Healthy Flesh.

Last night, in between all-out bouts of sex (and America's Deadliest Women's Prisons), I looked over Alan's whole body. Creepily, probably. I like exploring things and feeling them out, on my own time, and it's rare that I get the chance to do that with a whole human body.

Well, no, it's not. I get to thoroughly examine naked, passive human bodies every single day. It's just that this is in the course of working in the ICU, and they're very, very sick bodies. And maybe this is sick, and maybe it's particular to me, but the fascinating thing about Brandon's body was how healthy it was. I see so many ways that flesh can rot away, whole flesh is not just beautiful but amazing.

"You're not like an ICU patient" is a terrible compliment. And so is everything in the following paragraph. It's the things I was observing last night.

Except for a birthmark (buttmark!) and a well-healed scar on his knee, his skin is unmarked. There's no lesions, no nonblanchable erythema or unhealed wounds or other horrible things. Just strong and smooth skin. And he has muscles! Squeeze his arm and you don't feel flabby tissue and then bone--there's a wonderful pleasing firmness, a feeling of strength even in stillness, a body that can defend itsef. And he has fat! A soft little pooch of it over his belly, neither so much that it overgrows and smothers the rest of his flesh nor so little that he has nothing to draw warmth and padding and resilience from. And everything is so deliciously clean.

(Also, he has a decent-sized flaccid penis. I hate to have noticed this, but all the male ICU patients have absolutely microscopic ones. I mean, basically a stubby little head coming straight out of their groin and no shaft at all. One guy doesn't even have that; his catheter tube just goes into this hole over his scrotum. Nothing traumatic, his cock is just that small. Does sickness make your dick that much smaller? They're lying on their backs, they're feeling crappy and often cold, and they're not getting any boners, but still...)

Is Alan a healthy man, really? Eh, not really. He smokes, he drinks, he doesn't do any really demanding sports and he doesn't have any amazing physical abilities. You wouldn't look at him and go "oh wow, what a specimen of vigorous humanity." But he's fantastically healthy in the deeper way, the way us younguns like to take for granted, which is just that his body works. It moves and breathes and heals itself. It's beautiful.

Not being terminally ill is pretty fucking hot.