I arranged to meet Avi an hour after the tournament at my hotel room. I had stupidly picked a hotel far enough away from the championship that I needed to take one of the elevated walkways to get back. I didn’t like the walkways back when I could walk and it was much worse when I had to wait for two elevators in order to use it. Worse still was the fact that most of the people using the elevators were people with a lot of little kids, especially ones in strollers. On the elevator up, one boy got into a fight with his brother and managed to smash into my wheelchair, knocking my foot clear out of the rest. At least the mother apologized to me as I was putting it back. It was great when perfect strangers got to watch me handling my paralyzed legs, thinking christ knows what.
The elevator up to my room in the hotel contained three very drunk, giggling girls. “I don’t know if I can stand up any longer,” one of them proclaimed. She looked over at me. “Excuse me, mister... will you give me a ride to my room?”
“Kara, shut up!” her friend scolded her. She smiled at me and giggled slightly. “Sorry about that. She just misses her husband.”
“No problem,” I said, not really knowing what else to say. Sometime in the last five years, I had forgotten how to flirt with women.
I got to my room with some time to spare. The first thing I did was to cath myself, as I was already a little behind schedule. Then I checked myself in the mirror... I thought I looked tired, but otherwise okay. My face still didn’t look the same to me since before the accident, but nobody else seemed to notice, and I was used to it by now. I remembered the first time I saw myself in the mirror after the accident, with my jaw wired, my cheek ballooned up, and my nose set, I thought I was going to lose my lunch. You don’t look that bad, Riley, my sister Grace said to me, as if I was blind too. I never thought of myself as being vain and I didn’t care that I might not be the best looking guy anymore, but I didn’t want to go through life looking like Frankenstein’s monster.
Avi showed up fifteen minutes late, but I got the feeling he had been pacing outside for at least twenty minutes. He quickly closed the door behind him like he thought he was being followed. “I don’t think anyone saw me come here,” he said.
“Nice work, James Bond,” I said.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Avi said. “But I think I have a little more at stake here than you do.”
“Yeah, my life is already fucked up, what difference does it make if people know I’m gay?”
“You’re not gay,” Avi insisted, “and neither am I.”
I shrugged.
Avi sunk down on my bed and pulled off his Yankees cap. “I’m sorry, Riley, I really am,” he said. “My life is fucked right now. My marriage is fucked. I did everything wrong. And now I’m taking it out on you.”
“Well, I’m your friend,” I said. “And it looks like I’m in the minority here.”
Avi didn’t seem surprised by my statement. “I should have come to see you after you got hurt.”
“Don’t feel bad. All my other friends abandoned me too.”
Avi stood up and paced back and forth across my room. I sat in my chair and watched him. Avi was a pacer. More than once, I woke up during the night and found him awake, pacing across the room. What the fuck are you doing, Avi? Come back to bed.
“That still fucking drives me nuts,” I said finally.
“Huh?”
“You’re pacing,” I pointed out.
“Shit! Yeah, I...” He took a deep breath and sat back down on the bed, a troubled look on his face.
At that moment, I knew exactly what was going to happen in here. I wheeled over next to Avi and began unzipping his pants. He didn’t try to stop me... no surprise there. I reached my hand into his boxes and felt his dick filling my palm. Avi moaned softly.
“I missed you, Riley,” he said.
I grinned at him. “I can’t believe you won the championship, you son of a bitch.”
Avi smiled back. “When you’ve got the cards...”
“You’ve got more than the cards,” I said. “Those other guys just don’t see it. I saw it.”
There was no kissing. I took off Avi’s pants and he took off my shirt. He sat up, resting his hands on my shoulders as I studied his dick for a second, reminiscing to myself. Avi’s was the only penis I had ever touched beside my own. We were both cut, but Avi had an irregular scar from the circumcision that felt rough when I ran my tongue over it. That scar was so fucking hot. I looked up at Avi and saw how bad he wanted it; I shoved his dick deep down my throat. I figured this wasn’t something his wife did for him very often. And even if she did, I knew she couldn’t be as good at it as I was. She didn’t want it as bad as I did.
Avi and I experimented a lot when we were together, but today I gave him a good old fashioned blow job. I sat in my wheelchair through the whole thing, hoping the chair didn’t kill the mood. I didn’t want him to think of me as being a cripple. I wanted him to remember the way I used to be.
“Riley, Riley...” he murmured. His dick spasmed in my mouth and I knew he was getting close. I felt his fingers dig into my shoulders as he threw back his head and shot his load into my mouth. I swallowed it, the way I always did.
Avi collapsed backwards onto the bed, breathing hard. He didn’t recover as fast as Marie did earlier today. I stared at him, thinking how I wanted him worse than I ever had five years ago. I don’t know if it was that something had changed or just that I hadn’t had any kind of sex in a long time before today and I was really horny.
Avi got off the bed and bent down in front of my chair. “Now you,” he said as he started unzipping my pants.
I grabbed his hands. “Nuh uh,” I said.
He stared at me in surprise.
“I’m paralyzed, remember?”
“Even that?” Avi looked horrified.
I sighed. I had been dreading that kind of reaction, but I wasn’t that shocked. “Just stay above the belt, okay?”
“Okay, tell me what to do.”
I transferred to the bed so that I could lie next to Avi. He looked down at my chest, which had a scar going down the full length of my abdomen. I was bleeding internally after the accident and the doctors had to take out my spleen and part of my colon, neither of which I missed that much. If I had turned over, Avi would have seen the scars all over my back.
“You’ve got a nice chest,” Avi said, outlining my delts with his finger. That got me to smile. I hadn’t been in bad shape five years ago, but I didn’t have many chances to go to the gym with all the poker playing. That hadn’t changed, but my upper body (down to my belly button, at least) was in good shape now from wheeling my chair. “I wish I hadn’t let myself go,” he said.
“Let’s see,” I said.
Avi’s pants were already off but now he pulled off his shirt too. His chest was pale but hairy, and he was getting a bit of a gut. Poker players aren’t known for being physically fit. “Not too impressive, I know,” he said. “But I’ll make up for it, I promise. Tell me what to do.”
“My nipples,” I said. “They’re very sensitive.”
That was all I had to say. Avi’s mouth was all over my nipples... sucking, biting, licking. He went at it with such enthusiasm, I could tell he hadn’t gotten laid in a really long time. Through the waves of pleasure, I didn’t notice his hand going down my pants until he looked up at me with wet lips: “You’re getting hard, Riley.”
“It’s a reflex,” I explained. “I can’t feel it and it doesn’t last. Really, just stay above the belt.”
Avi did as I told him. His tongue explored my nipples and it was almost as intense as back in the old days. Avi always had a fucking amazing mouth. I had toyed with my nipples in the last few years in a half-hearted attempt to “jerk off” like I used to, but it had never felt anything like this. The sensation escalated to the point where I realized I was actually going to cum. When I did, it was the most powerful orgasm I could remember. It had been five years since I had one, after all.
“Jesus Christ, Avi,” I said.
Avi was grinning at me. “I never heard you yell like that.”
“It’s been a while for me,” I admitted.
I reached into my pants to feel my dick and see if I had ejaculated. I hadn’t. A small part of me was disappointed, but the important thing was that I had cum in some way. Avi traced circles around my nipples with his fingers and I shivered. “Is there any chance you’ll walk again?” he asked me.
I smiled wryly, “I’ll tell you what my doctor said when I asked him that question, ‘Well, there’s always breakthrough research...’”
“Well, isn’t there?”
“I guess I shouldn’t rule it out,” I said, “but it’s probably less than a one percent chance of even getting any sensation or movement back in my legs, much less walking.”
“I’m sorry,” Avi said.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” I replied, shrugging. “I get around in my wheelchair and I’m fine.”
It wasn’t completely a lie, but it wasn’t completely true either. When I was in rehab, I saw plenty of people much more disabled than I was and it was hard to feel sorry for myself. But out in the real world, people stared at me, pretended not to stare at me, or acted like I couldn’t do anything without needing help. Any way you look at it, relying on a wheelchair was tough sometimes.
“I couldn’t believe it when I heard about your accident,” Avi went on, “I kept thinking I should go visit you, but... I don’t know, I was scared. I heard you got ripped limb from limb.”
“That’s a poetic way of putting it.” Poetic and accurate, unfortunately. “Good thing you didn’t see me back then. You probably would have had nightmares and never wanted to fuck me again.”
“That’s impossible...” Avi flicked his tongue across my nipple and I moaned.
I lay my head back down against the pillow and thought back to five years ago. Five years ago, I was such hot shit. I was 22 years old, one of the top poker players in Vegas, and I could walk. When I dumped Avi, I thought I was leaving him behind. I was wrong.