Papi Read online

  Papi

  WHAT the fuck am I doing here?

  Kyle Lang surveyed the street with distaste. The area was rundown, almost like a warehouse district. Grimy buildings, faded paint peeling with age, stood as silent witnesses to the street’s illegal and immoral goings-on. A woman in a short, slinky electric blue skirt and jacket looked around quickly before grabbing her latest score from the dealer and slapping bills into his outstretched, dirty hand. Shoving them quickly into a large bag, she walked away on four-inch heels. As his car rolled along the stretch of road, he moved slowly around vehicles parked against the curb. The occupants of one parked car, a jacked-up Honda, leaned out of the window and leered at a couple of working girls.

  It had been nearly a year since his old lady had split, taking their two kids and moving in with her mother. She had called him “emotionally unavailable” during the divorce, and Kyle didn’t contest that. He thought that “not remotely attracted” would have summed it up a little better, but he was rid of her, and that was really all that mattered. Though he would miss the boys, they were probably better off without him. Better for his ex to find someone else and get married again to give them a real home, a real family. Kyle just wasn’t a family guy.

  Kyle had gone out during the last year and fucked his share of barflies. Each of them wanted more than he wanted to give. They all wanted “the dream”. Apparently, they didn’t know that there was no fucking dream. There was no cute little house, no white picket fence. That was the bullshit guys told girls to get them to give it up. He was surprised that half of them still believed it.

  The last month, however, he hadn’t hooked up with anyone.

  The thirty-five-year-old with the salt-and-pepper hair and the nice body, who always scored with the women in his neighborhood bars, had decided he wanted something different. After years of carefully concealed stares at the gym and lingering around the locker room, Kyle decided to be honest with himself and explore the possibility that he might be attracted to men. The normally confident Kyle was shaken, but it didn’t matter. After four weekends of fruitless attempts to hook up at various gay bars near his home, he felt old and out of touch. At least at the straight bars, he recognized the classic rock blaring from the speakers. In the gay clubs, he was completely out of his element, as if he were on a different planet. Their hair, their clothes, their tight hot little bodies rubbing and grinding against each other, had been a completely foreign experience.

  When the car rolled farther up the street, Kyle saw what he was looking for.

  Rolling down the window on his beat-to-hell Ford, Kyle scanned the few young men who mingled with the women trying to score a “date” from passing cars. A few of them looked strung out, like tweaked out little meth queens, high on shit they probably scored from a john in return for sex—a blow for a blow. One of the guys actually tried to pass for a girl; too bad for him he didn’t own a scarf to cover up the prominent Adam’s apple. Just a few feet away stood a boy helping one of the girls into a jacket. She was a hot little mamacita with black, wavy hair and very long legs. Kyle could only see her from the back, a tight little ass wiggling under a too-tight jean skirt. As he watched from his car, she turned around, and he would have bet anything that she was a popular girl. The pair both had sweet, heart-shaped faces and full, pouting lips. In fact, the boy and girl were too similar not to be related; it wouldn’t have surprised Kyle to find out that they were brother and sister. The boy spoke quietly as the girl walked toward the car in front of Kyle’s. A tender expression passed across the kid’s face as the girl stepped into the car.

  “¡Texto que me tarde!” the boy called as the car sped off, pausing briefly at the stoplight on the corner before turning left and out of sight. His shoulders fell as the boy watched where the car had been. Shoulder-length black waves framed his face, appearing angelic by the moon’s light, a sharp contrast to his mouth, which looked like it was just made for sin. Without any trouble at all, Kyle could imagine those sweet lips wrapped around his cock while the boy’s innocent eyes looked up at him through those long lashes. His face was clean-shaven, and Kyle’s gaze followed the smooth lines of the younger man’s throat to the top of his chest, clearly visible above a tight black tank top that looked painted on.

  As the boy turned and bent to grab a well-worn jacket from the ground behind him, Kyle knew that he had found exactly what he was looking for in the shape of the boy’s sweet rounded ass.

  The focus of Kyle’s keen attention turned then, almost as if he knew that someone watched him. The boy may have blushed from the attention, but no hint of it showed on his warm caramel skin. A street-like arrogance covered up the raw innocence in the kid’s face almost immediately.

  “Hey, papi, you like what you see?” the boy asked, stretching his arms out to his sides and strutting toward the car; the vulnerability that had been in his face only a moment before was gone. Pulling up the front of his ribbed tank top, which he’d artfully ripped to match his battered jeans, the boy ran a hand along his soft stomach and toyed with the top button just below his navel. Slowly, he traced the bare skin in a tiny circle, entrancing Kyle so that he couldn’t tear his gaze away.

  “Yeah, I do,” Kyle replied, still watching the incredibly erotic trail of the boy’s fingers as they strayed to the waistband of his jeans. “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Jesse… you looking for someone to play with, papi?” the boy asked, letting his hand dip into his jeans, his eyes never leaving Kyle’s. The contrast between the innocence in the boy’s open expression and the blatant sexual behavior made Kyle ache.

  “How much?” Kyle asked, not wanting to play games. His tongue flicked out to moisten his suddenly dry lips. The zipper confining his interested cock started to get uncomfortable. He wanted the boy in the car, and then he wanted his dick down Jesse’s throat.

  “Depends on what you want. I got a place, if you wanna go there. It’s one-fifty for the hour. If you want to stay in the car, it’s fifty for a blow and a hundred for a fuck,” Jesse rattled off in a businesslike tone, and then added, “oh, condom only.” The time for flirting and posturing had passed. Looking around, the street seemed pretty fucking exposed for Kyle’s taste. The last thing he needed was for someone to tell his bitch of an ex that he’d come down by the docks to pick up a hooker. She would probably have a goddamned heart attack, and he would spend the next twenty years playing daddy.

  “Get in,” Kyle told Jesse in a clipped, brusque tone, and had the car in gear before the boy had the door completely closed.

  “Hey, ese, I know I’m hot, but I don’t start the clock ’til we get to the room.” Jesse laughed but Kyle didn’t hear a bit of humor in it. At the mention of the room and the clock, however, Kyle’s cock went from interested to semi-hard and hopeful.

  “Where’s the room?” Kyle asked, turning left at the first light. Turning right would lead them away from downtown, and he figured the shithole hotel would be close.

  “It’s the Phoenix Inn on seventh.” Jesse put on his seat belt. As surreal as the situation was for Kyle, that small bit of normalcy, putting on a seat belt, caught him as strange. The boy was about to sell his body to a complete stranger for sex, but he was worried about a seat belt? At least the kid had some sense of self-preservation by wearing the belt and requiring a condom to fuck. A condom wouldn’t save him from everything that he could contract through oral sex, but that didn’t seem to be a consideration. Who would pay fifty bucks to get blown through latex?

  “I know where that is. How old are you, kid?” Leaning forward, Kyle turned the radio off and glanced over in time to see Jesse smirking at him. The boy turned so that his back leaned against the passenger door of the car, and he seemed to be amused by the question.

  “How old do you want me to be,
papi?”

  Kyle suppressed a smile. He liked the kid’s attitude and that smirk was sexy as fuck. Only the thought of being caught with an underage kid stopped him from playing the boy’s hot little game.

  “No, I want you to tell me how old you are,” Kyle countered as he turned right onto Seventh and began to scan the street for a sign to the hotel.

  “Dieciocho…” he replied and wiped his palms on the threadbare jeans before translating. “Eighteen.”

  Kyle chanced a glance at Jesse to gauge whether or not he was telling the truth. What he didn’t expect was for Jesse to pull his lower lip between his teeth. The gesture made him look even younger and more vulnerable. As he spotted the Phoenix out of the right side of the windshield, Kyle also noticed that beneath the thin tank top, the boy’s nipples were hard. Like little pebbles caught beneath the thin material, they were straining, almost begging, to be stroked. Silently, the older man hoped that the air conditioning in the room worked as well as it did in his car.

  JESSE Valdez wrapped his arms around himself as the old guy pulled into a space near the front entrance of the Phoenix. It wasn’t as if the place felt like home, but to be honest, he’d already been there twice that day. The first well-paying encounter was with a man who liked to be restrained and spanked while his partner watched. It was the only hotel in the neighborhood that would rent cheap rooms by the hour and not ask too many questions. The guy at the desk had to know something was up when Jesse showed up a couple of times a night with different guys and sometimes if he was really fucking lucky, a few girls. There wasn’t a huge call on the streets for a straight boy whore. Only when a guy had a place and a reputation could he get that kind of gig. Jesse knew he had the looks, poor little Latino boy, but while he was still making enough to help his sister Alicia with their rent, he was going nowhere.

  It broke his heart each time his sister got into a car to go for a trick. Like him, she had no papers and couldn’t get a job that could pay the rent. The hustler who had brought them over the border had taken every bit of their money. Ten thousand dollars had been the going rate for smuggling illegals into the United States. It was money that Jesse, Alicia, and their mother had spent years saving. Their mother, Maria, had stayed behind in Mexico. He felt sick lying to her about his and his sister’s new lives but it would break her heart to know how they were living, and how much they missed their family. No one here cared if they lived or died—certainly not the old fuck next to him. He just wanted to fuck Jesse senseless. Jesse knew that he just had to close his eyes, let the gringo bottom out in his ass a few times, and it would all be over. This money would keep him and Alicia fed for the week. He couldn’t fuck it up.

  The guy got out of the car and Jesse followed. He would have called out to him, asking him to wait near the vending machines rather than going into the office, but realized he didn’t know the older man’s name. It didn’t matter, because the guy had already started to go in that direction anyway. Jesse stood in the doorway for a moment, watching him dig for change before turning to enter the office. He saw the same bored desk clerk who had been there every night that week.

  “Hey man, I need a room for an hour,” Jesse told him in the way of a greeting, pulling a battered twenty from his jeans. He’d learned long ago not to carry a wallet, not on those streets.

  “Okay, it’s twenty bucks,” the guy told him, but something was off. Jesse could feel it. He’d been on the streets long enough to know how to read people. The guy’s pale, almost clammy skin had flushed like he was embarrassed or excited. Shit. That was something Jesse did not need. He tried to play it off, sliding the twenty across the counter with a smile and waiting to sign his name in a small thin book. Unfortunately, the ledger didn’t slide in front of him as it had every other time he’d been in there that week. Instead, the pale kid with stringy brown bangs hanging in his face looked sheepishly up at Jesse through dirty, smudged glasses.

  “The police have been hanging around lately asking about frequent flyers. Maybe it’s the mayor’s new shit about cleaning up the city. I haven’t told them anything yet.” Jesse watched him for a moment, swearing silently in Spanish. The guy’s pupils were dilated and he was panting as he shifted on the high stool. It was subtle, but the guy was definitely aroused.

  “Well, thanks,” Jesse said, reaching for the room key the guy was holding. As he expected, the clerk pulled the key back out of his reach.

  “What do you want?” Jesse sighed, resigned to the situation as he played with the pen he’d picked up while waiting for the ledger. He’d been extorted in every possible way during the last year. It came as little surprise that the guy half-demanded, half-asked for a blow job. It was almost as if he felt entitled to it, like it was some kind of reward for not telling the cops. Jesse was a whore, after all; that was his profession. He read the clerk’s hotel name tag, slowly sounding out the name in his head like his mother had taught him.

  “Brandon,” he said, “you’ll have to wait ’til I’m done. I will take care of you when I bring the key back in an hour. I got someone waiting.” Jesse spoke with far less patience than he felt toward the creepy little fuck. If they were back in his home town in Mexico, he would have taken the guy out back and beat the fuck out him, but they weren’t. Jesse needed the seedy place to do business so he could eat. There were some guys who wouldn’t fuck just anywhere. If Jesse was forced to go back to alleys and cars, he’d lose johns, and that meant losing money. He could barely afford to take care of Alicia as it was. No way she could afford to quit hooking and go to night school if he didn’t keep working. Once she got an education, maybe she could apply to get a green card or marry one of the gringos. Then she would be safe and he could worry about his own life.

  The clerk shoved a metal key across the counter and Jesse grabbed it, taking his chance to leave. Throwing the key into his jeans pocket, he ignored the clerk’s stammered threat about what would happen if he didn’t come back. Jesse could feel the guy’s piggy little eyes on his ass even after the office door closed.

  “Ready?” Jesse asked the man, who was leaning against the door frame drinking a Coke. It had been ages since Jesse’d had a real Mexican soda, not the crap the Americans drank, but a real one with real sugar. The guy shrugged away from the door and held out another Coke. Jesse looked at him. In the year since he’d started hooking, no one had ever treated him like a person, just a thing, a possession. He felt like a razor that needed to be thrown away after so many uses. Still looking at the Coke, he almost didn’t take it at first, wondering if it was some kind of trap or trick. It was still tightly sealed and the guy’s face was open and relaxed, not like he was hiding something. Jesse took the plastic bottle with a quiet word of thanks and led his new friend down the hall to their room.

  As he closed the hotel room door behind him and locked it, Jesse felt an uncharacteristic shyness. Only he couldn’t quite find a reason for it. The same scene had played out hundreds of time before in the last year; why should the man in front of him be any different? Was it the Coke? The thoughtful gesture, no matter how insignificant it would appear to other people, had thrown him off balance.

  “What’s your name?” Jesse blurted before he could stop himself. Rule number one for being a whore was “don’t make it personal.” Why had he even asked? Feeling a little stupid, he trained his eyes on a loose strand of carpeting. Slowly, he began to working it out of the rough stained carpet beneath his worn-out shoe. Moving his foot in small circles, he saw the strand finally starting to give way as he waited for the guy’s long-deliberated answer.

  “I think,” the guy mused as he reached for Jesse and pulled the boy hard against his chest, “that I like ‘papi’.” The admission came in a quiet, hungry whisper.

  “Ai, papi,” Jesse said with a smirk, shaking off the strange initial hesitance and getting to work.

  “Ai, miho,” the guy said and Jesse felt his stomach turn. “Miho” was a name that his mother had always called him, for as lon
g as he could remember. It was her name. Rather than bring that up, which might just entice the fucker to torture him with it, Jesse forced his lips onto the older man’s neck and began to kiss the sensitive skin.

  “Kyle,” the guy whispered against Jesse’s ear. “My name is Kyle.”

  Jesse moaned softly against Kyle’s ear for effect, taking the tender lobe between his lips and sucking. He felt the responding moan against his own neck just as he’d expected. God, they were all the same. Next, the guy would pull him down on the bed, want a blow job, fuck him, and it would be over. He could find another guy before it got too late and start the process all over again.

  Instead, Kyle pulled Jesse’s tank top up, sliding warm and gentle fingers over his stomach. God, this guy smells good, almost spicy but more subtle. Not anything like the stale beer, sweat, cigarettes, or worse that he was used to. Jesse’s breath hitched at the touch, not in his carefully practiced way, but like he had been surprised, and maybe even aroused by it. Kyle didn’t stop there; he dragged the younger man’s shirt up and over his head, forcing them apart for a few seconds. Hungry eyes swept over Jesse’s body, making him feel almost naked. Then Kyle did something that no man ever had; he lowered to his knees, pushing Jesse onto the bed as he went.

  Jesse sat on the side of the bed, his nipples hard from the cool breeze of the air conditioning. Almost immediately, his left nipple was covered by the kneeling man’s hot mouth. He tried not to react too strongly, to not give the man any more power over him. Reaching back, he leaned on his palms, which tightly held the tacky tropical bedspread. Somewhere outside the thin walls of their room, Jesse could hear the faint strains of Pearl Jam, or maybe Nirvana, something old. Kyle had moved to his other nipple and Jesse could feel the strong, steady hands pulling at the button on his jeans.

  Suddenly, everything stopped.

  Kyle rocked back on his heels, his face a little flushed and his eyes wide. He pulled off his own shirt, tossing it into a nearby chair, but didn’t move back to the boy reclining on the bed. The older man didn’t move or speak for at least a full minute. Finally, the boy prompted him.