Per Anum Ch. 06: Deadliest Sin

It was the colors that got me the most. I tend to favor subtle gradations of color in my work, and my artist's eye was strained to the limit by the sheer riotous explosion of color that was the parade ground. Pink and green and yellow and orange in eye-searing combinations whirled around me; it looked like a kaleidoscope threw up all over downtown. And, of course, full-on rainbows were everywhere. There were rainbow flags, rainbow face paint, rainbow-striped clothing and everything else you could conceivably slap a rainbow pattern on. Pride was turning out not to be what I'd expected...but also, it kind of was exactly what I'd expected.

Overwhelming, in a word.

I wasn't even sure I was supposed to be there. Was all of...this...really for me? All the people around me, sure, cheering and waving, hoisting glitter-painted banners and the ubiquitous rainbow flags. They were who all this was intended for, not me. Did one experience, however transformative, really entitle me to a place here?

"You look lost."

I jumped at the sudden quiet words in my ear. With all the chaos of the march, I hadn't noticed anyone come up to me. Although given the general level of noise and the density of the crowd, I don't know how I could have. I pulled away and turned to get a look at the person speaking to me...and had to stop and take a second, longer look.

He was breathtaking.

Glossy black hair, streaked with understated blue highlights that matched his eyes perfectly. Finely wrought features, from high cheekbones and straight nose to a jawline that would make my sculpture professor tear up. His body was chiseled perfection, every muscle defined in such ideal proportions he could've put every figure drawing anatomy textbook I've ever seen to shame. He sparkled in the sunshine, each ridge of muscle lightly dusted with body glitter. To complete the effect, he wore only a tiny set of iridescent swim trunks that paired well with the huge, glittering fairy wings strapped to his back. At least I assumed they were attached somehow; in that moment, I might have believed they were real, that he was some sort of fey creature from the Irish legends my grandmother told, beautiful and terrible and impossible.

It made me wish I had my sketchbook. I could have drawn him for days.

He smiled, and of course his teeth were perfect too. "Ease off the ogling, you'll make me blush," he said, though there wasn't the slightest hint of embarrassment in his voice or bearing. If anything, he enjoyed the attention--and it wasn't just my attention he was getting. Practically every man who passed us in the parade spared an extra-long glance to take him in. Somehow, I was pretty sure it wasn't just the wings they found so eye-catching.

"Look," he said, "you just seemed a bit overwhelmed. If not, my mistake."

"You're not wrong," I admitted. "It's my first time at one of these things, and it's kind of a lot."

His smile became something wicked. "Ooh, a virgin? Well, now you have my attention."

I found myself blushing as only a redhead can. "I am not a...look, never mind. Thanks for your concern, but I'm fine."

That unreasonably attractive grin only deepened. "Oh, don't be like that. Tell you what, why don't I show you around this madhouse?" His eyes twinkled as though at some private joke. "I'll be your Virgil, and guide you through Pandemonium."

I blinked at that. I had not been expecting classical literature references from this man, though I couldn't point to a reason why, precisely. Don't judge a book by its ridiculously sexy cover, I guess. I opened my mouth to refuse him, and was surprised by what came out.

"Sure."

His smile gave the sun a run for its money. "Perfect! Come on, I know just what you need to see." He tossed a well-muscled, vaguely glittery arm over my shoulders and swept me off into the maelstrom of color and noise that was Pride. "By the way, what's your name?"

"Connor," I replied. "Yours?"

He smirked. "Dante."

I rolled my eyes. Of course.

He started pointing things out, both widespread traditions like Dykes on Bikes and stranger local ones that were apparently unique to our town. Why we needed a gay-only gardening/horticulture society was unclear to me, but to each his own, I guess.

"So," Dante said at one point, "you mentioned this was your first time marching. Mind if I ask why?"

I hesitated. "I guess I wanted to see if I fit in here, with...all of you."

He raised an eyebrow. "All of 'you'?" He gestured at the crowd around us. "Pretty diverse crowd here. You're going to need to be more specific."

I fumbled. "Um...gay people?"

The eyebrow was joined by its immaculate twin. "You must have really been lost. Exactly where did you think you were?"

I ran a hand over my face. "Ugh, I'm not explaining this well."

He snorted. "There we agree. Let me guess. You had an...experience, shall we say...and now you're confused. Not sure if you fit in one camp or the other?"

"Exactly!" I exclaimed. "I've always liked girls. Still do. But my...horizons were broadened recently, and..."

Dante snickered. "Oh yeah? Get your horizons broadened good and hard, did you?"

I blushed again. I was doing a distressing amount of that today. "Shut up. The point is, now I'm looking at guys in a way I wasn't before. I mean, I could always appreciate male beauty, but that's just part of being an artist. Now I'm...feeling it, I guess, in ways I never have."

Dante, of all things, shrugged. "So? There's a B in LGBT for a reason. Welcome to the team, I guess."

I stared. "That's it? Welcome to the team?"

He shook his head. "You're focusing on the wrong thing. People get so worked up over labels." He spread his arms out, encompassing the swirling madness around us. "Look around. Pride is not about labels. In fact, it's the opposite. Why do you think we called it that in the first place? We are here to proclaim that we are who we are, and the rest of the world has to accept that, not us who must accept the world. Take no prisoners! Show no fear! No shame! We march to be recognized as the individuals we are, not the box everyone else tries to put us in!"

Cheers and applause broke out around us, and I realized belatedly how much Dante had raised his voice. Apparently they agreed with him, though they thankfully went back to parading instead of paying attention to us. Dante, however, stayed focused on me.

"So you think guys are hot as well as girls. Congratulations, you get twice as many options when it comes to getting laid. Sounds like something to celebrate, not be ashamed of. Something to be...PROUD of, even." He waggled his eyebrows as I rolled my eyes. "What you need is something to get you out of your own head. You're overthinking all this."

"Oh yeah?" I asked, knowing he was right but not wanting to admit it. "And what would you suggest for that?"

His grin was downright devilish. "Some say pride is the worst of the seven deadly sins, did you know that? I say, if we're sinning anyway, we might as well try out a few more and see which ones we like." He loomed closer to me, abruptly inside my personal space. I found myself intensely...aware of him. Despite the warmth of the day and the crowd around us, I could have sworn I could feel the heat radiating off his skin. "I'm quite fond of lust, myself," he purred, eyes inches from mine.

I gulped.

*

"This is a terrible idea," I hissed at Dante's well-toned back. Well, I could mostly just see the wings. "There is no world in which this ends well."

"Now that's just not true," he chuckled, pushing aside a large frond and pulling me forward. "I foresee a very happy ending."

"I can't believe I'm going along with this," I muttered. "I am not this kind of person." Was I? Wasn't I the guy who'd tried to jerk off listening to his friends having sex and ended up all but pouncing on the next guy to walk into the room? I couldn't even blame it on Dante, not really. I mean, sure, he was intensely attractive and charismatic, in a "this is a bad idea" sort of way, but it's not like I couldn't have walked away at any point before we climbed onto the Fabulous Fruits Garden Society parade float.

It was a massive rolling jungle, with three tiers of brilliantly colorful flowers and plants of every description. Vines dotted with bright flowers spilled from one layer to the next, filling gaps between broad leaves and blooming shrubs. There was even a small tree at the peak, the green of its leaves interspersed with shockingly blue blossoms. We'd taken advantage of a spontaneous "Mamma Mia" flash mob to slip between the gardeners and vanish among the thick greenery. Somehow, even Dante's sparkling wings blended into the riotous colors of the flowers, though he had some trouble maneuvering in the dense foliage due to their size.

Dante suddenly dragged me down among the verdant growth of the second tier, and to my surprise we were cut off from the crowd completely. I could still hear them, cheering and hooting, but the thick plant life blocked us from their line of sight. We were in a little hollow space between bushes just big enough for the two of us...a hidden bower where my mysterious companion could have his way with me. This was straight out of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," fairy wings and all.

Before I knew what was happening, he was atop me, lean body pressed against me full length. Speaking of lengths, Dante's hips wound up matched to mine, and things were getting longer by the second as he ground against me. I inhaled a sharp breath as his lips found my neck. My hands slid up his torso, all smooth skin (with occasional gritty bits of glitter) and taut muscle.

My hands were forced away from exploring him when Dante peeled my shirt off over my head and tossed it aside. I think it ended up draped over a bush, but in that moment I couldn't have cared less. His mouth wandered down my newly revealed skin, clavicle to nipple to abs and then lower still. The elastic waistband of my athletic shorts proved no obstacle, and he snagged my boxer briefs as well, pushing both down and off in one motion.

He ran his nose through the narrow line of hair that divides my abs, making me shiver, until his face was pressed against the side of my erection. He...nuzzled it, I suppose is the word, rubbing his cheek and jaw up and down my length like a cat marking territory. Dante looked up at me, holding my gaze as his lips opened and slowly, so slowly, wrapped around the head of my cock and took me into his mouth.

I choked back a groan. Fuck, that felt good. Why were guys so much better at sucking cock than women? No girl I'd ever been with held a candle to Greg or Dante. I had to resist the urge to buck into his mouth as his tongue slithered up against that amazing spot just beneath the head. What had Greg called it? Our friend the frenulum? Dante was certainly getting on good terms with mine.

He pulled off me with a wet pop and grinned at me. "No need to worry about the noise. Who's going to hear you in this?" He had a point, the noise of the parade was only growing, though it was kind of surreal to hear it all around us but see only vegetation. It was still my instinct to keep quiet, but something told me Dante wasn't going to make that easy.

As if hearing my thoughts, Dante took me back into his mouth, but this time he didn't stop at the head. He relaxed his jaw, arched his neck, and swallowed down my entire length in one smooth glide, not pausing until his nose was buried in my close-trimmed bush.

I did not manage to muffle my groan that time. My back arched, my hands clutching reflexively at the turf beneath us. Dante, perhaps inevitably, did it again. Pulling up about halfway, he swallowed me down again, then again. "Damn, that's good," I gasped. "God, Dante, how do you even--oh, fuck!" One of his hands found its way to my balls, and the paired sensations were overwhelming.

Then, as if that thought was a challenge, he started going faster.

Dante's head bobbed up and down faster and faster, his tongue doing...things--oh God, what WAS he even doing to make it feel like that--and his hands worked my body like a master pianist, finding every sensitive spot and discovering erogenous zones I didn't even know I had. Greg had been gentle, easing me through my introduction to all this. Dante, though? Dante was clearly a take no prisoners kind of guy. He had me climbing toward the peak faster than I ever had before, and the small portion of my brain that could think anything besides "oh yes more" was getting concerned about an early conclusion.

"Dante," I panted, "you might want to ease off, if--damn, that's amazing--if you don't want this to end very abruptly, very soon."

He looked up, met my gaze, very deliberately swallowed my entire cock in one long, torturously slow glide that had my toes curling, and pulled off me with a wet pop. Before he could answer me, however, another voice spoke from behind me.

"Well, we can't have that. This party is just getting started."

I jerked in surprise, twisting away from whoever was behind me and instinctively trying to cover myself. Where were my pants? There wasn't much room to maneuver in the little hidden bower. I'd only managed a sort of weird half-crouch, trying (and failing) to obscure all my bits at once, before Dante stopped me with a chuckle.

"Relax, Connor, they're friends." Friends, plural? God, how could this be happening?

Another voice interrupted my downward spiral. "Yeah, Connor, don't cover up on our account. We should definitely be friends."

"Absolutely," agreed the first voice. "Say what you will about Dante, but you can't fault his taste."

Dante laughed. "You're just saying that because it was you I had in here begging for it yesterday."

The first voice, smoother and deeper than the other, answered with some amusement. "Pretty sure it was me who brought you in here. You're not even a member of the Society."

Dante's smile was wicked. "True enough, Ricky. I notice you didn't say anything about the begging, though."

The new arrivals emerged from the greenery surrounding us, becoming visible for the first time. One was short and dark and boyishly handsome, all liquid brown eyes and compact muscle, clearly of Latino descent. The other, taller and slimmer and more pretty than handsome, had the cinnamon skin and epicanthic folds of Southeast Asia, though I couldn't identify his particular ethnicity. Both were dressed like the other members of the Garden Society we'd seen, which is to say hardly dressed at all. They wore loincloth-like garments made of strategically arranged leaves that barely hid anything, as though they were fresh from the gay porn version of the Garden of Eden.

"How did you find us?" I found myself blurting. The mental image of these two begging Dante to do...well, anything, really...was not helping my erection go down. Which I wanted it to do. Right now. Really. And that line about the party getting started was definitely not spinning around in my head over and over.

"Did you really think no one would notice?" asked the Asian guy. "He's a smoking hot nearly naked guy wearing giant glittering fairy wings. Even at Pride, that's hard to miss."

"Then we just followed the moaning," added the Latino. I glared at Dante. Don't worry about the noise, indeed. "This is Kai, and I'm Ricardo," he went on, flawlessly rolling the R despite his otherwise total lack of an accent, "but anyone who's seen me naked can call me Ricky."

I blinked. "But I haven't seen you naked."

He grinned, and I realized the trap a moment too late as they both stripped off their leafy loincloths and tossed them into the bushes around us. Part of me wondered how they'd ever find those things again, but most of me was distracted by the new and improved view. Both were fully hard, Ricky's cock shorter and thicker than Kai's slender one.

There was absolutely not enough room for all four of us in the little hidden spot, but none of my companions seemed too concerned about it. The two newcomers piled in atop us, and I found myself buried in a writhing tangle of stroking hands, hungry mouths, and thrusting cocks. Someone's tongue slithered over my erection, making me gasp, and someone else used the opportunity to slide his own cock into my mouth. I choked a bit but did my best to give what I was getting. I wrapped my lips around the head and applied my tongue, trying to leverage what little experience I had. Judging from the moan, I was doing okay.

Then again, there was a fair bit of moaning going on in general. It was getting loud enough to be concerning, though I had no way of telling if anyone outside had noticed us after Ricky and Kai. I could still hear the roar of the crowd around us, chanting and cheering, and in a weird way it kind of felt like they were cheering for us. I knew we were concealed, logically, but doing something this...intimate...with so many people around us ratcheted up the intensity somehow.

The mouth on my cock--I think it was Kai's, but I'm not positive--worked its way down to my balls. I groaned around the cock in my mouth--pretty sure it belonged to Dante, just going by skin tone--and writhed as much as I could, buried on the bottom of the pile as I was. Breathing was manageable, at least, if not precisely easy. On the other hand, my position did provide an excellent view when Ricky slid his tongue into Dante's asshole.

My crash course from Greg hadn't covered rimming, and part of me was fascinated as Ricky went to town on Dante's hole, tongue diving in over and over in between spreading saliva across the puckered rim. He'd tease the edge, just the tip of his tongue circling and playing around the ring, then suddenly push in, stiffened tongue penetrating Dante's body deeply. When Ricky slid a fingertip inside him, Dante's whole body shuddered in obvious pleasure. Above me, his abs clenched reflexively as his hips bucked against Ricky's hand, which also served to thrust his sizeable erection down my throat.

I only gagged a little, which I'm considering a victory. Dante heard it, thankfully, and pulled up a bit, putting things back in a comfortable range for me. Well, if anything about this whole situation could be called comfortable. A little piece of my mind, way in the back, was absolutely freaking out about basically everything that was happening, but that was a problem for Future Connor. Present Connor was split between relishing the renewed blowjob I was getting, trying to give a good one to Dante at the same time, and enjoying the simultaneous shows of Dante getting alternately rimmed and finger-fucked while he energetically sucked both Kai and Ricky's cocks at once, which his shift in position had revealed.

Needless to say, Present Connor had quite enough to deal with at the moment. Emotional upheaval could wait until later.

"Okay, Dante," Ricky said, now steadily thrusting two spit-slick fingers in and out of Dante's hole, "time to see what your boy here can do. You ready?" Wait, did that mean what I thought it meant?

Dante extracted the two cocks from his mouth with an obscene slurpy noise so he could reply. "Of course. It's literally why I brought him in here." As he spoke, he pulled his own erection from my mouth, and there followed a great deal of scrambling and shuffling as the three of them rearranged themselves and sort of dragged me along. Somehow they all seemed to know where they were going, but none bothered to fill me in. Surprisingly, I got elbowed in the head only once during the whole operation.

By the time the stars cleared from my vision, I found myself lying on my side with Dante's back against my chest--and his well-toned ass all but grabbing at my erection. Kai was lying head-to-toe with Dante; or rather, head-to-cock, as the two of them immediately engaged in an enthusiastic sixty-nine. Beyond Kai was Ricky, his face already buried between Kai's lean buttocks as Ricky gave him the same treatment Dante had gotten.