Editor's Note: this story is tagged with "horror" and "erotic horror" story tags.
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My reflection blurred in the smear of concrete and greenery.
I was a passenger on the MetroRail, Austin's only commuter train. I stood against the window, steadied by my grip on a metal pole. As the train careened at its top speed of sixty miles-per-hour, I considered how everything about this trip was in transit--the place I boarded from was a temporary replacement for the downtown station, which was being rebuilt. It didn't have enough lines for the ever growing population of the city. One of the ticket machines had been out of service. I had found an empty mounting pole on the station's platform--it looked like it was designed to house a dot matrix info board, but given the station's temporary nature, I doubted it would ever be filled.
My eyes fixed on nothing in particular. I, too, was in transit, just another blur in the window of a crowded city.
It didn't bother me, mind you. I think I preferred it. I had a great appreciation for the smear of life, and the swirl of messy color and thought that comes from being in a world smoothed over by generations of advancement. There is a great, beautiful impossibility to my existence, and that train ride, uneventful as it was--as it always was--was evidence for it.
Because not a single man surrounding me would or could know the extent or nature of my lust for them.
I didn't need them to know. I was horny for concept, not cock. I am old enough to know what I want and what I am, and as I studied the disparate sizes and expressions and bulk of the men in repose around me, I was as aware as I ever was that I am burdened with sexuality without the need of sex. I don't have a "come hither" gaze because my eyes don't covet, they catalogue.
To my right, there was a black man in his mid thirties. He's clean shaven, with a smooth lineup I'm sure he paid plenty for. He's smiling at something on his phone. Beautiful white pearls peeked through thick, dark lips; lips that could swallow your tongue, your face, your soul. His orange tank and yellow sweats indicated a playful personality, and his muscled shoulders and broad chest hinted that he lived in a world of labor or fitness. You can find so many ways to build an aesthetic body like his; he was a sculpture I imagined many approved of. Perhaps he gave his approval back to them in long, sweaty nights wrapped in silk sheets. Assuming he was vanilla in taste--perhaps his gave his disapproval in swats across the rear or face, if he was a little more wild. Maybe only a difference of mood separated the two possible outcomes. Not knowing, but considering, was part of the fun.
To my left sat a bearded construction work. His overhung, hairy belly pushed out from an orange vest, hastily unfastened after a long day of work. He was talking to a woman across the aisle. He laughed, and waved his hands as he talked. I imagined those hands were strong, calloused, and in regular use. I wondered how much weight he'd put on in his days of hard labor. I wondered how proud he was of that bulk, and how much he enjoyed showing it off to smaller guys at the construction site. Maybe there was a nerd there--some accountant or intern for a manager he despised--that got grabbed by those strong hands and forced face first into his navel everyday. Or maybe there was a guy like me, unassuming and forgettable, who knew he was built to please. Who was looking at him and thinking about what he might look like naked, free, worshiped like the Dionysus he should've always been.
Across the aisle, I saw an old Latino man with silver braids. He wore a shimmering black suit, dark as night, still full of stars. His eyes hid behind mirrored shades, and his gray beard was neatly trimmed. He looked expensive. Too expensive for me, or anyone else on board. Which made you wonder what his price was. And was his price to have, or be had? Was this a powerful business man who hid a deep yearning for a dominate subordinate to throw him across his desk and take him? Was this silver fox ready to slip a few hundred into the waistband of a twink's panties, or a jock's strap? The grimy possibilities were there, made all the more salacious by often unspoken scandalous precedent.
The train pulled to my stop. I got off. None of them needed to know that, just as they were, they were inspirations to me. It had been my experience that most men can't handle the burden--or the truth--of their beauty. So, I never told them.
I much preferred to write about them, instead.
My apartment was a small one bedroom above a bookstore. The walls were painted a dingy green, like dried toothpaste, and there was little furniture except for a bed. None of these choices were mine--life made them for me. My writing table was a simple wooden slab I'd bought from the antique store down the street for twenty dollars. Sat upon it was my computer, several years out of fashion, but still up for the challenges I presented it. I had a few bookshelves filled with old paperbacks and a couple of pillows strewn across the floor. Any of these places would become dinner tables, depending upon my energy that day. I'd sometimes eat out, but mostly I ate cereal and drank coffee. No one would accuse me of good health, or confuse me for the gods I found in other men.
I rarely left the house for anything other than work. I didn't need to go anywhere else, though I won't pretend I didn't want to. I hated my job--it didn't pay enough to live. To really live, you know what I mean? To walk outside when you want to, take in the sun, go places without a schedule, to be where you want to be because it's curiosity and not a demand. When I think about life, I can't imagine it was invented to only pay bills and starve. Yet the latter two activities seemed to be all I did--which made those quiet moments between my dick, my mind, and the keyboard all the more special.
I wrote. No... I write. I still do. I always will.
I didn't need to flirt with those men on the train not because I feared an accidental run-in with violent straights, but because what really turned me on the most was narrative. Structure threatened my loins, character arcs unzipped my pants, the wandering prose of a sentence without end sent electricity from my mind to my prostate. I didn't have to specifically write porn to have a good time, but it was a good time I always found myself drawn to, all the same. The need to conjure rammed into me, and fucked my imagination with possibilities. I average around four pages or so before I came, and if I'm not playing with myself when I write, then I know it's not a story I'll finish. I am, and you may think lowly of me for this, madly in lust with making.
You'd think I'd write more often, horny as I was for the page.
Between my job and the hours to get to it and leave, most of my time was away from the keyboard. My brain never stopped, of course--all day, men would walk around me, and I deified them from afar. Every man's body was a story I wanted to tell, and the backlog of ideas in my mind was long. But writing is a terrible commitment of resources. If I had both the time and the energy to write when I got home, it would take the remainder of my night. If I lacked one, or the other, or both, I would read someone else's story, jerk off, sleep for 4-6 hours, then stumble back into work the next day.
I appreciated other people's words, and sometimes posted my own, on a sex-story site called, appropriately, Literotica. My audience was small, far smaller than I wanted it to be, but that size was deserved given the few stories that I had posted on the site. While I consider myself a workhorse--I could easily write 2k words a day for fun if I had that freedom--it was a struggle to finish anything. I would orgasm when writing the stories I enjoyed the most, then go to sleep, then get distracted by the burden of the real world, and by the time I got back to doing what I loved--and it would sometimes be days or weeks--I would, more than likely, have a new story or scenario choking my mind, my throat, my cock.
I sat down in front of the keyboard and opened my word processor.
Something about the train ride home stuck with me. I was horny--I was painfully horny, always--but I was also drowning in a frustration of particular heaviness that night. I thought about those three men, sitting across from me, laughing at something, joking with each other. I imagined their bodies, how they moved, what they were like underneath their clothes. I pictured the valleys of their muscles, and where they met. Their cocks, hard and stiff, jutted out from their pants, reached for the sky, begging to be touched. They deserved whores and lovers and gimps and masters and any sort of carnal craving they desired. They deserved novels unto themselves, each of them. They deserved three act structures that found them, whether heroic or villainous, triumphantly sexual. Those worlds didn't exist--couldn't exist--without imagination and time. Best I could give them, I thought, is an orgy with each other. On the train.
"Train on a train," I mused, unzipping with one hand and tapping away with the other. "There's a ring to it."
So I took notes. I gave those gods names, and motivations, and fetishes. I carved their descriptions in time with strokes across my blue cotton underwear. I was half-hard and fully finished with a layout for my story. Good progress on both fronts.
Or, it should've been.
I stared at the monitor, at the clock in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. I grumbled, then slumped in the chair. My dick begged for my attention, but I let it dangle unattended. Anger had set in, a new emotion that had never found its way into my work before. It was late. I had the energy! I had the motivation! I absolutely had the capability, but there was no fucking time! If I didn't go to bed soon, I'd be dead at work the next day. Dead for a job that I needed just to scrape by. And for the first time, I felt too angry at that fact to even finish jerking off.
I saved my work, slunk to my kitchen, and open the window. I draped myself across the pane, and let my arms dangle against the brick outside my apartment. I stared up into the sky, letting the cool air wash over me.
"Fuck this shit," I muttered. "Fuck my life."
The sky was dark. I counted the stars, few as they were. I knew that I was meant to be somewhere else, doing something better. I rarely believed in purpose, but there was too stark of a difference between my happiness in writing and the rest of my micro-managed time.
I closed my eyes and pictured a story, any story. Men taking off their shirts, getting their pecs sucked. A man on his knees, begging another for more. The wetness of a mouth on a dick. A needy hole clenched around a cock. I tried to picture any scene that I could conjure up, any scenario that would allow me to feel full. But every visual was drained out by the reality that I was chained to a cubicle that paid too little for too much of my time, and too much of me.
