“I shall write an ode to your bum!” I proclaimed one night. (I was drinking hot toddies; it came out a bit like “Ishil ritanode toyer BUM!”)
May looked at me, an adorable mixture of bemusement and self consciousness. “Uh huh, sweetie. That would be weird, but you write whatever you want. Maybe you should sit down?”
What is there to say about May’s bum?
I call it a bum quite consciously. It has none of the adolescent sniggering of a butt; only a smattering of the gritty sex appeal of an ass. It is rounded, very soft, and exceedingly cute. It is a bum if ever I saw one.
When I first met him, May did not have a bum at all. I remember one of the first nights he spent in my bed. I lifted his bum in the air with two fingers hooked into his pubic bone on either side, and as his legs spread wantonly open I remember his perineum bulging outward, prominently displayed against the flatness of his inner thighs. He was achingly skinny, achingly aroused.
I didn’t think about his bum, then. I had never had a partner with a particularly pert ass, and had yet to understand the appeal.
Of course, as the relationship progressed I began fattening him up. All very subtle, of course. When I met him you could count his ribs with his hands at his sides, and his jawbone was etched in stone. Once his mother, his incredibly Jewish mother, commented on this. I agreed, thusly: “Yes, the boy looks like a Ho- . . . like a famine victim.” Behind her back May and his brother choked on their orange juice to keep from laughing. Hello, my name is Awkward, could I stay a while?
My campaign to put meat on his bones rests mostly with the siren call of the Milky Way bar. Maymay cannot resist this combination of chocolaty, nougaty goodness. He’s very particular; regular Milky Way bars are ideal for munching. Popable Milky Way candies are summarily rejected (wrong chocolate to nougat ratio) while dark chocolate Milky Ways are reserved for special occasions. And king sized? Look out, world.
I hid them in my purse. I slipped them in my pockets and sent him hunting for them. I would ask him in drugstores, “Do you want a Milky Way?” He’d say “Noooo, they’re so bad for me!” and I’d smile, and buy it anyway.
And then one day he slipped on his first pair of tight-fitting jeans, turned in a pert little circle, and there it was. The bum.
May’s body is for the most part skinny, with muscular limbs and a triangular torso. His bum is round, soft, and just a bit on the squishy side. When he lays on his stomach it protrudes like a pillow. I carry my fat in my hips and my thighs; May carries his entirely in his posterior. I am shaped like a pear. He’s shaped like a porn star. Adorable little bastard.
From pictures you may or may not have seen, you might know that May’s skin is about the color of a polar bear in a blizzard. He’s covered in the posterior regions with a fine little coat of very small, very blond hairs. Slap a hand to his ass, fingers spread, and the handprint lingers on. If you do it hard enough, it can stay for hours.
Maymay is also (just a little bit, slightly all the time) anal retentive about personal cleanliness. We won’t talk bathroom habits in this particular entry, but suffice it to say I have never met such a well-soaped anus in my life. It even smells lovely. Skin and Old Spice and vanilla ice cream; this is the smell of May’s bum on warm evenings in bed. I like to bite his flesh, tongue it, roll it around in my mouth. It makes him pout when I bite his bum. Oh, I just can’t get enough.
And because I am on a calculated, tactical campaign to impress May with the reality of his sexual attraction; I pay a lot of attention to this part of him. A day does not go by when I do not grab his bum in some public setting or caress it in privacy. When I met him Maymay could not stand to be hit in that region of his body; spanking would drive him into a blind rage. I systematically destroyed this response. In this more than any other place, his attitude to spanking, I admit a deliberate, manipulative hand.
And then, there came the wiggle.
One day, pressed close against each other in bed, he made a little animal noise, combined with a tiny movement of his rear. It was not quite a shiver, not quite a wriggle. It was a wiggle. I was almost incapacitated by the cuteness of this gesture.
He kept doing it. Soon he was doing it at parties, on the subway, everywhere. It became how he said hello, how he said goodbye, how he said I love you. All of this contained in the wiggling of his bum. It got a soundtrack, an accompanying “wiggelzeebums” type of word. We joked that if he were ever made into a Super Mario Smash Brothers character, the bum wiggle would be his attack move.
His bum has become a character in our relationship. It has its own language, its own habits. It is a plump little inside joke.
Sometimes when May is tripping about the apartment, wagging that naked bum of his at the neighbors and dragging his long boned feet, I stop, and sit back, and watch him. This makes him self-conscious; he will stand pigeon-toed and wave at me. Sometimes I will stop him in the kitchen while I’m sitting at the table, pull him close and plant lines of kisses down his protruding hipbone, take little nips out of his skin and cup my hands around him.
He’ll stand for this for a minute or two, usually. Sometimes we get into little tug-of-wars. He’ll want to go back to fixing dinner, and I’ll be rapidly forgetting food in the luxurious, distracting swell of his skin.
