Writer of the Stars

Editor's Note: this story is tagged with "horror" and "erotic horror" story tags.

*

My reflection blurred in the smear of concrete and greenery.

I was a passenger on the MetroRail, Austin's only commuter train. I stood against the window, steadied by my grip on a metal pole. As the train careened at its top speed of sixty miles-per-hour, I considered how everything about this trip was in transit--the place I boarded from was a temporary replacement for the downtown station, which was being rebuilt. It didn't have enough lines for the ever growing population of the city. One of the ticket machines had been out of service. I had found an empty mounting pole on the station's platform--it looked like it was designed to house a dot matrix info board, but given the station's temporary nature, I doubted it would ever be filled.

My eyes fixed on nothing in particular. I, too, was in transit, just another blur in the window of a crowded city.

It didn't bother me, mind you. I think I preferred it. I had a great appreciation for the smear of life, and the swirl of messy color and thought that comes from being in a world smoothed over by generations of advancement. There is a great, beautiful impossibility to my existence, and that train ride, uneventful as it was--as it always was--was evidence for it.

Because not a single man surrounding me would or could know the extent or nature of my lust for them.

I didn't need them to know. I was horny for concept, not cock. I am old enough to know what I want and what I am, and as I studied the disparate sizes and expressions and bulk of the men in repose around me, I was as aware as I ever was that I am burdened with sexuality without the need of sex. I don't have a "come hither" gaze because my eyes don't covet, they catalogue.

To my right, there was a black man in his mid thirties. He's clean shaven, with a smooth lineup I'm sure he paid plenty for. He's smiling at something on his phone. Beautiful white pearls peeked through thick, dark lips; lips that could swallow your tongue, your face, your soul. His orange tank and yellow sweats indicated a playful personality, and his muscled shoulders and broad chest hinted that he lived in a world of labor or fitness. You can find so many ways to build an aesthetic body like his; he was a sculpture I imagined many approved of. Perhaps he gave his approval back to them in long, sweaty nights wrapped in silk sheets. Assuming he was vanilla in taste--perhaps his gave his disapproval in swats across the rear or face, if he was a little more wild. Maybe only a difference of mood separated the two possible outcomes. Not knowing, but considering, was part of the fun.

To my left sat a bearded construction work. His overhung, hairy belly pushed out from an orange vest, hastily unfastened after a long day of work. He was talking to a woman across the aisle. He laughed, and waved his hands as he talked. I imagined those hands were strong, calloused, and in regular use. I wondered how much weight he'd put on in his days of hard labor. I wondered how proud he was of that bulk, and how much he enjoyed showing it off to smaller guys at the construction site. Maybe there was a nerd there--some accountant or intern for a manager he despised--that got grabbed by those strong hands and forced face first into his navel everyday. Or maybe there was a guy like me, unassuming and forgettable, who knew he was built to please. Who was looking at him and thinking about what he might look like naked, free, worshiped like the Dionysus he should've always been.

Across the aisle, I saw an old Latino man with silver braids. He wore a shimmering black suit, dark as night, still full of stars. His eyes hid behind mirrored shades, and his gray beard was neatly trimmed. He looked expensive. Too expensive for me, or anyone else on board. Which made you wonder what his price was. And was his price to have, or be had? Was this a powerful business man who hid a deep yearning for a dominate subordinate to throw him across his desk and take him? Was this silver fox ready to slip a few hundred into the waistband of a twink's panties, or a jock's strap? The grimy possibilities were there, made all the more salacious by often unspoken scandalous precedent.

The train pulled to my stop. I got off. None of them needed to know that, just as they were, they were inspirations to me. It had been my experience that most men can't handle the burden--or the truth--of their beauty. So, I never told them.

I much preferred to write about them, instead.

My apartment was a small one bedroom above a bookstore. The walls were painted a dingy green, like dried toothpaste, and there was little furniture except for a bed. None of these choices were mine--life made them for me. My writing table was a simple wooden slab I'd bought from the antique store down the street for twenty dollars. Sat upon it was my computer, several years out of fashion, but still up for the challenges I presented it. I had a few bookshelves filled with old paperbacks and a couple of pillows strewn across the floor. Any of these places would become dinner tables, depending upon my energy that day. I'd sometimes eat out, but mostly I ate cereal and drank coffee. No one would accuse me of good health, or confuse me for the gods I found in other men.

I rarely left the house for anything other than work. I didn't need to go anywhere else, though I won't pretend I didn't want to. I hated my job--it didn't pay enough to live. To really live, you know what I mean? To walk outside when you want to, take in the sun, go places without a schedule, to be where you want to be because it's curiosity and not a demand. When I think about life, I can't imagine it was invented to only pay bills and starve. Yet the latter two activities seemed to be all I did--which made those quiet moments between my dick, my mind, and the keyboard all the more special.

I wrote. No... I write. I still do. I always will.

I didn't need to flirt with those men on the train not because I feared an accidental run-in with violent straights, but because what really turned me on the most was narrative. Structure threatened my loins, character arcs unzipped my pants, the wandering prose of a sentence without end sent electricity from my mind to my prostate. I didn't have to specifically write porn to have a good time, but it was a good time I always found myself drawn to, all the same. The need to conjure rammed into me, and fucked my imagination with possibilities. I average around four pages or so before I came, and if I'm not playing with myself when I write, then I know it's not a story I'll finish. I am, and you may think lowly of me for this, madly in lust with making.

You'd think I'd write more often, horny as I was for the page.

Between my job and the hours to get to it and leave, most of my time was away from the keyboard. My brain never stopped, of course--all day, men would walk around me, and I deified them from afar. Every man's body was a story I wanted to tell, and the backlog of ideas in my mind was long. But writing is a terrible commitment of resources. If I had both the time and the energy to write when I got home, it would take the remainder of my night. If I lacked one, or the other, or both, I would read someone else's story, jerk off, sleep for 4-6 hours, then stumble back into work the next day.

I appreciated other people's words, and sometimes posted my own, on a sex-story site called, appropriately, Literotica. My audience was small, far smaller than I wanted it to be, but that size was deserved given the few stories that I had posted on the site. While I consider myself a workhorse--I could easily write 2k words a day for fun if I had that freedom--it was a struggle to finish anything. I would orgasm when writing the stories I enjoyed the most, then go to sleep, then get distracted by the burden of the real world, and by the time I got back to doing what I loved--and it would sometimes be days or weeks--I would, more than likely, have a new story or scenario choking my mind, my throat, my cock.

I sat down in front of the keyboard and opened my word processor.

Something about the train ride home stuck with me. I was horny--I was painfully horny, always--but I was also drowning in a frustration of particular heaviness that night. I thought about those three men, sitting across from me, laughing at something, joking with each other. I imagined their bodies, how they moved, what they were like underneath their clothes. I pictured the valleys of their muscles, and where they met. Their cocks, hard and stiff, jutted out from their pants, reached for the sky, begging to be touched. They deserved whores and lovers and gimps and masters and any sort of carnal craving they desired. They deserved novels unto themselves, each of them. They deserved three act structures that found them, whether heroic or villainous, triumphantly sexual. Those worlds didn't exist--couldn't exist--without imagination and time. Best I could give them, I thought, is an orgy with each other. On the train.

"Train on a train," I mused, unzipping with one hand and tapping away with the other. "There's a ring to it."

So I took notes. I gave those gods names, and motivations, and fetishes. I carved their descriptions in time with strokes across my blue cotton underwear. I was half-hard and fully finished with a layout for my story. Good progress on both fronts.

Or, it should've been.

I stared at the monitor, at the clock in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. I grumbled, then slumped in the chair. My dick begged for my attention, but I let it dangle unattended. Anger had set in, a new emotion that had never found its way into my work before. It was late. I had the energy! I had the motivation! I absolutely had the capability, but there was no fucking time! If I didn't go to bed soon, I'd be dead at work the next day. Dead for a job that I needed just to scrape by. And for the first time, I felt too angry at that fact to even finish jerking off.

I saved my work, slunk to my kitchen, and open the window. I draped myself across the pane, and let my arms dangle against the brick outside my apartment. I stared up into the sky, letting the cool air wash over me.

"Fuck this shit," I muttered. "Fuck my life."

The sky was dark. I counted the stars, few as they were. I knew that I was meant to be somewhere else, doing something better. I rarely believed in purpose, but there was too stark of a difference between my happiness in writing and the rest of my micro-managed time.

I closed my eyes and pictured a story, any story. Men taking off their shirts, getting their pecs sucked. A man on his knees, begging another for more. The wetness of a mouth on a dick. A needy hole clenched around a cock. I tried to picture any scene that I could conjure up, any scenario that would allow me to feel full. But every visual was drained out by the reality that I was chained to a cubicle that paid too little for too much of my time, and too much of me.

I opened my eyes again. There was a star I missed--a little more yellow, a little brighter than the others. I focused on its light, since the worlds of my mind, normally my refuge, had abandoned me. It grounded me long enough to think foolish thoughts. I thought that, maybe, I could make a wish on it. I knew that thought was lore inaccurate, of course--you're supposed to wish on shooting stars. But I was unaware of any repercussions for sending your dreams to any old part of the cosmos, and frankly, if there was something out there willing to respond to me, I was ready to accept them. Nothing else had worked out in my life, so why not this?

"Hey, you up there?" I watched my breath fade into the cold air. "Can you hear me?"

I waited, staring at the same point in space, hoping that someone would appear and tell me that it was okay. If the star just twinkled in a knowing way, hell, I'd be satisfied with that.

"Well, if you can..." I took a deep breath, "...all I want to do is write. The odds are impossibly against me that I'll ever be able to, though, what with the way my life is. With the way the world is, too. It's too expensive and risky to publish on my own, the market is saturated as it is, and I don't have the time with my job to do the work I want to do. I don't have family or a big audience to support me. I'm gonna die at this piece of shit job at this rate. I don't want this anymore. I want..."

I took another breath, then started to cry. I couldn't help it. These were words I had held deep within me, never spoken, never shared. Once I started to speak them, they tumbled out with desperate need. I had to get it out of my system, even though my system was designed to prevent this sort of thing.

And then, for some reason, a thought branched out from my spiraling mind, a distinct and curious one.

In my erotica, I played frequently with various kinks just for the sake of challenging my writing. Because I was so enamored by every syllable that came from a male throat, every drop of sweat and spit and precum that a man could make, I found myself often writing about a wide variety of different things, some more sexual in thought than practice. Just to explore these different ways of being turned on was fascinating to me. And yet, one I hadn't pursued, one that I found intriguing but hesitant to leap into, was financial-domination. "Findom," as its known, is a form of BDSM where a submissive showers a dominant with money, with little in return other than humiliation. Maybe if I wrote about that, and maybe if I posted it on Literotica, my writing could fulfill someone else's fantasy. Maybe they can pay me, and I can bury them with my prose, with the filthiest, grimiest stories I desired. Absolutely destroy them with a flick of the wrist, and make them beg for more.

I could live that life easily.

And so, with this thought, perhaps arrogantly, perhaps foolish;y, I looked up to that shining star.

"I wish someone paid me to write erotica every week, at my own pace," I said. "I wish they paid me enough that I could quit my job and live comfortably, and write stories all the time."

The star didn't answer. It suspended itself in the air, unwavering. The wind blew through my hair, and the sound of the cars passing by on the street below faded away.

Disappointed, I closed the window and went to bed.

***

Tuesday morning was as routine as any other. My phone alarm screamed till I woke. I fussed with my tie and slacks, and drowned my cereal with too much milk. I carried coffee with me in a thermos and drank it as I ran to the train platform. I did everything I could to avoid thinking about the temper tantrum I thrust towards the night. I wanted to forget about it, pretend it never happened.

But when I got to work, I found a message waiting for me. The wall of sound of call center phones parted, and silenced when I noticed a small yellow note was stuck to my computer monitor:

***

I like it when you beg.

- S

***

The simple signature was followed up with a smiley face.

I sat down at my desk and held the note between tight fingers. I had no coworkers whose name started with 'S.' None that I could think of, not even last names. John, maybe? I shot up and looked over the cubicle wall at my coworker-neighbor, an older woman named Margie.

"What's John's last name?" I blurted.

Margie blinked over her large bifocals, caught more off-guard by the suddenness of my question than its content. "Andrews, I think."

My brow furrowed. "Huh."

I sat down. Then, shot back up.

"Margie, did you see anyone come by my desk?"

Margie's tone this time reflected a bit of annoyance. "No, just you."

"Huh."

"Something wrong, Davey?"

I shook my head, "No. Sorry."

I fell back into my chair, looked at the note, then crumpled it and threw it into the trash. I didn't have time to think about it--I had to clock in for work.

***

The rest of my shift was largely uneventful--or at least, as eventful as any other day of work. I finished my shift and got on the MetroRail towards home. My normal pastime of observing men and dreaming of the fantastical ways they could achieve nirvana was put on hold. My brain was too consumed by the note, too busy sorting through the files of my life and connections I had made. I searched for anyone whose name began with an 'S.' There had to be someone. Someone I was forgetting--someone with access to my desk at work. Considering my cry to the sky the night before, it was likely someone in my apartment building. Did I have a co-worker that lived near me?

I arrived home and ate dinner alone, as ritual. I tried to watch videos on the internet, but couldn't focus. My mind was locked in search of the missing piece of the puzzle. After dinner, I checked my email and Facebook accounts, but nothing new had come in since the morning. I didn't know my neighbors. I had no other clues, no solace to calm me to sleep, no brain-space to motivate myself to write. I just laid in bed and stared at the ceiling, wondering who the hell 'S' was. Hours ticked by. Frustrated, I decided I'd force myself to masturbate--maybe a good cum was all I needed. I turned on my computer and opened the browser.

Literotica waited patiently for me. My intent had been to just cruise around the "gay male" tab, flip through various kinky stories the way a audiophile browses vinyl records. I wasn't terribly picky, or at least I didn't think I was. Wherever that train of thought would lead to, though, I'd never know--because before I could make it to the tab, I noticed I had received a private message.

I never received private messages.

I clicked the link.

***

Hello Davey,

I've read your work on Literotica and find it compelling. I can't help but wonder what kind of man writes such beautiful words about such filthy things.

I hope you don't mind me contacting you directly. I'm curious if you're interested in working with me on something. If so, please reply with your email address and we'll discuss the details further.

I look forward to hearing from you.

-S

***

I read the message three times

I stood up from the desk, shaking slightly. I walked out of my bedroom and into the kitchen. I opened the window.

That yellow star, the same one I wished on, looked down at me with cool cruelty. I could find it easily, no matter how different the rest of the sky looked. I squinted at it with certainty and distrust.

I slammed the window shut and galloped back to my computer.

***

Dear S,

Thanks for the kind words. I'm really flattered--you're the first person that's messaged me on this site, and it often feels like I'm just another guy around here, you know? Haha.

I love writing, so, uh, yeah. You've got me curious!

Can I ask how you know my name, though?

***

I swallowed, and debated the possibilities in my head. Should I? Shouldn't I?

Ugh.

I typed my email address. Worse case scenario it's a scam and I just cut off contact.

I sent the message and stared at the screen with a disorientation that felt somewhere between punch-drunk and fear. My nervous stupor was only broken when I realized that I was hard as hell. With a shrug, I jerked off to thoughts of begging, my cock trapped underneath the heel of that older Latino man I saw on the train. In my fantasy, he was smoking a cigar, and slapping a stack of money across my face with idle amusement. It was a nice thought, and one that centered on my own body--truthfully, a rarity for me.

When I shot, it was much higher than usual. I cleared the desk and hit the wall. A drop of cum oozed down the screen. I panicked and ran to get some paper towels.

***

The alarm brought me to Wednesday morning. The heaviness of little sleep weighed me down as I reached for the phone. Through blurry eyes I checked my emails and found that there were two new ones