Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2020 11:47:58 +0000 (UTC) From: Milford Slabaugh Subject: A Matter of Perception story A MATTER OF PERCEPTION By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM I walked to the edge of my world and looked into the vague nothingness just beyond it. Not really looking at anything, in more ways than one. Oh, things were out there, but they weren't...logical...enough for my brain to process them. That's how it had been explained to me, anyhow. This was as far as I could go and be away from Kevin, and right now, that was what I wanted to do. In the nothingness, something moved and did something or other, their able assistance turned the something into words I could understand. "You're distressed about something, William." "Yeah." I admitted. "Is there anything we can do about it?" "I don't think so." "Tell me about it, then, perhaps I can offer advice." "Your people have already done more than a lot for us already." I demurred. "Nonetheless, tell me about it." "Sure." I took a deep breath. "It can't hurt, I guess." So I spilled my guts to the Nimee. Singular or plural, I don't know, that's how his/their name for himself/themselves came out to me. I guess I should explain this from the beginning. Kevin Bowdler and myself, William Marse, had been flying a two-man starfighter. Mankind was in a death-struggle with an alien species we called the Spyders, though actual spiders were first-cousins to Mankind compared to those maniacal killers of everything they encountered. Earth had thrown together a space fleet quick as they could and we were out there hoping it was enough to counter the Spyder threat. It was a kill-or-be-killed kind of war, don't ask to surrender for it wouldn't be accepted, throw yourself at their battle fleet and hope you could make a difference. So we'd flown at them, firing all we had as best we could (Kevin had been flying the ship, I was the one aiming the guns). We'd gotten two of them before it happened. Exactly what, I couldn't tell you. One moment I was sighting in on a third ship with sweat and fear pouring out of every pore and the next...we were here. According to the Nimee, we'd come through some sort of interdimensional rift and appeared in their reality. They'd recognized what had happened and built us the place we now lived, about twenty acres of what seemed to be normal Earth environment. It held a house with two bedrooms filled with furniture and even entertainment facilities that showed us everything we could imagine. This Earth-normal area floated in what was a sort of amorphous mist...only it wasn't substantial enough to be mist. My eyes saw a sort of vague nothingness of no particular color, not white, or pink or pale blue or light green, but all/none of those at the same time. That "mist" was the actual reality we now inhabited. Still did, according to the Nimee. They hadn't actually built Kevin and me a chunk of reality, they had adjusted our minds so that we "saw" their own reality in ways that we could handle. The food they gave us was changed into foods we recognized, I could sit down at the table and know that the covered dishes in front of me, when revealed, would be just what I felt like eating at that moment. Water, air, furniture, all of it, my mind was fooled by the Nimee into seeing/experiencing it in my own terms, in every sense of eyes, ears, nose and fingertips. All a matter of a change in perception. This place, then, considering that Earth now was probably being blasted out of existence by the Spyders, should be paradise and it was, except for one, very important detail. I was gay. Kevin was not. Emphatically not. He didn't know I was gay and subjected me to an almost endless stream of homophobic sneering and aspersions on my masculinity. If you weren't just a man, but a man's man who fought grizzly bears and blew snot out of your nose with one finger over the other nostril, you were shit under his feet. Such a man is hard enough to take in a regular universe but my universe was now shrunken to a small area with only him and me. Either I talked with him or I talked with the Nimee. We'd been here for sixty-seven days now (days counted from waking up to waking up, the Nimee had no sense of time and in fact, there may not have been time in this dimension) and I was getting depressed/desperate. So I spilled all this out to the sympathetic ears (I'm going to quit explaining my terms here, you understand the situation by now or never will). I concluded with, "And the worst thing is, at least once a day, he looks at me and says, "Why the hell couldn't you be a beautiful woman instead this wimpy ass of a man? I'm not a wimp, I'm as much a man as he is, I'm sick of him trying to say I'm not!" "That's not all of it, is it, William?" the Nimee asked when I stopped talking. "What do you mean?" "You want more than for him to quit criticizing him, don't you?" The Nimee had this talent, you couldn't hide any aspect of your psyche from them, according to them, our insides were as visible and evident to them as our outsides, and that included our every thought. So I didn't try to dissemble. "All right, sure." I admitted. "Hey, far as I know, he and I are the last surviving Men in the multiverse. Why does the only other man in my life have to be such a jerk? And why the hell does the jerk have to be one of the handsomest men I've ever known? It just isn't fucking fair! To be trapped here forever with him, wanting him and hating him at the same time! It's going to drive me mad, I tell you!" I took a deep breath. "The Nimee have done so much for us already, would it be too much to ask you to make another area like this? I'd be better off all alone than living in a hell like this!" "So the problem is that you wish your companion had a more pleasing personality, and he wishes that you were a member of the opposite sex. Is that the entirety of your problem?" I wouldn't have phrased it that way but... "Yeah, pretty much. It sounds like small problems, I know but...." "I will consult with the Nimee on this and we will do what we can." "Thank you." I said. "Thank you very much." The Nimee moved away, or should I say the nothingness no longer held something, and I sighed, turned away. I had to keep exercising my body, I'd been walking around the Earthlike area so I went back to walking. If Kevin and I were the last humans in existence, then I should stay alive and healthy as long as I could. Of course, if time didn't exist here, and I suspected it didn't, maybe I was now immortal. Stuck forever and ever, in a terrarium with a jerk. How's that for a good definition of Hell? I got back to the house and found it empty. Kevin was spending most of his days trying to repair the ship, taking it apart and trying to make it work again. The Nimee said that the ship wasn't damaged, but that physics worked differently here, and the ship we were looking at was actually another part of their reality, but hey, it kept Kevin busy and away from me for hours at a time, so I wasn't going to remind him of that. I decided to fix us both a dinner, the kitchen held a fully filled pantry, and the Nimee let us prepare our own meals when we chose. It would give me something to do for the next couple of hours. So I sat there and pared potatoes and peeled onions and such and tried not to remember that this was all futile. If I let myself think this was all real, maybe I could believe it. After all, how do you know your own reality is "real" or not. You believe your senses and that's that. This all felt real, so okay...let it be real. I had it all ready and on the stove, and steeled my nerve, went out to tell Kevin. He was hammering away at something or other (he was the technical one of us, my mechanical expertise was limited to maintaining the gun and the fire-control computer and aiming them at the enemy only), and said, "Kevin? Hey, Kevin?" He stopped hammering, looked at me and smile. I mean a real smile! "Hey there, William." Again I was struck with my dilemma, Kevin was a tall, broad-shouldered slim-waisted muscled stud with a regular smooth face, curly black hair, dancingly beautiful blue eyes, lips that begged me to kiss them, arms that enticed me to throw myself into them. Every time I saw the guy I felt like this, call it the loneliness, but I had the hots for this guy and I had them bad. I swallowed hard and got out my message. "I made dinner for us. It'll be ready in ten more minutes." "Sounds great. I'll go wash up, then." He said to me. "And thanks. You're way too good to me, baby." I was dumbfounded by this but plowed on. "How's it going on the ship?" "Beats the hell out of me." Kevin said. "Everything seems to be in order, but nothing works right. We may be stuck here forever." "I was thinking that myself." I agreed. "Wondering how we were going to handle it. Just you and me, for the rest of our lives." "Adam and Eve, you and me." Kevin grinned down at me. "I'm ready to do my part, how about you?" He lifted my chin with one grease-stained hand half again as big as mine and reached for my lips with his own. I was now beyond dumbfounded, I stood stock-still while he kissed me. Not an ironic kiss or a mocking kiss. A genuine kiss. "How about it?" Kevin asked me. "You want to play Garden of Eden with me?" "I guess." I said. "Like I have a choice?" "Don't you worry your little head about that." Kevin assured me. "I'll treat you right. You'll see." He kissed me again and I half-cooperated with this one. "Now, go get dinner on the table and I'll get washed up." I went back to the house, slowly. Something was going on, all right, but what? Kevin was acting weird. For Kevin. He was being nice to me. The Nimee! Of course! They'd done something to Kevin and now he was being nice to me. Having a fellow human's personality warped may not sound very kosher to you, but I was going to have to live with this guy a long, long time! I'd take the change and enjoy it! Dinner was a genuine joy. Kevin was polite, considerate, witty, even flirtatious. I kept pushing the envelope of my former guards against him and every time, found them needless. The Nimee beyond a doubt, they'd turned Kevin into the perfect man for me. After dinner, Kevin picked out a movie for us to watch, and by God, it wasn't one of his car-chase and explosion-filled action movies, it was a sweet-tempered comedy that had me nearly rolling on the floor. I ended up in Kevin's arms and I looked up into his face. His smiling, benevolent face. He hadn't spoken a single negative word to me since my talk with the Nimee. "Like what you see?" he asked me. "I sure do." I said and reached up to kiss him. He lifted me in his arms (those arms that I had dreamed about every night) and those lips (that I wanted to kiss and kiss and never stop) touched mine. This time, I gave it the full-on, passionate treatment and Kevin returned it in full measure. "Oh, God!" I gasped when he let me go. "Kevin, damn, I've dreamed about you and me doing this ever since we got stranded here." "So have I, baby, so have I." Kevin said to me. His big hands, so powerful and roughed from the labor of endless hours on the ship, were gentle as kittens on my face and his fingers slid through my hair in almost-orgasmic ribbons of warm steel. "Things have changed with us, haven't they?" I asked. I had to know how much he remembered. "In a way." Kevin agreed. "It was only today I stopped thinking about getting out of here and figuring it was you and me from now on. Hey, it could be a lot worse, couldn't it?" "I didn't think you liked me this way." I heaved. "I thought you didn't like me." Kevin returned. "But you fixed that dinner for me and I saw you standing there and I realized I had you all wrong. I did, didn't I? You want me, don't you? My body, if nothing else?" How do you answer that? Except honestly. "I've wanted your body from the first time I saw you. As for the rest of you...." I was cut off by his kiss. This one went on and was accompanied by busy hands of his, moving all over my body. Stroking my chest. Down to my crotch where he gripped my basket and moved his hand in a kneading fashion, working my cock through the fabric of my clothes. "We can work the rest of it as we go along." Kevin said when he finally let my lips go. "Works for me." I panted. I got to my feet with some difficulty, not only did I have a major erection in my groin, my legs didn't want to support me. To have a major crush on someone, the only other man in the universe (this universe, at least, maybe all of them), and now to have him wanting me, it was doing major things to my head. I staggered. It didn't matter. Kevin stood up with an erection at least as big as mine, scooped me up and carried me to his bedroom. Placing me on his bed, he began to unfasten my shirt buttons. As he opened the shirt, his hands went inside and palped my breasts one after the other. "Mmm, man, nice titties you got." He murmured appreciatively. "I guess." I said. "I just got to work them over and good." His head went down and he sucked on one of my nipples, his hand moving over it in a way that was both familiar and unfamiliar. It took me a while to figure out where I'd seen this sort of thing before. A man sucking on a woman's breasts. Kevin was working me like I was a woman! As he finished with my shirt and was undoing my pants, I got nervous. My cock was still down there, he had been touching it. But what would he do when he got to the real thing? "Kevin, you do know I'm another guy, don't you?" "Sure, I know that." Kevin agreed easily as he caught hold of my pants and yanked them down and off my body. "Don't worry, I'll treat you right." "You...you don't have to do anything you don't want to....Urk!" Kevin's mouth had fastened on my cock and if he thought I was a woman, he thought women had huge, throbbing cocks! And he sucked it like the best gay man ever would! I stopped fighting it. If Kevin wanted to play with my tits like they were a woman's, I could live with it. Not the worst fetish for a gay man to have. His lips were sliding up and down on my cock and I was getting lost in my passion. He let go and stood up, tearing off his own clothes. His chest was broad and well-formed, the hairs weren't as thick as I'd thought they'd be, only a light dusting on his upper chest narrowing down to a thin ribbon of thicker man-fur from the navel down to the pubic thatch. His hands undid his fly and pulled down his trousers and the majestic man-prong flopped out, thick and meaty and eagerly rising up to point its mushroom head at me. I rose up onto one arm and when he laid himself back on the bed, I caught his cock and wormed around until he and I could 69 ourselves comfortably. Oh, God, Kevin's cock. This pud, the war-dong that had delved many a woman's vagina, it was here and now it was mine, all mine. It filled my mouth when I took it inside me, the taste was the heady mead of divinity, the rich musk of raw masculinity, the salty taste of sweat combined with the rich oils of the male glands that ooze their scent unnoticed into the olfactory senses of men and women around until everyone knows that here, this one, this is a virile and potent MAN! Kevin's prick swelled to full rigidity in my mouth after the first couple of strokes, I had a steel-hard column of man-meat that was mine to suckle from, savor the rich sweet experience of sucking this man's cock, and Kevin was sucking on mine, a hedonistic delight that swayed through my body like a houri dancing before the sheik, pleasing him and tantalizing him to more excitement, more, more, more! I lost myself in this pleasure, let myself become only this time and this place, nothing that me mattered right now but that I was sucking this cock, being sucked on by this man's lips, and it was all I ever wanted and more. "Oh, oh, oh!" Kevin panted. "Enough, enough!" His brawny hands caught my head and pulled me from his godly tower. "Huh?" I asked him dumbly. "Let's get to the main event." Kevin paused, gulped hard. "You want to do me or shall I do you?" That was an easy choice, this first time at least. "Fuck me, Kevin. Fuck me good." "You got it." He rose onto his hands and knees and crawled around so that we were face to face. "I've been dreaming of ramming you, William. The first night we were marooned here, I wanted to come in here and crawl in bed with you. Fuck you night and day for however long we're here." "We're not getting out of here." I gasped out. "We're never getting away, the Nimee themselves don't know how we ended up here." "I know, I know." Kevin put a hand over my mouth, not hard, just stopping me from talking. "I couldn't come in here and fuck you, so I started working on the ship, but I know. There's nothing wrong with the ship at all. We can leave tomorrow, if it worked. It just doesn't work." He wormed his way between my legs, his hands caught hold of both my ankles. "Different laws of physics here." I agreed. "Everything here is an illusion, nothing is what it seems. Even you and me." Kevinlifted my legs up and moved my lower body into position. "This is real enough for me." Kevin punctuated his sentence by shoving his spit-slicked prod up into my ass. "Ah-ah-ah-ahhhhh!" I groaned as he slid into me. So long, it had been so long, since another man had fucked me. Now...Kevin and I didn't ever have to stop! "Oh, man, such a tight pussy!" Kevin grunted as he pushed the last inches into me. "Such a sweet, tight pussy." "It's not a pussy, it's my ass." I clarified. "Yeah. Really tight." Kevin began to move his hips back and forth and the joy of that movement was so damned terrific, I didn't care what he called it any longer. His face was right in front of me, his wonderfully beautiful face, his eyes sparkling like sapphires into mine, beads of sweat standing out like small crystals all around them, grosser jewels to call attention to the more precious twin gems in their center. The eyes beamed at me, his eyelids closed and his mouth opened, small grunts slipped from his lips that still beckoned to me. I reached up and tasted them, the flavor of my own cock still lingered there, metamorphosed into something uniquely together. Like a moment of marriage. I don't know how long we fucked, Kevin and me. When we tired of the position of him on top, we moved so that he was lying behind me on his side, thrusting away. A bit more time and I moved and straddled him, rode him like a proud Arabian stallion racing across the desert, and his hand caught my own cock and pumped me as I bounced up and down. I felt my orgasm rising in me and I gasped, "Kevin, Kevin, I'm going to come, man, coming, coming!" "Yeah, shoot it, Will, cream all over me!" I exploded as he pounded me harder and he said, "Yeah, God, yeah, all over me, cover me with your jizz, man, all over!" "Ah-uh-ah-uh, ah-uh, ah-uh!" I sagged as I finished my climax. With a rough push, he threw me over and rode up with me until we were again face to face, me on my back and him on top, and he began to ram me once again, powerful thrusts that shook me to my very core, and with a long, low keening sound, he crammed his cock in to the very base, held it there, lifted his head with a grimace and a moan, and I felt his hot spooge jetting into me, loading me, owning me, I was his now, and he was mine, now and forever. Done, he held me tightly and my spunk still covering his chest glued us together and his cock remained in me, and we were bonded, one being, one race, one now and always. "Mmmm, that was great!" I said to him softly as he gently pulled away and out of me, and onto his back beside me. "More than great, that was awesome." he agreed. "Why haven't we been doing this from the first day?" I knew full well why, but this was no time for the truth. "We could have." I said instead. "We have a lot of time to make up." Kevin said. "You and me, one man and one woman, and that's all the human race needs." He held me tightly and I felt his arms like an alien force around me. "Yeah, all the human race needs." I said softly. It was no time for truth. We made love again in the night, and this time I fucked him, he let me do it while never letting slip this delusion of his, that I was a woman instead of a man. Even while my cock told him the utter truth with every thrust of my body. I sought out the Nimee the next morning, leaving Kevin to work on the ship again, whistling and bragging he'd have the ship fixed in a few more days' time. I found the something in the nothingness and I asked with no preamble, "What did you do to Kevin?" A horrible possibility occured to me, "Or did you do it to me?" "We have done nothing to you we haven't done since the first day you arrived." the Nimee told me soothingly. "To survive in this dimension, you had to have a frame of reference you understood. Nothing you believe you see is what there is to see, nothing you feel is what there is to feel." "I know that, but Kevin thinks I'm a woman!" I complained. "I'm not a woman, I'm another man!" "So he does. You think he is being kind and considerate to you, yes?" "Yes, he's a lot nicer to me than he used to be. Or is he?" "Everything your race knows comes to it through your senses, both the five you recognize and those you don't, because they are in the way you function, that make you who you are." "So Kevin isn't being any nicer to me than he ever did." "You perceive him as being nicer to you, don't you?" "Yes, of course, but...." "Then what else matters? All that is human is a matter of perception. What you perceive to be real is real. All else is unimportant." "But...but...." "Are you happy now, William?" the Nimee interrupted me for the first time ever. I had to think about it. "Yeah, I'm happy." I agreed. "As long as Kevin treats me like he has these last few hours, I'm happy." "And as long as he perceives you as female, he is happy." the Nimee concluded. "So the danger to your happiness is at an end." "So we'll be happy the rest of our lives." I said. "You've said this before, the rest of your lives." the Nimee mused as if to himself. "As if there was some limit to existence. Non-existence is a logical impossibility." "I see." I said. "So this is forever." "What is forever?" "Never mind. Thank you." I said. I went back to Kevin and watched him at his work. He saw me watching him and smiled and I smiled back. Kevin had a timeless eternity in which to work, he could find a way to make the ship work again and we'd find a way to get back to our own universe. Meanwhile, he and I loved each other. Given that, what else mattered? After all, true love is just a matter of perception. [This story is a sample from my book "Going Straight to Gay" available for sale at my website (the URL is below) as well as at Amazon and Barnes & Noble (but my website version has illustrations!] THE END Comments, complaints or suggestions? E-mail the Author at Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM