Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover (2 page)

Sue, the golden-haired cheerleader, greeted Bill with a cloying hug and kiss on the cheek—gag me! He had apparently just rolled out of bed and hadn’t shaved and had a heavy, heavy five o’clock shadow. Gorgeous black five o’clock shadow.
Pull it together!
I ordered myself.
Don’t make a fool of yourself in public, especially not around a jock.

I had never been this close to the man before. And that’s how I saw him, as a man; he was certainly no boy. Needless to say, I was shocked when he walked over and sat on the bench next to me, leaving the two cheerleaders on an adjoining bench.

By that point I was nearly hyperventilating because this teenage near-deity was sitting a foot away from me. My God, the man was gorgeous. I could smell his musk, and even his un-showered musk smelled gorgeous. I wanted to close my eyes and just lick his body to get a better taste, but I knew that such a move would be the absolute kiss of death to a high school student, so I kept my mouth shut.

While the girls chattered away about something and the advisor went off to call the candy company to find out where our truck was, I was absolutely bowled over when Bill, God who walked among mortals Bill, started to talk to me. I was terrified that my tongue was going to get all tied up and that I would trip over it and make a fool of myself. I was torn between two overwhelming feelings—one, oh my God, Bill Cromwell is talking to me! And two, don’t talk to me—I’m just a mere mortal! I’m not in your league!

“Hi, I’m Bill. You’re Mark, right?”

How did he know who I was? Now I had an entirely new reason to be concerned. “Right, Mark,” I responded.

Looking at me with those beautiful brown eyes of his—brown eyes surrounded by gorgeous eyelashes that seemed to be, like, a mile long. Had nobody else ever noticed them? Was I the first?—Bill started to talk about an upcoming test we all had in our calculus class. I found calculus to be easy and fun, but apparently everyone else was finding it to be a struggle. But then, what can I say? I liked math, and math seemed to like me.

Since there was still no sign of the truck, we had time to talk. Bill asked me where I had applied for college and what I was going to study. I didn’t know if he had planned to go to college or not—I didn’t know anything about the man aside from the fact that he had a body by God and eyelashes that kept tickling me from a foot away.

Not only did Bill plan to go to college, but he named off several places where he had applied—good schools one and all. As he talked on I was doing my best “pay attention” routine, which was proving to be very difficult because I was talking with a god. Who wouldn’t be impressed communing with a deity? In teenage boy terms this was akin to being admitted to the inner sanctum, the holiest of holies. The curtains had been pulled back, ever so briefly, and I had been allowed to see what others got to witness on an everyday basis.
I was conversing with the most popular guy in our school!

I was paying attention—or acting like I was—and he was talking, and I was a pig in slop. And wouldn’t you know it! It was just then that the damned truck arrived. So I wasn’t alone to unload the truck, but there were only four of us—two cheerleaders, one god, and me. Like I said, I’m no jock, so I didn’t have the sculpted body of an athlete. Still, I did spend time in the weight room at the gym. When you suck at team sports you come to excel at the more solitary ones. The coaches were only too glad to spare their prize teams from my presence, and I was still able to earn my credit for physical education. A win-win situation. Still, I was no muscle-bound man.

We moved outside to figure out how this was going to work. While we had two adults, the advisor and the truck driver, they both turned out to be utterly worthless. The advisor complained that he had a back problem, and the truck driver simply opened the truck and told us to get our boxes. He went inside the building to use the bathroom, and we didn’t see him again. Great, so that left just four of us and one freaking big truck full of boxes.

Everybody in the senior class had been given a catalog and charged with selling as much chocolate as possible. The candy company had boxed each person’s order, and the truck was filled with those packages.

When we looked at the boxes, Bill and I looked at one another and shared an honest assessment. “Damn!”

The two girls went into the school to retrieve a dolly. Bill climbed up into the back of the truck. Oh! My! God! The man had an ass that was a work of art! Holy sweet Jesus! I nearly came on the spot as he climbed the ladder steps built into the truck, thrusting his gorgeous ass nearly into my face. His jeans pulled tightly across his backside, and I probably could have counted the number of hairs on each butt cheek—if I hadn’t been one step from hyperventilating.

Bill’s jeans were old and tattered. I had noticed inside earlier that he had several tears in his jeans. There was one spot on the left leg in particular that had nearly driven me crazy. The man was hairy—not gorilla hairy but masculine hairy. His legs were covered with a nice coat of black hair that matched the black hair on his head and on his face.

Let’s see. Hair. Check. Nice skin. Check. Muscle. Check. No underwear. Check! Wait a minute! Time out! No underwear? Oh, dear Lord, I was going to die right on the spot, either from self-combusting or from having Bill beat me into a pulp because in a moment of weakness I licked his body. One way or the other, I could see the inevitable path.

But to both my disappointment and relief, Bill was now in the back of the truck, so the rips in his jeans were less in evidence. They were still there but much more discreet now. But I knew where they were so I knew where to keep watch.

I was grateful that I had a coat on that covered my erection. Bill assessed the situation (the truck, not the erection), and in his usual take-charge manner said that he and I should move the boxes to the edge and that the girls should load them onto the dolly and move them inside the building. Well, they objected to that plan. They didn’t want to be lifting boxes down from the back of a tractor-trailer. So Bill came up with a new plan: he would move the boxes to the back of the truck, I would lift them down and load them on the dolly, and the girls would haul them into the school and unload them inside.

There was only one dolly and a whole lot of boxes, so it was a slow process. A very slow process. The first part of it was ultra slow because the two girls made a big show of the work being so hard. They should have tried lifting those boxes down from the back of that big-assed truck and then we’ll talk about something being hard. They of course had to pull the dolly together, complaining up a storm in the process.

Bill and I had no choice but to wait until they returned with the empty dolly to repeat the process. Until we had cleared some space in the back of the truck he couldn’t even move boxes from the front of the truck toward the back. So we were stuck. Every time he bent over to lift a box or move a box, my eyes were riveted on his jeans to make sure that the rips were still there and that I hadn’t missed anything. One time he caught me looking and said, “What?”

Thank God I was able to bluff it by saying something like, “That’s a lot of boxes. We’re gonna be here all day.” Fortunately that worked, and he was distracted by the obvious.

Since we couldn’t do anything until the girls appeared, and when they did we moved like dock workers on speed, we had time on our hands. Bill had asked me earlier about the calculus test we had coming up soon, so I asked him if he was ready. He was a smart guy, so I assumed he would have no problem. But he claimed that he didn’t feel ready and that he was seriously worried about this one. Most guys would have taken time with primo jock numero uno to talk about sports of some sort, but not me—I couldn’t do that in any way, shape, or form. So we talked calculus.

“What part has you worried?” I asked.

“That last chapter was a real ballbuster.” I hope he knew that talking about his balls was not helping me. Before I could continue that line of discussion, the prima donnas had returned and were ready for another batch of boxes. At Bill’s suggestion I tried putting a couple of extra boxes on the cart, but the girls objected too much so I had to take a couple back off. Okay, so we were moving in the wrong direction here.

When he could see how slow this was going, Bill said something surprising. “My dad is gonna kill me. I’m supposed to help him this afternoon.” I never would have pictured Mr. Handsome Hunk Super Jock scared of anything. This was a revelation. There was a chink in the armor of the knight.

Bill hopped down from the truck, too fast for me to watch him move, and pulled down something I hadn’t seen—and he apparently hadn’t either until just then. “Ah ha!” he shouted. Another dolly. “I hope the driver doesn’t mind us using it,” he said.

“How would he know? Have you seen the man since he parked the truck?”

Bill had to agree with me. The dolly was a nice one that collapsed for transport but then folded out to haul boxes in a number of different configurations. Bill climbed back up into the truck—oh, yeah, baby, show me that moneymaker! The man could make some serious money if he ever decided to be a stripper—and moved some more boxes over the back end of the truck. I wanted to tell him I’d rather have his back end than the truck’s back end, but there just wasn’t a good way to work that into a conversation, and besides he probably would rather die than have a math nerd touch his body, so instead I just focused on manual labor and packed the dolly with boxes.

Faster than the girls had done, I pulled the heavy dolly to and through the doors of the school and into the storeroom we were authorized to use. While the girls puttered and complained, I unloaded my dolly and raced back outside to the waiting Bill. He seemed anxious and was concerned about his dad, so maybe if I helped him finish up and get out of there he might like me. Did that make me sound like a big old girl? Hell yes! But desperate times called for desperate measures.

Back at the truck I loaded another batch of boxes onto the dolly and headed back into the school. The girls were finally moving, but I still beat them back to the truck. I could feel a shared surge of testosterone with Bill when he smiled. Was it getting warmer? I shed my jacket and worked in just my jeans and long-sleeved work shirt. I loaded boxes on the girls’ dolly and then did my own, racing past them again. I was getting pissed because the faster I moved the slower they seemed to move. It seemed that they knew I was gonna do 90 percent of the work so they didn’t see a need to hustle. If I hadn’t disliked them already, I would now have a really good reason to dislike them.

Back and forth I went, loading, packing, unloading boxes. Really, who in the world was gonna eat all of this damned chocolate? Was there a major emotional crisis looming that was going to require the population of our valley to eat its own weight in chocolate? I didn’t understand it.

Back and forth, again and again, over and over, yadda yadda. You get the picture. I worked like a big dog. The girls moved slower, until they became irrelevant. On one of my trips back to the truck I stopped for a minute to catch my breath. Bill asked me, “Where the hell are the girls?”

“They said they needed to pee about twenty minutes ago, and that was the last I saw of them.”

“Damn!” he swore. “I thought some of the guys were gonna show up to help this morning.” And then he said something that was music to my ears. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
Oh, baby, whisper sweet nothings in my ear like that, and I’m gonna melt right here on the spot.
“Those damned girls are probably out back smoking weed… or blowing the truck driver.”

Interesting. Bill is acquainted with the concept of a blowjob. Well, duh! What guy wasn’t? Blowjobs were sort of the holy grail of high school males. Everyone wanted to get one, everyone swore that they had witnessed one or had a buddy who got one last night, but really it was just shared male mythology in action.

I didn’t say anything, but moved back to grab more boxes and load my cart yet again. I lost track of how many trips I made, but I was starting to sweat like a pig—and it was a cold day. Bill was working hard too, and he had shed his jacket at some point. When I noticed that his shirt was soaked with sweat under the arms and along the back I nearly lost it. That shirt. That gorgeous, glorious shirt that fit him like a second skin, all molded to his body. His glorious, hunky body. The only thing I was more grateful for at that moment was it wasn’t the front that was stuck to his body. Had his nipples been in play, and had they been tight and pointy, I really would have lost it right on the spot and humped him despite the threat of death, or teen ridicule, which was equivalent to death. I could hear it now. I could hear Bill telling all of his jock buddies, “Oh, you wouldn’t believe what the little faggot did! He was practically humping my leg!” It wasn’t the Bill I was seeing working like another big dog, but still in my mind I knew that the other Bill had to be lurking just below the surface, waiting to snap me back to my lower place on the food chain. High school was all about levels of society, and people didn’t move from one level to another easily or often. Bill and I were in different castes, and at the end of this task I knew that we would each have to return to our own place in our society.

Finally, with no help from the girls who finally did reappear, we were near the end of the task. I had lost track of time and didn’t care. Bill’s sweat had spread and was looking super hot on his body. I had caught a countless number of glances of his torn jeans and the skin and hair underneath, so I was a happy man—a tired, sweaty man, but a happy man. That day had given me new fantasy material for weeks to come.

When the last box was removed and moved into the school, Bill and I folded the cart back up and packed it back inside the truck. Unexpectedly, he gave me a massive smile and reached his hand out to me in some odd combination of high five, handshake, and hug. I didn’t know what to call it, aside from hot.
Bill had hugged me! Holy sweet baby Jesus! Bill Hunk had hugged me!