O’Melissokomos
The Bee Keeper

Ruben showed up at my place, unannounced, early on a random Saturday morning. I’d still been in bed when he knocked and I hadn’t even showered yet. Now we were sitting around my apartment. I was still in just the tee-shirt and sweatpants I’d pulled on to answer the door. Ruben had no real reason to drop by, other than a friendly visit, but his eyes kept prowling around, looking for something, like a jaguar hunting for prey.

After maybe twenty minutes of shooting the breeze: “Want to flip a coin?” he asked, smiling that same old sheepish smile. Like I hadn’t seen that one coming.

“C’mon, Ruben,” I said. “You’ve got a fianc�, and you know I’ve got a fuckin’ girlfriend. Now you’re gonna tell me you still want to do the whole heads-tails game?”

That’s what we always called it: the heads-tails game. It’s not the kind of thing where you expend a lot of effort dreaming up some fancy name.

Ruben shrugged, looking crestfallen, maybe blushing some. I felt kind of bad for disappointing him like that. One of the things we’d agreed early on was that we wouldn’t discuss it much. If one of us proposed flipping a coin, the other just said “yeah, okay” or “not now.” We didn’t drag it out or make a big deal out of it. It wasn’t a big-deal kind of thing, which was pretty much what made it great.

But, truthfully, all that seemed like ages ago.

“Sorry, man,” I apologized. “I’m just surprised is all. I mean, we haven’t done that since we graduated college, y’know? It’s been ... what? Two years?”

“I know,” Ruben said, playing with the sleeve seam of his tee-shirt now. “I’m not here just for that. I miss hanging out with you. I know we have different friends and all now, but ...”

“Oh, man, don’t say that—we’ll always be good buds,” I said, only partly believing it myself. Back when I was a kid or even in college, I’d have said my friends were friends forever. But I was figuring out real life didn’t work that way—too many things pulling everybody in too many different directions at once. Staying connected was hard.

“I know,” Ruben said. “I guess ... I just miss the way things used to be, you know, with us.”

“That’s cool,” I said, reaching over and punching Ruben on the shoulder. “Don’t sweat it.”

Ruben thought about something for a minute. He looked up from his shoes. “So you don’t want to flip a coin? Just take a deep breath and answer the question.” That familiar tone of voice. Was he trying to hypnotize me?—Outside the rules of the game? We’d never done that except as part of the game. Or maybe he just wanted to remind me.

I let out my breath. I had to take a moment to wrap my head around it—but once I did, I started to bone up. Old habits die hard, I guess.

“Yeah, I could be up for that,” I finally answered. The smile that burst on Ruben’s face just about killed me. “You got a quarter, or what?” I said, because my sweatpants had no pockets.

Ruben searched his pants. “I guess I don’t,” he said.

“Hold on,” I said and got up. I knew Ruben’s eyes were snapping right to the tent my erection was pitching in my sweats. I had to remind myself not to act embarrassed. This was Ruben, after all. We’d roomed together for years in college and been through a lot together. Plus, he’d seen me boned up before.

I got a quarter from my laundry jar and put it on my thumb. “Call it,” I said.

“Heads,” Ruben said.

I flicked it with my thumbnail. The ding of the coin hung in the air as the quarter shot up, tumbling over and over. The coin came down. I snatched it out of the air, slapped it on to the back of my hand, and held it out so we both could see: the big reveal.

“Tails,” I said.

Ruben took a deep breath. “And so it goes,” he said, which is what we always say when we lose the coin toss. Or what we used to say, I mean.

I met Ruben freshman year, on my first day in the dorms. We got assigned by random chance to be roommates. We got along great from the start. He was on a soccer scholarship; I ran track. He had dark hair; I had blond. In some ways we complimented each other, like a yin-yang thing. We became the nexus for a close group of friends, but at the end of the day it was always Ruben and me. We told each other everything. I felt closer to him than I ever had with anyone else.

I guess it was near the end of our sophomore year that we started the whole heads-tails game. We were sitting around our dorm room on a Saturday night, bitching about this psychology class we were both taking and a bunch of other shit. Neither of us felt like getting on the party train. But Ruben had hauled out a bottle of vodka he’d stashed, so we were passing that back and forth.

Ruben had gotten laid the previous weekend with a chick we both knew who got weird about it fast and was basically stalking him. “It sucks I have to avoid her ’cause she was good fucking sex,” Ruben said. He gave his crotch a quick, casual rub. “Yeah. She’s bat-shit crazy, but I wouldn’t mind fucking her again.” We were both on the floor. I was stretched out on the cheap-ass throw rug, and he was sitting with his back against the side of my bed. “Or maybe we could at least make out. I love making out.”

“Me too,” I giggled, because everything seems funny when I’m buzzed.

“If you and I could make out with each other, that’d be so fucking perfect.”

“Huh?” I said. The comment took me completely off guard. I was way too inebriated to process this. “Us? Each other?”

“Yeah,” Ruben said. “Like if one of us was a girl. We could have sex, like, whenever we wanted.”

“I guess,” I mused, trying to wrap my half-drunk head around what he was saying. But then I couldn’t help it—I had to laugh, and Ruben started laughing with me. “Or one of us could just pretend to be a girl,” I said. We laughed again, but my heart was beating like crazy, I remember.

I looked at him and decided that maybe, yeah, I did wonder what kissing him would be like. Would his mouth be soft like a girl’s?

“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I couldn’t just pretend to be the girl.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this conversation, so I just said: “Oh. Okay.”

“It’d have to be real.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“It’d have to be real. For the one who’s the girl, I mean. Whoever would have to really believe he’s a girl, not just pretend.”

So again: “Oh.”

“Like, whoever is the guy would have to hypnotize the one who’s supposed to be the girl into really believing he’s a girl. Then it would be real, for the girl at least.”

What he said had a weird kind of logic. There was something not quite right about it, but I was drunk enough I couldn’t figure it out. So I just agreed: “Yeah. That makes sense.” Because most of what he said did make sense, kind of.

Ruben suggested flipping a coin, and that was that.

Ruben took off his baseball cap and slid off his tee-shirt. His body was a little bit softer than it had been those couple of years ago in college, but it was mostly like I remembered. All that hair on his broad chest. His dark, oblong nipples.

I stripped off my tee-shirt, and Ruben whistled. “Yeah, I’ve been working out,” I said, proud of my smooth, tight body with its new, denser muscles, proud of my sleek, hard cock on display through my sweatpants. He got down to his briefs, and there was Ruben’s fat cock, bulging out the front of his pale blue briefs, a wet spot the size of a dime right where the head sat. Ruben the leaker.

“Let’s do this,” Ruben said, looking up from my hard cock.

I nodded. That was part of the game. Whoever won the coin toss got to be the man and had to hypnotize the other into believing he was the woman. I won the toss, so this next part was all on me.

I tossed Ruben the quarter, and he caught it. We always used a quarter—it was part of the game, and no other type of coin would do.

Ruben knew what to do because we always did it the same way. That first time, I’d lost the toss. He handed me the same quarter we’d tossed, and he proceeded to hypnotize me the way we’d seen the instructor demonstrate in psychology class. I remember how nervous I felt, in spite of the alcohol, when we started, and how relaxed I felt once we got underway. I knew what he was doing, and I was drunk enough to be willing, so it worked fine. That’s how we started setting the rules of the game.

Ruben held the quarter between his thumb and index finger, a little above his eye level, right where he could see it. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis, our instructor had said, way back when, so all I had to do was help guide Ruben as he hypnotized himself.

“Stare at the coin,” I told him. “Concentrate all of your attention on that coin, and as you do, just let yourself get more and more relaxed. As you relax, the coin gets heavier and heavier. As the coin gets heavier, you arm also gets heavier and heavier.”

This part didn’t take long. It never did. The coin will drop from your fingers, I told him. Ruben and I had done this hundreds of times, maybe thousands. Your eyes will close, I told him. We knew the routine by heart. He was willing. Your arm will come back down to rest at your side, I told him. He listened, and it all happened as inevitably as breathing. Watching his eyes close and his arm drift down, knowing what that meant, anticipating what came next ... I was boned up hard the whole time.

Feel it happening, I told him. Feel yourself changing, becoming. I have no idea whether Ruben really believed he was a woman when he was hypnotized. We never discussed that. For me, I never did, not completely, but when I was hypnotized I always felt so open and cooperative that I always agreed when Ruben told me that’s what was happening. It was part of the game, and I played along because everything—being hypnotized, playing the role, the sex—felt good. The point of everything in the game was to make each other feel good.

“Hey, baby,” I said to kick things off when girl-Ruben opened his eyes and looked at me. We brought our bodies together and pecked each other on the lips. It was the lamest kiss ever.

“C’mon, babe,” I laughed, as if he really were my girlfriend. “Don’t be like that.” And then we really went for it. Tongues and everything. Kissing’s crucial—we realized that from the start. Even if it’s with another guy, when your eyes are closed and your mouth is working against another person, you can get lost in it, whether you’re the guy or the girl.

Of course our hands were going all over each other too, but that’s how it always went with me and Ruben. We didn’t mess around. That was the paradox, I guess—what made our thing so good was that it was never serious; it was just fun. But when we’d get down to it, it was totally real.

Ruben began to kiss his way down my body, and I knew what that meant. At some point we’d decided that blowjobs weren’t essential, but they could still happen. The most important thing was to stay hypnotized, follow the rules, stay in the role. So if you lost the coin toss and your subconscious mind was feeling like a blowjob was how it should go, you did it, like sometimes you gotta give some head before you give some tail.

Ruben slipped my sweatpants down to my knees, freeing the most intimate parts of me. I moved my legs and my sweats went down around my ankles, and I stepped out of them. Then I presented those most intimate parts to him again. Ruben tugged gently on my ball sack and let my dick hang there in the air in front of his face for a minute. His mouth was open. He licked his lips and squeezed his pecs like some boob-jobbed bimbo in a porno clip. He was letting me anticipate it, the way his lips and throat were going to work my dick. Ruben’s good like that. I think we both knew that it was better when he lost the coin toss, but we never said it.

His mouth engulfed my cock. He went up and down on it with a slow suction; I mean, really savoring my dick. I’d forgotten how Ruben could make my dick feel like it was a straw he was going to use to suck the cum right out of my nuts. No real girl had ever done that for me. It was uncanny.

He held on to my balls, really getting into bobbing my knob. Ruben still had his blue briefs on; I looked down and saw that the dime-sized wet spot in the front of his briefs had become half-dollar sized. I started thinking things like, Man, this bitch is in heat; this bitch is fucking loving my dick. I never said that stuff out loud, but always wondered if Ruben thought it too when he was the man.

I know when I was hypnotized and imagining I was the girl, I’d be thinking shit like, I want your load; I want you to bend me over and fuck me like a bitch in heat. It got me off, thinking nasty shit like that. If I thought of him as a friend, I’d start to wake up and I’d start to lose it. It happened a few times.

Ruben lifted my balls and started tonguing my taint. Nasty bitch, I thought. He lapped at my unshowered nuts, rolling them around on his face. I looked down again and realized Ruben had his other hand down the back of his underwear and was fingering his asshole. I can’t describe how much that turned me on. He was unconsciously avoiding his dick to play the role. The sleeping part of his mind knew I’d probably stroke him off later, but for now, it was all about his pussy. The way it should be. I was the same way when I was the girl.

I picked Ruben up by his armpits and turned him around, bending him over the couch, teasing down those blue briefs of his, kissing his butt cheeks. Gonna lick your pussy, I thought over and over again. Ruben’s ass was as round and firm as ever. I pulled apart his cheeks to look at his nice pink hole.

I could see why people might think it’s nasty to eat ass, but it’s not like I haven’t done it to my girlfriends before. It always turns me on. With Ruben and me it always made complete sense—lick it before you stick it—you got to get that pussy ready before you fuck it.

When I got my face close to his butt, I could smell that he was freshly showered. Underneath that was a deeper smell, musky and sexy, and my memory of it punched me in the gut. For a minute I was back in the dorm, back in the day.

I drove my tongue inside of him, and it was slick and smooth. Ruben moaned, groaned, rode against my tongue. Like a bitch in heat, I kept thinking. I slapped the sides of his ass and kept working that pussy, knowing it was where my dick wanted to go and that my tongue was just getting things prepared. I was so hard I couldn’t stand it.

I slid my finger inside him, slowly. His ass was still nice and tight. Ruben took it easily though, and I sunk it in and out a few times, unable to resist bending down and getting a few licks at my finger, the rim of his stretched hole.

I stood up with Ruben still bent over, and I brought his ass back toward me. I smacked my cock in his crack a couple times, against his hole, making his dick pulse and his hole clench up. I leaned in on him, riding my cock against his ass, reaching down and pinching his tits. He was so close to me. I kissed his neck and back, let my cockhead jab at his hole, pushing against it some.

There always came a point where whoever was the guy would have to break the fantasy and grab the lube. I had a tube of it in my underwear drawer that I ostensibly used for jerking off, but now I wondered if I’d kept it around for Ruben, like I was waiting for it to happen again on a subconscious level.

I lubed up Ruben’s hole and got my dick nice and slippery.

“You need me to go slow, babe?” I asked. My dickhead rubbed on his butthole like a pencil eraser against a page.

“Just fuck me, you fuckin’ stud,” Ruben said in his girly voice.

“You want my dick in you? You want my dick in your pussy?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ruben groaned, sounding just like a girl in a porno. “Wanna feel you inside me.”

I sank my dick head inside. Ruben moaned. I took a minute, letting him adjust, but he bucked back and took the rest of my dick inside him to the hilt like a total slut.

“Fuck, that shit is tight,” I said. It was tight; I’d forgotten how good it felt. I wondered why we let our friendship slide when we could have been enjoying this on a regular basis. Who knows?

I took Ruben’s hips in my hands and started slowly, steadily pumping my cock into his butt-pussy. Ruben melted like butter, getting into it more and more. I knew he was right there with me, and I started pounding him hard.

I got him down on the floor and laid him on his side, lifting one of his legs on my shoulder so my dick fit between his butt cheeks, which hugged it like twin loaves of bread. Ruben’s mouth was slack, his eyes screwed up. His dick was still hard, but his hand was underneath it, holding up his balls to give me better access to his hole.

I knew I should go longer, try to make it last, but the truth is that neither of us ever could. I got Ruben on his hands and knees because I knew I wanted to cum in him like that, bent over like a bitch, his back arched and his ass-pussy splayed back for me, for my pleasure alone.

I porked him hard, and he shoved back harder. I knew I was gonna cream a load inside of him, which was always the best part of this game, even better than the hypnosis. The cumming was always the best part—letting yourself lose control. Total abandon.

“I’m gonna cum inside you, dude,” I said to Ruben, breaking the role a little, but we were too far past that to care and, besides, he was still hypnotized, right?

Ruben was gasping, “Oh, yeah—fuck, yeah,” and I knew he wanted it as badly as I did.

“Here it comes—”

Blam!

I shoved my cock in him to the hilt, let my balls empty themselves deep inside my friend. Ruben porno-bitch-moaned like he always did when he felt my load start to go. I reached around and started to tug on his dick, and after barely a few strokes it shot off, spraying cum all over the carpet. I held myself deep inside him all the way through, feeling his asshole clench around my dick as we lost our loads together.

Finally we collapsed on the floor, my body splayed on top of his. Our breathing slowed in unison. In a minute I’d need to snap my fingers and tell him he was a man again and to wake up—but not just yet. I stroked my palm gently up and down his arm, not wanting this skin-to-skin connection to end just yet. I wondered whether he’d want to play again in a few minutes and, if he did, which of us would lose the coin toss.

I guess the idea of the game is that we’re in love, we’re boyfriend and girlfriend, and we know each other so well that we feel free to do whatever we want with each other. Once you accept that basic premise, it’s weird how natural it always became, no matter who won the heads-tails toss. But the truth is, Ruben and I do know each other that well. That part isn’t from the hypnosis, and it isn’t an act. Or at least it wasn’t, at one time.

I wondered, as I lay there on top of him, whether it was possible to revive something like that.