“A socially-challenged young man has a sexually-frustrating evening alone.”

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He was a dirty Boy. Hot on the heels of his shift, he reclined in his death-trap on four wheels, cruising the back-streets at 110 k with his high-beams on riding up some poor helpless Honda’s ass, scratching, couldn’t stop scratching. His Mom reminded him yesterday, “Make the prescription!” And he’d tell her, “I know, I know, I know!” Something with his sweat. Couldn’t stop sweating and he couldn’t stop scratching now, itching the skin around the outside of the hairy part of his armpit as it reddened, swole-up, pimpled in real-time under his nails and damn it, this fucking itch is KILLING me! I can’t wait to get home, jump in a hot shower and give it Hell with my luffa.
Through the front door he burst, stripping right down by the laundry room that sat parallel to the rental’s entrance, straight to his bareness, and scampered barefoot down the main hall to the bathroom. Music. That damn music again! It was his neighbour: his landlord’s 18-year-old daughter who had recently-graduated, occupying the suite next to his on the ground floor of the house they all shared. Blaring that Top-40 garbage at the maximum volume her little, pink, pig-shaped IPod dock could muster while singing at the top of her voice, the shower on, the water-heater – which sat in the wall between both suites – at full-tilt. He might not get any hot water now. Oh well, too late. And he wasn’t prepared for another hour of scratching while he would wait for her to finish showering and then wait for the hot water tank to fill back up again. He closed the bathroom door & kicked the mat so it blocked the gap at the bottom of the door, unplugged the night-light, turned on the shower to secure his place and sat on the toilet to take a big, fat shit. It was about damn time.

He liked this. The mat blocked any light coming in from the hallway, so when he finally got in the stall he could turn the light off and have a “dark shower”. Very meditative. And this was meditative too, having a poop, listening to the sound of the water, letting the steam fill the bathroom, fill his lungs, through his pores. His skin was finally beginning to calm down. Maybe it was the heat, or the ASMR, or the pulse of the girl’s music next-door, which strangely had seemed to decrease in volume. Maybe it was that she wasn’t singing anymore. The Boy’s toilet was directly perpendicular to the wall so he could be a creep & put his ear up next to it and hear whatever was going on. Through the layers of plaster & rows of pipes, and the sound of a rushing current, like standing close to a waterfall, the pressure – the immense strain required to have two young, first-world adults have a hot shower at the same time – through the wall, into her bathroom.
Never, could he ever say, he had ever been this close to an 18-year-old’s bathroom, so close he could hear her through the wall, hear her water running, hear her humming. There was something perversely-sexual about the whole thing, which bothered the Boy, but didn’t. He didn’t care. It wasn’t like her father was going to storm in to his suite without warning while he was in the bathroom & catch him on the toilet with his ear to the wall and EVICT HIM! Prove it! Prove I was spying on your daughter! You know already she listens to her music way too fucking loud all the time, how am I not supposed to eavesdrop, out of, frustration! Heh, yeah, that was it. Who was he going to believe? For eighteen, his daughter wasn’t anything to look at anyway. Like every other teenager these days: tall; thin; long hair; long face; athletic; no tits; no ass… he wasn’t sexually-attracted to her. But he was attracted to the idea of her. That she was so close. That it could have been any other girl and fantasy fulfilled, but since it was her he could lust for whoever he wanted in the same situation. But, the fact was, it was her, and over time that she was a part of the fantasy at all made him adore her. And now, as close as he was liable ever to get to her, he could hear her, through the wall, and not humming anymore. No, she wasn’t. The Boy wiped quickly & flushed, then turned the light off and got into the shower.

Could he still hear her if her was actually standing in the running shower? He never tried before. But yes, he could, on the other side of the pipes that supplied both heads opposite one-another. And he could swear, she was moaning. No, it can’t be. This is too good to be true. Wait, why am I getting so worked up about this? I shouldn’t be. She’s not even hot, she’s just a skinny White city girl. There’s plenty of other girls I could be jerking off to. He didn’t even know what he was hearing anymore.

From somewhere far beyond his own machinations, it was his voice, speaking back to him in the darkness. A voice that told him many stories. Stories that flipped through his mind like the pages of a never-ending photo book. Photos from a life, his life. And all the girls that inhabited every possible scenario in this endless loop of fractured memories & dreams, the ones he knew from high school, the ones from art college, the ones from work; the ones he spoke to, the ones he didn’t, and the ones he never had a chance to; the ones from TV and the ones from the porn & hentai that he watched, even the animated chicks; and the ones he saw on the street, passing him on the sidewalk, that one who passed him on the skytrain, 15-years-ago, he still remembered that one…
and all these faces & these deliberate, naked bodies inhabited whatever-you-would-call the central “hub” of his mind, that manifested his imagination as he would see it in his mind’s eye. And as his attention turned away from the landlord’s daughter – who by this point had finished her shower & turned the water off, surprising the Boy with a sudden blast of renewed pressure – his damaged mind ran through the hub’s Rolodex, never staying on one face longer than a few seconds, his brain well-versed now in shuffling the objects as one would playing cards. His body couldn’t reason whether it was horny or not, as he beat his battered subject raw under the mask of the heat & the water. No one was making him hot, in the way he wanted to feel. He turned the water off and got out.

The night dragged on. He couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop touching himself, he kept his day’s boxers near his hips in case he managed to grind himself to climax. Anyone? Weren’t any of them what he needed to get off? What did he want anymore? He wanted to get fucked, as he gyrated between the sheets of his single mattress. Nothing. I stuck my finger in my ass once, that helped. He licked his finger and pushed it in too far & too quickly, and his ass clenched naturally in denial of its own entry. He wiped his finger off on the boxers and tossed them into his laundry hamper in defeat. He opened his eyes. A silverfish crawled along the ceiling. He wondered whether there were statistics for number-of silverfish eaten accidentally. They have statistics for how many spiders people eat in a year while sleeping. Three. If that silverfish lost its footing and fell into my mouth while I was sleeping, how would I know? How would scientists know how many spiders people are eating unless they lock them in a room with an average number of spiders and literally document if any crawl into their subjects’ mouths? How do you get someone to agree to that? Lie to them, probably. Tell them it’s a sleep study when really it’s an accidental-spider-eating study. What a ridiculous train of thought. He rolled over and tried to forget about the unwanted visitors.

3 AM.
His alarm clock blinked clearly between his blurry vision. It always blinked, those two lights in the middle separating the hour & the minute, maybe to tell you it was still working, or you needed to change the batteries. But wouldn’t dead batteries mean no display at all? What about his clock, which didn’t need batteries at all? Then why would they keep the flashing light? Just to annoy the restless?
A sound.

An exhale through his walls. No noise came through the wall on this side: it was just a little den that the daughter used on-occasion. As far as he knew, nothing ever went on in there.
There it was again. A squeal.
He pressed his ear up to the wall. Deep breathing. Moaning. Oh fuck, she really is doing it! He grew inches in those moments alone, and seized the opportunity to finish what he had started, what he had set himself up for all evening. A climax. A release. Finally. It didn’t even matter her position, or how she was making herself cum. Her undulations were enough, the speech of the angels, straight from the mouth of a babe. A young girl who desired some late-night fun as much as his sorry, thirty-year-old ass. He was as erect as he was going to be, and he started to grind the uncircumcised tip against the wall while he continued to lean in on both hands. She picked up speed and so did he. Oh my God, I’m almost there. I’m actually almost there. I’m going to fucking cum!

A click in the wall.
The furnace. Forced air began to flow through the inside of the walls. Louder and louder, enshrouding the teenage squeals until he couldn’t hear her at all. He didn’t even like the forced air, it made the bedroom too fucking hot and he woke up every night sweating to death. No! NO! I was so close! He was losing it. The blood tide was receding. In fact, it felt like his whole penis was receding back inside, like a bellybutton. He never felt so small & so demeaned.

He felt like he was being punished. Submissive to powers beyond his control, teaching him something. Something deep, about his subconscious, about the real reasons he wasn’t able to relax & get off. But I don’t want to think about those fucking things right now, I just want to get off! I can feel my engorged testicles and they twinge as a bruise would, pressing down on it, on them, squeezing, wishing this fucking semen would just ejaculate already and leave me in peace! “Damnit!” He cried out-loud, “God damnit!” He slammed his fists on his mattress like a hissy Neanderthal, pulled his pillow up to his face and screamed like he saw in the movies. He jumped up out of bed and paced the room, cursing under his breath, frustrated as all-Hell. “Damnit!” He punched the wall facing the daughter’s suite, and the force knocked an impact hole through it.

“Ouch!” That really hurt!
His phone was ringing. The Boy peeled his hand out of the wall and looked at the call display. The landlord. Of course. “What’s going on down there?”
Nothing, just dropped something, sorry.
“It sounded more than that to me.”
I just dropped something, sorry. I’ll tell you more in the morning. I’m sorry I woke you up.
“This isn’t the first time this has happened, Shawn. We’ll be having a conversation about this in the morning.”
Fine, I said sorry! Good-bye! The anxiety began to grip him, the itch under his arm intensified. He knew it was psychosomatic.
The hole in the wall began to move, as the silverfish colony stirred.

//jf 1.13.2021

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