Popping The Bubble

I made myself wink, my gum snapping loudly in my mouth. "Not tonight, kids!" I crowed into the webcam, corralling my wandering thoughts. "I'm taking the night off." I hiked myself up and straddled the webcam, giving the subscribers a closeup of my vag in their thumbnails. Over the years I'd read a thousand comments about every possible aspect of my snatch, and the consensus was clear: people loved looking at it.

So? Why not. I spread my pussy lips for the camera and made a kissy face, only to be rewarded by a flurry of chimes as a series of one and five-dollar contributions flowed in. There we go. It was the cardinal rule of porn, at whatever level, from home movies to Deep Throat: when in doubt, just show your twat. And all was right with the world: the livestream was back on track, the Whang was once again pummelling some helpless damsel, and I wasn't thinking about poetry anymore.

Fucking poetry. I had no clue why it was obsessing me these days.

It all ended in a poll, with a five-dollar participation fee, about where the Whang should finish. That netted a quick $755, most of which wanted to see the prof get her eyes glued shut. The sweaty pair obliged with good grace, Grundle leaning way over to get the studio lights glistening in the pearls Elliot lined Lynne's face with. Pearls, sea-bountied, scattered before swine...

I shook my head again. Fucking poetry.

We lounged around afterward, sharing a blunt and sitting there in no particular hurry to put clothes on and go home. Elliot Wiley and I had spent countless hours together, and probably less than fifteen percent of it had included so much as underwear. I knew his naked body better than I knew my own, in some ways. "Tuesday. Tyler Schiff again." I held in the smoke and passed the joint. "Make sure you stretch your ass. He destroyed you last time."

El made a face. He always took pains to remind people that he was not "bi;" he was what he called omnisexual. I had no doubt he'd have fucked anything he could legally get away with. Someday, I reflected, his amazing penis would quit producing such reliable erections. But so far, at 26, he showed no signs of slowing down. "Yeah, he's pretty big. This time, I hope he just wants oral."

I laughed. "He never just wants oral. Nice guy, though."

"Oh, he's the best." I stared closely at his dick, still dusted with the dried remains of Dr Tirado's sluice. "Jesus. You're getting it up? Again?"

"You know me," he shrugged.

"None better," I agreed. "So. Is that for Lynne, for Tyler, for me, or... just because?"

His eyes glinted. "Been awhile. You and me." It had, in fact, been eight months. Give or take. "I mean, here we are..."

"No." It was a final, chopped syllable, cutting through the pot, through the lassitude, through the strange poem-fog in my mind. "No. On the job is one thing, but I'm not fucking you just because."

"Yeah yeah yeah," he smiled, his hands held up. "No worries, Christa. You know that. No pressure, ever." We stared at his penis, which did not stop rising. "I mean, I guess I'll just yank it? Or... oral?" he asked hopefully.

"No." I passed him the last of the doob. "I've got to go, anyway."

"Homework?"

"Something like that." Elliot had about a year still to go in his pharmacy doctorate, but he never seemed to do any work for it. "I... I might just write."

"Write?" He didn't seem much interested, bringing his cock fully to life. Goddamn, it always looked beautiful. That was the word for it: beautiful. Elliot's member, I knew, would always be my archetype for phallic perfection.

But I wasn't going back to it. "Yeah." I pulled my hair back into a loose ponytail and started hunting for my clothing. I had no real wish to tell him I was writing poetry, that was for damn sure. "You know. Words."

"Whatever." The old, cold finality had come creeping into the back of his voice. When Elliot was in the mood, he cared about nothing but getting relief. And anything that didn't contribute to that, he had no time for. "Tuesday. Let me know if you find out anything new, as far as show prep."

"Later."

* * *

Barracudas eat,

Feasting on the least they find.

They beware the shark.

* * *

The problem with being a poet is that you never quite know when your stuff is any good. That's because we're hardly living in a Golden Age of Poetry anymore; it's not like you can use sales figures or critiques to let you know how you've done.

This had stopped being an existential problem for me midway through my sophomore year, when I'd finally abandoned my Creative Writing/Romantic Literature double major in favor of a brief toe-dip into an Anthropology program. I'd always enjoyed poetry, but that year had finally convinced me of two things that I took as truths:

I'd never be as good as I wanted to be, and it wouldn't matter even if I was.

Because I was at least sixty years too late to make an actual living as a poet. No, more like a hundred-fifty; it staggered me that there'd ever been a time when a professional poet could rattle off some lines, send them in, and get a paycheck from Punch or Harper's or whatever.

And yet, now, here it was. The urge had returned with a vengeance. It was distracting me as I tried to prep for my interview with the Schiff kid. He was a hockey player, I remembered, and our school's hockey team was doing well that year, so I assumed I could make a few jokes about how puck rhymes with fuck, or puns about swinging his stick, or whatever.

I remembered his first time with us, about three months after we'd launched Nude Mood. El had been tentative and I'd been surly, still jaded about how the end of Kinkytime had played out, and neither of us had been sure about the Nude Mood concept. But Tyler had come striding in, sporting one of those hockey-player grins where every tooth is dazzling white except for the gaps where the missing ones belonged. He'd heard the concept, nodded calmly, and stripped naked with no compunction at all.

And even Grundle had admitted, later, that the kid looked like a stud.

I'd been salivating during the whole interview, staring unabashedly at his penis and knowing it would fill me ever-so-neatly, but then he'd chosen to bang the Whang and I'd had to sit there and watch as their two perfect dicks had a brief swordfight before they'd gotten down to it. It had been my first time seeing El take it from another guy, and I'd been mesmerized.

This was going to be his second visit to the studio, I figured, but I've got a bad head for remembering shit like that. Maybe third? There was some big tournament the hockey team was headed for, and that was worth reading up on. I'd need to plug it.

I could do that Tuesday, before the Mood started.

I thought about my vagina, then scrolled through my phone and chose a few of the men I knew I could get on demand. My mind ranked them swiftly: Glen, with the wide cock that never lasted long; Jeff, average, but a good pussylicker; Todd, with the really nice penis that, alas, performed unevenly. Some nights he was a one-pump chump, the next he could go for hours.

I sent them each a text, figuring I'd see who replied first. Then I crashed on my roommate's bed; she wasn't coming home tonight, I knew, and my hair smelled all marijuana-y. I figured her pillow could suffer, instead of mine.

* * *

Cold water to the face is a sudden understanding,

Dripping down the face of a nameless, senseless man

Just in from the gym, needy with heat, craving

Clarity.

* * *

Tyler was supposed to arrive at five, but the fucker was running late. Which meant we were paying Grundle for nothing. "Like old times," Elliot sighed, playing Tetris on his phone, "just you, me, and Grundle."

"Yeah," I sniped after a pause, "only if this was still Kinkytime, I'd probably be pegging you with a bacon-greased cucumber or something." I watched, incredulous, as his eyes took on a faraway look. "Ew. Don't get any ideas, perv."

"You didn't used to mind my ideas," he mused, and then it was my turn to go wading through the swamp of memory. Which always made me moist.

"Yeah. Well, that was then, this is now." I glanced at the clock. "And he's late."

"Only five minutes." El sipped at his coffee. "That's not a problem yet."

"It will be soon, though." I glanced uneasily at Grundle, who was seeing dollar signs. We were contracted for 45 minutes of Nude Mood content, meaning we were already cutting it close with soundchecks, retakes and the like. Five more minutes was all we had before we'd either have to pay Grundle an extra hundo, or speed up Sloppy Seconds.

I was just about to open my mouth about that when the door burst open. "Fuck! Sorry, guys." He said sorry like a Canadian, with the o all fucked up like in sore. I recalled he was from Minnesota or Montana, someplace like that. "Parking, man. You know?"

"Let's do this," I nodded before Elliot could open his mouth. He tended to enjoy pleasantries, and the best way to stop that was to steamroll him right off the line. "Strip, kid."

Tyler Schiff wasn't a kid, really; he was a junior, already 21, but that made him younger than me by two years of time and what felt like decades of nudity. He flashed me a lopsided grin. "Hi there, Bubbles."

"Tyler," I nodded, feeling a burst of satisfaction as his eyes maneuvered over my body. He lingered on my tits, so I gave him a little shake; it's always nice to be appreciated, especially by a gay guy. "I'm going to ask you some raunchy ones tonight."

"No prob." I remembered his last visit where, intrigued that he'd chosen to bang the Whang, I'd asked him if he'd ever fucked a woman. He'd winked. Only up the butt, he'd deadpanned, and I'd been pretty sure it had been a lie. But the comments on the webcast had told us he'd hit it out of the park, lie or not. I watched now, feeling a tingle behind my belly button as I watched him undress, folding his clothes with Upper Midwest neatness and laying them carefully on the shelf by the window.

I'd never really fucked all that many athletes. Most of my partners had been, well, Elliot. And a few of the kinds of people we'd had as occasional guests on Kinkytime, who'd tended to be the emo type into weird stuff, sexually, and not all that physically attractive. And nowadays, when guests chose to pop the Bubbles... well, let's just say we never really could get a lot of athletes to agree to show up and do a nude interview show for public consumption, however pixellated it would be once it aired.

So? Many of our Bubbles-poppers these days tended to be the same kind of guys from Kinkytime.

As a result, I'd never really seen all that many nude guys who were actually studly-looking. It was one of the reasons I looked forward to Tyler's visits: the guy was mouth-watering, easily the finest-looking dude I'd ever seen in the flesh. That I got to watch him fuck, even if it was another guy he was doing, was merely a bonus.

He was down to his boxer-briefs by that time while Elliot logged his medical information in the spreadsheet. All our guests had to bring in clean tests, and the men were expected to have clean testes as well, and Tyler Schiff certainly had both: his balls swung most gloriously, firm and round and fat as he stepped out of his underwear. It's rare that balls are awesome enough to draw my eye, but, well... yeah.

I wondered whether I was puddling my stool yet. "You've shaved? Or, what, waxed?" I called out to him, smiling across the little room. He looked quizzically down at himself. "No, mostly just the balls. You were hairier last time."

"Oh! Yeah." He blushed cutely, gesturing at himself. "One of my dates complained, so I did like a general trim. And, yes, the balls. That's a wax."

"Kinky," I hummed. "They look edible." He smiled at me as he took his seat and messed with the mic. "We ready to go?" I asked Grundle, thinking we could just barely get the taping done before the second hour started, if we all stayed on the ball.

"I was born ready." I wondered sometimes what went through Grundle's mind. He'd been filming us for years, and pixellating enough closeups that he undoubtedly knew my cooch better than my gyno did, but it wasn't like we were friends. He had a pregnant wife at the moment, and I often wondered what he thought about while he filmed other people banging. Granted, he produced a lot more shows than just Nude Mood, so we were probably just another gig as far as he was concerned. "I'm already rolling."

"Great." I cleared my throat, squared up to the camera, arched my back, and launched into my spiel while El was still finishing with the paperwork. "Hey there, friends! Welcome to another episode of Nude Mood With Bubbles And The Whang! I'm Bubbles..."

"...and I'm the Whang..." Elliot leaned up and spouted the line on autopilot.

"...and we're here on the Monroe College Comms Platform today broadcasting live as a podcast, with a video version posting this Friday. For those new to the show, we're a... well, a different sort of experience than you'll typically find on the air, wouldn't you say so Whang?"

"Very different, Bubbles."

"We do interviews, which isn't special, but both hosts and every guest is stark naked! We always find that tends to open our guests up. We do take audience questions; buddy up with us on our Pixboox link or call in with any requests. Might also spin some tunes for y'all, if our guest doesn't mind. Do you mind, Guest?" I smiled over my mic at Tyler, who was just settling onto the couch.

"Spin whatever you want!" he replied easily, that low surfer-dude voice of his booming through the studio.

"Ooh. I just might." I winked at the camera. "Our guest today is a repeat customer, Tyler Schiff from our very own Monroe Marauders hockey team, where he plays... forward? I think you're a winger, right Tyler?"

"Left wing, Bubbles." Goddamn, the way his cock lay draped casually across his thigh! I liked his confidence.

"Left wing, right. Well. I'm sure we'll get to the hockey talk, but we'll start with something I noticed as you strolled on in here: tell me all about your newfound scrotal hairlessness, hmm? Is it normal for hockey players to wax their sacks?" And so it went, the cut and thrust of innocuous interview questions, with Elliot chiming in every now and then from his own stool. We had so much history, he and I; it sometimes amazed me that we could work together this well, but we both knew our content was primo even without the money rolling in.

It took ten minutes for us to get Tyler to admit he enjoyed Belle and Sebastian, so once Grundle found "Sukey In The Graveyard" and started playing it, I was ready for a break. My arms reached for the ceiling, cramped back stretching. "Want something, Ty? Coffee? Water?"

He watched me stretch. "You should take the couch. You look like you need it more than I do."

I shrugged. "Just a rough workout this afternoon, that's all." I patted my thighs. "Leg day."

"It's working."

"Aw. Thanks."

"Use the couch, Christa." Elliot was scrolling through his email. "It'll be good content, you and him sharing it."

"Yeah." Tyler scooted over. "Come on down. I don't bite."

"Bullshit," I snickered, "I've seen you on the Whang's nipple," but Elliot had a point. I didn't usually slide down onto the couch until later in the show, and more often than not I did it when it was obvious the guest was going to pop the Bubbles, but the content would be rad. Tyler looked beautiful under the lights, and I knew I did too, so... "Would that cause you problems, Grundel? More pixels?"

"Nah. It's no real difference," he shrugged.

"Well then." I slid sideways off the stool, hoping my butt would squeegee the puddle I suspected I'd leave there otherwise, and scampered over to plop down on the couch, which badly needed a cleaning. We tried to shampoo it a couple times a week, but we were also college students and therefore lazy. "Hi there," I grinned at Tyler.

"Hi yourself."

"Thirty seconds," Grundle announced, and then we were right back into it, with Elliot asking about the ethics of nudity in hockey locker rooms.

Just another interview.

My last piece of bubblegum was just starting to lose its flavor as I went through the bit about our Passion Pit buddy list with the special offers and the Kinkytime archive, and Elliot dragged the show to its grateful conclusion. "So! Tyler! You've been here a few times before; you know the drill. You up for some Sloppy Seconds?"

"Sure." He'd maintained a nicely firmed penis for most of the interview, a trick Elliot had clued him into: it looked better that way, pixellated. We had a significant gay audience, and they paid well.

"Okay! Well, in that case, there's really just one more question to ask as we wrap up this edition of Nude Mood: would you like pop the Bubbles?" I dutifully gave my gum a smack. "Or you want to take another chance to bang the Whang?"

Tyler grinned hugely at the camera and half-turned, reaching out to rest a big hand on Elliot's knee. "Well, I'll tell you, it's tough to go wrong either way, but you know what? I think I'm going to have to take this opportunity to pop those luscious Bubbles over there."

I blinked, unable to hear Tyler over the choir of angels that suddenly burst into song in my head. "No shit?" I blurted, my mouth falling open.

"Not if you've wiped your ass properly," Elliot snickered. He turned to the camera. "So we'll take a few minutes to get set up here. Thanks for watching another episode of Nude Mood; I'm the Whang, and we'll see you soon." Grundle signaled the sign-off, and then El rolled his eyes theatrically. "Well, hot damn! My ass gets a rest."

"You pitched last time, instead of catching." Tyler brushed his hair back. He had that tangled-up flow that a lot of hockey players went for, like an updated mullet. "You don't mind, do you Bubbles?"

"Fuck no." I was still in blurt mode. "Just a pleasant surprise, is all. What are you, feeling experimental tonight?" I didn't bother wasting time, laying a proprietary hand on those balls of his. "These have been calling my name since you got here, honestly."

He laughed and opened his thighs for me as Elliot scooped up my laptop and settled in for hosting duties. "We'll see what we can do about that. And, how do you know I wasn't experimenting before? With your buddy over there?" He winked. "I told you, I had a girl complain about my nuthair. So."

"No, you said you had a date complain about your nuthair." It was all I could do to keep myself from leaning in, dipping low, and sweeping that glorious sack into my mouth then and there. They were firm in my hand, as juicy a pair of balls as I'd ever cupped. "I assumed it was a guy."

"Nah. A girl. One of the chicks on the Marilyns." I nodded. Monroe College had a dance team we all called the Marilyns, because they tended to be blonde and busty. And because Monroe. "They do ice dancing during the intermissions. Most of them aren't very good skaters, but they can certainly fuck."

"I bet." I rolled him like dice in my hand, unable to let go. "You should get one of them to come here and interview." My hand was going to smell like his crotch, and I loved that shit. "Jesus. This is going to be fun."

His smile melted me. "I'm glad you're looking forward to it."

"I'm Christa." I gave his scrotum one last tug while Grundle finished his tech bullshit. "I'm going to go pee real quick. Don't go anywhere." I did, then let him see me baby-wipe myself as I strode back toward the couch, past an incredulous Elliot.

"We're already at fuckin' $1200," he marveled. "People really want to see you two get down."