So if I gained forty pounds, I’d be a bear? 

Well, I guess.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. 

Mm, you have the hair for it.

You are furry, yeah.

You’re an otter, man. Is that a thing? I’d never heard of it.

I’m an otter. Great. Great. 

No, no, it’s not a. . .  No, I mean it. I like it. We like it. 

I rolled my eyes, picked up my dirty plate. As I walked by Tomas’ seat, I snuck in a tickle under his arms leaning against the backs of his chair, and after a split second, his lightly furred shoulders were clamped down around my hands, trapping them in the moist hollows of muscle and fur that formed his armpits. Tomas laughed as if being tortured, and in a way, wasn’t he in such a position?

(Gentle Reader, some background: Mari’s boyfriend Tomas smells like a day’s worth of a Quebecois otter boy/man harvesting heirloom apples by the light of the rising sun over the dew-speckled grass, loading an old loud farty truck by himself along a country road come high noon, wiping his damp almost unibrow with the end of his soaked plaid shirt at the big city’s farmers market, pulling up the bottom to reveal a luscious thick black treasure trail that spreads out as it nears the translucent wetness of his tighty whities. Whorls of dark hair even curlier with musky sweat. He’s still wet under the arms, in those forested and fragrant caverns of soft masculine strand, droplets of cumin suspended in the tufts of armpit hair. His feet are usually what hit me before I know he’s in the house. Those soft feet, just trapped between layers of thick cotton fabric, stinking, simply because those are his favorite kind of socks. And he only has two pairs.) 

Yep, like that. 

Tomas keeps his shirt on throughout his long shifts at the organic market under the July sun, but every time he stretches between clients paying too much for rabbit food, you can see dark patches of wet brown hair under his arms, even through the fabric. Every Saturday when we run by with our books, sunscreen, and never enough booze, he would wave us over, offer us a slightly mushed peach, shining with summer honey. 

“We have to keep our standards up here at Peachy Paradise.” 

He would smile like he hated the joke, but when you come down to it, you have to laugh if you work at a place that was a sweltering shack on the beach that only sold peaches and occasionally nectarines. It would be such a contented laugh that we would count on him to laugh at most of our jokes. As he got tired and drowsy, and when a critical mass was reached, we would pounce. Tomas would end up on the shack’s sandy floor, his legs trapped in the booth, one of us holding his thrashing feet in their smelly sneakers, the other two, each a squirming furry limb. Fingers would find their ways under his toes (those wet Nikes just slip off his feet!), across his firm hairy stomach, under his pits.

And he would fight us hard each time, knowing that he would ultimately lose. The beginning would be rough, and sometimes one of us would have a puffy lip, and you don’t talk about fight club in 13^th grade. Or ever. But it would be worth it when we eventually had poked and prodded and kneaded at Tomas long enough for him to lose his grip over a crucial ticklish spot. Even with the extensive experience of twenty-four years of being tickle tortured by the jackass grad students he subletted from, Tomas always broke within ten minutes, looking ruddy in the face, doused in his own panicked mansweat, leaving the windows steaming as he laughed and laughed. When whoever was scraping their nails up and down his soles would slow enough for him to catch a ragged breath, he would call out for us to let him go and let him up. Hot dog customers would hear the yelps for help and mercy and come racing across the beach. After minutes of excited people cheering us from what they could see, the booth would smell like Tomas’ funk for days. When Tomas finally screamed, “Uncle, Uncle, I give, I give up!,” we would let him would get up, and he would then rake in more hot dog money than he would have sold all day on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays put together. And after he closed up, he would let us bury him in the warm sand, and take turns tickling his feet, him in hysterics. 

But I digress. 

Tonight, it was very late by now, and somehow Tomas has put Mari to bed, kissing her curly hair as she drifted off to bed. And as I was sitting by the window trying to get the cat to come in, someone slips back into my room. I’m startled, but Tomas raises a hand, smiles, “I just wanted another beer before hitting the sack. It’s been awhile since we’ve hung out.”

I return the friendly grin, and I toss him my bottle opener. I don’t think we even talked about much, but we might have talked about everything too. Eventually the comfortable periods of silence between lengthen and I realize with a start that we had both fallen asleep. I look over and Tomas has slid halfway to the carpeted floor of my room. I look at the open door, considering how I’m going to move an ex-hockey player out of my room, complete dead weight. Almost two hundred pounds of solid Canadian. He blinks open one eye, fixes his look on me, and says, “Come here, man.” I look around, halfway believing there must be someone else in the room, Mari? He snuffles and is back to a drowsy muttering. I surprise even myself, closing the door to a slit as I lie down on the far side of his body. He pulls me closer within minutes, and I breathe in his clean manly scent, a full day of ripeness. 

I watch the warm breeze in the room as it wafts through the waves of soft brown hair that cover his broad chest, spreading out thickly down his torso past his big pink nipples, and then disappearing into his jeans to envelop his surprisingly delicate balls. This is not to say that they were small; in fact, they were probably the biggest that the rest of them had ever seen, with the exception of Manny, who can tell you about that one drag queen in Brazil. But I had my mouth agape, nervously lapped my upper lip once, erasing the dryness with a promise of a wet tongue. And that gentle lick could easily be applied to that also gentlemanly underside of Tomas’ balls, sneaking my tongue into the wide hole of his green boxers into the white parts that never see sun through all the hair. It would smell so good with your nostrils squashed into the fur beneath, his tongue just wetting the darkening hair that provokes such low moans from the 190 pounds of man above him, until you decide that all the piggy smells are gone, sucked out of each hair, and you are in search of more. Suddenly there are three hands, where there were just your left and right, and you see that Tomas is in fact running a tight fist across the top of his mushroom head where it pokes a solid inch out of his sodden boxers, a bead of precum flowing, stopping, and then forming strands you can smell from a few feet away as it dribbles heavily down his jeans. I swat his greedy hand away, he gives me a badboy smirk, and I point at him in the most non-threatening way, warning him that he better listen. His eyes continue to rebel as he asks me where else in Canada I plan to be. Knowing that I’ve only been to the eastern parts, the questions are hard and I answer just one: the Northern Lights. 

After a few more beers, he belches, complains about the heat at midnight, and pulls off his tank top. The quick smell of grass and dirt is filled in immediately by the pungent scent of his pits, heavy and cloying. I find myself noticeably closer, nose craned to the source. Even Tomas notices, he sniffs his left pit, wrinkles a nose, and shakes his head: “Man, that’s what a man smells like.” 

Leave your arms up, and put your legs here. He’s playing along, letting me secure his hands behind the rocking chair, anchoring them behind him, and I’m squeezing his legs under my arms, slowly tracing one finger after another across the bottoms of his feet. After an eternity of him asking me to stop, please, just stop, I agree to give him a rest. As his exhausted face looks to me innocently and with hope, I sit on his upper arms, and before he can finish a yelp of surprise, my hands are scrubbing away across his ribs, dipping fingers through the thatches of wet hair under his arms. His willingness to fight back again wanes as he’s given no rest from the sensations washing over his body, heavy belly laughs as I scrub his feet with my fingers, yelps when I wander my finger nails over his increasingly tight ball sack. I smell my fingers after running them through his pubes, and he smells like comfort, manly, and just like Tomas. I lick his pits for what seemed like an hour, hearing his giggles as he struggled to let me stay under his arms, licking away, tickling him ferociously. I then switch to his feet, giving each toe a gentle tongue bath and Tomas keeps laughing, sputtering.

Once we both get tired, we fall asleep hugging despite the warm night, my nose pressed deep into his right armpit as he cups my head from above with his other furry arm. We somehow wake up together in the cold of the morning, realizing we’re naked in the living room. He laughs some deep delicate rumbles, gets up relatively delicately, and clambers up the stairs to stand with dramatic emphasis on my bed. I look at him, looking for a cue as to how to proceed. He looks back, peels off his moist socks, his soiled tank top, sniffs both of his furry pits, musty sweat mingling with my spit in the cool morning air and then asks, “So you coming here to spoon me or not?”