Episode
1 - Tracing Trace
Opening his eyes, Trace found himself staring
at the ceiling. A ceiling fan forced cool air over his naked
sheet covered body and created a transparent shadowy circle
that hovered just under the popcorn ceiling as its blades rotated.
Trace followed the diameter of the circling blades to the fan’s
hub and listened for the motor’s hum. At first, he could
not hear it, but eventually, beneath the swoosh of the swirling
blades, he could hear its hum, the same hum that lulled him
to sleep. He closed his eyes and thought of sleeping more, but
he was no longer tired. Shifting his attention to the rest of
the house, he listened for the sounds of activity, but heard
nothing besides the droning fan.
The lack of activity meant there was no weekend
company upstairs, and at this late Sunday hour, no one would
be stopping by now. Trace sighed, simultaneously happy he would
not have to put on a happy face for family and discontented
the evening would be a solitary one. He thought of dressing
and going upstairs to talk with his parents, but he saw them
this morning, last evening, and every morning and evening before
that for twenty-six years, so the prospect of spending the evening
with them failed to excited him.
Pulling the sheet from his body, Trace ran
his hands along his stomach and over his chest. Grazing each
nipple with his fingertips, he sighed and wondered what he should
do. He ran his fingers behind his ears and over his scalp. As
he raised his arms, a smell flowed out from his armpits. Scrunching
his nose at the existential smell, he gleefully jumped from
the bed, enthused by the idea of having something to do.
Trace made his way across the narrow hallway
into the laundry room and slipped into the bathroom. Stepping
into the bathroom, he wondered what it would be like to have
a larger bathroom. This one barely left room between the toilet,
sink, and stall shower to undress in without having to be careful
of falling into the toilet. Releasing a stream of piss into
the toilet, Trace pushed out the walls in his mind and wondered
what the room would feel like if it had just six more inches
of square footage in each direction.
The room was uncomfortably small, but its immaculate
condition pleased Trace as he regulated the shower water temperature.
He turned each temperamental knob until a comfortable temperature
was achieved and stepped into the shower and waited for the
water to drench his hair with its light spray. Realizing he
had turned the knobs to their usual half open position, he opened
each one as far as it would go. The spray of water increased,
and it poured over his face and neck, along his chest and stomach,
and over the length of his cock, which thickened as it was licked
by the warm flow of water.
He turned a bar of soap between his hands and
spread the lather over his body. Dragging his fingernails under
his armpits, he felt his cock stiffen to a full erection. Lowering
his hands, he pulled his balls with one hand and grabbed his
shaft with the other. As his soapy fist slid up and down his
cock, he wanted to cum and made a concerted effort to do so
by rubbing his soap slicked palm over his head. He thrust his
hips forward and tensed under the itch developing in his head,
but he knew it would not be enough. He only comes flat on his
back. Shifting his attention to his other head, he gave up and
shampooed his hair as his erection sliced through the spray
of water.
Toweled off, Trace wrapped the towel around
his waist and returned to his bedroom. Its blue walls and walnut
trimming greeted him warmly, and he could feel the dampness
of the concrete floor seeping through the carpet beneath his
bare feet. The damp carpet simultaneously signaled something
familiar and something repellent to him. He closed the bedroom
door and positioned himself in front of the full-length mirror
that hung over its backside and pulled the towel from his waist.
The reflection of his naked form filled the
mirror, and he looked himself over with an evaluative gaze,
starting with his feet. He appreciated their Romanesque largeness
and thought they looked manly but would have preferred if they
weren’t topped with a small line of hair. He considered
himself fortunate the hair was not as dense here as it was on
his legs, which were also solid and shapely, but he thought
the moderately dense black hair that covered them blurred their
shapeliness, and he pondered whether or not he should start
trimming. Eyeing his cock, which was now shriveled to a quarter
of its erect length, he wondered if such an extreme variance
between one’s erect and flaccid self was normal, but he
did know that beyond his feet and legs, he had reached the last
part of his body that pleased him. He raised his eyes to his
torso and thought what he saw was an odd mixture of unattractive
features. His slim waist belied the stomach bulge, which could
be seen in profile, and this bulge oddly contrasted his small,
yet defined, pecs, which framed the flat hairy ridge of bone
between them. Contrasting the shapeliness of his pecs with his
stomach, he realized he could improve his torso fairly easily
if he stuck to the exercise plan he avoided more than participated
in. Looking up quickly from his chest to his head, he caught
a momentary unconscious glimpse of himself, and he thought what
he saw must be what he looked like to other people. He remembered
the first compliments he had ever received were about his eyes.
A secretary at his father’s office had raved about the
length and curl of his eyelashes, and a co-worker once leaned
across his desk and told him there was no need for furs with
sable eyes like his. His face was made handsome face because
of his eyes, and their attractiveness rested largely in their
ability to reflect his slightest emotion and inevitably produced
an empathic response in others. The response he was capable
of eliciting in others was something he was only just beginning
to understand, and he was made more attractive by the fact,
once learned, he would never exploit this ability. Running his
fingers through his wet hair, he examined the first physical
feature he noticed age-related changes in, and since the age
of twenty-three, his hair had been thinning. It still maintained
its dark brown color, but its dark shimmering brownness was
beginning to fade, and its thickness, although the same on the
back and sides of his head, was not what it once was in the
front. Gone were the hair hey days of the eighties when Trace
could compete with the East Haven girls for height in hair.
A sudden lassitude overwhelmed Trace, and he turned from the
mirror.
Pulling on a tee shirt and shorts, he slid
a cigarette from the pack on his nightstand and made his way
to the kitchen. He considered smoking at the table, but remembering
his vow to give up smoking inside, he looked out the kitchen
door, which opened out at ground level into the backyard. Through
the window, he could see the grass was taking on a dark green
hue as the gloaming shades illuminated it more dimly as the
sun faded and fell in the distance. The desire for sunsets and
twilight overcame Trace, and he stepped out the door.
He walked to the back of his family’s
farmer’s acre and lit his cigarette as he took in the
view of the sunset hovering over the distant Sleeping Giant
Mountain. His view was framed by a new housing development that
skirted the horizon. The house used to face a fallow field that
offered an unobstructed view of the horizon. The field used
to glow at night with the light of fireflies, and sitting on
the front porch, one could not discern land from sky as the
light of the fireflies melded into the star bespangled sky.
Trace fondly recalled uneventful evenings spent
on the front porch with his mother as he looked toward his house
and wondered what his parents were doing. His apartment occupied
the in-law apartment on the first floor of the raised ranch,
and his parents occupied the second floor. They were not on
the porch, their usual haunt at night, and he figured they were
contentedly tucked away—Mom reading in her bedroom and
Dad watching television in the living room. He dragged on his
cigarette and looked toward the sunset in time to catch the
last lick of flame dropping behind the mountain. The expanse
of darkened sky hovered to his back, as the western horizon
was bunted in the purples and oranges of the velvet sunset.
He felt a coolness emanating from the woods as the last vestige
of daylight fell from his face. Nothing moved, and except for
the chorus of crickets and the whir of tires from a lone car
making its way along Route 22 in the distance, there was no
sound as this bedroom community fell easily and early into twilight.
He listened to the burning cigarette as he
took the last drag off it and thought about the upcoming workweek.
He felt he should be happy, or at least contented, with the
prospect of the workweek: wasn’t the potential of working
as a social worker instead of a waiter the reason he had forsaken
everything and everyone to obtain his bachelor’s degree
and why, before that, he worked two jobs and attended night
school for a year and a half to reverse his dropout status by
obtaining his high school diploma? A discontentedness filled
him as he realized the answer to this question failed to alter
his feelings about work the next day.
Trace pulled his cock out from
the bottom of his shorts and began to fist himself. It quickly
thickened in his grasp, and as it thickened, he fisted himself
harder. The increasing friction created a chill that permeated
his cock until he laced the grass before him with cum, and as
it soaked into the New England soil, Trace whispered: I
want a boyfriend.
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