THREE WISHES
Short Story
Michael Gouda

"Do you know that story by H.G. Wells, I think it was? The one where the guy suddenly finds he can do magic? Can't remember the title."

It was a slack period in the bar. Two elderly, grey-haired queens were sitting at a table discussing chess moves. A blond guy with his lover were gazing into each other's eyes and paying no attention to anyone else. A tall clone in jeans and a check shirt was picking his nose by the bar. He even had a moustache. For a moment I wondered whether I'd done a time slip back into the eighties. Perhaps it was retro-fashion. He seemed to be more interested in the contents of his nostrils than either of us. Me and my mate, Yeo, with whom I share everything - except our body functions - were sipping at our halves of lager and wondering whether it was worth staying on or if we should go somewhere else where the pickings were better.

Our conversation was desultory. We'd finished analysing and destroying the reputations of our friends and enemies. We'd recounted what we'd done or who we'd had the previous week. Now we picked at subjects at random to chat about.

"No," said Yeo. "I don't know it." He didn't sound all that interested but I persisted.

"He was illustrating a point about doing magic and he suddenly pointed at the light - I think in those days back in the 1880s it was gas lighting, or perhaps oil - and said, 'If I could do magic, I'd just say turn upside down, and it would'. And it did!"

"Did what?" said Yeo.

"Do attend," I said. "The light turned upside down."

"Very useful," said Yeo sarcastically, then more seriously, "though, I suppose, being able to work magic would be. Think what you could do."

"You'd have to be careful. In the story, the guy is trying to prove his power so he halts the moon. That's it, I remember the title, 'The Man who Could Work Miracles' or something like that. He tells it to stop still in the sky but of course doesn't think that stopping the moon would have disastrous consequences because it's actually the earth that's moving. Earthquakes, everything comes to a juddering stop, except what is on the surface. That flies off. Everyone dead."

"What a prat," said Yeo. "Is that the end?"

"Of the world?"

"The story!"

"Can't remember. I have a feeling the guy, in the last seconds, wishes he had lost the power and all was back to the beginning - and that's how the story ends, the same as the beginning except that this time when he tells the lamp to turn upside down, it doesn't."

"Huh!" commented Yeo. He didn't sound impressed.

Perhaps it was the way I told it.

"All the same," I said, "it'd be good if you could." I sank my nose into my glass and slurped the residue. "I could say I wish this was full again and it would be. Whose round is it anyway?"

Yeo didn't answer and I looked at him. His eyes were wide and his mouth open. He was staring across the room. For a moment I thought he'd seen a lamp turn upside down but then I saw he was staring at someone who had just come in - a slim young man with glossy black hair, the sort that looks good even when you've just got out of bed in the morning after an athletic night's uninhibited sex. Even across the room I could see that his eyes were blue-grey, those sort of very light, come-to-bed eyes which I find irresistible.

He was wearing a dark red pullover which looked expensive, no shirt underneath so that a bit of his tanned chest showed, and baggy grey trousers which, although they may be fashionable, do nothing to show what sort of figure the guy has - nor the size and contours of his package. Where are the days when we all wore skin-tight jeans so that everyone could see what they were getting? I sighed.

Yeo obviously felt the same.

"Look at that," he said. "Varda the eek! Wonder what sort of body she's got."

"No way of telling," I said, "not with all that clobber on. Tell him to take his pants off."

"Oh puhleeze." said Yeo. We'd reached the right sort of alcoholic stage where we were almost prepared to do something silly - but not quite. "I'm not that drunk. Now if he goes to the cottage. . ."

But the young man was standing still in the centre of the bar, poised but not posed, perhaps waiting to be greeted, perhaps - I fantasised - waiting to be picked up.

"No," I said. "See if you can work magic. Point your finger at him and say 'Take off your trousers'."

Obediently Yeo did what I told him.

Nothing happened.

"Did you see his right hand?" asked Yeo optimistically. "Didn't it almost move towards his zip?"

"I wish," I said and considered whose round it was.

"You have a go," said Yeo.

I was suddenly bored with the whole subject. I shook my head.

Yeo insisted. "I did it," he said. "Now it's your turn."

"OK," I said, "and then you can go and buy some more drinks." I pointed my finger. "Take off your pants, you gorgeous hunk." I said.

For a moment the guy turned towards us, though we were too far away for him to hear what we said. I held my breath. . .

. . .and then the lights went out.

There were a couple of high-pitched screams from various parts of the bar and, from somewhere away to our left, a deep chuckle - someone, perhaps getting the grope he'd wanted all evening. We waited, expecting eventually our eyes to get accustomed to the dark, perhaps the streetlights from outside would give us enough light to see what was going on - when the bar lights suddenly came on again.

In the middle of the floor were a pair of trousers, crumpled, as if someone had just stepped out of them. Of the guy himself, there was no sign at all.

Then an almost universal intake of breath.

"Wow," said Yeo, voicing what was probably the general surmise. "You realise there's a delicious hunk wandering around somewhere without his trousers."

"Never crossed my mind," I said, getting up and going towards the gents, picking up the trousers on the way. They were still warm.

Yeo beat me by a short head into the toilets but I was second through the door, closely followed by the two grey-haired men.The guy who had been picking his nose arrived last. But all to no avail; it was empty. Well, that wasn't true of course. There was Yeo and me, two grey-haired . . . OK you get the scene I'm sure. The main point being that, wherever the dishy guy with no trousers was, he wasn't in the bog - and the cubicle doors were open so he wasn't hiding there.

We shuffled back into the bar feeling slightly embarrassed.

The engaged couple were still looking into each other's eyes.

The barman caught my eye. "Bit of a quiet night," he said philosophically. "Shall I take the trousers? In case the young man returns to claim them."

After that Yeo and I decided to call it a night so we started off down the road together for home. We didn't live together, you understand, but his flat lay in the general direction of my bed-sit.

"Odd that," he said, after a while as we walked in and out of the pools of light cast by the street lamps so that we were alternately turned orange and pale grey.

"What?" I said.

"You know. that business with the trousers. You said 'take 'em off' - and he did." He paused as if to consider. "Then he disappeared."

"You're not suggesting that I had anything to do with it?" I said. "Magic and all that."

"Just odd," he said. "Now what do you think would happen if you told him to appear?"

"Very little," I said pessimistically. "Young men rarely appear when I want them to. Especially young men as hot as that one."

"Try it," said Yeo who was obviously in a silly mood.

Sighing, I raised my finger. "Gorgeous hunk," I said, to the world in general, "appear!"

A jogger passed us running fast. He was wearing a pullover and shorts. The sodium street lighting stained the pullover orange but when he moved out of the pool, it appeared reddish. I stared at his slim figure and even more so at his tight white shorts which, from the back at least, clasped two of the most perfect globes I'd seen for many a long day.

I gave a long drawn-out moan of frustrated desire. The jogger raced down the street and disappeared round the corner.

"It's him," said Yeo. "That was him. Minus his trousers. Didn't you see his gorgeous black hair? The same red pullover?"

I hadn't actually been looking at the upper parts of his body just those two cotton-embraced, hemispherically exquisite orbs that had me jiggling with lust. Globes that could be clasped and prised apart so that I could delve between with nose, and tongue, and fingers and eventually . . . with that other digit even now, at the thought, lengthening and strengthening into a hard, hard cum-shooter.

"You've done it again," said Yeo.

I looked guiltily down to my groin but he wasn't actually talking about that.

"You told him to take off his trousers - and he did. You told him to appear - and he did." He looked at me with something akin to awe. "You can work miracles. You have a gift."

"Don't be silly," I said, and tried to look modestly ungifted.

"Go on, do it again - and this time make him stop."

I looked at Yeo. He seemed almost too enthusiastic. What if I had suddenly been granted this gift. Suppose I could conjure up this dream of a guy from whatever fortunate level of paradise he currently resided in - and then he went off with Yeo. Of course I could always dispose of Yeo with a bit of magic. But then a thought struck me. I remembered something more from that original H.G. Wells story. There had been an interfering policeman whom the man had got rid of - and this had been really the start of his problems with his gift. I certainly didn't want to start things going wrong by having my friend Yeo disposed of, however pleasant the place or situation I sent him to.

No, I wouldn't bring my hunk - and indeed I thought of him as mine now - back while Yeo was around.

"Come on," insisted Yeo. "Just say it."

"Gorgeous hunk," (I really must think of some better name for him) then sneakily, I thought, DON'T, then said aloud. "appear."

I wondered for a moment if thinking didn't count but as the seconds passed and nothing happened, I breathed a sigh of relief. I'd wait until I was alone and then really do some magic... and the sort of magic I was imagining was making my toes curl.

Yeo was disappointed. "Perhaps the gift's gone," he said. "Gone as suddenly as it came. Perhaps it'll pass on to me." He raised his finger hopefully. "Gorgeous hunk," he said, "Appear."

The night was as still as ever, even the sounds of the traffic in the distance seemed to have stopped. We walked on in silence, both probably thinking hard. I know I was.

Yeo sighed. "Fun while it lasted," he said. We had reached my house. "I'll see you next week. Take care. Don't do anything I haven't done."

I felt a bit guilty about deceiving Yeo, but that didn't stop me from racing indoors, swearing at my key which had suddenly decided not to fit the lock correctly, running upstairs and into my bed-sit, stripping myself to my briefs and throwing myself onto the bed. Then I said, in as seductive tone as I could, "Lover of the night, APPEAR!"

There was the briefest of heart-stopping pauses and then the door, which I'd thought I'd locked, slowly opened. He stood there in the doorway. He'd taken off his pullover which was a bit disappointing as I'd wanted to do that, slowly, lovingly, kissing his nipples as they appeared, licking the vertical line that divided his pectorals, down to his umbilical where the hair started, leading down, down. But at least he still had his shorts on, white and bulging seductively.

"I thought you'd never ask," he said, his voice, low and enticing, husky and full of promise.

He came over and stood by the bed, staring down at me with those bewitching grey eyes. I could smell his body, sweet and clean, the faint scent of healthy sweat. I reached out to touch his thigh, then moved my hand up under the leg of his shorts, up further to feel into the hidden depths. Warm balls, a tangle of pubic hair, a cock, the soft, silky skin enclosing a hard core. He sighed as I grasped it in my hand.

Using it as a handle, I pulled him down on top of me.

It was as if he enveloped me. There was no other word for it. His lips, parted, covered mine and my tongue, I swear, without any volition on my part, disappeared into his mouth.

His arms and his legs grasped me, his body seemed to surround mine so that I was inside him. Not actually, though I hoped that would come later, but as if I was really part of his inner core. He surrounded me physically but also held me by the sheer force of his sexuality. his skin, silky-smooth rubbing against chest and stomach. And the cock, ah the cock, so strong, so hard. I could feel it pressed against mine both striving, as we flexed our hips and pelvis, to get even further into each other.

My hands inserted themselves into the legs of his shorts, grasping, clasping those hemispheres of arse which had so taken me as he jogged past in the street. They were firm yet soft, the muscles covered with pliable flesh. My fingers scrabbled into the crack between and found the entrance, hot, yielding, welcoming as I slid the middle finger of each hand in.

There I had him. Tongues embracing, his arms and legs around my body, My hand holding his arse, and he, impaled on my fingers. There was no way he could escape me now.

"My miracle," I murmured, as well as I could, through the confines of his imprisoning lips. "Stay with me for ever."

And then I felt him going. Not exactly withdrawing but becoming fainter, less physical. My hand grasped at insubstantiality, my fingers plunged into nothingness. The weight of his body lessened. My tongue was released.

There was a great sigh. "You only have three wishes...," he said, half fading. "And then I must go on."

"Where?" I asked wildly. "Who are you going to?"

There was nothing. The weight had gone. Nothing clasped me. Only the shadow of a word hovered in the air, before sighing into oblivion.

"Yeo..."

* * * * * *

2,548 words

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Michael

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