100 Boyfriends

by Brontez Purnell

I would feel the soft caress of a hand that pulled me away from control, and I was too young to know that all men who want to extract something from you generally have the sweetest touch.

The silence was deafening but that wasn’t the only cliché present in the room. The man hadn’t changed his make-out music since the nineties—it was all Cibo Matto tapes and other artifacts from his old hipsterdom that he carried around like duffel bags. The time they spent together felt like it was always in between sunsets; the red-orange final glow of the final minute of the day had not quite mixed in with the new purple of night. The sex was stuck within that same standstill.

“I don’t feel like it tonight,” they both said at the same time, and giggled upon doing so. With no other reason to oppose each other, and nothing really to prove, they hopped into bed and held each other even after their skin pressed together and the bed got uncomfortable and sweaty, but neither of them bothered to change the sheets because it just didn’t feel that serious.

He was the only man I knew whose sex was that fluid: boy, girl, everyone in between, whichever race, that boy was sticking his dick in everybody and I admired the caliber of slut he was. He showed me pictures of his baby daughter and we read to each other all afternoon. He left after that for good.

They were the weirdest couple I had ever fucked. They made me slightly uncomfortable. They drank wine and fought a lot but did it in a way where you could tell deep, deep down they literally hated each other. One boyfriend was this white top who had a big-ass dick, and thank god he was hung because he was dumb as fuck. He didn’t know what calculus was.

His stroke game was at about 58 percent and considering how much plot was involved I still felt that instead of fucking him I should have just, like, eaten a cheeseburger or goofed around on the internet. He had a box of condoms with inverted-pentagram insignia on them because apparently Satanists have their own brand of condoms? Condoms by nature seemed like such a lawful thing—why would a thrall to the Dark Lord even bother?

True. Love. He says. Just by themselves the words “true” and “love” are pretty sturdy concepts. Put together they can knock down any man who’s lonely enough to believe a lie as long as it’s said politely.

We had fucked each other so much that sex at times felt like we were scraping the last bit of toothpaste out of a tube that shot its last load two paychecks ago. We had to reinvent our fuck-buddy-hood. The world moved goddamn fast—it was all bills, heartache, and defeat. Those moments of tenderness sometimes had to be engineered. We did terrible things to each other. It was exciting.

The older man looks as if he wishes to God this interaction had just been a blow job, but I can’t imagine how one would get a dick in this young man’s mouth: he talks too fucking much.

In a world where white rappers were winning and I was decidedly not, I did the only thing a person in my situation can do in America—I fucked a white dude to get ahead.