Wood Worker

He’d been due to come around at eleven but he turned up at half-past twelve.

As I opened the door, I was ready for an argument.

But the guy standing in the doorway threw me. I’d been expecting an old man with faded overalls and a battered toolbox. Whenever things had bust, collapsed or died on me in the past, the landlord had always sent round one of his geriatric mates of his from the building trade.

This guy was in his twenties. Six foot four with short light brown hair. Wearing a loose-fitting checked shirt and jeans so tight that they almost strained with the bulge inside them.

I gawped like a fish. Managed to mutter, “Yeah?”

He smiled. It was warm and friendly.

He said, in a deep but gentle voice, “I’ve come to fix a wardrobe or something… did I get the right apartment?” 

I thought, “Jesus,” but stuttered, “Oh yeah… come in…”

He stepped into the hallway and looked down the corridor, sizing the place up. He had his tools on a canvas belt, a row of them tucked into pouches around his right hip.

I said, closing the door, “I was expecting an older guy…”

He laughed. “Well, yeah, actually my dad was intending on doing this. But something turned up, so you got me instead.”

“You don’t normally put together collapsed wardrobes, then?”

“Well, sometimes. I mean, I used to. I’m more into designing furniture now… fake Mexican chairs and stuff. That’s where the money is!”

He had a beautiful smell. He must have done some work elsewhere before he’d come to my apartment because I was aware of a faint odour of his sweat: not strong or unpleasant; just gentle traces of the musky smell of his body mixing with the subtle perfume of his after-shave or deodorant.

He said, “Oh, sorry I got held up, by the way. I hope I didn’t put you out…?”

I laughed and shook my head like I hadn’t even noticed.

He grinned broadly again. Who needs to apologise with a smile like that?

I took him into the bedroom, checking out how round and firm his buttocks were as he walked ahead of me. His jeans were literally clinging to him, showing off his thick muscular legs, leading downward to his dirty brown hiking boots.

He surveyed the twisted wreckage of the wardrobe, one of the side panels that was protruding from the remains at an angle.

He smiled. “Looks like someone beat their way out of this.”

“Well you know how it is. You’ve got to lock your victims up somewhere…”

He laughed again. A warm laugh with a broad, unaffected smile.

He pulled off one of the wooden struts which came easily away. “This is so badly made… it looks like it was put together by a four-year-old.” He considered it for a few seconds and then added, “Actually, it could easily be one of my dad’s creations…”

I chuckled.

He went on, “Everything’s held together with glue and dowels. No joints. I’m going to have to rebuild it from scratch.”

The wardrobe had creaked and groaned every time I’d hung something up or taken something out, but last Thursday it had collapsed during the night. The noise of it had woken me up at about three in the morning. It had totally freaked me; I thought someone was breaking in through my bedroom window.

He took off his tool-belt and bent over to lay it out on the floor. I checked out his beautiful arse again, this time with the added bonus of seeing the curving ridges made by the hem of his briefs against the seat of his jeans.

He found a claw-grip hammer and a chisel and stood back up to prise some of the panels apart. His hands were large and strong, his wrists thick with short light brown hairs on them.

I realised I was just standing there, mesmerised by him, and so I said, “Do you want a cup of tea or coffee or something?”

He looked up at me and then his eyes focused behind me, on the wall above the head of my bed.

He smiled and said, “Interesting…”

I turned to see what he was looking at it. It was a picture that was hanging there; a print I’d bought. It was a confusing painting: a night-time scene in a cornfield full of dark blues and greens, with scattered patches of moonlight and dark shadows deliberately misleading and confusing the eye.

I said, “Yeah. It’s a good painting. I like it a lot.”

“So do the guys in it, by the look of things.”

That caught my attention. “What do you mean?”

He kept smiling. “Well, you must have seen the two men making out together in the middle of the cornfield…?”

I smiled back, my eyebrows betraying my surprise. “Oh right. Most people don’t see them until they’ve looked at it a while.”

They were there alright, but you had to look carefully to discern their bodies from the busy lines and the twisting foliage. One guy was kissing the other’s neck. Their trousers were down around the tops of their thighs. One guys’ cock was visible, the other’s was disappearing between his friend’s legs.

He stared at me, still grinning. “I’ve always been good at illusions and stuff…”

I said, “It took me about five minutes to make them out. And I’d read about it beforehand so I knew what I was looking for…”

He nodded. “It’s pretty cool. Not really my kind of thing, but I like it.” He glanced around my bedroom at some of my other stuff. At my David Hockney print of a naked guy in a swimming pool; at odd ornaments I’d picked up with similar themes.

He kept nodding. “Yeah… I like your style… not mine, as I say, but it’s interesting…”

I repeated my offer of tea.

“Oh yeah. I’d love one. Can I use your bathroom first, though…?”

I gestured to the doorway and walked along the corridor to make the tea.

As I put the kettle on, I heard him pissing into the toilet. The sound was loud and sharp: he hadn’t closed the door.

I thought, “That’s kind of strange... it’s pretty clear that I’m gay and first he says that’s ‘interesting’ and then he leaves the bathroom door open…”

I wouldn’t have intruded on a guy using my bathroom normally, but the open door seemed too good to miss. Maybe not an invitation, but definitely an opportunity.

I walked back along the corridor and stood in the bathroom door. He was standing side-on to me, pissing into the bowl, staring at another of my pictures on the wall in front of him.

I said, “Sorry… d’you take milk and sugar…?”

He didn’t respond for a few seconds. He was staring at the picture intently.

I glanced down at his cock, soft and limp in his fingers but longer and thicker than any flaccid cock I’d seen before. It was like a pale-coloured snake: as thick as a cucumber with five or six inches of it sticking out from his jeans. The foreskin was slightly retracted to expose half of inch of the pale red head. A stream of yellow piss connected the tip of it with the toilet bowl in an almost straight line.

Eventually he said, “This one’s pretty interesting too. Are you an art student or something?”

I laughed. “No. I’m a journalist… I just like pretty pictures, I guess.”

He kept looking at it, his piss stream faltering and his fingers working at his cock to pump the last few spurts out of it.

He said, “I guess this one could be religious or sexual. Depends on what the viewer wants to see.”

The picture was a painting of two men, one kneeling in front of the other with his head level with the other man’s crotch. Since you could only see the back of the head of the guy kneeling, it was ambiguous as to whether his posture was an act of deference or if something more intimate was going on between them.