CONCH

I just figured out how Radek rides PKP express trains for half-price: He buys a local fare (for much cheaper) and when he hands his ticket to the ticket-taker, he presses a nail-polished thumb over the incriminating section. Of course, they never ask him to move it.

No other thumb would work, not even mine. It’s homosexual genius at its best.

Radek is so handsome. I’m not sure you care, but he has puppy-dog eyes like Elvis, and shaves twice a day to keep his face smooth. He has one dimple, a swirl of koperek I’ve wanted to lick for some time, and a permanent case of bed-head that makes me think about ... his bed.

We were headed to the Baltic Sea again, passing one dreary town after another, and antique tractors and homemade pigeon coops and seas of radishes and potatoes. Radek was fascinated and stared out the window, his chin lit by sunlight. We passed all his favourite animals: pigs were snuffling truffles out of the muddy soil, dogs were chasing foxes, and the sheep were doing nothing.

I unwrapped our lunch of hard-boiled eggs and a salad of peas and carrots, and I salted everything appropriately.

“Tell me about the Internet,” Radek said.

“It’s mostly online and written in code,” I answered.

“I mean your plan, silly ... what’s all this about?”

“This?”

“We’re not going on an adventure, because we’ve been to Gdask before. Withholding information is a very Communist thing to do, you know.”

“So people should constantly be spitting out their thoughts?” I said, suddenly not finding him very attractive. “They should speak without timing?”

“Of course not. But I’m ready to know.”

I showed him my brand-new video camera.

“We’re making a YouTube piece,” I said.

“Actors?”

“You.”

“Just me?”

“No, but you’re the star.”

“Pay?” He double salted his egg.

“Fame. I hope there are no zits on your ass cheeks.”

“You can just pop them,” he said. “You’re pretty good at getting under the skin. Should I have brought condoms?”

“No.”

We watched the countryside roll by.

“Thanks for the book,” he said.

We got off in Gdask and had a cup of herbatka at the station restaurant. Then we pushed through the usual crowd of hooligans that clogged public places when school was out for the day, past juvenile comments about the size of my breasts and about Radek’s nail polish. You know, “Who’s the wife?” and other such childish remarks. Of course, I was the one who answered back, “Go fuck a pencil sharpener,” because if Radek had said it, they would’ve beaten him up on the spot. You can’t outrun a pack of kids on a 4 pm sugar high.

We caught our tramwaj to the beach. The weather was gorgeous. On our way to the bluffs, we passed a cluster of people setting up their picnic and arguing about the best way to get sand out of a cell phone. After we cleared them, Radek got naked immediately—even before I did—and I took it as a sign that the shoot would go well.

While we were walking through the bluffs to find a cozy spot, we came across patches of blood in the sand. People apparently had violent sex out here to a soundtrack of the sea ... I guess the water brings out something different in everyone.

We continued a little further and eventually settled on a bank of white sand flanked by reeds on three sides. We sat facing the beautiful, blue Baltic, at peace despite the broken shells and dead hermit crabs that poked through our towels and into our skin.

I leaned over to Radek, kissed him on his cherry lips, and then fell into his naked, cross-legged lap. He hovered over my face for a few seconds, inhaling my hair, and then he buried his tongue down my throat. Searching. He was always looking for something, this boy. We made out for a few minutes, then picked sand out of our mouths.

“Wow,” he said. “Your molars taste metallic.”

“That’s because I have fillings. You’re not supposed to notice.”

That did it. My pussy was wet. Please understand, dear reader, if I need to use Radek’s vulgar, Americanized English to explain what happened next.

He sniffed a noose around my neck and then turned idiot. He turned theoretical.

“Poland may learn to accept gays and lesbians in the coming decades, but it will take centuries for it to accept—”

“Be quiet,” I interrupted. “I need your face near my pussy.”

Radek obeyed. He lay on the sand in front of me, planted his face in my pubes, and took a deep whiff. His nostrils flared. This was about the body—our bodies—and not about “us,” so I wasn’t upset that he avoided eye contact with me. I preferred that sentimentality didn’t ruin our session.

You see, Radek thinks I’m a nice girl, but I’m really an animal.

Who whitewashes a city of all tampon advertising for some guy’s funeral? My vagina wasn’t going to stand for invisibility. I lurched forward and fucked Radek’s nose, smothering him with my labia. Ekstra, I thought. His tongue knows what to look for and doesn’t take long to find it.

His tongue, in fact, was radically fudging up the gay community’s spit-shined image of boy-on-boy, girl-on-girl. Bisexual stigma, lost right up my cunt.

I should’ve been enjoying these precious moments with Radek— the wind in his hair, the sun bronzing his pale ass, his tongue unleashing months of pent-up energy in me. Instead, I was thinking them to death.

“I almost forgot,” I said, setting up the camera on a book beside us. “Let me just turn this on.”

I rolled him over on his back and tried to quickly brush the sand off his cock, but it clung stubbornly to his moist foreskin. So I picked and picked. Then, when I thought it was clean, I pulled the skin back and found even more. The pee-hole is so interesting.

His erection grew in my hand, long and thick. Forcing my fingers apart. This was what I had been waiting for. Can a virgin be queer? Can a virgin be anything? I decided not to tell him this was my first time, in case it would spook the roughness out of him.

I straddled Radek’s body, lifted up his heavy dick, and slowly impaled myself on it. This girl’s tummy got very full, very fast. Anatomy doesn’t make any sense when it’s being turned inside out. Radek’s face became a pool of pleasure, and then he throbbed, pulsing into me. I daydreamed his cockhead would erupt on his strongest throb, pushing blood into my deepest recesses.

I was silly with lust. Since when do I drool?

Then he flipped me on my back and pumped my pussy raw. Bits of shell were digging into me, but I didn’t care.

Radek thought that nothing had changed, but that’s not true. We had changed, and our bodies told us so.

“Fuck,” I said. “You feel that?”

“Yeah, I’m in your fornix.”

And with those words, I came and came and came, and squeezed the cum out of sweet Radeki, as orgasm deformed his face against a sky of squawking seagulls.

He collapsed beside me, then after a few minutes of rest, threw my ankles over my head and ate my ass out like a fucking pig. My anus was Queen of Poland for five minutes, and I came again.

Sigh.

Radek laid his head on my stomach and faced the water.

“You know what’s hotter than a gay guy who knows where the fornix is?” I asked, the last full sentence I spoke to him that day. “A gay guy who can reach it.”

He looked happy. I wanted so badly to go clean up in the sea with him, and then swim and play all day, but I was too tired to move.

“What does this have to do with the Internet?” Radek said.

I had forgotten all about the video camera. It was still recording.

“I’m going to post this online, with the caption ‘If he’s not afraid of pussy—’”

And that’s when we saw the skinheads kicking their way through the bluffs, threshing the reeds with iron chains and laughing. It could only be one thing, the worst thing: They were on a faggot hunt.

I can still hear the swish of their track suits. It was the most terrifying sound ever.

But Radek was with me—a naked woman who smelled of sex—so I was sure he was safe.

The skinheads saw us, and the short, wiry one threw down his beer can. A stream of gold spilled into the sand and meandered toward us.

“What’s up, bitch?”

“I’m with my boyfriend.”

“This pedał?” he said, holding up Radek’s hand. “Only women and perverts wear nail polish.”

Radek froze, like a sculpture. I was expecting a little more fight in him, but he was naked and vulnerable. I forgive him.

“We just had sex,” I said, and showed him Radek’s cum leaking out of me.

“Who cares. He’ll always be a faggot.” He twisted Radek’s wrist backwards for a few seconds and then threw his hand down. Not a yelp from my baby.

In any other situation, I would’ve agreed with the skinhead, because he was right. Radek was a free spirit who could identify however he wanted, and one fuck wasn’t going to change that. But Radek’s life, I realized, was now in my care.

“Why don’t you leave him alone, and just fuck me.”

“Does it look like we want AIDS?” the other thug said, fitting himself with a set of brass knuckles.

“If he’s not afraid of pussy, then he’s not afraid of you,” I said desperately.

That was supposed to be the video caption.

And then Radek took off, dashing naked down the beach with these two monsters running after him.

I forgive him.

It was going to be like old times, I thought, starting with a franchissement, then a passe muraille, followed by an acrobatic roulade into the water. I was certain Radek would kick gravity in the nuts, and transform into the superhero he was always meant to be.

But that’s not how it went. He got a few hundred yards, then tripped in the sand and fell. The skinheads caught up with him. One of them held Radek down by pressing a boot on his neck, while the other fetched a nearby conch shell. Together, they pried opened his mouth, and gently placed the spire in the back of his throat.

I wish I had never seen that shell.

Parkour only works when there are obstacles to overcome. The beach is a horribly barren place.

I forgive him.

That’s where the video ends, because I turned off the “record” function. This was only supposed to be a porn shoot, a picnic, a bonding experience. Unfortunately, it turned into so much more, especially after the short skinhead, the one with the venom in his leg, gave the first banana kick.

There’s no way I can ever forgive Radek.