin. As he lay upon her bed, he recalled his solitary experiments with anal stimulation, and marked this in his mind as the first time an object had distracted the flow of his blood away from his erection, instead of calling it from somewhere else.

Keisha cleared her throat, trying to look anywhere but at her bed. From an adjacent wall, a shirtless poster of Usher stared back at her with a smile that seemed at odds with everything she felt. In the space between them, the Pink song continued. Keisha recalled its music video, which she had recently written an essay about for school. She had watched it on YouTube, and downloaded it, seen it iteratively t the point of nausea. Now, her mind focused upon it, once again, with an erudite and analytic stance. Keisha vividly recalled a playfully symbolic, recurring scene from the video, in which blindfolded young women were attached to milking machines so as to provide milk for a Holstein calf. The cow was black and white; she was black, he was white. Keisha was trying to milk him, in a way; forbidden to touch the organ. The roles were reversed, literally harnessing something deeply subversive.

It rested below his eye level, glistening with decanted lube and bodily fluid. Its translucent, multicoloured form was designed as a replica of an average penis. Along the topside, from glans to base, it measured 5.6 inches in length, according to the box. And it was just under five inches in girth. Thus, it was not the most menacing thing he had been sodomized with.

"I think ya should go now, Merritt," Keisha murmured, and then turned her face away so as to hide the tears that were forming.

"All right," he acknowledged, and walked out of her room without so much as covering himself. Merritt closed the door gently behind himself, and made his way across the hall to his own room without being seen by their other room-mates.

Keisha unclipped it. It dropped onto the carpet at her feet, like an overcooked sausage left for a dog to finish. She did not even miss the other end, lower down, that had been modestly penetrating her vaginal orifice while the more menacing shaft had faced him from its place upon her mound.

"Arrgh!" she seethed, kicking it into the closet, its fluid strewn across the carpet.

It hit its box with a quiet thud.

Her manicured fingers hit the tabs on her stereo, and the iPod dock glistened as she found the comfort of a certain song. An instrumental version of Katy Perry's "Not Like The Movies" began to play, vacant of vocals.

Keisha, however, provided some. Though she knew the real lyrics, they were not enough to get her through it. She improvised, rhymed and vented, rum and coke in hand.

"He pulled it off me,

I let it fall,

Right on my matching thong,

He wasn't fit,

It wasn't hard,

Wasn't just the size."

Keisha knew the irony of that first verse, and it pained her, to remember oggling her room-mate from afar at the gym, or the time she walked in on him even though she was certain he was masturbating. It was not just his personality, but his body too -- he was everything she had dreamt of in her love-lorn youth, except he identified as gay and was not even remotely as African as her parents would expect.

"They say you know when you know,

You don't kno-o-o-o-o-ow,

I didn't feel an up-to-scale feeling, no-o-o,

Are you a stupid fag,

For even dreaming that I would?"

She knew better than to blame him. And yet, brevity at his expense was a comfort to her then.

"If you don't like my boobies, Not even a woody, yeah, When you've got none, When I'm undone, With no plan for an inning... And you're not even grinning... Yeah!"

But he had been. He had been so kind to her through it all. She could tell, that he was as heartbroken by nature as she was. Something had stung them both bad, and yet they could be nothing more than friends.

"Pffft, right, said that you were hung, No thicker than my thumb, Is that your pride at stake?"

Feminine laughter came in from the hallway, and Keisha smiled to know there was at least one ear pressed against her door.

"

They say it's hard to treat your snatch, Couldn't help but really laugh, At those wrinkly reject grapes,"

"If his isn't sublime, If it's not in its prime, If it's shorter than nine, Wait for it, When in bed content, Worth every sorry rear end, You'll be the one that impinges my crevices!"

Her mind was firing on many cylinders, poetic synapses shocked into action. Her spontaneous rhymes had almost caused herself to stop and laugh, but she knew her song must go on. It was post-modern parody, it was intertextual, it was a viable option for the creative assignment one of her professors had issued earlier that morning. Keisha grinned.

"If you don't like my boobies, Not even a woody, yeah, When you've got none, When I'm undone, With no plan for an inning... And you're not even grinning... Ohhhh, yeah!"

The door of her bedroom creaked open, but she didn't care. Her back was turned to them. She just reached for the brazier and underwear at the head of her bed, and slipped them on as she sang.

"'Cause I know what's down there... And you're looking upset, oh-oh-oh! It's a crazy idea that, You were made perfectly, For me, You'll see!"

Gentle, shifting footsteps -- she surely had an audience!

"Y'don't like my boobies, You disappoint me, Problematic and erratic, A premature ending, Oh-oh-oh, You don't like my boobies, oh! And that's how it should be, yeah!"

All of her university room-mates were there, now. Even Merritt stood awkwardly behind them, blushing unseen in the shadows of the hallway. She turned around to face them, hand deftly clipping her bra while she sang the final stanza.

"Cuz you've got none, When I'm undone, With no plan for an inning... And you're not even grinning..."

But they were grinning. And clapping. And cheering. All four of them. Even Merritt. That was how she came to terms with it: the first genuine love of her budding adulthood was gay, and there was nothing she could do about it.

"You're a real diva, y'know that, right?" Merritt said as he gaver her a hug, one that patted her on the back. And that was the first time he had touched her and she had not felt the wild warmth of touch altered in perception by affectionate emotions.

As she fell asleep that night, Keisha could feel her love for him changing, shifting from romantic to platonic. It was still just as strong, if not stronger in being requited at last. And she smiled, as her eyelids fell, knowing that they would both find love and companionship in due time.