A Queer Utopia: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Six

6

So it did go on. We rented the cabin again and gathered in memory of Pete at the autumn Equinox. A chill edged the air that time, despite bright sunshine, as we assembled on the deck. We couldn’t get past the gap in the midst of us, where Pete had been, to decide who should take his place on the table. Finally we understood that nobody could. That’s how the bronze Tibetan singing bowl that Pete had left Jake first became the solution, a vessel to hold the joy we’d gathered to make with our bodies. The momentary confusion about what came next when we’d filled it, and it still gave off a living warmth in our hands as we passed it around, lasted until Jake dipped his fingertips into it, like a kid lost in wonder with his first set of watercolours, then turned to his right and pressed his hand to Billy’s heart.


"May the circle jerk be unbroken,” Hank had quipped. Our mingled seed had glued us heart to heart with Pete. Now it began bonding us heart to heart with each other. Talking in late October about how we opened up in our times together, how our hearts started to close again when we went back to the usual round of our erotic lives, we made our pact: we’d save ourselves up for each other till the winter Solstice. We’d flirt and have sex in the meantime, but hold back as best we could from ejaculating till we gathered again. Reunited in the bleak midwinter, we compared notes by a blazing fire how we’d perplexed the men we were with. Jake lost a potential boyfriend who gave up in frustration. 

 

Nobody seemed too surprised in late December that we hadn’t all made it through. Five of us had gone over the edge since we’d struck our bargain. Jim and Rajiv, despite every good intention, had lost count of their spills. (Just on the cusp of the breakup, I was simmering with sidelined jealousy by then, though Luke and I reached our own sweaty point of no return more than once on a long weekend’s rendezvous.) But we’d all saved up at least two full weeks of energy.

We made the Big Mistake of the winter by pouring our new sacrament onto the hearth in misplaced homage to the fire. Do not attempt this with your own spooge at home–the stench of scorched cum roasting on hot coals practically drove us out of the cabin into the snow. 

In the spring, most of us had managed to keep the lid on for the full three months with no more than the odd slip. We felt like endlessly horny teenagers again. Twelve weeks without release left us so cranked up, so drunk on the ecstasy of long delayed fulfilment, that without anyone actually proposing it, we found ourselves feeding our seed to each other as the first fruits of a new year, fingers dipped into the nectar of a ritual feast and sucked greedily by the lovers to whom we offered them. 

This summer gathering, a year after Pete had brought us together, would be our last, we’d decided on our final night in the spring, entwined in each other’s arms in a pile before the fire, moonlight streaming through the windows over our tangled limbs. At least the last time we’d husband our lust from season to season like a precious commodity to lavish only on each other.  Jim and Rajiv wanted an untrammeled sex life with each other. Jake longed for a soulmate to share his small-town life from day to day, and we all agreed that his chances were slim of finding someone who’d put up with our singular arrangement any more cheerfully than the guy who’d already thrown in the towel.  

We all found ourselves at least a little relieved at the thought of coming down from the mountaintop; at the prospect of not living most of our waking moments for weeks at a time wrapped in a thick, golden haze of ambient sexual energy. Our experiment had brought us everything we could have hoped for. We’d planned this weekend as the consummation of a year’s journey none of us could ever have anticipated. And we’d hit on how to bring it all full circle, for us and for Pete.