Lover Boys Forever (2 page)

“
Fuuuck,” he exhaled, the sound swirling around us like a swarm of wasps as he grabbed his cock, pumping away at it.

“
Show it to me,” I told him, a third finger buried inside now, a triple onslaught.

He grunted and pushed his cock back through his thighs, piss slit staring up at me as he continued to jack, one arm leaning against the tree for support. I crouched down, dick in hand, face up close to it all. Ass, balls, prick, the heady aroma of musk and sweat obliterating the forest
’s scent in an instant.

Faster my hand went inside ass and faster my other hand went on my dick, both of them in sync, both pumping away. Him too, pumping and moaning up a storm from the other side of things.
“Close,” he rasped over his shoulder.

“
Wait,” I told him. “On your back.”

I retracted my fingers. He fell backwards, prone in a heartbeat. I knelt by his side, grabbed his cock and took up where he
’d left off, while he grabbed mine and did the same. His dick was so thick in my grip that it was nearly impossible to keep a hold of it. Still, I worked it for all it was worth, watching, waiting for the inevitable.

Then he moaned again, so loud as to scare of a pair of doves off an upper branch. One last time his back arched, mouth in a pant as his fat cock exploded in my hand, an eruption of come that flew up and back, splattering on his belly and chest, dousing him in pungent white. A moment later, my cock, too, shot, his hand lightning fast on it as a stream of come spewed out, joining with his before both wads dripped over his side. And still I jacked his prick, making him writhe on the forest floor.

When the last drops of jizz were coaxed out, I stood up, sighed, and walked back to my house, not turning around to watch what he’d do next. Instead, I entered through my kitchen, locked the door, and headed for the shower, washing the sweat and come and forest debris off me. I played the scene back through my head as the hot water flooded over my body, allowing myself the briefest of smiles.

When I came out of the bathroom, my boyfriend was walking in through the front door, a grin on his face and a large bouquet of flowers in his hand. He walked up and handed them to me, a warm, wet kiss placed on my mouth.
“Happy tenth anniversary, dude,” he said, his hand tweaking one of my nipples, eyes locked tight on mine, so much blue as to take your very breath away.

My smile grew mega
-watt bright on my face, a rush of tenderness rising up from my chest. My hand caressed his cheek, his neck. “Happy anniversary, Joel,” I replied, my hand lingering on his throat. “What happened here? You’ve got a bruise.”

He shrugged, reached out his hands, and pulled me in tight.
“Little accident around back, hon,” he replied. “Never a dull moment around here you know.” His smile mirrored my own.

I couldn
’t help but laugh. “Amen to that, Joel,” I said, the kiss repeated, again and again and again.” Amen to that.”

Michael Bracken is the author of several books and nearly 1,000 short stories. When he isn’t writing, he’s sleeping.

Eddie and I were best friends throughout high school, thrown together in detention during our first week as ninth-graders for a pair of heinous offenses against the school system that I no longer remember and rarely separated from that point onward. I was the skinny new kid, having arrived in the small northern California town with my parents only three weeks before the school year started; Eddie was a town lifer, the pudgy only-child of a waitress and a laborer at the lumber mill.

We did everything together – shot pool down in fish town when we should have been at Wednesday night Bible study, drank stolen bottles of Schlitz and smoked pilfered Virginia Slims under the bridge as often as we could, and wore the ink off the pages of three pornographic magazines we found stashed in his grandfather’s garage. I didn’t tell him then because I didn’t think he would understand – I’m not certain I understood myself – but I was more interested in the men in those photographs than the women.

I lost track of Eddie the summer after graduation. He enlisted in the Army, intending to make a career of it to avoid spending his life in the lumber mill or on the fishing boats, and went off to boot camp while I moved halfway across the country to attend a university in Austin that seemed to employ more people than even lived in the town I left behind. I found a home in the English department – a place where skinny guys like me didn’t stand out – and lost my cherry to a graduate assistant after a long evening spent discussing
Beowulf
and smoking fat little spliffs in his one-bedroom walk-up.

After graduation
, I joined the university’s public relations department, traded my student hovel for a small loft apartment and, a few years later, traded up again for a two-bedroom fixer-upper not far from campus. I drifted in and out of relationships for the next two decades, with none lasting more than a few months.

The lumber company transferred my father midway through my second semester, and I lost my only incentive for returning to the northern California town where I’d attended high school. Because I made no effort to maintain contact with my former classmates, I was surprised when I opened my mailbox one evening in the spring of 2000 and discovered an invitation to my graduating class’s twenty-five-year reunion. By then my fixer-upper had been fixed up, my neighborhood had become trendy, and my house was the envy of neighborhood latecomers.

I removed my jacket, loosened my tie, and settled onto one of the two director’s chairs I kept on my porch. I read and reread the invitation, examined the schedule of events, and pondered the wisdom of using vacation time to return to a place that held few particularly good memories. There was only one reason to take the time and spend the money: I wanted to know what had happened to Eddie, and I had no way to know if he would be there or not.

Three weeks later, after spring became summer, I flew into San Francisco, rented a car, and drove north along the coastline until Highway 1 became Main Street. The town hadn’t changed much. A McDonald’s had joined the locally owned cafes and restaurants, the lumber mill where my father had once been a senior manager had closed, and Main Street had two more stoplights.

I had reserved a room at a motel north of town, across the creek from the bowling alley where Eddie and I first encountered Pong. My second floor room overlooked the Pacific Ocean, held a king-size bed, and had the same decor as every other low-budget chain motel room across small town America. I probably could have stayed in a newer hotel, but I had booked my room in the only place I could remember by name.

After I unpacked, I napped for an hour, then showered and dressed for the evening, an adults-only affair in the banquet room of a restaurant that hadn’t existed twenty-five years earlier, and the first of a weekend’s worth of activities that included a family-friendly picnic the following day in the state park three miles north of town.

At the registration table, I realized that some overly ambitious former classmate – probably a bored housewife for whom the reunion was the highlight of her social calendar for the decade – had included our yearbook photos on the name badges. I grimaced when I saw the longhaired, pimple-faced young man I had once been, then silently thanked fate when I realized the elephantine mouth-breather on the far side of the registration table had been the head cheerleader, a buxom blonde who had more balls between her thighs our senior year than the football team’s center.

After pinning the name badge to my jacket, I stopped at the cash bar for a glass of Pinot Grigio. Then I circumnavigated the banquet room, stopping now and then to stare at name badges and speak briefly with people I barely remembered and who barely remembered me.

Then I saw Eddie.

He was speaking with two pot-bellied ex-jocks, not looking in my direction. His shoulder-length black hair had been buzzed into a flattop liberally sprinkled with salt, and the doughy young man I had known then had become a thick, muscular adult. I had changed as well, adding weight and muscle tone thanks to the exercise room and lap pool in the university’s student center, and I regularly visited a stylist who not only trimmed my hair
, but also maintained the highlights that masked the encroaching gray. I didn’t approach Eddie immediately, instead waiting until he finished his conversation and the two jocks moved on.

He turned, saw me approaching and smiled. Without glancing at my name badge or even hearing my voice, he said, “I didn’t think you’d come.”

Eddie gathered me into his arms, gave me a bear hug that spilled my wine and threatened to crack a few ribs, and then held me at arm’s length and looked me up and down. “Time’s been good to you.”

“You, too,” I said, and it was true.

When Eddie saw that my Pinot Grigio had spilled, he took my elbow, led me to the bar, and asked what I’d been drinking. Then he ordered a replacement for me and for himself a Jack and Coke.

After we had our drinks, Eddie raised his in a toast and said, “To misspent youth.”

I touched my wine glass to his tumbler, and we both drank.

We spent the rest of the evening reminiscing, oblivious to our former classmates milling about, and we remained long after they returned home or headed to their motel rooms. When restaurant staff closed the banquet room, we moved to the bar.

We talked about cruising Main Street with Bachman-Turner Overdrive blaring from the 8-track player, about hours spent playing pinball at the miniature golf course south of town, and about more hours spent immersed in digest-sized science fiction magazines we bought at the liquor store. We talked out about our parents – mine retired and living in Seattle, his still working and living in the same house where he’d been raised.

I told him about life in Austin, a liberal pimple on the conservative ass of Texas, and he told me about his military career and his role in Desert Storm after Iraq invaded Kuwait. There was a delicious irony in that, after a childhood spent as a corporate vagabond, I had opted to settle in one place for the entirety of my adult life and Eddie, having spent his entire childhood in one place, had seen the world through military service and had continued traveling after retirement, purchasing a small motor home and towing a Jeep behind it as he cruised the back roads of America.

Despite all the places he had traveled and all the things he had experienced, Eddie was the same person I had known all those years ago, the same person I had called my best friend, and our conversation flowed as if mere hours had passed since we’d last been together. We were so entranced with one another that we remained long past last call and the bartender finally had to escort us out the door before barricading it behind us. We walked around the restaurant to the dark back lot where ours were the only two cars remaining, his a WWII-era Jeep with a tow bar sticking up in front of the grill, mine a rental with no discernible personality.

I probably should have shaken Eddie’s hand, maybe given him a hug, but I’d had a bit too much Pinot Grigio and I wasn’t thinking. Eddie had been my best friend for four years, someone I had cared about more than any other person in my life other than my parents, and someone who, I was reluctant to admit, I actually loved. So, I grabbed his face with both hands and planted a kiss on his lips.

Eddie didn’t resist, but he didn’t return the kiss, either.

Realizing what I had done, I stepped back, horrified at what he must have thought, and then turned and hurried to my car. I drove away without looking back, and I spent the rest of the night chastising myself.

I arrived at the reunion picnic just before noon the next day, arriving late because I was unsure how to deal with the conflicting emotions seeing Eddie had stirred up and finally decided to confront them head on. I found Eddie sitting alone at one of the picnic tables gnawing on a ham sandwich and nursing a beer.

“About last night
...” I started.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said around a mouthful of sandwich.

“But …”

He held up his hand, palm toward me, a silent command to stop talking. After he swallowed, Eddie said, “I knew. Even back then, I knew. You don’t have to apologize.”

“You did?”

“I didn’t know the words for it, but I knew.” He held up his beer bottle and used it as a pointer. “There’s more where this came from in that cooler over there.”

After I grabbed a beer, I was stopped by one of the reunion organizers, a woman I had barely known when we were high school students. I then visited with more of my former classmates, met their spouses and children and grandchildren, and deflected questions about my own marital status and prospects for parenthood by saying I was happy with my career and hadn’t yet met the right person. Many of my former classmates were happy to tell me about their lives and the insignificant things they’d accomplished in the years since graduation. Few of them seemed to notice than I shared little in return.

Someone had brought lawn darts, and I found myself taking third place in an impromptu lawn darts tournament. Someone else had set up a volleyball net on the beach, but the only people playing where the children and grandchildren of my former classmates. The afternoon disappeared in a flurry of activity that included gathering the Class of ‘75 in one place for a group picture while the sunlight was still favorable.

After posing for the group picture, standing in the back row with Eddie’s arm around my shoulder, I bade my farewells and told Eddie I would be leaving town first thing the next morning.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

I told him.

“Mind if I stop
by on the way back into town?”

I had no idea why he would want to, but I told him he could.

I had been in my room for nearly an hour when Eddie rapped on the door. I opened it and found him standing outside with a cold six-pack of beer, a bucket of warm potato salad, a paper plate filled with lunchmeat, and half a loaf of bread that he had liberated from the reunion committee.

“Dinner’s ready,” he said with a smile as he pushed past me into my room.

He piled everything on the room’s only table. As we ate, we continued the conversation the bartender had interrupted the night before as if nothing had happened after being escorted from the bar. When he finished his second beer, Eddie kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the bed.

Before long, I stretched out beside him and our conversation drifted from past to present and covered all the intervening years. After another hour, Eddie finally revealed himself to me, telling me how difficult it had been to remain in the service after he finally admitted to himself that he was in the closet.

“I think about you all the time,” Eddie said. “Dream about you, fantasize about you, wonder what might have been if I hadn’t taken so long to – if I had just admitted to myself – if ...”

“I’ve wondered the same things,” I admitted.

“You surprised me last night in the parking lot,” he said. “I should have told you right then how I felt.”

“Tell me now.”

When Eddie rose up on one elbow and looked down at me, I knew what was going to happen and I wasn’t about to resist. He kissed me, gently at first, his lips just brushing against mine. He kissed me again and again, on my lips, my cheek, my earlobe, my shoulder, the hollow at the base of my throat. When his lips returned to mine, his kiss became more urgent and soon our tongues met in a fiery dance of desire. At the same time, our fingers fumbled with buttons, buckles, snaps, and zippers. Our clothes hit the floor at a steady pace.

And when we were both naked, we paused and looked at one another. We had seen each other unclothed many times – in the locker room showers after gym class, skinny dipping in the river, while preparing for bed during sleepovers at his house or mine – but we were no longer undeveloped and inexperienced young men. We were adults, with men’s bodies and more experience than either of us was ever likely to admit.

Black hair covered his barrel chest and abdomen, and his crotch was a wild and untamed forest from which the thick tube of his cock rose majestically. I ran my thin fingers through his chest hair, teased his nipples with my thumbs, and then let my hands stray lower until I wrapped one fist around his cock. I slowly stroked the entire length, from the hard pubic bone at the base to the spongy soft mushroom cap of the glans.