We reached home at eleven. My roommate wasn’t returning until next morning so we had the house to ourselves. “I’ll keep these Hershey’s in the fridge”, I told him, scurrying to the kitchen. ‘Should I just like jump out of the kitchen window and leave him here?’I pondered stupidly. That wasn’t going to happen, no way as a) this wasn’t some shady hotel, and so I was essentially fleeing from my own HOME like the biggest coward on planet instead of sending the guy away and b) my room was on the fifth floor so jumping down meant instant death or lifelong paralysis. ‘Stop being a coward and put on a good show!’. I checked my underarms first. ‘Super hairy and damp but smells alright’. Check. Next: the stretch marks. They adorned my body in patches like an incomplete Worli painting. ‘Okay, lights off before tops off’. Check. Next: the briefs. I pulled out the wedgie and inspected the colour – stripped blue Marks and Spencers. ‘Don’t think these will look that bad next to his Andrew Christian’s’. Check. Next: the erection. ‘Why did I have to be exclusively top? And why does my willy dilly-dally just in his case?’ I rued, ‘Maybe thinking of some reliable porno hunk when I plunge it in might help’. It was a cheap move though, only justified when Demi Moore had to make out with Whoopi Goldberg to contact her husband in Ghost. I couldn’t exploit his body like that.
“Hey, come and try an avocado!” he called out to me. Chanting ‘You is worthy you is sexy you is fuckable’ (obvious lies), I walked back to the living area, where he stood holding a ripe avocado in one hand. “Would you like to taste the fruit of the Gods?” he joked, sounding like an apostle. I pulled out one from the bag with my mendicant fingers. “Take one that’s soft” he advised. When I took a bite, he asked, “Is it golden within?”. I nodded. “See I have the knack to pick the best ones”, he gloated cheerily. “Hmm…” I agreed, eating it slowly.
To be honest… I hated that fruit, and each bite was like poison to my taste buds. And the taste didn’t improve no matter how hard I tried convincing myself of its palatability. Nevertheless, my very-Indian deference got the better of me and I gulped down the diarrhoea-inducing devil only to keep him happy.
“That was wonderful”, he remarked, continuing, “I couldn’t thank you enough for your hospitability”. I could only go “Hmm….”, still attempting to digest that strange fruit in my mouth. Just as I was about to ask, “Want to use the rest…?”, he sidled up to me, placed his right arm around my back and kissed me squarely on my lips. I dropped the rotten avocado seed out of shock and went hopelessly weak at the knees. He took off his cardigan in a flash and tugged at the hemline of my tee-shirt, asking, “Do you mind if I?”. I was too disoriented to recall pointer number 2 (lights off before tees off’), and unthinkingly raised my arms so he could strip me topless. I was mortified when I felt the cool air grazing against my exposed skin. My inglorious archipelagos of stretch marks were in full public display! To my surprise, they barely registered any reaction from him, and he began kneading my belly affectionately and sucking on my nipples. ‘How does he love this?!’, I exclaimed to myself. He went on for about eight minutes as I stood motionless like his sex doll. He somehow seemed to dig the hair, the paunch and the marks. Or at least turned a blind eye to them. He undid his jeans to reveal, again to my surprise, jet blue Superman briefs with the ‘S’ emblazoned in red on the crotch. Hardly Andrew Christian, hardly expensive, hardly able to contain his junk. I sensed some anxiety in him and figured it was owing to my frigid response. Before he took off his underwear, he grinded against me and I felt his bulge growing harder and harder against my jeans. “It’s my first time with an Asian” he mentioned hastily, perhaps hinting that I was some litmus for future experiences. Next he showered me with kisses, first on the lips, then the cheeks, then the neck and working his way back onto the lips, this time using his tongue. I didn’t realize when he had dropped his briefs and began pleasuring his fully erect penis the size of a cigar. Not as huge as the aubergines I had imagined. This activity took up another twelve minutes, and I knew he was growing weary of being the sole performer. He was sweating more than I was, and it trickled down his nipples and flat abs. He stopped masturbating as well, and was waiting for me to drop my pants voluntarily.
“Can we move to your bedroom?” he suggested, perhaps as a last-ditch to loosen me up. I consented, and the first thing I did upon entering the bedroom was switch off the lights. The darkness pulled up my confidence a bit. I pulled down my trousers while he began scanning for my scrotum with his fingers. He gently fondled it with one hand, and stroked my butt cheeks with the other. ‘The porn star… think about the porn star’ I said to myself. But so much was going on that I found it impossible to conjure the image in my head. Plus it would’ve been unfair on my part to treat him that way when he seemed so much into me. It confounded me that while nothing about this perfectly groomed, perfectly toned guy who could easily be the gay version of Disney Prince could excite me, every dark, speckled and pot-bellied man I’d spotted that day had given me a hard-on. Maybe my biggest guilt was exoticizing this guy because of his skin colour. Maybe my own insecurities were so overwhelming that I subconsciously felt it would be a heresy to afflict him with my brownness, my largeness, my unattractiveness, my Indian-ness.
“Listen. It’s not working” I finally admitted, “We should stop”. When he heard that, he shoved me resentfully and stormed out of the room without saying a word. As bad as I felt for rejecting him so late, my body loosened the moment he let go of it. I switched on the lights and went out to apologise, still in my undies. He hadn’t taken the rejection kindly, shooting back a look of revulsion on seeing me. “Why don’t you put on some clothes? Why do you think I’d want to see that?”, he spat abrasively. “I’m sorry… I should’ve told you earlier itself that I wasn’t feeling it…”, I began awkwardly, but he cut in, “Well, of course you wouldn’t do that because I was paying for your dinner and your bloody chocolates”. That accusation was untrue and it hurt me, but I didn’t retort because I felt I deserved some reproach. But he didn’t stop there, taunting “You think you’d get another guy like me? I should’ve figured that you were doing this only so you could go back to your Indian friends and brag about sleeping with a fetching white guy. Consider yourself lucky because I only dated you because of a dare!”.
“Wait, what?” I exclaimed. Immediately realizing his blunder, he said evasively, “What’s the point? Just forget it. I need to go”. I didn’t want him to leave without an explanation, so I grabbed his bag of avocados before he could take them. “What’s the matter with you? Give them to me!”, he demanded. “What did you mean by a dare?”, I asked, “I’ll give you these only if you answer me truthfully”. He suddenly felt intimidated, partly because of my tone and partly because I was standing in a kushti stance that too just in my undies (which I realized only after he’d left). “I don’t want you to feel offended by what I’m going to say… especially as you’ve been extremely hurtful to me… I only chose to date you because my friends dared me to sleep with the… with the most unattractive Indian guy I could find on Grindr”. That hurt like a kick in the groin, and I lost all my admiration for him there and then. “So…so… all that time you were only sharing those Snapchat videos to keep them posted on the date?”, I asked, putting two and two together. He was stunned that I’d made that inference so quickly. “B-but I did stop once we were in the cab because I-I really began enjoying your company”, he replied. While he sounded sincere enough, I wasn’t buying into his bullshit anymore. “So you thought I’d had forgiven you if I found this after we’d ended up having sex? I was like what, some use and discard amusement for you and your friends?”. “I’m very very sorry for everything… I shouldn’t have mentioned this at all. But I did feel guilty eventually when things went smoothly. I wasn’t expecting you to be so… like those funny Indian guys… you know them…”, he tried to justify with the same puppy dog face he gave at German Bakery. He failed miserably this time though. “You are such an ugly human being. Shit! And I was actually fretting all this time about being so inferior compared to you? GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!” I lashed, flinging the bag of avocados at his face. “Aahh!” he cried out, as the bag thwacked him in the eye. “And yes, that reminds me, I lied about the avocados. They were awful, bloody awful! Goodbye!”. He darted out of my home clutching the bag with one hand, the other hand over his swollen eye.
On regaining my composure, I realized I had fought an argument entirely in my underwear for the first time in my life. I was still unsure whether his revelation was true or was it a petty form of vengeance for nursing his hurt ego. But it didn’t matter anyway now that he had left for good. I was exhausted by then, and wished for nothing but a good night’s sleep. I felt sudden craving for chocolates, and went to the kitchen to get the Hershey’s. As I sat on the couch with the Hershey’s in one hand, I felt more confident about myself which was puzzling because someone besides myself had hurt me that day like no other. ‘Well, what right does he have to think I’m ugly or need to lose weight when I’m a much better person at heart?’ I thought. As I unwrapped the Hershey bar, I remembered the man sorting them at the store. ‘Non-descript looks, loose pants, saggy straight-guy buttocks… dark-skinned, a mushrooming stubble, slightly puffy jowl and broad shoulders… might be having some stretch marks on his body like me, but less… and an awesome willy too…’.
I took me twenty minutes to savour the Hershey bar…. and pleasure myself simultaneously while thinking about him. I dozed off on the couch that night, having the best sleep in months.
