Carter, the man next door - Chapter 2 (Patreon)

Author’s note: All my characters are consenting adults (18+). All sexual acts depicted are consensual between the adult characters.

Chapter 2

The week after, everything on our street looked the same and nothing felt the same for me.

Carter still pulled into the driveway next door at 7:30 pm like a man on rails. Still loosened his tie before he got out of the car. Still kissed Diane on the mouth on the front step when she opened the door. On Thursday he brought her flowers — white roses, grocery-store bouquet — and she laughed and said he was ridiculous and he smiled the private smile I had only ever seen him use on her. I watched it from our kitchen window while I dried a plate that was already dry.

He didn’t know I’d been there.

He didn’t know the boy from next door had watched a stranger swallow him in a theater that smelled like bleach and old sperm.

I made myself useful. I helped my dad with the gutters on Saturday. Carter came over the fence with a ladder like he always did, same blue eyes, same barber cut hiding the thin spot, same easy hey, kid that had been my name since I was tall enough to hold a hose. He smelled like grass and the same aftershave he’d worn in the dark. I said the new shipment of strings had come in at the shop. I said a kid had tried to lift a cable. Normal things. Neighbor things. Inside, every time he reached up and the shirt pulled across his back I saw the careful way he’d opened his belt. The long cut cock in the light from the lesbian porn. The guy in the pink shirt going down on him. I had to run to my room, hard and leaking.

Sunday they did the cookout. Both families. Same folding table in the strip of grass that didn’t officially belong to either house. Same argument about whether the grill was hot enough. My father stood on one side of the meat with a beer. Carter stood on the other. Diane put out a bowl of chips and told them they were both useless and they laughed the same laugh they’d been laughing since before I was born.

I held a plate I wasn’t eating from and watched Carter’s hands.

He flipped a burger with the calm he used for everything. The same calm he’d used to open his belt in the dark. The same wrist, the same watch. When he reached for the tongs the shirt pulled across his back and I saw the lean runner’s line of him and I had to look at the cooler instead.

“You gonna stand there all afternoon, kid, or you gonna make yourself useful.”

His voice. Over the fence-line that wasn’t really a fence anymore, just a habit. Kid. I was an independent adult working. But form my parents and Carter and Dianne I will always be the kid. The word he’d used when I was twelve and he was teaching me to throw in the driveway. The word he still used when I was old enough to have a job and a secret and the taste of a stranger’s mouth in my throat from the Friday before.

I looked up. Blue eyes. Easy. Nothing in his face that belonged to a porn theater.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Grab the cheese before your dad burns the second round. He always does.”

My father made a noise of protest. Carter grinned at him, the old grin, best friends since before the houses, and for a second they were exactly what the street thought they were. Two married normal men. I went to the table. I unwrapped the cheese. I handed it over and our fingers didn’t touch and I was grateful and I was not.

Diane passed behind him and put her hand on his waist. He leaned into it without looking, the way a man leans into a life that still works. I thought about the guy in the pink shirt on his knees in the aisle. I thought about Carter’s jaw changing and his eyes never leaving the screen. I thought about saying something just to see if the grin would crack. I didn’t.

“You look tired,” Carter said, not unkind. He said it the way he asked if I’d eaten when my dad forgot. “Shop running you hard?”

“Fridays,” I said.

“Fridays’ll do that.” He bumped my shoulder with the back of his wrist, casual, friendly neighbor-next-door, and went back to the grill. The place he’d touched stayed hot for the rest of the afternoon.

I stood at the cooler and watched him laugh at something my father said. I went to bed that night hard and furious with myself and still hard, staring at the strip of light under his bathroom window next door, the word kid sitting in my mouth like a stone I was going to have to swallow every time he used it now.

By Wednesday I was counting the hours to Friday.

I told myself I might not go. I told myself the first time had been enough — the shock, the proof, the knowledge. I didn’t believe it. Men like him went back. Routine was safer than novelty. Same night. Same hour. Same seat if he could get it. I knew because I was the same kind of animal now. The theater had stopped being a place I visited. It had become a place I needed.

There was an extra lie I told myself in the shower: I was only going to watch. Confirm he came back. Leave. I knew that was garbage before the water went cold.

Friday afternoon I left the shop early and drove to the mall on the other side of town. I bought a dark gray hoodie two sizes too big, a plain black baseball cap, and a pair of cheap sunglasses with black lenses. In the food court bathroom I put them on and looked at myself in the scratched mirror. The hoodie swallowed my shoulders. The cap sat low. The glasses hid my eyes and most of the shape of my face. I didn’t look like the boy who threw a ball in Carter Hale’s driveway. I looked like another body in the dark.

I sat in the car in that lot for twenty minutes with the engine off, watching people walk into the mall with shopping bags, trying to talk myself into going home. Then I started the car and took the long way out of town.

The theater lot was already half full when I parked. I put the car at the far end, behind a work van, not wanting the risk of him recognizing it if he pulled in the same time I did. Same mix of sedans. Same BMW energy, different plate. I paid cash. The booth guy still didn’t look at faces.

Inside, the bleach-and-cum smell hit me like a familiar hand.

The main room was loud with porn — MILFs this time, older women with heavy tits and louder moaning, the kind of porn that made the married men sit up straighter. I moved through the dark the way I always did, but today every shape made my pulse jump. I was looking for one silhouette and dreading it at the same time.

I sucked three men before he showed.

The first was a construction guy, thick and already leaking, who held my head and came fast with a curse. I swallowed and barely tasted him. The second was a skinny guy in a windbreaker who kept whispering yeah, yeah like he was coaching himself. I let him finish and wiped my mouth on the sleeve of the new hoodie. The third was older, maybe fifty, careful, the type who folded his jacket over the next seat before he opened his pants. He took longest. I gave him the work and thought about nothing except the door at the back of the theater and the sound it would make when it opened.

It opened at 6:40.

I knew the walk even in the dark. Measured. No rush. The posture that never really left him. He came down the far aisle and took a seat three rows from the back, left side, the same general area as last week. Light blue dress shirt. No jacket. Tie still on, loosened one notch. Brown chinos. He sat like he was in a meeting that required patience. For a minute he only watched the screen. Then his hands went to his belt. The same careful order. Buckle. Button. Zip. He lifted up just enough to push the chinos and the underwear down and his cock came out into the light from the MILFs — long, cut, already filling as he wrapped his hand around it and started the slow stroke I remembered.

My mouth went dry.

I stayed where I was for a full minute, knees on the sticky step, heart slamming so hard I was sure the men near me could hear it. A guy in a polo tried to step in front of me. I turned my shoulder and he moved on. I watched Carter’s hand. The same rhythm. Patient. Like he had time. Like this was the one honest hour of his week.

I got up.

I kept my head down, cap low, glasses on. The hoodie was large enough that my shape didn’t give me away. I moved along the row behind him and then into the aisle beside his seat. No one stopped me. In a place like this a body on its knees was just traffic. I dropped down next to his thigh before I could talk myself out of it.

Up close he smelled like his strong aftershave and the faint clean sweat of a man who had worked a full day at the bank in a suit. His cock was right there, inches from my face, the head already wet from his own hand. He didn’t look down. His eyes stayed on the screen. A MILF was getting fucked by a young guy over a kitchen counter and moaning like it was the end of the world. Carter’s stroke didn’t change.

I leaned in and took him in my mouth.

He went still for half a second. Just the smallest hitch in his breathing. Then his hand left his cock and settled on the back of my head, heavy, certain, and he pushed me down. I had to turn the cap backwards so I can suck him properly, sunglasses stayed on.

He pushed me. Not gentle. Like a man who knows what he wants and has one hour to take it.

He set the depth he wanted and kept me there, the long cut cock filling my throat, the clean taste of him flooding my tongue. I almost choked on the shock of it. This was the cock I’d watched a stranger swallow last Friday. This was the man who asked if I’d eaten when my dad forgot. My father’s best friend. And he was forcing my head down in a porn theater while he watched older women with saggy tits get used on a screen.

I sucked. I gave him everything I had because if I did it well enough he wouldn’t need to look. If I did it well enough he would stay inside the fantasy of a stranger’s mouth and never ask questions. I used my tongue under the head. I took him as deep as the angle allowed. Spit ran. My glasses fogged at the edges. The cap shifted. I kept my face angled away from any light that might show him the shape of my jaw.

His hand tightened in my hair through the hoodie and the cap. He started moving my head himself — up, down, a steady hard rhythm that told me exactly how he liked it.

He still wasn’t looking. His eyes were on the MILFs. His other hand gripped the armrest the way it had last week. His thighs were tense under the brown chinos. When I hollowed my cheeks and took him deeper he exhaled through his nose, a controlled sound, and pushed me down until my nose pressed against the open fly of his pants and I couldn’t breathe.

He held me there. I counted in my head. Four. Five. Six. My eyes watered behind the sunglasses. When he let me up I dragged air in through my nose and went back down without being told. He made a low sound in his chest — not a word, just approval — and used both hands now to keep my head where he wanted it. The wet noise of it was loud under the movie. Anyone in the next three seats could hear a man getting his cock sucked properly. No one cared. That was the point of this place.

I was terrified he would glance down.

I was harder than I had ever been in that room.

He fucked my throat in short, precise strokes, the way he did everything — no wasted motion. The long cock dragged over my tongue again and again. I tasted the clean skin and the salt of him and the fact that this was Carter Hale from next door and he didn’t know the mouth on him belonged to the boy who used to leave muddy prints in his hallway. My hands stayed on my own thighs. I didn’t touch him anywhere else. I was a mouth. An anonymous mouth in a hoodie and a cap. That was the only way this worked.

His breathing changed. The hand on my head grew heavier. His hips lifted a fraction off the seat, the first break in the perfect posture. On the screen a woman was coming loudly. Carter was about to come quietly. I felt the swell, the warning pulse, and I stayed down because I needed it in my throat, not on my tongue, not wasted.

He grunted once — low, locked behind his teeth — and emptied into me.

Hot. A lot of it. Pulse after pulse straight down my throat while his hand held me through it and his eyes never left the movie. I swallowed on instinct, again and again, until he was done and the grip in my hair 

loosened. He sat there for a second with his cock still in my mouth, softening, the last small twitches of it against my tongue. Then he pushed my head back, gentler now that he’d finished, and reached for the napkins he must have brought in his pocket like a man who planned ahead.

I turned while he was wiping himself.

I didn’t look at his face. I turned the cap again and kept it low and the glasses on and crawled two rows back on shaking knees before I trusted my legs enough to stand. My throat burned. My mouth tasted only of him. I went toward the side aisle and the darker section near the front where the screen light didn’t reach as hard, and I dropped down in front of the first man who was already out — a thick guy in a work shirt who put a hand on my head without asking. I took him because I needed something else in my mouth or I was going to make a sound that would give everything away.

Behind me I heard the soft clink of a belt buckle.

I didn’t turn.

I sucked the stranger and listened. Footsteps in the aisle. Measured. Unhurried. The walk of a bank manager who had finished what he came for and was going home to his wife and dinner, next door to mine. The door at the back opened and closed. The movie kept playing. The man in my mouth finished with a quiet curse and I swallowed him too, automatic, while my whole body shook with the knowledge of what I had just done.

Carter was gone. My father’s best buddy. The bank manager. The guy who fed me his load.

I stayed on my knees in the dark until the fear and the want stopped colliding hard enough to make me dizzy. Then I stood, adjusted the hoodie, fixed the cap, and walked out the way I had come in. The lot was cooler. His car wasn’t there. In my own car I sat with the engine off and the sunglasses still on even though it was night.

He hadn’t seen my face.

He hadn’t said my name.

He had only used a mouth in the dark and gone home the same man who brought Diane flowers on Thursdays and borrowed our ladder on Saturdays and called me kid over the fence, even though I’m a grown ass guy.

I started the engine.

When I pulled onto our street his kitchen light was already on. Diane’s silhouette moved behind the glass. I sat in my driveway with the hoodie still up and watched that window until it hurt.

Next Friday I would be here again.

And the Friday after that.

Until the disguise wasn’t enough, or until it was, and either way I already knew I wasn’t going to stop.