From: Harry_Schultz@nycnet.com (Harry Schultz)
Subject: 1964
Organization: NYC NET
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 17:05:13 GMT

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WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING
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The content of this work is essentially angled toward an adult male
homosexual readership.  If you're a person not yet past eighteen years
of age please read no further and be advised that your reading or
perusal of this material is expressly prohibited by law.

A NOTE TO THE READER:
All characters and incidents within this work of fiction are purely of
my invention.  Any resemblance herein to actual events or persons
living or dead is entirely coincidental.  Throughout this story the
character's dialogue may contain language, distinct and obvious
relations of alternate lifestyles and attitudes that may prove
offensive to some.  Verbal depictions of sexual acts are intentionally
quite graphic.  If you're of the sort that's easily offended or
disturbed by literature of such nature read no further.  Additionally,
I've written nothing herein without reason as regards the shaping of
this piece, however no slights are intended toward any race, gender or
group through the manner of this tales unfolding.

Thanks.  All comment will be happily received by:
Harry_Schultz@nycnet.com,Internet

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1964 - Part 1

The crowded city bus that ran downtown into South Philly along
Twenty-third Street, whined and hissed its way to a halt at Bainbridge
not long past four that freezing Wednesday afternoon.  Harlan Creely,
standing first in line, planted a foot on the first of the little set
of steps that automatically opened the bus's rear door.  Hesitantly
descending, he finally set one foot, then the next onto the curb.

Moving much like the brown leaves following the chase the November
wind's fancy led that day, the other passengers exiting the bus swirled
impatiently all around the tall, walnut skinned youth.  He'd abruptly
come to a dead halt in their midst.

The whole of the little throng of shoppers and workers hastening
downtown to their homes after tending to business on Market Street
manufactured a swift changing, nearly kaleidoscopic pattern on the
sidewalk as they scattered all around the handsome yet strangely
expressionless and immobile boy.  Clad and bundled up to satisfy
individual requirement for thwarting cold, each on deciding his or her
own path hurriedly disappeared from Harlan's sight either up, or down,
or across the street.

Although the largest part of his attention had been set off-hinge by
preoccupation of the deepest kind, Harlan's gaze slowly swung this way
and that as people moved off.  The plaintive sigh that followed the
tall youth's survey of the street bloomed like a cloud of cotton in the
chill air.  The crowd's dissipation painfully accentuated the greatness
of the distance Harlan already perceived there to be between himself
and the rest of the human race.

Despite its growling roar, Harlan was barely aware that the bus behind
him was pulling away.  He dully shook his head to roust his memory from
the leisure it had suddenly elected  with respect to his whereabouts. 
Somehow the street and every house in view along it all at once seemed
foreign and unfamiliar even though this was a neighborhood the teenage
boy knew very very well.  Widening in minor alarm over this sudden loss
of his wits, the anxious youth's butterscotch eyes snapped hard right,
then left, as he attempted to get his bearings.  Yet unsure of what
move he should be making although the surrounding scene slowly was
taking on clarity again, Harlan remained stock still in the last of the
dissolving crowd.

It took a rough shove from the cold wind to move the tall, long-limbed
boy on.  But not before he'd made a more comfortable arrangement of the
several textbooks he toted under an arm.  His free hand quickly hoisted
the fleece collar of his tan leather jacket higher about his long neck.
 Then came but a second or two more of blank-eyed self-counsel and
Harlan resolutely commenced the walk, four blocks east, to the church
he and his family had attended for as long as he'd owned memory.

Step by step, the fall of his feet landed on cement soldierlike; brisk
and steady-paced.  No matter how even the meter of his gait, within,
Harlan faltered round and round a circuitous route of travel inside a
dank and dim cenotaph of perturbation.  Troublesome visions hung across
his path of thought like cobwebs.

In the dull light of this gloomy mood, he'd groped his way about the
inside of anguish the entire day.  Harlan still continued attempting to
struggle out on his own but all sides of the thing engulfing him
appeared to remain far too high for climbing.

The same as since that morning when Harlan had begun to fumble his way
through the day, all the gears in his thought processes continued to
gum up, to refuse to mesh.  Likewise, every check and balance which
might have held his perspective in better calibration remained
inoperative.

He stood helplessly at the cliff edge of fright as bewilderment rolled
in all round him like thick, encroaching fog.  As he walked, the
anxious nineteen-year-old took to repeatedly hounding himself all over
again; meaning to prompt his hasty orchestration of some final solution
to the the thing on his mind.  The tonic note on the staff of change
had yet to ring out clear through the haze in his head.

Considering all things possible, the leggy youth none too lightly
courted notions that, maybe, through some unintended slight on his part
an unknown but significant force with a hand in the forging of the
bigger plan of things had angled an eyeful of vengeance expressly his
way.  As he covered the next block, Harlan speculated this possibility
as an explanation for the curse that seemingly had brought to bear the
sealing off of all ends of every avenue of reasoning which might well
have permitted the easy commerce of solutions to his problem.

Frustrated, he'd quickly come to find as he knew he would, more
silliness than sense in such a thought.  His full lips tightened. 
"Damn," he swore softly into the stiff breeze coming at him as his
plight yet stood seemingly unsolvable.  Though most of his elders would
have right off assumed him far too young to hold an appreciation of
what real pain was, the pain the sad-eyed youth bore that day had a
bite as hard and deep as the chill wind.

One thing was sure.  Harlan intended to begin, as best he could, to
learn how to put an end to the ache inside him.  He'd made up his mind,
from that day on it must surely be he and only he who stamped the
deeper concerns of his life with the final word as to how they'd be
resolved.  This decision had been settled by the unanimous vote of one
he'd cast early that morning.  He'd elected himself sole chooser of his
paths on his walk through life.  He'd choose for himself what to take,
how to give -- and where to leave his love.  For a moment as Harlan
again thought on the decision he'd made, the flicker and glow of slight
hope again struck him as he briskly kept walking on.  The Dark Ages
were long past, he realized.  After all, this was the Twentieth Century
wasn't it ... it was Nineteen-sixty-four.

Though the weight of it had been carried with quiet resignation until
this certain day, the youth's quandary over the specifics of right
flavors of the mind continually nagged him.  All the questions that the
weighing of things wrought had rested heavily on Harlan's shoulders
well before they'd grown anywhere near as broad or strong as then. 
Thus, worry had unfailingly lingered as near him as his adolescent
awareness of himself.  It continued disconcertingly tolling like a
great bell in his ear.

The truth which the oval-eyed teenager kept hidden had become adamant
for his overt recognition and uncompromised final reconciliation with
it.  Strong as the need for food or the urge for sex, that Wednesday,
an inner need to feel free had set to haunting Harlan the strongest it
ever had.

The presence of longing this giant-sized was quite an overwhelming
thing for Harlan whom had never been told any more of life by his
parents than they believed fit for a child to know.  And childlike the
broad-shouldered youth was with respect to the feelings going on inside
himself.  He was ravenous from curiosity.  Nonetheless, as though the
frighteningly overpowering impact of a scene's suspenseful unfolding
might somehow be lessened, just as a kid front row at a scary movie
furtively peeks at the action taking place on screen through gaps in
tiny powerless fingers, oft times Harlan found himself barely able to
glimpse at the full face of his need.

However, Harlan somehow had come through all right.  He'd made the
passage from boyhood, to where he stood ripe and on the verge of full
manhood, unwarped despite the experience of living with fact he often
found unnerving.

He'd come all the way from birth to nineteen going on twenty the bearer
of a warm heart and an extremely kind and even nature.  This nature had
seldom been deemed overly adverse when authority that governed his
upbringing made its usual requirement of his immediate and
unquestioning obedience.

At high school and around his neighborhood in West Philly, Harlan had
developed no friendships conspicuous enough to have been looked on as
particularly intimate even by his watchful mother.  Notwithstanding,
the soft-spoken, devastatingly good-looking youth was well liked.  As
well, inside of the beehive of the very carefully organized adolescent
existence which sequestered him -- planned church and school functions,
chaperoned parties and outings -- he'd always been one of the gang and
accepted by both his male and female peers.  Thus, Harlan bore little
wisdom of what it meant to make one's own way other than how he'd been
told.  Early on he acquired the strong belief that life was indeed a
very hard thing to live.  This was because the young man's
self-conscious preoccupation with desires and emotions he deliberately
endeavored to leave undefined prevailed and grew.

But that didn't matter anymore, that Wednesday all aspects of his life
were to undergo great change.  Harlan Creely had without doubt got it
in his mind that a turnabout was to come because at last he'd made the
decision to not turn his face from anything, great or small, that lay
inside himself ever again.

Of course, making a decision's much easier than acting on one.  The
youth's fears often towered over him in sporadic flare-ups as the day
of near wintry cold slowly poured itself out.  However, since morning,
over and over he'd recited under his breath, "The truth shall set you
free ... nothin' but truth ..."  It would indeed be the telling of the
truth that opened a door the handsome brown-skinned youth had thought
would be forever closed to him.

********************************************
********************************************

Singular, anxious deliberation over where to seek enlightenment
regarding the stirrings inside he'd come to know well but didn't
understand, had been prevalent in the light-eyed youth's troubled
thinking for several weeks prior.  From the very first, Harlan had
pondered whether his purpose could be served by putting his confidence
in the young minister heading his church, the Reverend Clay Adderly. 
Then again through a sizable caution heavily tinctured with  foreboding
by way of all the adamance with which his father had instilled the code
of family in him, Harlan thought for a long time on whether to break or
conform to the rule.  He was eldest son and heir and had even more so
been made to know, coming to his parents was to his first action toward
the remedy of any predicament he might occasion; his duty no less.

Yet Harlan knew seeking counsel inside the Creely family's framework
bore sure odds of a hellish approach with his father Frank. even to the
outskirts of the matter.  Carefully rethinking the worth in that
alternative, Harlan came to an alternate answer.  `Go someplace where
there's real understanding to be found,' he'd heard himself say.  Thus,
he took a course opposite the one he knew his father would highly
prefer.  It fostered his motivation for the walk crosstown in South
Philly that was to come that cold afternoon.

For Harlan, the apprehensiveness he felt was a mosaic of fragments of
fear and doubt strewn on that day's face.  The youth's picture of his
troubles was redrawn every time his recall of time and place returned
like a disturbing wind.  It never let him claim a sense of calm for
long but he walked on.  Nonetheless, Harlan was determined to prove
himself man enough to face, boyish desperation gusted about the heart
of him like the stiff winds that whipped round the cold streets.

********************************************

The boy's first solution's inception hadn't jelled until Harlan had
exiled himself to a removed corner of Edmund E. Gerard High's
cafeteria.  It became clear to Harlan that his only chance to gain any
peace inside lay in finally relinquishing the secret he kept to the
wisest and most willing ear he could find.  He believed his fears would
be stripped of their power over him once he at last heard himself speak
of the thing out loud.

Chair set back from the table as if making a study of the worn oak
planks on the old school cafeteria's floor, Harlan had sat there quite
some time gazing past the dark knot his clasped hands formed in his
lap.  But, his countenance somehow connoted a completeness of focus; as
though in his head he might be carefully summing up of a column of
large figures.

The true mathematics of Harlan's mental exercise were meant to adduce
the mean of his chances through the counting and figuring of 
plus/minus comparisons ... his ironhanded father's all too familiar
rigid mettle and, on the other hand, the charity of spirit he believed
made up his minister's.  It took but a little time before Harlan
rationalized his best chance as being a talk with the one person he
yearned to speak with most all along -- Clay Adderly.  "Him ... it has
to be ... him," he'd resolved at last.  "How could it be anybody else
but him?"

The large electric bell above the cafeteria's swinging doors loudly
clanged and called for the next period's commencement.  Without thought
Harlan had risen, collected his books, and his barely touched tray of
food.  Merely a look attested to the teenager's deeper interest in the
taste of the fare off his contemplation's menu than the fish sticks,
peas and potatoes lying cold on his plate.  Once he'd returned the
tray, Harlan determinedly put forth an effort to bury worry beneath a
look of steely calm as he started for his next class.  For a while he
drove off the doubt he felt wafting in the air all around as he went ...

********************************************

Long-legged and athletic, the youth easily sprinted across Twenty-first
Street hurrying on though still quite preoccupied.  A horn blasted and
a large truck rumbled past with its haul just as he leapt onto the
curb.  The sounding horn blasted a fanfare for the sudden return of
Harlan's father's stoic visage as it once more loomed large inside his
head for what seemed the hundredth time that day.

Harlan halted, then scanned the greying sky thoughtfully.  For a
moment, as he'd found cause to do many times over the last few years,
he seriously pondered the depth of what he felt for his father, Frank
Creely.

In the aftermath of some out-and-out conflict between them, if feeling
especially wronged and therefore seeing himself set in a right enough
place from which to indulge his contained resentment, Harlan would
fashion rough inventions with which to probe his soul and the raw hate
he'd feel begin to bloom.

All his life he'd been given good food, warm clothes, but no right to
anger.  "Honor thy father," he'd always been lectured.  The smooth
field of his high forehead would crease when he'd sometimes jam shut
those tan-colored eyes of his and out of darkness form a luminous
picture of his father lying flat on his back, stone cold and dead. 
With this vision in mind, he'd put himself to the test.  "How bad would
it hurt me if he up and died tomorrow?" he'd ask himself.  "Would I
break down cry about it?  Would it make me feel like I was all busted
up inside?  Would it be like I couldn't see some way to keep on livin'
`cause somebody real important was lost forever ... the way it's
supposed to?"

Employing the like for many such examinations of the rickety
relationship his father and he dwelled inside generally left Harlan
feeling confused and guilty.  He'd lived his life in Sunday school and
never before had seriously made an attempt to fit his hand to
rebellion's guiding wheel.  That a father was to be honored and obeyed
but not questioned was all Harlan knew.  So when "Of course," the
obvious answer he'd assumed any father's child would give to such a
self-query didn't instantly come to mind, Harlan first felt himself a
derelict son.

Harlan's surely industrious father was head deacon and trustee in
charge of Greater Thesselonian First Baptist's financial affairs as
well.  Once the reaping and counting of the  offerings and tithes
gathered up from the congregation in the collection plates and baskets
was done and set aside, Deacon Creely displayed a most visible stern
piety and apparent abandonment of worldly things.  At least that was so
full-time on Sundays and part-time come week-night prayer meetings.

However, day by day with the use of the remainder of his time, the
uncannily shrewd businessman was quite content to reroute the energy he
applied to his devotions to works more beneficial to his own gain than
that he anticipated as heavenly.  The management of his insurance
business was one.

No one would ever deny Frank Anderson Creely was and had always been, a
hard working, self-declared no-nonsense man.  A "pull yourself up by
your own bootstraps brand of a man," he'd often say of himself none too
shyly.  Therefore, no more than this tall, wiry man's nature allowed
him to ignore for a moment the strategical value of his placement in a
crowd, would it let him lay aside part or parcel of a narrow philosophy.

Frank would have absolutely nothing to do with anything that missed the
mark in jibing with the stringent logic he'd learned by rote off his
own father's slate or that opposed any judgements his forebear had
bestowed as to proper living.

It was this same manner of sentiment that brought to bear Frank
Creely's choke-hold frugality as regarded his allowance for latitude in
his toleration of fooling around in life's grey areas.  That applied
not only to himself but to all under his dominion.  "You either do or
you don't, boys.  You hear what I'm tellin' you?  It's no more simple
than that!"  Words to live by...

In the ministering of this his gospel, "You either do or you don't,"
was likely the most presented of the not necessarily luminous pearls of
wisdom the deacon constantly sermonized to both his sons.  Although his
delivery of the message never qualified as charismatic even in essence,
neither Harlan nor Buddy, Frank's youngest, had much difficulty
remembering.  In the course of any given day, Frank without fail would
minister this phrase either to one of his sons or an unlucky employee
at the insurance office he owned and ran on his detection of some
dereliction of duty.

About to turn twenty, two days past the coming Christmas, Harlan was
even more keenly aware of the expanding void between himself and his
father.  He was a ship about to drift away from the dock.  Little
remained of the fast fraying family ties strung across the chasm
between himself and his father.  Only a few last taut threads of
connection sometimes quite naive Harlan himself had spun out of
sentimental, wishful inventions remained in the teenage boy's sheer
embroidering on the bands of the shared familial existence he very much
needed to believe in.

With graceful quiet the age of twelve or so Harlan, quite a handsome
boy, met the onset of his metamorphosis from child to adult.  Since
then not only had his body markedly showed all the expected but
surprising signs of change, the concerns that led his thinking proved
entirely new manifestations as well.  Along with the deepened timbre of
his voice, his mind experienced a change of depth all its own.  His
questions changed formed, growing more of size and like his body
adopted secondary traits of a man.  By circumstance quite as natural in
its occurrence as his physical transfiguration, Harlan grew less and
less a complaisant believer in his father's truths.

Harlan's fertile mind was a vast field for the new feelings, desires
and curiosities that sprouted in him as swift in speed as the upspring
of the patch of kinky, black hairs that came to thickly cloud the very
base of his smooth brown belly like an oasis all around the newly
veined and thickened length of man-flesh rooted in the meeting of his
thighs.  All of it was so normal -- so usual  as became any boy
becoming a man.

But as with all processes, mysterious turns are made in the making as
they push on toward completion.  Harlan's arrival at the limbo that
prefaces manhood sometimes struck him as more a backward step toward
infancy.  Overly simplistic juvenile queries, "Why? ... Why not? ...
How? ... What if ...?" all embarrassingly continued coming into play
whenever he sought to take a position of weight when in discussion with
his elders.  It wasn't often the innately bright youth considered
himself speaking with knowing confidence.

In earlier times, the son had been quick to come running to call upon
his father in the pursuit of the elusive final word on life, living,
and the meaning and placement of manly emotion.  Sadly, it wasn't long
in his listening and later comparison that Harlan found Frank's
theories on any issue, other than propagation of money unenlightening
and, quite often ... useless.

"No! ... no! ....Daddy's just about the worst one to go talkin' to. 
There's nothin' I've got to tell him that he's ready to listen to
anyway .... When could anybody ever talk to him?  Dag man"  The wind's
cold, open hand wiped his face, smudging the resolute color of that
soft utterance as Harlan's step speeded up as he covered the last block
to the church ...

"Who? ... Come on ... Come on!"  A little bit annoyed at hearing the
faint knock at the door of his study as he hurriedly made ready to
leave for home, the Reverend Clay M. Adderly wheeled about in response
as he extracted his heavy overcoat from a rather old and scratched
enameled wardrobe just beside the closed door to the pastor's study. 
Nonetheless, the tall, young, square-jawed preacher's face abruptly
bloomed bright as day on his instant recognition of the light brown
eyes peering shyly just past the squeaky office door's edge as being
Harlan Creely's.  The young minister chucked the tweed coat he clutched
in his large hand onto the leather armchair near his desk and went to
pull the door open, wide as it would go.  His strong hand flew to
Harlan's shoulder as he ushered the youth just inside his small
office's doorway.

Clay's broad smile proved the instant progenitor of Harlan's.  Although
he was all at once pressed hard under the thumb of his shyness, all the
worry the youth had been traveling with suddenly withered.  Harlan
brightly beamed back a smile at the husky, bull-necked young preacher
who'd come to lead the large church almost three years before.  For a
moment, the aura of this warm, most approachable man he'd long thought
much of was more than enough of a source of protection to proffer him
escape from the urgency that had compelled him to come.

"Hey there man, how you doin'?"  The thin dark line of Clay Adderly's
well-kept mustache traced his broad smile.  It continued shining on
Harlan as the strikingly handsome young preacher reached forward and
sandwiched one of the teenager's cold hands firmly within the warmth of
his two.

"Well sir," Clay said cheerily, "looks like the good Lord sure `nough
does move in manners mysterious.  Don't he?.  Can't call this nothin'
less than a welcome surprise.  Since goin' on ten o'clock this mornin'
all I've heard is a plumber cryin' to me, `Rev, that thing over there
ain't so good, this one's worse, and the one over there ain't good as
either one.'  Got to be plain to just about anybody, I've been in line
for some kind of uplift to head my way all day.  And right here it is
-- you've just done the trick.  Really man ..."

Clay Adderly's light line of conversation was abruptly severed on a
keen edge of the anxiety sighted coming into view on his young
parishioner's face.  Subtle and politely cautious, the broad-shouldered
young preacher folded his arms and leaned back a little to look Harlan
up and down with a gentle eye.  "Just where is it you're comin' from --
West Philly?" he inquired quietly.

"No, down from North.  I ... I came straight from school."  The last
remnant of the smile Clay's exuberant greeting had elicited from Harlan
somberly faded from sight.

Clay hadn't been sure of it at first but within moments it was
impossible for him to mistake the heavy pall of significant sadness on
Harlan's face for the flimsier trappings of simple teenage worry . 
"Harlan, what is this?  Tell me what is it that's got hold of you?
...Tell me.  For the life of me, you look like you've been tusslin'
with the very Devil himself man ... and pretty hard too."  The handsome
man with skin as rich a color as honey paused a second to gently bring
the troubled youth's chin aloft with the top of his slow rising big
balled-up hand.

For a long moment mercifully unburdened by voiced questions, the
preacher painstakingly explored Harlan's eyes for signs of his
particular affliction as his other broad hand reassuringly squeezed the
boy's shoulder.  Clay resumed his offer of comfort in a gentle, earnest
tone.  "Now, youngblood, come on out with it and tell me what it is you
need.  It don't matter what it is `cause nobody's set me down here to
be your judge.  It positively ain't a hill of beans to me what the
problem is.  All that really matters is how I can help -- that's the
thing I'm here for."

Harlan, silent and anxious, still hadn't come all the way into the
office.  He stood before the puzzled clergyman, head hung down again as
he shifted his weight foot to foot.  An amalgam of disparate emotions
-- need, fear, and guilt -- laid on him from behind like a heavy weight
that rendered the youth incapable of doing that which he wished most;
to simply look up into the tall and strong preacher's eyes and somehow
know everything could surely be set right.

Harlan's proud chin trembled.  "I ... I ... I want to talk with you
Rev," he stammered on the verge of tears.  "I mean I've got to.  It's
real important."

A look of concern that bespoke an unfathomable depth of feeling,
flooded over the confused young preacher's face swift as a river. 
"Well sir ... I sure can see that ... yeah ... I can see it's some kind
of serious."

Harlan trembled, frightened that an attempt to say more would not only
unleash a landslide of words but also precipitate a torrential fall of
the stinging tears he fought to hold in abeyance.  He tightly clamped
his lips together and stiffly nodded in confirmation.

Just about to fall completely away, Clay's big hand reversed its
downward drift and ascended once more.  That hand, warm and strong,
tenderly caught and cupped Harlan's trembling chin.  "Come on now
youngblood, don't you worry none," he said gently.  "All of it's gonna
work itself out."  Some of Harlan's sorrow exited his eyes.

Very next moment, Clay shot a glance up at the round black clock that
hung on the wall adjacent the place of a gold-framed white Jesus who
wore a rainbow for a halo.  "Look here my man, best thing to do is get
ourselves out of here and go somewhere," the handsome preacher
suggested in a tone so light its lift immediately furthered the revival
of Harlan's confidence.  "Matter of fact," Clay said without waiting
for Harlan's reply, "why don't you head up to the house with me.  We
can talk this whole thing out up there ... just you and me; won't be
another soul nowhere `round.  We'll have all the time in the world and
...," he chuckled, "might even feed you -- if you feel like eatin'. 
Although I'm not known to be much of a hand in the kitchen, I believe I
can find somethin' I can fix for us that I can't burn up.  Okay with
you?"

Harlan looked up.  His eyes met Clay's and his smile slowly
resurrected.  "Okay," Harlan consented with the soft, willing finality
of one who truly trusts.

"By the way, do Deacon Creely and your mother know you've come down
this way?" Clay asked cautious but quite scrutinous.

"Uh-uh."

"Well then, wouldn't be too bad an idea to ring home so somebody knows
where you're at," Clay said, pointing to the old phone on his desk. 
The telephone had weathered many years and many preachers and their
trials there in the old churches study.  Its black casing had no shine
left at all.

A call home was indeed in order.  It was the middle of the week -- a
school night.  A quick nod of Harlan's head indicated his immediate
understanding of that.  Yet, his snail-paced approach to the preacher's
cluttered desk, heaped high with books and Bibles and papers, suggested
the greatest reluctance.  The slender youth steadily gazed at his slim
fingers while, painstaking and slow, he dialed seven digits one after
the other.

There was only a few seconds' wait.  Harlan turned his back to Clay and
leaned over the desk -- "Mom?...Yeah, I'm okay.  I'm all right I said. 
I just called `cause there's somethin' special I've got to do and I'll
be home kind of late. ... Well, I can't say exactly what time ...
Anyway, it's nothin' really; just somethin' I need to see about, that's
all ... Just somethin' Mom ... No -- no homework tonight ... I won't
forget ... Huh? ... The thing off the TV? ... I don't have it.  Buddy's
probably gone and put it someplace again and forgot where ... Yes
ma'am, I've got my key with me ... Yeah ... Yeah ... See you later..."

Harlan found Clay sitting on the arm of the chair as he slowly
straightened and turned from the phone.

The clergyman had used the time just passed for a tactful inspection of
the slightly worn edge of one of his only winter coat's lapels. 
However, the big man had shot glances toward his desk, now and then,
from the corner of an eye.  Supported by the one long arm he'd braced
himself, he'd seen Harlan all the while wearily lean over the large
desk as he'd conversed with his mother.  By Clay's immediate impression
the youth seemed surely a soldier too long on the battlefield.

Young Reverend Adderly's ear had been put to as keen use as his eye. 
He'd listened as his young parishioner had ever so carefully maintained
his guard on the telephone.  Clay searched the vacant expression that
had wiped Harlan's countenance clear of any telling emotion once the
phone's receiver was back in its cradle.

"Harlan, is it all right to ask you somethin'?"

"Yeah, Rev.  What?"

"I'm not tryin' to press you `bout your business but why didn't you
just straight out tell your mother you're comin' up to Germantown with
me?"

Harlan's reasoning, in reply, was of too painfully honest a weight to
allow his voice to rise above the  whisper that forced out, "It would
mean a whole lot of questions later."

Clay, turning inward himself as he hastily resumed donning his coat and
hat, neither asked nor said anything else until a minute later to end
the trespass of the hindering silence that came.  Giving Harlan a firm
pat on the shoulder, "Well, youngblood, let's say we get in the wind,"
he said and they exited the church through the dimmed sanctuary.

*********************************************

"Come on man hurry up, the cold out here's a killer.  Right now's time
for some quick steppin' `cause it's a mite too chilly for strollin'
like it's still summertime," the Reverend Adderly shouted as he
hurriedly headed on to his car with Harlan in tow.  Outside in the
street, laughing as they put distance between themselves and the locked
up church, the hardy, well-built minister and his athletic young
congregation member raced on foot two blocks north to where the
minister's conservative black Buick sat shining in the last of the
afternoon sun.

Clay's sides shook with laughter as he stood beside his car catching
his breath.  "Good God, youngblood, wonder what's goin' on with me. 
Maybe I need to see about shapin' myself up a little.  Little bit of a
run like that used to be nothin' for me back in college."

Harlan's smile was quizzical but he withheld his opinion in regard to
Clay's state of fitness.  He knew the muscular young preacher's college
days hadn't been that long past because he'd seen Clay's diploma on the
wall behind his desk.  There was no one he saw as more strong or vital
than Clay.

Collected and ready to be on the move an instant later, Clay quickly
unlocked the passenger side of the car for Harlan and commented loudly
about how brisk the wind was as he trotted around to the opposite side
of the large sedan he drove .

"I never was a man with a likin' for cars plain lookin' as this but
folks -- `specially church-goin' folk -- seem to see this kind of car
as more dignified for a preacher."  Slamming the car door hard once
he'd pulled the tail of his heavy coat all the way inside and settled
himself into the leather nest behind the steering wheel, the big man
continued thoughtfully.  ""Maybe -- maybe not ... I'll never like `em
but lookin' dignified and lookin' proper seems to be what this world is
all about lately; yep, means everything to whole lot of folks."

As Clay leaned forward to slip the key into the ignition, the young
preacher said almost absentmindedly, "Like always -- I go right along
with the program."

As the big black car rolled northward to Germantown, Clay tried to keep
the subject of conversation light despite all the concern Harlan's
troubled face was rousing in him.  "I'm a bachelor again.  Been left on
my own for the next ten days -- maybe two weeks.  The wife's gone down
to Memphis for that women's conference at Reverend Haley's church.   
Brought her down to the Greyhound station late last night.  Means to
see some of her people too."

"I know," Harlan informed him.  "Mom mentioned.  She had it in her mind
to go too but there wasn't time enough to change up any of her vacation
days."  Harlan hesitated cautiously though he knew what he'd say was
not news.  "Besides, you know by now how Daddy is -- `Best service
anybody can give is the service he renders for those at home.' "

Clay nodded empathetically but did not want to appear other than
neutral where a son's criticism of his father was concerned.  He
shrugged his broad shoulders, uneasy at even a slight acknowledgment of
Deacon Creely's overbearing ways, and refrained from verbal comment.

"So tell me now, how Sister Creely feels about her boost up in the
business world," the preacher inquired, changing the subject.

"Can't say I know for sure.  You never hear Mom say all that much about
work once she's in the house.  Seems pretty happy about it though."

"And rightly so.  Penn Industrial's not a bad-sized company.  Bein'
made a department supervisor certainly can't be said to be too bad a
thing for somebody colored in Philadelphia ... especially these days.

"Of course I know you've got to see there's a bigger meanin' inside it,
young man," the preacher chided the youth with a gentle shove on the
shoulder from across the car.  "It's a sure `nough a beginnin' --
enough of a beginnin' of somethin' to feed us folks some hope with a
dream or two piled on top.  Not so much for ourselves but for you
young'un ... for you," Clay said quite seriously.  "It's a hard world
out there and your gonna need every dream you can get."

Optimism came back to warm every inflection of the young preacher's
deep voice and bloomed wide as his grin.  "We've all got our eyes set
on a great day when we'll be lookin' to see you sittin' at the head of
any table you want -- anywhere."

Harlan's pondering glance toward the driver's side of the car housed
silent, questioning doubt.

"I know, Harlan ... yeah I know," Clay quickly conceded the immediate
look of relations between black and white in respect to current events.
 "Lord alone knows how bad things seem from all the mess that turns up
on the TV news -- all them sheriff's and dogs; firemen turnin' their
hoses on folk.  Sure must look, to anybody young as you, as if we'll
never be able to just sit down and say we're satisfied.  Like we'll
always be out there fightin' ... and waitin' ... then havin' to fight
some more but ... but ..."

This time it was Clay's turn to glance, sidelong, across the car.  The
caramel-colored eyes that every Sunday without fail sent him the
reassuring comfort of unconditional trust from the front pews as he
preached weren't focused his way.  Instead, they gazed steadily through
the windshield off into the darkening sky above.  The curious preacher
hastily brought his own eyes back to the street ahead and guided the
black Buick farther on, devoid of the vaguest notion of the answer that
Harlan sought out on the horizon.

Oblivious to everything beyond the borders of a his spontaneous
deliberation, Clay Adderly's young companion slipped quietly away to
some other place.

Tempted to take just one more stab at making benign patter, it struck
Clay Adderly bottom line, "Common sense'll tell you, nobody speaks on a
thing until he feels good and ready.  Keepin' up nothin' but a whole
lot of useless talk ain't about to do any doggone good."

That duly considered, the minister instead opted for the resumption of
his own hushed speculation.  Though clueless, Clay continued
endeavoring all on his own to divine the root of what it was that was
going on with Harlan.  Then, rethinking this pursuit too he brought
himself up short with a silent reprimand.  "Cool it!  Just cool it and
leave Einstein to bein' Einstein.  Let it all rest a spell.  `To
everything there is a season ...,' " the young theologian dutifully
reminded himself.

Clay quietly mulled over a few events in the more than three years that
had gone by since his arrival in Philadelphia as a newly ordained,
young minister with his wife, Joyce.

*********************************************

Greater Thesselonian's edifice, a huge, regal stone structure, was one
of the city's oldest and most venerated black churches.  The
intricacies of its protocol, no less in mass and importance than the
edifice itself, had it that the responsibility for an incoming
minister's briefing in regard to the management of church business
could only be entrusted to either the church's head deacon or trustee. 
Frank Creely haughtily sported both hats.

Clay Adderly and Frank Creely met, for the first time, at the church to
discuss preliminaries the very same Tuesday afternoon Clay had driven
in from Lancaster with the remainder of his and Joyce Adderly's
belongings.

Joyce, Clay's wife of two years by then had already preceded him to
Philadelphia nearly a week prior, to put the renovated and properly
tuck-pointed red brick house they'd rented in order.  The ensuing
constant shuttling of essential details and questions via telephone as
well as in person since Clay's arrival soon brought him, and Joyce too,
into close ongoing contact with the deacon and his family.

Cleotha Creely, Frank's wife, was a short, soft-spoken woman with a
body nearly as stout as her spirit.  In her free time, she tended to
much of the church's secondary affairs and clerical matters.  She kept
them set to right with steady-handed and dutiful thoroughness.

From the start, she'd much impressed the church's new preacher, in
contrast to her vociferously fussy husband, by the quiet, unassuming
fashion in which she moved around the church, task to task.

As earnest a parent as church member, at that point in time it was
never uncommon to find Cleotha and Frank's brood of two in close
proximity to any site where their mother's hand was being applied.  And
so, domino effect, common events led to a string of circumstantial 
first meetings that eventually brought about the new preacher's
introduction to Harlan a week after his arrival.  It was late morning
the Saturday abutted against the day he'd deliver his premier sermon. 
Even then, first handshake, each had taken a liking to the other ...

Clay remembered well the quiet, beautiful unassuming boy he'd met who
even then had stood nearly as tall as he.

*********************************************

Waiting for the yellow cab just ahead to move on, Clay reflected on how
he and Harlan had seen the other grow; each from his respective side of
the pulpit.  In quiet undefined friendship each had given to and taken
from the other in unacknowledged, respectful ways of the spirit ...

Just the year before with his gentle assurance of good things to come,
it had been the young preacher's strong arms that had cradled Harlan's
head and broad shoulders and gently let the lean youth down into the
baptismal pool and borne him up again into the world, clean.

In turn as Clay, himself young in age and the ministry would opine of
faith and angels before the church's large congregation, from the
corner of an eye the preacher often drew much needed assurance and
inspiration from the well of silent support and admiration that always
lay in Harlan's attentive gaze.

At the next stoplight Clay curiously thought on that -- the full
meaning of Harlan's apparent admiration of him -- and then thought
again.  "Man, don't go jivin' yourself ... ain't no such thing ...
can't be.  Got to be losin' your mind," he cautioned himself suddenly
uneasy with his own meditations.  "Anyhow, don't let foolish thinkin'
get in the way of providin' what he needs most-- real help."

As far away as he seemed, Harlan was only removed from the big man
beside him by his silence.  At that moment, Clay Adderly was the axis
of all his doubtful thoughts' orbits.  Though he'd come to know the
busy minister as well as anyone else in a congregation so large might
have the chance to, Harlan had yet to learn there's no earthly
difference between a preacher and an everyday man.

"If I ask him to, he'll keep it to himself.  Mom or Daddy won't have to
know.  But what am I doin'?  He's a man with a wife; what in the world
would he know to tell me about somethin' like this?" Harlan considered,
anxious and skeptical all over again.  "There's no way on Earth he
understands a damn thing I feel.  He's probably not even interested in
hearin' it I bet."  Harlan's long, soft sigh was not heard above the
drone of the Buick's engine.

"Good God, sweet God ... please ..." inaugurated a silent and desperate
teenage prayer.  Harlan felt fear start to crawl all over himself
again.  "I need to have him somehow understand ... got to," he prayed. 
"So no matter what else, don't let openin' my mouth go and mess up this
one thing on me.  Please, let just a little bit of somethin' stay the
same.  Let me tell him the truth and at least have the man still look
at me with that smile ... like always ..."

A visitation of no less reverently beheld vivid images, holy to some
and not to others, broke Harlan's train of thought when he envisioned
Clay's wonderful smile.  Harlan's thinking shortly plummeted from the
lofty place from where he'd lifted his prayer.  "Wonder just what he'd
say if I told him how he stays on my mind at night," he asked himself.

*********************************************

Late into the prior night as thought and fantasy forestalled sleep,
Harlan had lain restless in bed across the room from his sleeping
younger brother.  The long-limbed youth had turned from his back to his
belly, to his side to no avail.  Though he'd tried hard to allow the
veil of sleep to fall down about himself, Harlan continued to lie there
wide awake and aware of his agitated body.  His closed eyes were
crammed full of what seemed the count of a thousand brilliant pictures
of Clay; all from a continually unfolding collage inside his head.

That night the door of Harlan's imagination was well-oiled and open
wide.  It was easy for him to usher Clay, in naked phantom form, inside
the still, darkened house to his room.  An open-eyed dreamer, Harlan
used every shred of precious recollections to weave the sorcery that
drew the object of his passion to the stairs and into his bed.  Recall
of the contours of Clay's muscular form, the bass register of the young
preacher's kindly voice, his scent, put no hard demands to the youth in
the effort.

And so, the lean young dreamer lay close with Clay's mirage as his dick
slowly firmed and grew.  His scrotum lay loose and slack couched on his
intermittently tensing thighs feeling as if it was a storehouse for
fire.  For what seemed hours, he made drowsy pledges of love to his
invisible companion.

Side by side in the darkness, young Harlan and his lover lay in the
twilight where dreams come out to play saying things.  Things -- such
wonderful things -- they'd alternately whispered one to the other.  The
same bewitchment of anticipation that foretold to Harlan what he'd hear
his preacher man someday say added a preciousness to his dreaming that
was as priceless as the gold of Clay's skin.

From the core of his musing's rapidly mushrooming inventions, a very
malleable passion had burst upon Harlan.  Body thoroughly kindled by
it, he lay acutely conscious of all parts of his lean, strong body. 
His ex need, stirred up and more and more real than the ghost he lay in
bed with, instigated Harlan's barter of bedroom assumptions for the
greater comfort to be had in a self-surrogate tactile communication of
the moment's meaning.

Harlan slowly submerged his hands into the sea of heavy covers that had
lain over him through the wintry night.  Once against his bare burning
teak-brown skin he'd set them free, quite willingly giving them their
leave for a slow and familiar migratory descent past his waist.

On the way there the tips of his slim dark fingers gently brushed the
taut, velvet smooth skin on his chest and the ridged plain of his
abdomen.  His hands, like blackbirds gliding low, moved on and at last
took roost where the young man's want had made itself obvious as it
throbbed fully alive and aching for touch between his legs.

Emitting a boyish gossamer grunt, Harlan arched his supple back and
wiggled his slim hips as he quickly pushed down his white cotton
briefs, all he wore.  He then began to make his fantasy real, in the
only way young men left to solitary longing know how ...

*********************************************

Traffic in the narrow street before them grew heavier.  The going was
slow light to light.  Harlan rode along only half-cognizant of the
activity going on in the world outside the warm cocoon of the moving
car.  His mind would not let go of the hand of the remembrance he
courted from the prior night and the overpowering arousal that had been
spawned by Clay's seductive apparition.

Car horns and other realities persistently delivered light tugs at the
hem of the reverie robing Harlan, bringing about the preemption of his
daydream.  It was his own silent question that drew him back toward
current reality.  Harlan, curious, wondered at its answer.  Had Buddy
been roused by the frenzied creaking of his bed's springs or the
shuddering groan he'd been unable to rein when his fantasy had grown
too great and unruly to be controlled and at last had overwhelmed him?

Just at that point of thought, full-force reality yanked Harlan all the
way clear of dreams' and pondering's reflecting pool.  Ruminations of
the past night's solitary climb to satiation had, with quick success,
produced physical evidence of how real they'd been.

A large hill loomed between his long legs.  The accompanying sweet and
specific ache that emanated from the site, though definitely not
similar in type, was equal in strength to the ache he'd felt inside.  A
rush of hot blood gushed up to Harlan's face as, sprawled in his seat,
he returned fully to his senses.  With awkward haste he jammed his
knees together, then drew one leg across the other.  The embarrassed
youth bit his lip and grunted when he banged his knee against the car's
dash in the process.

Harlan nervously snatched one of his books off the seat and pressed it
into his lap just as Clay turned his way in response to the sound. 
Desperately ashamed, he hoped the preacher hadn't noticed.

"Harlan."

Harlan quickly straightened up and shook himself, deciding to turn no
more of the pages of his daydream.

"Yeah, Rev?"

"Turn the radio on -- go ahead -- I mean, if you feel like it.  Pick
out any station you want."

Relaxing a little in relief that no discovery of his hard-on had
occurred, Harlan quickly leaned in the driver's direction to reach for
the silver knob at the middle of the dash panel.  He turned it and a
click set the small numbered rectangle on the radio's face flashing
like a smile in the dimming light inside the car as dusk continued to
deepen.  Keeping in mind that after all he was riding with a preacher,
in polite deference, the teenager's wary first intention was to turn
straight to the local gospel station.  Then again remembering his
pledge to truth and to honesty, Harlan changed his mind and searched
the dial for music that better suited how he felt about the moment.

The ends of the youth's slim fingers danced quick-step along the row of
silver buttons just beneath the radio's lit dial until ... "Yes, I know
it looks all wrong."  The singer repeated herself twice more and ended
phrasing, "But my loneliness is gone ... And I feel for sure ... that
tonight this love is right."

*********************************************

The music played on as Clay braked for another a red light.  Mindful of
the traffic in the street ahead, Clay caught a glimpse of dreamy-eyed
Harlan as he appeared to be once again slipping away; this time sinking
into the peaceful sea the soulful song provided.

The young cleric jerked his gaze from the street and back again.  He
listened a little more carefully, then gave the steering wheel a light
tap with the heel of his hand.  Clay felt he'd finally comprehended. 
"So that's what it is!  Youngblood's a man in love," he thought,
grinning to himself, "Well, well, well."

Though reluctantly revealed, a look at a time not all that long passed
flooded the young preacher's mind in a surging rush too great to allow
him time to open himself to its pleasure or steel himself against its
pain.  His days of tutelage at the seminary came into view, and so did
Dan and all of it ... all over again.  Frowning, Clay shook his head
and shooed the invading past away...

The remainder of the ride was silent save for the radio's soft playing.
 It came to an end a few minutes later as Clay swung the shiny black
Buick off the street and into the common drive at the rear of his house.


1964 - Part 2

"In you go," Clay enjoined his guest and once more cheerily snatched up
the reins of conversation.  "We'll get ourselves in out of this cold
air right quick and see what's good for eatin' in my kitchen
cupboards."  The tall preacher hurriedly locked the car on Harlan's
exit.  He led Harlan along a short flagstone walkway to the backsteps
of the house, then quickly ushered the youth in once he'd dredged his
overcoat pocket for his house keys and swung the back door open.

The click of the light switch on the wall just beside the back door
initiated a clean and warm kitchen's bright exhibition as the
fluorescent ring centered in the ceiling flickered on.  Familiar to
Harlan by its strong resemblance to his mother's, the large kitchen
smelled of fresh made bread, pepper and sage and sweet spice.  The
resulting sense of safety he gained in such a benign environ naturally
alleviated some of Harlan's nervousness as he silently took a longer
look around the preacher's kitchen.

"Hey, it just came to me; this has got be the first time you've been
out this way," Clay realized as he rested a yet gloved hand on Harlan's
shoulder.  "The deacon stops by here every now and then as need arises
you know -- even Sister Creely's been by two or three times."  Pulling
off his gloves to stuff them in the pocket of his heavy coat, the
minister paused his speaking.

"Well then," he began again affably, "if that indeed's the case, Mr.
Creely sir, I bid you welcome to my humble home."  The tall man's quick
salutary nod accompanied his offering of hospitality.  Smiling
reassuringly at his visitor as though no matters for concern existed,
the young preacher's strong right hand shot out equally as quick in
welcome and he gave the warm nape of Harlan's neck a firm squeeze.

"Put your books any place you feel like over there," the preacher said,
pointing to a round white dining table ringed by four high-backed
chairs at the kitchen's opposite end, "and let me get hold of that
jacket.  I'll take it up and hang it with my stuff."

Harlan momentarily stacked his books on the floor between his feet and,
quickly removing it, handed his fondest possession, his leather jacket
over to Clay.  The preacher disappeared from the kitchen it and his own
coat.  Taking a seat, Harlan settled himself at the table and stretched
out his long legs, not wanting to think.

The young minister returned to his guest and again broke into friendly
banter as through a series of little inspections, he began to select
and transfer a few foil wrapped items from inside the refrigerator to
the kitchen's countertop.  Looking up as he searched , Clay eyed the
clock over the stove.  "Say buddy," he asked, "feel like givin me a
hand?  I sure could use one if you don't mind.  Plates are in this
cabinet just by me and the silverware's right over there in that drawer
left of the sink."

Harlan had been sitting anxious at what to say in his anticipation of
the advent of some serious talking.  The far braver side of himself,
ready to see a change made, eagerly awaited the coming discussion while
his more fearful half tried to blind itself, meaning to void his mind
of the thought.  Thus, any task offered him would have proved a relief.

Immediately, the tall and comely youth rose from his seat and began
gathering together the table's necessaries.  He set his books aside in
a corner and carefully laid places for two.  Though himself never known
to be an eager hand in a kitchen, this seemed a very special time; the
tw them alone together.  Harlan left the table for Clay's side at the
stove asking anyway, "Anything I can do over here?"

Clay gave Harlan the same wide grin he always easily granted him. 
"Youngblood, thank you kindly for askin' but when it comes to shufflin'
pots and pans it's probably best you let me get myself in trouble
alone.  Besides, everything's just about ready anyhow."

Quite true.  Within the next few minutes, Clay was quickly setting out
a pan of hot, aromatic baked chicken wings along side a bowl of
steaming greens, some rice and store-bought bread at the center of the
table 

Automatic in their response, once seated, both Harlan and Clay's heads
solemnly lowered as, aloud, the young minister thanked his God for
bounteous goodness.  The blessing said, Clay then jabbed his fork in
the direction of the hot food waiting on the table.  "Dig in," he
generously encouraged Harlan.

Straight off, it appeared each had found a perfect companion in the
other.  Both ate heartily and contentedly followed as table
conversation roamed whim's free and easy paths.  Harlan sat happily far
removed from his worries, for a time.

It wasn't until they were standing side by side at the kitchen sink,
cleaning up the last of the dishes, that Clay gently informed Harlan,
"You know youngblood, nowadays there's every kind of sadness imaginable
in this world -- whole lot of it too.  Yet sometimes a problem's not
the uncrossable river we might make it out to be.  Then again sometimes
it may well be but usually you'll find you can begin to see your way
around it if --"

"I can't see how I'm gonna find a way past this ... ain't none," Harlan
suddenly blurted out.  "Rev, right now I feel like I might as well lay
down and die."

"Why is that?  Tell me," Clay gently demanded to know but no
explanation came.  The minister  thought on it and then asked, "Harlan
did you get yourself in some kind of trouble with a girl?  Is that
what's got you so upset?"

"Huh?"  Harlan's face momentarily masked the alterations his woe had
made upon it as he almost raucously snorted out a laugh.  But all it
took was a second's worth of his own thinking to cause the teenage boy
to turn his beautiful face from Clay as his cheeks began to burn red
hot.  He searched for strength as he replied with a quavering voice,
"No Rev, that's my whole problem.  I'll never be in trouble with
girls."  The dinner plate he'd just washed slipped from his soapy
fingers back into the dishwater.

All at once, the handsome arrangement of Harlan's fine, winsome
features was twisted awry by an overwhelming rush of pain.  The dam
that had held back the vastness of his pent-up tears and emotions until
just that moment crumbled and collapsed.  All his sorrows began to
cascade down his burning cheeks in a flood.

The young preacher instantly enfolded this young member of his flock's
slim, shuddering frame within both his strong arms and pulled him tight
against himself.  Holding the weeping youth close as a baby despite his
size, the tall, muscular preacher rocked the youth side to side in the
gentlest way as he stood leaned against the sink cabinet.  "Go `head,
let it out ... let all of it out," he softly whispered in Harlan's ear.

Harlan, helpless to throttle his tears, hid his weeping eyes away at
the warm junction of Clay's thick neck and broad shoulder.  He cried
for quite some time as Clay held him close, a big hand cradling his
bowed head.

Eventually, the more the sorrowful rain of the youth's tears gradually
abated, the more obvious it became to Harlan just how near they stood. 
Despite all the hurt he felt inside, sensory pleasures invoked by their
bodies closeness as he drew on the tall man's solace all at once set
its spur to his volatile teenage sensuality.  The requirements
respecting the remedy of his distress were sudden and decisively being
reprioritized by rapid degrees.

The comforting strength of the young preacher's arms was imbuing a
feeling of security in youth again the same as they had that day he'd
been baptized.  It seemed just then to Harlan, no meanness, no
misunderstanding lying beyond the cozy realm of Clay's kitchen could
ever touch him as long as he was there bound up and sheltered in the
young preacher's arms.  The youth sensed his healing beginning.

Nonetheless, it was in strange, surprising manner that his anguish
commenced to turn itself inside out.

This deft execution of acrobatics by emotion despite the great girth of
his misery was as amazing to Harlan as it was frightening.  All in one
involuntary convolution, the feeling in him kept its size but changed
its face.  Harlan was no longer yearning to be free of pain but,
instead, wanting to be quickly taught how to express love.

Hot-cheeked and shaken, every muscle of Harlan's lean, hard frame
suddenly stiffened near as rigid as the rip-roaring erection that ached
like all hell as it strained full-blown against his pant leg.  Though
there was no doubt that his each and every dream, daytime ...
nighttime, often put forth for display brightly painted depictions of
moments exactly like this in Harlan's head, the youth stood completely
stunned and surprised at how self-control had become so slippery in his
grasp.  Long and strong as it had grown, he was certain his hard-on had
to be obvious to Clay because of the tight press of their bodies.

Fear of the rawest and most elementary kind goaded the bewildered
teenager to break free and run before an avalanche of the preacher's
scorn and scathing judgment could begin to fall upon him.  However, his
legs suddenly felt devoid of strength and way too weak to support him.

Trembling and too terrified to peer into the frame of outrage he
believed he'd find about Clay's face, Harlan let his own remain hidden
away since the big man had yet rescind the shelter he provided and push
him off.  It was with the greatest fear that he slowly raised his
gathered brow off the young preacher's shoulder.  His glistening oval
eyes were wide with horror and his young, gentle countenance was marred
by ribbons formed from the salt trails his tears left behind.  With
some effort, Harlan at last brought his eyes to Clay's and stammered
piteously, "Oh my God!  I'm so sorry Rev.  Real sorry ... I didn't mean
to -- but I --"

Clay slowly let him go but made no move to break the close contact of
their bodies.  Instead he gently clasped Harlan's face betwixt his big
hands and said, "Hold steady youngblood.  It's okay."  With fatherly
tenderness the big man deftly whisked away the track of a tear's wet
sheen off Harlan's cheek with his thumb.  "It's somethin' that's
understandable.  Just about every young man's full of nature bustin' to
be let out.  Every now and then that nature'll boil up on him and --"
Clay cut his counsel short.

As though a sentinel alerted by some sound faint and distant, Clay
Adderly's brow lifted as he stopped to consider a peculiar scent riding
the wind just that moment as he kept Harlan close.  And all in that
moment, the handsome preacher's broad chest abruptly swelled even wider
as he gasped.  "Wait!"  His voice swooped to a low disbelieving
whisper.  "Youngblood; is that what you been tryin' to tell me all
along -- that you're --"

Harlan's chin quivered once more as he nodded an affirmative to Clay's
unfinished question.

Suddenly, Clay hugged the youth hard himself and his sides shook as he
began to laugh out loud.  "Aw man come on," he chuckled at the
absurdity he assumed to be inside the silent admission as he began to
rock the teenage boy side to side again and rub his back with the
comfortingly firm press of his hand.  "You think you're that way; young
as you are?  You can't know nothin' `bout no such a thing.  What makes
you think so?"

" `Cause I feel it all the time, Rev!  I feel it right now for you,"
the Harlan cried out desperately, seeming almost ready to surrender to
tears once more as he confessed, "and I always did."

Though taken by surprise again, Clay continued to hold onto Harlan but
tilted his own head back for a deeper, more serious gaze into Harlan's
eyes.  "Me?" he asked.  A hazy cast was lain on his voice by pure
amazement.  "You've got feelin's for me youngblood ...  somethin' like
sex?"

"Uh-uh, more than that Rev -- somethin' like love," Harlan heard
himself whisper before he could detour his words.

It was then that Harlan Creely came to make the greatest decision of
the day; the one that would effect him for all his life.  Despite the
youth's amateur rank with respect to matters of the heart, he willingly
gave in to the inevitable belief in miracles that beguilement leads
those seeking love to count on.  Suddenly made brave, in a headlong
rush Harlan mashed his full mouth against Clay's.  And so, the handsome
youth gained his very first exposure to the sugar sweet contagion of
the madness that inherently infects a lover's kiss.  Awed and hungry
from this first experience of the electric velvet of Clay's lips,
Harlan compacted his mouth harder against the young preacher's and
kissed him as deep as he knew how.

A flash flood of fire swept all through Harlan's veins.  Swollen stout
and seemingly about to burst, the lean youth's manhood twitched and
ached, its considerable length agonizingly bent askew inside the
confines of his pants.  Accordingly, the heat of sex came to gain a
height of degree for Harlan beyond any test by the virgin youth's
previous imaginings once he began to see it wasn't just the walls of
his own reserve that were being ripped down from the inside.  He
hadn't, after all, found himself forsaken in light of the rash manner
of his revelation of himself.  There he was still tightly gathered up
in the handsome preacher's hard arm's.

His own emotions gone renegade too, Clay had begun to seriously invest
himself in the urgent kiss, ardently reciprocating Harlan's soft, full
lips' offering of pleasure as his hold on him grew all the more fast.

Merely an Earthly man, the preacher had never known a time in his
thirty-two going on thirty-three years when any of the inner components
that made the whole of him had ever come into alignment.  That proved
never more true than just that instant.  Due to the separate nature and
pursuit of each, the young minister's reason, faith, heart, and the
compelling, electrifying arousal of his body chose up sides leaving it
to some unkown sector of the man he was to decided where he'd stand.

Clay Adderly found it impossible to pull his mouth from the salted
sweetness of the lips of the slim, hard-bodied youth he clutched so
hard against himself as he meant to.  With every rise and fall of the
wide span of his heaving chest, jet blasts of breath raced through the
tall man's flared nostrils as though he were a stud bull suddenly in
full run toward the nirvana of a mounting.  Yet all the while, reason
and faith naggingly prompted the handsome minister to let go of his
desire and Harlan.  seek and accept a pious victory by a leap to
thoroughfares higher than the common supply road for pleasures of the
flesh.

However, such protest to his actions was proved of no avail.  The
desperate ache in his heart and the burning of his man parts straining
to rise up from between his hard, muscular thighs were undoubtedly
fostering an easy win for the temptation he was fighting.  It became
obvious that, as a man, Clay would not be able to resist one more press
of Harlan's stumbling lips.

Invisible forces made a free-style game of ping-pong with the tossing
of torturesome feelings.  In volleys coming swift and continuous, the
young minister's affection for the youth he somehow couldn't seem to
release, his fear for his soul and the ball of carnal fire smoldering
hot at his loins were lobbed back and forth across the table of his
awareness.  Despite the fire storm of passion his fevered mind was
caught in, the young preacher knew full well that everything respecting
the moment and both their lives rested on the same high table of
decision.

From the very onset of his ministerial training, it had been ingrained
in Clay Adderly that a man of the cloth was bound to his work by vows
even more sacred than those he'd, one day, make to a woman when he took
her for a wife.  As the young cleric himself would be expected to
teach, he'd been taught that the prescribed recourse in the face of
trial and temptation was the remedy of strict obedience abetted by
prayer that was bolstered by careful propriety.  The well-trained
soldier in himself adherent to that teaching, loudly wailed out
cautions of ruin and recompense's closeness at hand should he leave his
lips on Harlan's a moment longer.  But, Clay had waited too long.

In love, sexually aroused, and thoroughly confused all at once, the
virile young preacher found his gut a mass of knots.  In truth, as any
man engulfed by an earthly need, Clay harbored no immaculately
conceived desire to have either his heart or body's outcry pass Harlan
unheeded.  Alternate to everything the calling of the church demanded
of him, this side of himself was willing to hazard just about anything
for that one small opportunity to take a taste of a happiness he'd
always wanted.

Yet ... love proves itself in the strangest ways ...

It was all in one a fell swoop that the preacher broke the lock on the
kiss that had melded their mouths for the last several minutes. 
Furious with himself for not immediately resisting but gasping like a
drowning man fighting the undertow of Harlan's kiss, Clay abruptly
shoved Harlan away; forcefully enough to leave the bewildered teenager
suddenly standing on his own, startled.

"Harlan ... baby ... I want you to think about this.  You've got to,"
Clay panted.  "Are you sure -- really sure?  How in the world do you
know you really want somethin' like this?  Who's been with you?"

"Nobody -- ever," Harlan replied, his own muscular chest heaving wildly
as Clay's eyes, gone stern, painstakingly traversed his face for signs
of the truth.

"Well then seems to me, the best I could do for either one of us right
this minute is lie.  Yeah, lie ... and lie big time," the suddenly
wild-eyed, good-looking man mumbled as he stood half-dazed just outside
the gates of a hellish confusion.  "I ought to come right out and say
ain't no way on Earth I'd have a doggone thing to do with messin' with
you.  Think about what I'm tryin' to say youngblood."

The tone of Clay's voice rang frighteningly resolute in Harlan's
unwilling ear as the young preacher arched an eyebrow and leaned
forward to put forth a question that apparently already bore an answer.
 "Ain't that right?  Shouldn't it be me tellin' you it's one hundred
percent wrong to have this happen; that it's wrong for you whether it's
with me -- or with any other man?  Boy, shouldn't I be smackin' you
cross your lean behind and sendin' you home?"

"Good God almighty, youngblood.  One day, somebody's goin' to look me
straight in the eye and say plain and clear, if not for my own sake
then surely for yours -- you bein' nowhere near grown -- that that's
exactly the thing I should have done if you wouldn't show sense enough
to get up and get out of here on your own.  Come that day, they'll be
right.  Yes, they will.  And, guess what else; after all's said and
done, they're goin' to say the weight of the sin in this rests on me
`cause, in spite my havin' a knowledge of the Word, I helped you break
laws set above any of those of man's."

"But..."

"But nothin!  Please ... please!  Just you hold your peace and hear me
out."  Clay ordered as his thick, splayed fingers flew up to Harlan's
lips, nervously fluttering there as if his hand was a great bird
seeking a to roost.  Though gentle, the press of his fingertips did
weigh down the protestations just about to rise from Harlan's lips.

Mystified as the panorama of all there was to be considered grew wider
to him, the befuddled young preacher sighed heavily and then went on. 
Eyes all at once full of helplessness he said, "Lookin' at the thing
the other way, at least now I know what the feelin' of bein' really
close with you's like.  Most of the wonderin' I felt no right to come
to you with is over.  You were right here inside these two arms," the
big man said as he hoisted his big arms and dreamily gazed between them
genuinely mystified at what they'd just known.  "Yeah, -- I've found it
out for myself now and never another moment in my life'll seem as sweet
and I don't want to have to let you go," he continued with a sigh as he
let his arms fall to his sides once more.  "I want it to be for forever
just like all those Motown love songs and the TV stories you young'uns
pay so much attention to.  Wrong or right, youngblood, that's the
genuine truth; I swear."

"And worst thing ... I can't do a durn thing about it.  It's almost
like I can step outside my skin and see me here just like ol' Sampson,
gone and got his hair cut.  That's how it is.  I feel no strength in me
at all as far as you're concerned, youngblood ... not a whit's worth of
strength."  The big man's strong broad hand trembled leaflike as he
slowly lifted it to allow the tips of his fingers to longingly trail
along Harlan's smooth cheek.  "Sweet, sweet youngblood," he murmured
fervently, "there's not even enough power in me to hand you your jacket
and those schoolbooks on that table over like real love's supposed to
make me do."

Yet endeavoring to master his desire, the muscular, gold-skinned young
preacher shook his head, rallying himself for another round.  "Exactly
where you go for comparisons of such situations I can't say, `cause
it's been a long time gone since I came `cross anybody sharin' this
same kind of feelin' `cept you and me.  Even so, there's a significant
difference between us you see.  For whatever there appears to be to me
sizewise," his open hands demonstratively swooping from his head and
down his broad upper frame, "I don't think in all my life I've ever
been as brave as you just now Harlan -- save for one livin' man -- I've
yet to let a single soul know.'

"Not that I didn't want to, I've always known what was in my heart,
what I'd have liked to have, what my real nature was.  Then again, it
was always plain to me, without needin' it drummed in my head, just how
much the world's willingly going to give me permission to own.

"Won't claim I've been standin' down here long enough to consider
myself a voice of deep wisdom but I've seen enough to know a man can
end up payin' serious consequences if he reaches out meanin' to take
more off the table than this nasty, low down ol' world we're livin' in
feels he's ought to have.

Thoughtful, Clay shrugged his broad shoulders.  "Who knows my man,
might be that's my problem," his sigh tellingly rueful.  Maybe I'm
runnin' scared; too scared to take a long shot chance on somethin'
wonderful.  But, my oh my, look at you," Clay added as he took the
Harlan by the shoulders and began to grin at the youth as with pride. 
"You're full enough of a hot-blooded spirit to come right out and say
you think you love me.  Dead in front of me I see the risin' nature a
young black warrior's surely got to have if he's of a mind to conquer. 
You've showed me all that just now in a kiss and for all the rest of my
natural days I'll not forget it."

"But you're so young;" the handsome preacher stated with a sad groan,
"way too young to have the scarcest idea of what it is you're askin' to
be allowed to snatch off that table I'm talkin' about.  Hold on now,
don't you go shakin' your head -- You think I'm standin' here sayin'
all this just to here myself talk?  Listen to what I say."

Clay once again sternly cut off another protest.  "Shh!  Listen!  Right
now, let me try my level best to guide you to a way out.  Let me do the
right thing and boost you up to higher ground before we end up swamped
in somethin' there'll be no way to climb out of.

"Believe me, everything I feel for you inside here --" he said, turning
a big, thick finger to his broad chest's center, "burns as big as any
fire my wantin' to lay down with you could ever set ablaze in me.  The
very same way I burnin' for you in my body, I need you for my heart. 
It's because I do care that there's still that little bit of right left
in me that's makin' me say, `Think it over one more time.' "

"Youngblood, you can go home.  We can stop the whole show right here,
right now, before we commence dancin' to this music ringin' sweet in
our ears.  No denyin' the tune I hear playin' is the same you do.  Sure
sounds real pretty too but don't you be deceived.  Uh-uh!  Even though
it's mighty, mighty sweet to us -- kissin', touchin' like we've just
been I mean, -- more than likely, we'll soon see a fiddler at the door
lookin' for his pay, my friend.  Then what?  You startin' to understand
what I'm sayin' Harlan?

"Go ask somebody else to pick a name for that tune playin' for us now. 
They'll give you names aplenty.  And I guarantee you, not a one's gonna
sound nice.  There's no doubt in my mind you want to call all this
sweet romance ... true love ... somethin' like that.  But, that's you,"
the young preacher chuckled dryly.  "They'll tell you ain't but one
name for this song -- wrong," Clay said flat voiced and earnest. 
"That's why I'm askin' you if you're really sure you want to own what
you say you feel?"

Harlan refused to keep silent any longer.  "Yes!  Yes, I'm sure," was
his first blast of fiery insistence.  Yet, for all the brave appearance
of the bold, soldierly face he'd put on, suddenly fearing he was about
to be sent off forever, the anxious young lover desperately grabbed two
handfuls of Clay's shirtfront like a little boy frightened of falling. 
With all his might, he slowly drew his lean body against the rocklike,
reassuring firmness of the preacher's once more.  Meaning to make a
convincing demonstration of reasons for Clay to let him remain, Harlan
mashed and nuzzled his smooth cheek against the thrillingly rough
stubble on Clay's.  He held on as he rubbed his smooth temple against
the young preacher's thick neck with relish as he sucked in the scent
of the man and remnants of that morning's splash of aftershave eagerly
into his nostrils.  "I don't want to go ... don't send me home now,"
the youth whispered in his hero's ear.

Like a novice attempting to learn the attitudes of a ritual dance',
eagerly the tall, lean youth awkwardly coiled his own strong arms about
Clay's thick neck and, clearly pronouncing each word, told him, "I
don't care.  Do you hear me?  I don't care.

"Huh?" the minister asked without attempting to push his young
parishioner from his body.

"No matter what name anybody else gives it and even if I've never had a
chance to hear it turned up loud before, the music I hear is the music
I like and it's sweet to me -- every note ..." Harlan peered deep into
Clay's eyes.  "It makes me want to dance to it and I don't feel like
waitin' ... no ... not now.  So, whatever the cost comes to, I'll pay
up if and when the time comes -- if that's the way it's just got to be."

The little radio on the windowsill at the back of the kitchen was
unplugged.  No music at all drifted into the kitchen save for the one
note drone of the refrigerator.  Nonetheless, pulling Clay along as he
showed him how, Harlan began to lead a clumsy, comic waltz.  "Doesn't
make a bit of difference to me Rev, long as  ... one-two-three ...
one-two-three ...," their feet slowly shuffled on the kitchen floor,
"long as I'm dancin' with you."

In time their dance slowly came to an end but the enchantment of it did
not.  The two reluctantly parted themselves to sit face-to-face across
the table.

"Can you tell me why it seems everybody thinks you've got nothin' but
air between your ears just `cause you're young?" Harlan quizzed Clay
once he'd judged his thoughts sufficiently ordered.  "You know, just
`cause I'm not some old man with false teeth for a badge of merit,
doesn't mean I'm so young I can't make out the way the pieces sit on
the board.  I do."

Curious at what he had to say, Clay sat back.

"Even though the picture doesn't look too pretty, there's still this
feelin' in me and I don't mean to fight it anymore.  Love this, love
that.  Love your fellow man and your neighbor, love your father, love
your mother, love your brother, love your sister," Harlan recited. 
"Then it's all about love, ain't it?" he asked of the young minister a
second later.  "Well then that's why I want to look at this love I feel
to find out for myself what it really is; to see if I can enjoy it --
even live with it ... live with this love.  I just have to Rev."

Harlan sighed and straightened in his chair.  "You know, I've never
even tried seriously discussin' sex and stuff with my father;
especially anything about this.  Even so, it won't matter whether I
tell him or not.  Daddy never leaves anybody else's business alone for
long.  He always goes nosin' round in every darn thing, makin' your
plans for you without askin' first; settin' everything the way he
thinks it ought to go.  It's a sure thing one day he's going to find
out I'm a --"

Hesitant, Harlan first frowned and caught his lip between his pearly
teeth.  Then, the handsome youth suddenly drew his wide shoulders all
the way back and sucked in a chest full of the kitchen's spice scented
air the instant before he made himself describe himself with the only
serviceable word he knew, "... faggot," for the very first time.

All in the turnover of the next moment Harlan, greatly relieved at this
small step forward, smiled shyly, suddenly feeling warm inside as his
thinking happily led him back to the kiss.  He set that thought aside
to continue

"Maybe I'm goin' crazy but just this minute I don't feel afraid of what
my father might say or do `cause, same as you, at least one thing I've
wanted to be has happened and it's turned out to be even better than
I'd dreamed."  In transient silence, the teak-hued youth sat quite
thoughtful as he lightly traced the edge of his bottom lip with two
fingertips.  "No -- I almost can't believe it myself," Harlan said, his
eyes bursting with light.

"That's where my problem starts, huh?" Harlan quickly added not wanting
his golden man to, after all, take him for a dreamy-eyed boy.  "Hmm, if
I can hardly believe it, how could anybody else understand it?"

Harlan's full mouth abruptly thinned and stretched into an uncharitable
slash across his handsome face.  "All my life, Daddy's done nothin' but
preach, `Boy, your duty plain and clear is to listen and obey,' " the
son, bitterly contemptuous mimicked his southern born father's pompous
manner of speech.

"No matter how hard I've tried, Rev, I can't get him to recognize me,
to see me, to know me.  Even in simple stuff."

"For months now I've been tryin' to make him see I'm no way interested
in his tight-assed way of livin' or the plans he's got for me and his
insurance business.  I've been tellin' him over and over I don't like
it, I don't want it.  But does he hear me?  No.  He just keeps on
pushin' me along anyway, like I'd never said a word to him."

"You can bet your last money, if the man even had had a half-idea of
what's in my head he'd have hauled off busted my back in two by now.  I
know without even guessin' how my father's gonna take it, if and when
it comes to light.

"It'll be somethin' like the atomic bomb bein' set off in West Philly. 
Deacon Frank Creely's never goin' for leavin' me to be with who I want
to -- or leavin' me to anything else I intend doin' my way and not his.
 Not now, not in the next thousand years -- meanin', my father will be
first on the list of people I'll have to ... How do those big business
guys say it? ... oh yeah ... I'll have to rack him up as a loss."

"As for my mom ... what she'll do ... what she'll say ... I don't
know."  Worry again registered on Harlan's face.  "She loves me I know
but with Mom and me it's been nineteen years of her pushin' me in back
of her while she stands back and lets Daddy always have his way. 
Whatever I've wanted to do, whatever I've felt I should have, with her
it's always been, `Ask your daddy.'

"She's not goin' to like any of this one bit and won't be able to
understand it either, but maybe she'll still love me anyway ... maybe
... she's my mom.

"And friends -- Shoot no sense in studyin' about them either.  Who
could I run to?  Not one.  None of them could get a handle on somethin'
that's this out of sight.  It hardly even crosses their minds.  I ought
to know, I've been around `em all through school."

"Every other guy I've grown up with can't be beat if you're looking to
learn how to set up a jump shot or fake out somebody on a basketball
court.  And every one's got more than a page worth of lines to get
girls to let you mess around feelin' on `em and stuff.  But, for
anything serious -- they know nothin'; especially if it comes around to
somethin' as way out as a guy havin' feelin's for another guy.  And
they don't want to know either.

"You don't hear stuff like that come up until all of a sudden somebody
gets a dirty story goin'.  Probably, it would be easier to tell one of
my good friends I'd come down with some kind of bad disease than to
come out and say, `Hey man, I'm sweet'.  No way," the youth shook his
head resolutely decided he was right.  "As far as friendship goes I
pretty much expect I'll be left on my own in that department too."

"And ... if everything ends up fallin' apart at home and my friends
won't stick by me," he leaned forward drawing Clay's eyes up from his
folded hands as the pain of knowledge cast clouds on his own, "I can't
look to you.  Where can we go beyond tonight, beyond just now?.  You've
got a special life all your own and -- you're married.  See, I've got
the picture real clear."

"But at least we could have tonight -- couldn't we?" Harlan asked
guardedly, though as his face brightened like a boy in hope of
convincing his father to take him for a ride on a ferris wheel.  "I
admit all this is somethin' that's finally got its chance to breath
just tonight but it didn't just come from out of nowhere.  I know it
and so do you.  It's been there all the time, right between us, waitin'
to be born and owned up to.  Hasn't it?  Can't you tell it?"

"So, even if it's got to live and die all in this one night, I'll never
be sorry.  Wrong or right -- I'm glad the feeling's alive?  Can't you
see it on my face?  You can't tell I really do believe this thing I'm
feelin' inside is good, that it's okay?  Uh-uh Rev," he continued, soft
but stubborn, "no matter how rough it comes down on me I won't run. 
I'll stand and take my licks but, swear to God, you'll never once hear
me say it was for nothin' because there'll have been this special thing
that happened with you.  But it can't be with just any old body -- It's
got to be with you!"

Stammering as he began, Harlan spoke more deeply of his secret.  "I ...
I get so scared ... just can't help it sometimes.  I feel as if I don't
find myself somebody to be with I'm ... I'll... oh, I don't know.  I've
thought about tryin' it with somebody for a long time but I never have.
 No one else would do anyway.

"Since the very first time I saw you, seems all the dreams I dreamed
have been about what touchin' you would be like, what it would be like
to feel you touchin' me.  To know if it feels the same to you ... you
know when you ...," Harlan blushed, not finishing what he wanted to
say.  "Honest, I can't help it," he said with finality.  "I wonder
about you all the time."

Putting truth to the test emboldened Harlan in speech yet, skittish,
his light eyes often avoided Clay's direct gaze.  "Day and night I keep
on thinkin' and thinkin', " he continued, turning his face away, "even
though I've heard a truck load of dirty jokes and stories `bout guys
--gettin' on each other -- about some of `em even actin' like they're
supposed to be girls.  But, I don't want to be no girl, Rev.  I just
want to be me and be like a man even though I want to be with you.  I
know now you can show me what I want to know.  Do it.  Please?  Do it."

Solemn and deep as the darkness that escorts midnight yet as soft and
fine on Harlan's ear as velvet to a finger's touch, Clay's deep voice
issued consent to his wish, "Come upstairs then, youngblood.  Come on
up now."

In a dream state the pair, Clay leading, rose from their seats at the
table and exited the kitchen.  All the house was silent except for the
refrigerator's hum which faded behind them each step farther away.  The
musical tinkle of the glassware on the polished shelves inside the
china cabinet in the small darkened dining room chimed a brief tiny
chorus as the two of them crossed the middle of the house to ascend
into the light at the top of the narrow stairs.

They were halfway up when Clay reached back for Harlan's hand.  Once
they'd reached the upper landing he led the way and they put the few
paces of the upstairs hall's length behind them as they slipped into
the quiet, unlit front bedroom.

The closing of the bedroom's door banished the radiance of the cluster
of small bright bulbs screwed into the tentacled brass fixture hanging
high in the hallway outside the largest of the brick rowhouse's three
upper rooms.  It's door firmly shut behind the two, the front bedroom
was dark again save for silver slivers of light being forced in through
the spaces in the closed Venetian blinds as a street lamp vigilantly
burned out front.  There was no brighter beacon's rays to guide them in
the dark that night but without any difficulty, they found each others
mouths again.

Without a look downward at the world they'd begun to put behind
themselves, the handsome man and the comely youth embraced once more,
alone at last, there upstairs in the dark.

So moved by the wonder of the moment that he had to speak his heart,
Clay briefly interrupted their feverish kiss.  "I swear nobody ...
absolutely nobody ... should ever kiss this mouth but me," his baritone
shuddered with passionate conviction.  "Nobody."

Uttering no verbal reply, Harlan declared his full agreement by
hungrily hurrying his mouth back home to Clay's.  All his prior
ravenous appetite for words with which to express himself and the best
of his dreams, had flown from him.

The highly combustible composite of volatile essence which constitutes
beginnings for lovers -- the taste of lips, the sense of speciality in
a certain touch, the particularly seductive natural scent of someone's
skin or hair -- ignited.  So fueled, his first rocket ride on the
sensations of first real intimacy inebriated Harlan, bestowing upon him
a sense of elevation he couldn't in a million years explain.  He was
close to Clay but far beyond the dense atmosphere of practical thought.

Only someone else who'd already made a like journey could have readily
grasped the reasons for virgin Harlan's uncomfortable squirming within
the aggravating bind of the heavy winter clothing he wore.  The flannel
shirt he wore, his woolen sweater, the heavy corduroy pants all felt
suddenly itchy and ill-fitting.  His heaving belly and groin were
rigidly bound by his cotton briefs.  Harlan's cock was arrow straight
and hard as a rock inside them, aching for freedom.  Pushed against
Clay's groin with needful insistence, Harlan's sex throbbed out the
same intermittent code matching the pulse Harlan had first felt against
the inside of his own hard thigh when Clay and he'd stood pressed
together downstairs.

Passion prodded them as their trembling hands explored, tested flesh,
and spoke in signs.

Harlan snatched a breath of air.  An odd sensation made him gasp as it
set his legs to trembling.  No one's, no other man's fingers had ever
trailed the tight divide of his backside.  Like a low lying cloud of
mist, Clay's fingers came tenderly creeping across the seat of his
pants and upward with light-handed stealth, through the narrow valley
just above the backs of his jittery thighs.

With equal deftness upon discovery, each new treasure of Harlan's
maleness bore Clay's tender discovery, as on route to the climax of
this meeting, it fell into the path of his large, hard hands.  In the
darkness, Clay surveyed the firm rounds of muscle cupped in his hand by
touch.  Keen as a razor, the combined sensation of awe at the coming to
pass of the thing that he'd refused to even let himself dream of for
the past three years, plus raw want, slashed at him as his trembling
hands traveled on.

The elder delighted in the broken songs of assent to be heard in the
younger's ragged breaths.  His full lips stopped and started as they
made their way along the smooth brown skin on Harlan's neck.   The
young preacher gently sucked an earlobe into the moist warmth between
his lips and flicked the tip of his tongue against it.

The tall lean youth moaned and pushed his crotch harder into the meat
of the young preacher's thick thigh.

Overcome and trembling, head to foot, Clay roughly shoved a broad hand
underneath Harlan's woolen sweater and jerked the tails of the heavy
plaid shirt free from the waist of his pants.  That same hand pressed
flat against Harlan's heaving belly.  It was left to linger only a
short while before Clay reversed its downward course and slid it slowly
upward and halted.  His fingers raised and he let their tips delicately
drift to and fro over the breadth of one nipple as if lazily sounding a
guitar.  His young love's next moan echoed the note struck.

Clay groaned louder in answer.  More than just a sympathetic resonance
signifying attunement or the mutuality of his desire, it warned of the
rise of the fire raging below in his groin.  Through the material of
his black trousers, for the first time Harlan's quivering hand reached
and took hold of the young preacher's hardened dick.

Gently, Clay disengaged Harlan's hand and backed away in the dark,
hurriedly feeling for the light switch on the wall.  With it's click, a
small lamp at bedside came on.  "It's time, youngblood.  I mean to try
my best not to cause you much pain but I can't wait any more," Clay
whispered earnestly.  "Get on the bed."

Harlan turned his back to Clay.  Beside the big unmade bed on the far
side of the room, his usually nimble fingers trembled but swift and
solemn, nonetheless, he unhooked the catch at the waist of his pants. 
With awkward decisiveness he pushed them and his briefs past his slim
hips and his sex sprang out of confinement, long, hard and angled
upward.  For a moment the youth stood studying his erection as if
examining the meaning of the need in him but then forsook the test.  In
a hurry to know love's ultimate end, the teenager gave no thought to
removing any of his clothing and hastily laid himself, face down and
ass bared, across the rumpled field of patchwork covering the bed to
wait for his golden man to come.

A zipper's brief shrill wasplike buzz brought Harlan's head up from the
quilt.  He gazed past his shoulder, beyond the anxiously flexing hills
of his ass toward Clay.

Clay stood before the mirror of the large dresser with his back to
Harlan as he pushed the tan suspenders attached to his trousers off his
powerful shoulders.  The wide suspenders fell away from the big man's
broad back and the waist of his black dress pants' fell open and draped
at the top of his muscular hips.  Hastily stepping out of them, he laid
them over the back of an old wooden chair.  Seemingly in the depths of
thought, the big-boned man hesitated for several moments before he
caught the waistband of his boxer shorts with his hooked thumbs and
shoved them down his hard thighs until they fell, on their own, past
his thick-muscled, hairy calves to the floor.  The dangling tail of his
white shirt accentuated every roll of the muscular honey-gold swells of
his ass as he stepped free of his underthings.  Clay turned his head to
look back where Harlan lay.

Harlan's turgid dick was mashed between his flat belly and the mattress
beneath.  Incredibly hard, it felt hot as steel from the forge against
the smooth skin on his abdomen.  It leapt the same as Harlan's heart
leapt as he caught first sight of the exposed lower hemispheres of the
hairy orbs of Clay's bared rear.  Clay's shirt prohibited the full view
he lay there eagerly wanting to take in but the young preacher abruptly
turned about and Harlan forgot for a moment.  The youth's trim frame
shuddered, head to foot, when he saw and his sex throbbed, imprisoned
beneath himself.

The youth's beautiful eyes, electrically alight, grew more hungry by
the second for sight of any bared part of the partially dressed
broad-chested man standing across the room from him.  Thus, Harlan's
gaze plummeted from Clay's broad jaw to the wedge shaped thicket of
kinky hair at the top of his long, heavy legs.

Clay's cock rose thick and strong out from the preponderance of hair
growing at the base of his belly at an angle, bending upward a little
like a saber.  Pronouncedly darker in tone than the rest of its owner's
honey-colored flesh, the foreskin of the thick and sturdy man-staff had
drawn back on its own to display its deep lavender hued tip, flared
like a plowshare in readiness for the task at hand.

Clay started for the bed but then abruptly stepped backward to take a
round plastic container off the end of the dresser.  His conscience
spoke again as he surveyed the various items in his wife's collection
cosmetics situated around the little jar of Vaseline but he shut his
ear to it.  Again about to go to Harlan, Clay halted once more to
softly ask, "Youngblood ... do you want the light on?"

"...Yeah -- leave it."

Between Clay's legs, the brown, soft and wrinkled purse seemingly
heavily laden with an abundance of his seed, bullishly swung side to
side as he came straight Harlan's way.

Expectant, Harlan laid his head on the pillow he'd fashioned for
himself by gathering up some of the quilt as he heard the sound of
Clay's approaching footsteps cease just behind him.

The preacher slowly squatted on the throw rug beside the bed and set
the small, lidless jar of lubricant on the bed next to Harlan's prone
form.  He extended his quivering hands and gently pushed the tail of
Harlan's shirt and his sweater higher off the warm, pliant mounds of
exposed flesh framed by the eager youth's hastily undone clothing.  As
though meant for Clay's hands alone, he marveled at how they fit his
grasp so well as his big thumbs began to pry them apart.  Under his
eyes within a thin wreath of shiny coal black hairs, the narrow portal
promising rare pleasures lay nestled in the central depths of the
spread flesh in his hands.  "What a mighty long time ago that was,"
echoed in Clay's mind as pictorial thoughts of things he'd all too
briefly shared with someone else flashed by.  Bringing his knees all
the way to the floor, the preacher leaned farther forward, shivering
with want.  Obeisantly lowering his head, the preacher applied a tender
kiss to each side of Harlan's warm ass.

Eyes opened by a taste of the fruits of genuine passion, Clay lifted
his head to peek at the gates of Paradise once more.  A moment later,
he straightened a little, pulling a hand away.  With the middle finger
of his right hand, he dug out a little of the jar's greasy contents as
the thumb and forefinger of the left held Harlan's ass divided.  Clay
generously daubed the thick lubricant onto the small puckered orifice
then, immediately afterward, reached down to take his rigid dick in
hand and hastily apply the Vaseline to himself.

Clay made no attempt to push his finger into the tight channel beyond
Harlan's sphincter.  Instead, he maintained a gently pressured rubbing
at its outside until Harlan's feverish sighs and whimpers beseeched
that the mysteries lying beyond the borders of virginity soon be shown
to him.

The springs of the big bed gave and groaned as Clay's weight combined
with Harlan's.  Supporting himself on his knees and an extended arm,
Clay began to insinuate the wide head of his lengthy cock into the
narrow gap of Harlan's ass.  Submerging so deep into a pleasurable and
sudden sense of safety as Clay's body began to press down on him,
Harlan didn't realize that the faint, far away moan he'd heard had come
from himself.

Clay was eager to mount and at last make a complete connection with the
youth lying underneath him.  He pushed downward more firmly.  Harlan,
more determined by the second that the barriers of this ignorance he
sought to end be torn down then and there, in turn, pushed his tail
back against the slippery lance between his asscheeks as its downward
force increased.  Ardent for ultimate knowledge of Harlan, the preacher
used more pressure which evoked a series of short, all at once doubtful
whimpered doubts from Harlan.  Clay's hefty manhood, priorly a welcome
arrival at Harlan's gate began insisting upon entry.  Minute beads of
sweat formed a crystal chain along the narrow bridge of the youth's
nose as the muscle along the backs of his thighs tightened rock hard.

"Ungh!"  A pained grunt wrenched its way out of Harlan's gut.  He
grimaced and squeezed his eyes shut, as if blindness would diminish the
pain.  A vein rose his long neck on the tensed muscle there as it
arched backward and drew his head from the bed.  Harlan loudly ate up
air by the lungful and spat out subsequent outward blasts of it through
tightly clenched teeth as, unrelenting, Clay proceeded to maneuver his
thick dick farther into his backside.

His sex securely wedged within the tight cleft in Harlan's slim ass,
the motion of Clay's brawny form set the bed gently rocking as he
probed deeper increasingly insistent.  Though the youth never once
cried out for the bull of a man on his back to stop, he thrashed wildly
in the depths of cacophonous fright pain brought.  He grabbed at
handfuls of the bunched up quilt as though a lifeline might be
discovered hidden somewhere in its folds.  This occurred the instant
the thick bronze bludgeon between the legs of the moaning man laying
over him suddenly rammed open the gate.

Harlan's sudden agitation by the pain inside himself, proved his prior
stalwart resolve not an easy faith to keep but Clay held him secure. 
Only a moment before, the teasing dick jabs the young preacher had used
to test the give of the tight split in his rear with his dick had
fueled the fires of the young virgin's ardor, making him ready to
surrender all of himself.  Now, the gasping youth felt as though the
broad spike of male flesh being driven up his ass would soon split even
the very fabric of his being along with his tail.

Clay, lodged halfway inside him, bore down more and if it had not been
for his mass hunkering over him, holding him down and holding him to
his word, the willowy brown youth lying speared on his sex might well
have tried to bolt and run.

But, it was too late for rising or walking away and Harlan knew even if
he could he'd only want to come back to try again.

"Stay loose.  Keep yourself just as loose as you can," Clay gasped in
Harlan's ear as one last thrust brought him all the way inside Harlan's
tensed body and held himself still for a while.

Minute by minute, the scorching ache in Harlan's entrails began
succumbing by degrees.  In it's dying, the burning sensation modified
to a feeling of warmth and fullness that led to his allusions of its
possible lineage from potential satiation.  Harlan, quieted, laid more
still and relaxed beneath the husky frame of the man who'd begun to
move again on his back ... thrusting deep, nearly withdrawing all the
way, and then driving in again.

The voicings of the guide and his charge's shared passion and pain, and
the cricket chirp of the bed's springs intermingled and rose and fell
moment to moment.  The issue of sounds contingent on the love they'd
begun to make randomly balanced against the noise outside in the street.

Over and over, sounds of early evening in North Philadelphia swelled
and ebbed.  Cars slowly passed.  A huckster's loud call kept repeating,
"I got winter squash.  I got yams here -- sweet as honey."  The
intermittent stop and go clip-clop of the hooves of the peddler's horse
as it bore its master wagon house to house played off the steady tap of
running feet at play in the cold just before suppertime.  The tiny feet
of the bundle-up children scurrying up and down the block danced in
counterpoint to the staccato of their flutelike laughter while the feet
of neighborhood elders shuffled on and off white marble stoops. 
Drumming out the time for the march toward home and hearth, doors shut
and opened all along the narrow street.

Equally as intense upstairs and inside, one most of life's common
expressions was heard only by them.  It sounded in the urgent breaths
of the handsome preacher and the comely youth lying with him.  The
sing-song their moans began to hang more prominent inside the room than
the patchwork curtain of exterior sound.

Harlan and Clay came to hear nothing at all but each other; saw nothing
at all except each other.  By then wrinkled and dampened by the rain of
sweat off their squirming hard bodies, that the remainder of their
clothing still had yet to be shed had become a thing inconsequential. 
All that mattered to either one was that they were lying across the
wide bed, at last completely joined.

Underneath the back of the heavy shirt and sweater, Clay's fingers
followed the finite etching of every muscle atop Harlan's back and
along his sides as he lay over him.  As he gyrated his hairy groin
pressed flush against the smooth, burning rounds of Harlan's ass, the
young preacher grabbed at his young love's wide shoulders as though a
famished man about to break a loaf.

Yet, Clay's thoughts were not merely focused on his own taking of
pleasure.  Snaking a strong arm around Harlan's hard chest, Clay pulled
the youth along with himself as he slowly rolled onto his side to spare
themselves separation.  Quickly, he grabbed for the open jar that still
lay just beyond them on the bed and scooped out a bit of its contents
with tips of two fingers.  Harlan's flaccid dick, instantly leaped
alive in the clutch of Clay's palm as oil was gently spread from tip to
base.

At first slow and tantalizing, Clay slid his big fist up and down the
length of the youth's greased, dark scepter.  Glistening in the low
lamplight, its throbbing denoted the extreme state of Harlan's desire. 
Deliberate, gradual increases in the speed of the ministerings of the
brawny man's oiled hand caused the novice, who's newly opened ass was
spasmodically seizing around his cock, to cry out involuntarily.  With
all his might Harlan began to rock his slim hips as he awkwardly pumped
his dick into the tight clutch of the fisted hand cradling it.  Clay
became all the more incensed by sensation.

Like a tiny eye the slit in the tip of Harlan's dick began to joyfully
weep a thin stream of  sticky, clear fluid in preparation of the
release that must come.  The plunging fist surrounding it reached
lightning speed as it traveled from head to root of the stiff,
twitching rod it grasped.

"Ooh!  I'm gonna jizz soon!  I'm gonna --"

"That's only natural for a man, youngblood.  Go `head ... let it go ...
give it up to me," Clay urged him on with a rumbling groan as his
thrusts from behind stepped up in pace.  Harlan's athletic form
suddenly jerked straight and quivered against the body of the big man
spearing him.  As Clay felt the burning shaft of the lean youth's
swollen cock pulse in his grasp, he jammed himself all the way in as a
squeal from Harlan pealed out like a bell tone.  Cometlike, the first
volley of Harlan's semen jetted across the quilt.

Clay too, suddenly a helpless pawn of the passion he'd long kept his
face turned from, hugged Harlan close and lay there doggedly driving
his dick into a vein of sweet sensation as he zealously prospected the
full depth of the long-legged youth's tight, lean tail.  The young
preacher's flared nostrils grew as tantalizingly filled up with the
heady perfume of Harlan's seed and sweat as his rapidly pistoning fist
was with the youth's erect sex.  Clay jammed his encircling hand all
the way down to Harlan's groin as the youth squealed once more from
pure pleasure and his firm belly jerked in response to the second
orgasmic pulse that coursed his stiff rod from his tight balls to its
throbbing fleshy helmet.  Shaded dark as night, the long thick ram
looming out from Harlan's flat, smooth belly spurted another thick lob
of his sperm into the folds of the quilt, then spat out seed again for
a third and fourth time as the no longer virgin teenage boy lay
triumphantly moaning out the news that he'd come across the line.

The centrifugal force in the powerful swing of the sublimely delicious
agony of first connection caused Clay's brow to knit as he traveled
with it, all the while hearing Harlan's pleasured whimpering bejewel
his own excitement.  "Got a sure `nough good feelin' comin' down on me
too youngblood!" Clay groaned, tiny sweat beads blooming wild all
across the golden field of his forehead.  "Good God, it's comin' down
just like rain!"

The grip of the muscles along the narrow channel cut deep below the
proud rise of teenage boy's ass tightened then loosened again and again
and involuntarily set a sea of heat churning all about the young
preacher's hypersensitized cock as the youth continued let go of his
load.  All in an instant, a bomb blast of sensual fire exploded and
rapidly amplified and spread from low in Clay's gut.  The taut
musculature of the big man's hard, hairy belly seized up and, eyes
squeezed shut and groaning like a bear through his clenched even teeth,
the young preacher began to spill out his essence inside Harlan's
clenched ass.

Learning to sing in an angel voice, Harlan uttered a long moan of
amazement as he felt Clay's dick pulsate and spurt jets of sticky seed
that made him feel mysteriously warm far up inside.  Greedy to grab up
every scrap this new moment offered any way he could, with a loud
whimper, Harlan impulsively ground his lean brown butt hard into Clay's
heaving belly....

As both at last became quiet, the preacher's panting and thrusts ceased
along with Harlan's groans for more of him, the repetitions of a car
horn's blast sounded off in the distance, somewhere seemingly far, far
beyond the mere second-story room where they lay.  Secure and sheltered
in the novitiate of Clay's strong arms as they continued to surround
him from behind, Harlan ate up each passing second of a new contentment
with mute relish as the preacher's thick cock, still lodged inside his
ass, gradually softened ...


1964 - Part 3

From behind the wheel of his car, Clay warily looked about the
periphery of the idling Buick to be sure that passers-by were nowhere
near.  It was past eleven and the side street under his eye, from where
he and Harlan sat, proved empty.  Despite any misgivings the somewhat
nervous young minister may have had as to the possible suspicions of
others should the two of them be seen parked that late at night, joy,
shyly kept but too pervasive to remain hidden burnished the dark timbre
of his low voice.  "Hold up youngblood ... kiss me one time before you
go," he said.

Harlan and Clay slid slowly toward the center of the big car's front
seat from their respective sides.  As if in their slow approach they'd
come to find each other all over again, their hearts pounded in their
high rising chests like drums.  Both the handsome young preacher and
his incredibly comely passenger leaned across the little hill Harlan's
heaped textbooks had formed between them.  Clay reverently framed
Harlan's face with his fingertips and guided the willing youth's mouth
to his as if a connoisseur about to rest the rim of a glass brim-full
of the rarest of wines on his lips.  Passionately wishing he could lay
the youth down again right there on the seat, the young preacher tested
Harlan's lips to learn the weight of their welcome and then mashed his
lips against the youth's.  He held them in his keeping for a long
moment.  "Quick now," he said, his breaths deep and ragged after
letting go of the taste of love with great hesitance, "better get
yourself home."

But, dreamy-eyed, Harlan didn't make ready to leave the car.  Instead,
he leaned back in the seat once more and his long neck arched as his
head tilted backward once Clay let him go.  Pensively cherishing Clay's
kiss, he traced the tip of his tongue lightly across his bottom lip to
savor any lingering taste of the preacher's mouth that might be left
there.  Then, suddenly overcome with reckless excitement, the
beautiful, starry-eyed boy sat straight up on the seat and
enthusiastically suggested, "Let's spend the whole day together
tomorrow.  Yeah, I'd have to be at school for roll-call by eight-thirty
but right after that I could cut out man and be back on a bus just like
that!" he hypothesized, all exuberance as he snapped his fingers to
sketch his speed of travel.  "Nobody would -- "

Clay, frowning his strong disapproval, cut him off.  "No, that's a
thing that ain't about to be."  The young preacher's bottom lip all at
once set as sternly as carved stone.  He gave the steering car's
steering wheel a hard knock with his big fist and ordered Harlan to,
"Listen," in a firm tone clearly defining that his absolute attention
was in demand.  "There'll be no such excursion tomorrow or any other
day.  You're not about to start doin' junk like that -- not on my
account anyway."

"It was good -- I swear it to you -- every last bit of what you made me
feel tonight I mean, but that ain't all there is to life.  Lovin's
somethin' we'll just have to tend to as best we can -- when we can --
`cause your makin' somethin' of yourself's a heck of a lot more
important."  Pausing, the big man looked out his side window seemingly
not about to say more.

The sudden irritation that had darkened the tone of the young
preacher's already deep brown eyes began lifting as the register of
their hue segued to a tender entreatment that Harlan look to logic. 
Clay sighed, "Enough meddlin' with what most likely should have been
left alone already's been done."

This time, Harlan frowned.

Empathetic, the handsome young preacher reached over and gave the
impatient youth sitting beside him a gentle squeeze on his nearer
thigh.  "God only knows, youngblood, how I'd like to just up and do
anything I feel like myself.  Why right this minute, I'd put this car
in gear and you and me would ride off and leave everything else behind
us.  You wouldn't see me study stop light or stop sign.  I'd just jam
my foot down on the gas and go.  Funny ... always did want to let this
ol' Buick show me what she can do," Clay said wistfully.

The brawn of the musing man made itself evident despite the way his
heavy winter garb masked his muscular frame as Clay, chuckling mildly,
pushed himself deep as he could sink into the car's upholstery and
allowed himself a moment's free withdrawal of luxury from a bounteous
balance of his unacted upon fantasies.

"It would be just you and me buddy; nobody but us two.  We'd head out
for someplace where there'd be not a soul who'd be eyin' us and
wonderin', or lookin' to have their little say.

"I'm talkin' `bout somewhere so far past Philadelphia that we'd never
be found.  Yeah youngblood, I sure `nough would fly away to be some
place like that.  Problem is," the young preacher said as the wistful
look that had lit his handsome face began to fade, "for the likes of
us, I can't rightly say I know of any such place.  Sounds way too much
like Heaven for it to ever be found anywhere here on Earth.

"There's no denyin' how I feel.  It's got to be all over my face, plain
as day by now," Clay continued, "but I can't let you start dodgin' your
responsibility to yourself no more than I can start settin' aside my
own.  Talkin' love's one thing, doin' it's another.  How could
encouragin' you to skip class show I care about you?"

"Don't worry, bet your bottom dollar, you'll find me right there at the
house waitin' on you when you're done with what you've got to do
tomorrow."  Suddenly smiling again on seeing his say carried some
weight, the young preacher quietly asked, "How is there a way on Earth
I could forget you now after what you've given me baby?"

All at once mindful of nothing else but his closeness to Harlan, Clay
lent no concern over the further possible need for his reconnaissance
of the dark street.  He roughly grabbed Harlan by the nape of the neck
and snatched another kiss.  "Now, get yourself goin'," he softly
ordered as he pulled his mouth away....

Euphoric and feeling wild, all due to one night's revelations, Harlan
scrambled out of the big black car a block away from his home at around
eleven-thirty.  The handsome young romantic who'd been made, inside a
few brief hours, unbelievably exuberant of spirit and giddy ran
homeward unaware of and untouched by the freezing cold that ruled the
dark street.  The long-legged youth's head was too overflowing with
naive and rash contemplations of innumerable tomorrows for him to hear
the drumlike rumble of wind in his ears as his running feet chewed up
the distance between the corner where the preacher sat waiting in his
car to assure himself that he'd made it up the sandstone steps of the
brick house on Walnut Street where he lived and was safely inside.

Harlan stopped only for a second to search his jacket pocket for his
key before taking the front steps two at a time.  Turning about just
prior to pushing open his front door, he hoisted an arm and waved
exuberantly at the headlights gleaming down the street ....

Inside, hearing the insertion of a key at the front of the house,
Harlan's mother came to meet him at the living room side of the
vestibule just as the heavy oak front door swung open.

Quietly cautious, Harlan offered her a simple greeting, "Hi Mom," but
no explanation for his late arrival.  He instinctively made an instant
though timid search of Cleotha Creely's inquisitive visage for signs of
real trouble.

"Well mister man, I was beginnin' to wonder what time you'd figured you
felt about ready to come in.  You know you've got school in the
mornin'," Cleotha tersely informed him as she crossed her heavy dark
arms.  Without missing a beat, the stout woman executed one quick pace
to the left; the next step of the dance countering her son's evasions
and deliberately positioned herself in his path before he could pass. 
Mother's intuition had already told her he'd try to.  She asked, "Now
Harlan, just what was so important that it kept you in the street this
time of night?"

Harlan hesitated guiltily before molding the frontispiece of the first
lie he'd felt it necessary to tell his mother in a long, long while. 
The jolt he felt inside his chest with each heavy thump of his racing
heart added to his unnerving.  He was sure his mother would soon begin
to notice its leaping even though hidden so deep beneath winter clothes
and a jacket.  Nonetheless Harlan steeled himself to answer, "There's
this science project that's on for school.  It's got to be all done
right away.  So tonight, I really needed to go in town and look through
some books and stuff at the main library.  That's all."

"Harlan, that couldn't take `til this time of  night.  And on top of
that, Center City Library closes at seven-thirty," Cleotha
matter-of-factly informed her son with suspiciously narrowed eyes.

"Uh ... uh ... yeah, I know," Harlan replied, suddenly nervous and not
helping himself one bit.  Clumsily sided on the defensive, the teenage
boy was growing more scared.  However,  even though he frantically
wondered whether or not his face was betraying him, the new young man
in love was desperate and somehow all at once rallied.  His heart had
come to hold greater sway over him than his mother would ever again and
just then its mandate called for the preservation of his secret -- by
any means.

This reason in its requirement of his rebellion simultaneously oiled
the doing of the deed by rendering within Harlan a reaction quite
similar to the release of endorphines upon the body's suffering a
wound.  Quite thoroughly, his justifications for lying brought on a
welcome anesthetization of the customarily forthright youth's
conscience.  So numbed by his need to by all means protect the special
thing that had just come into his hands, painful twinges of the youth's
conscience were near completely allayed as more falsehoods were about
to spill from his lips.

Remorselessly ready, yet not quite so numbed to be more than a bit
ashamed of himself, Harlan set to the hasty further weaving of his
explanation.  He knew if he was slow about it his wary mother would
begin to press him hard for more detailed answers as to his
whereabouts.  "But on the way to the bus I passed by this movie theater
on Market Street --" he began to add but was gratefully spared the
relation of the rest his invention for a moment more.

"A movie?" his mother sharply inquired.  "And on a school night? 
Harlan Creely where is your mind?  Lord have mercy!  If your daddy
heard tell of you comin' in here near midnight after some movie, why
you, me, and Buddy would all have to leave out of here because not a
one of us would be able to stay up in here once that man's mouth got to
runnin'.  Boy if --"

"It's okay Mom -- it's okay!  I mean, come on just take a look at the
time," Harlan interrupted, quickly drawing Cleotha's still suspicious
gaze from his anxious eyes with a nervous jab of his finger toward the
large banjo clock hanging on the living room wall.  "Daddy's not here
to know it and it's really not that late.  All I wanted to do was be
out for a little while.  Gee," he shrugged, "this is about the time I
always go up to bed, isn't it?"

"Anyway, there's still a lot more to do." Harlan said, taking a plunge
deeper into deception before his mother could get the chance to counter
with logic inevitably better than his.  "I'll have to go back tomorrow
night.  It's okay isn't it?  I mean, shoot Mom, it's not like I'm a kid
anymore.  I am nineteen-years-old now; up for college next year. 
That's way more than old enough to stay out a little late -- at least
now and then and --"

Harlan had grown up.  He cut himself short, realizing if he said more
he'd negate the point and his argument by merely appearing a sulking,
whining boy.

Harlan's story was far too vague and loose for someone as intuitively
on the money as his mother.  Being quite aware of that, on general
principle alone Cleotha had already set before herself several very
sensible reasons that should have immediately prompted her refusal. 
There'd been all sorts of reports of teenage boys and young men in West
Philly streets looking for trouble and hanging in gangs.  But thinking
on that, she felt assured only the most dedicated of hoodlums would
brave the freezing weather they'd been having lately for the sake of
folly.  "Praise God, can't be that many fools around," she thought.

Then again something disquieting but hard to define in the back of
Cleotha's mind almost did bring about her flat denial of Harlan's
request.  Yet unable to put her finger on the exact reason, the
frowning woman consented with a reluctant nod upon a moment more of
thought and abandoned motherly interrogation.  "But you be sure you
have your mannish self inside this house no later than this time
tomorrow night.  You hear?"

"Yes, ma'am," Harlan answered not surmising that something in his smile
set his mother to wondering again.  Impulsively, he saluted her and
then gratefully gave her a quick peck on the cheek.

Recurring thoughts of Harlan's miserliness in relating his itinerary
that evening kept Cleotha curious.  However, knowing her son to usually
be as good as his word, she decided to let this one incident pass and
leave the rest trust.  She thought to herself in an offhanded fashion,
"I wonder if that boy's gone and met up with some little girl
somewhere," but shook it off.  Since she hadn't been aware of him
showing any  particular interest in any among the gaggle of young girls
his age at church she couldn't, that moment, imagine who it might be.

Still thinking Cleotha turned and gazed toward the foyer.  "Well Lord,
my baby's just about grown," she thought.  Melancholy flitted across
her eyes as she remembered not that many years before it had seemed
that neither of her young sons could wait to rush through that door up
front to share every minute detail of a day's yield of deed and
accomplishment.  Present times seemed to show that the maintenance of a
grasp on what was going on with her two sons' time, spent more and more
away from her, literally required all the arts of alchemy.  She glanced
at the little brass perpetual calendar by the lamp on the side table
for no reason.  "Nineteen sixty-four ... Lord, how fast things can
change," she blandly marveled to herself.  Then considering boys'
transitions to men with slightly sardonic amusement, "How they do
change too."

With a grunt the portly woman wheeled about-face and started for her
kitchen.  "Come on then," she said, looking past her shoulder
impatiently.  "Get your butt out here in the kitchen and let me fix you
somethin' to eat.  Probably haven't had a thing tonight except some
junk."

Although his belly was already near full, Harlan wisely thought better
of begging off this second dinner and obediently trailed after his
mother to the rear of the house and into the kitchen  ...

Relieved that the road to back Clay had been paved quickly and with
relative ease, an hour later Harlan lay groggily ebullient upstairs in
his bed.  Stomach stuffed with his mother's cooking, he was ecstatic
and most deliciously awed by every circumstance that had forged the
clandestine happiness he struggled to quietly harbor.

Lying in the dark, Harlan turned his ear on hearing a sudden rustle of
bed things nearby.  At first he thought his younger brother Buddy might
be waking, possibly in need of a trip down the hall to the bath. 
However, though the nine-year-old stirred in his bed just across the
room he did not rise but incoherently mumbled something.  The utterance
was brief but seemingly of great importance and imparted to an unknown
compatriot who must have been traveling at his side while he dreamed. 
In another moment, the youngest of the Creely household snuggled deeper
into the covers, sighed deeply, then became quiet again.  The second
youngest Creely was lost in a dream equally as deep but he was wide
awake.

Harlan lay reliving every moment that had come to pass after his first
real kiss just hours before.  The youth eagerly harvested every mindful
he could grow of every line, ridge and rise of Clay's body.  The heat
of his cheeks intensified as he lasciviously dredged up his very last
recall of the bullishly virile preacher's readied implement of
connection just as Clay had stood over him as he lay waiting to have
the lance put it to his ass sure and true.

Inside Harlan's head the beautiful panorama of retrospect was wide. 
Some of sex's mystery dissolved and wildly aroused again by mulling
over all the worldly knowledge he'd seen strewn about outside his
virginity's exit door, the firm-limbed youth uttered a luxurious sigh. 
Its own brand of reactionary to fancies of sex, the black shaft of his
limp dick began to broaden and grow as he re-eyed every turn of scene
in the evening he'd passed with Clay.  Blotted out by the span of such
an awesome view, any previous consideration on his part of any pain
suffered in the accomplishment of rending the seal on naivet fell from
his mind.

He reminisced, with feverish delight, at how he'd lain securely locked
inside the band of one of Clay's big hard arms as the slippery
diligence of the preacher's hand on him, unequivocally proved no touch
was like a lover's touch -- not even his own.

The youth continued piecing the total picture of the time they'd shared
back together.  It reoccurred to Harlan the wide bed in Clay's bedroom
had rocked under them as though they'd been rafting a wild river's
white water.  The springs had groaned near as loud as he and Clay at
the culmination of their frenzied melee.  Jammed ass to belly they'd
been; close as any two men could be as Harlan received the warm spill
of the moaning young preacher's healing unction inside himself....

Harlan kept on lying there in his bed, lazily toying with his hardened
dick and thinking how wonderful all of it had felt.  Strangely content,
he required no more erudite a realm of comprehension respecting what
they'd experienced than came with his rudimentary visualizations. 
Simple recaptures of the significant bliss he'd found in giving himself
up to Clay to be held, to be opened, proved enough for just then.

Harlan abruptly shifted beneath the covers and felt a slight, curiously
ambiguous residual soreness deep in the cleft his backside.  Whether
this part of the harvest of his surrender was in actuality less a pain
than a bittersweet and integral component of afterglow he'd yet to
decide.  He remembered that Clay's thick, soapy fingers had made him
wince, first touch there, as they'd helped each other hurriedly clean
up shortly before leaving Germantown.  That strange dull ache was the
only actual physical reality left of their lovemaking that night and
the youth lay dreamily aware of it.

Whatever its interpretation, the odd sensation's presence prompted even
more of his recall of the man he'd longed for to assume as fully an
upright stand as his dick.

Mind well-fueled with voluptuous recollections, Harlan relit with
passion.  The heady muskiness of male arousal was leaking from every
pore of the smooth, teak brown skin all over his lean, hard body again.
 Maddened by the nagging itch in his cock that called for fondling, the
youth brashly snatched his tumescent sex from where it lay cached
inside his briefs as though believing as great and dominant an urge as
sexual need could be reined in merely with the motion of a hand. 
"Better hurry," Harlan whispered to himself advisedly.

A following and very brief application of his fist, tight and frenzied
in motion once he seized hold of himself, brought about a reflex
flutter of the muscle in the comely youth's thighs.  His splayed long
legs jerked as he hooked his heels into his mattress's sides.  Lending
strange harmony to his hard grunts, Harlan's narrow bed creaked as his
fist kept pumping his cock.  His sinewy body strained like a young bird
meaning to fly away toward some high place that for an instant had
appeared unreachable from where he lay.  And Harlan did touch upon it.

The lean youth's broad chest lifted high each time he sucked at the air
through his clenched teeth.  An all consuming sensation that radially
spread in its rising from the root of his cock took possession of him. 
Had his taut belly been a drum it surely would have toned loud; booming
out a message of his nearness to coming as his fist at work banged on
the bone in his crotch.

In the dark Harlan hastily corralled his feather pillow in the crook of
his free arm and turned his face into it just as he uttered a loud
involuntary gasp.  The beautifully formed halves of his lean ass
bunched and clamped together rock hard as his pelvis thrust high. 
Burning pleasure seething at his cock root and helpless to hide it,
Harlan gave up his frenzied groans and cries to his pillow and a fresh,
profuse delivery of his sticky essence to his fist.

No time or clarity of mind was afforded him to fling off the bed things
or yank the bottom of his tee-shirt past his heaving belly, clear of
the spurts of semen that gushed out onto himself with each pulse of his
dick.  Once the rainstorm of seed going on inside the cotton and wool
cocoon of the bed things wrapped all about him had passed Harlan, dazed
and sweating, lay still longingly moaning Clay's name into his pillow.

In a while the last of the colored tinsel stars he'd seen falling
behind his clenched eyelids as he came had evaporated, the tall youth
lay completely quiet in mind and body once more.  Noiselessly, he
planted his feet on the his room's bare floor and rose.

Standing beside his bed, Harlan quietly stripped in the dark, taking
great pains to find all the gluey remnants of solitarily expressed
passion that clung to his flat belly and firm brown thighs.  As he
found sticky patches of his come on his smooth skin he wiped them away
with his wadded up tee shirt.

Light from the street was sieved through the curtains at the window as
the tall youth stood carefully cleaning himself.  In the dark, here and
there on his beautiful bared frame the etchings of young man's muscle
was highlighted through the loose wrapping of the deep shadows inside
his room.  Harlan's smooth cheeks suddenly ballooned as he blew out a
breath of air and shuddered, head to foot, when he applied the wadded
up shirt to his still highly sensitive dickhead to clean his come away .

Buddy, not far away, continued to lay peaceful and quiet.  Harlan
satisfied himself that his often inquisitive nine-year-old brother had
been asleep the whole time and hastily shoved his soiled underthings
beneath the mattress.  He laid down naked to sleep.

It was nearing one o'clock and morning was coming.  He and Clay would
meet again that coming afternoon ....


1964 - Part 4

On the other side of the city, the handsome young preacher lay by
himself too.  A haze of mingled but conflicting odors drifted all round
the darkened master bedroom distracting him, already in a confused
tangle of thoughts.  Scent wafting from his absent wife's perfume
atomizer, across the room on the dresser, sang out in disturbing,
disharmonious concert with the leavings of the stirring masculine aroma
generated from the love he'd made with Harlan.

Agonized by the haunting, the handsome, worried man yet lay awake and
aware in the limbo of his want.  As well, his cognizance of every line
he'd gone lunging across headfirst -- and all in an evening -- grew
acute.  Knowing himself, the clergyman realized he'd never be allowed
the simple ease of merely blocking off the sad side of his thoughts.

Nothing was ever to be the same again.  Clay knew it.  There existed no
quick and convenient fixative for the broken clay of his vows to church
and spouse, both not long before dashed to the ground.  Then again,
undeniably, there was nothing and no one that he knew of who could
erase the unchained devotion he then even more gladly bore for Harlan. 
He didn't want to lose Harlan or anything he had but he knew that
couldn't be.
From the troubled young clergyman's position at the prow as time
gradually became a moving thing for him again those several hours
later, he saw clearly a cautionary beacon warning of perilous shallows
for those plotting courses while bearing cargo as heavy as falsehood. 
"Truth or lies?" the young preacher asked himself as he considered how
he'd greet the morning.

The coming of morning brought to mind, the preacher anxiously shot a
glance at the clock.  One a.m. already.  But a moment passed and he
remembered it would be all right to sleep a little later if he wanted. 
There'd be a few calls to make and a drain in the bath that it wouldn't
hurt to looked at but nothing required early attention.  He was sure to
have the time to sleep in.

The big honey-colored man turned on his side, simply meaning to lie
himself down to sleep but recollections of Harlan would not abandon
him.  Lying there befuddled and feverish as he was, Clay couldn't let
them go.  Exiting the car with him when he'd returned late that night,
his newborn memories rushed ahead of him, barging into his house like
sweet but rambunctious children.

It was clear to him they'd come to stay for, there alone in the dark he
discovered himself supplied with ease, perfect visions of Harlan's
handsome face.  "He is mighty like a warrior, ain't he?" Clay asked an
unknown ear with whispered awe.  "So much like Africa --," he marveled,
thinking back to his brief stay as a missionary on the continent one
summer just after his senior year in high school.  "Especially the rise
of his cheekbones all smooth and brown like teak, that lift to his
chin.  Somethin' about that nose too ... right blunt and proud with a
flare to it -- so much like the noblest in the tribe."

The preacher, meditations deepening, also recalled well the youth's
mystifying, light eyes and the thickness of the black lashes rowed
along their border lines.  He remembered not only the look of them but
the feel of them too when they'd swept his cheek as, man to man, he'd
helped the inexperienced youth in his arms begin to gain a mastery of
touch.  Clay's heart set to rumbling in his wide chest.  All at once
crazily needing something ... anything ... to hold he pulled the bed
covers closer, thinking how every wet kiss he'd sucked from Harlan's
full lips had borne a taste of salt and sweet.  As the two of them had
lain close, that mixture of flavors had been as much a tonic for the
young preacher's denied condition of the heart as the musky scent of
man that Harlan's young, hard body had exuded as the warmth of his skin
spiked synchronously with his urgency of his need for Clay's hands to
be upon him.

"Mercy ... mercy," rumbled softly in Clay Adderly's throat as a tidal
rush of sexual feeling took hold of him and sent an electric charge
streaking one-way straight through the heart of the bone rowed down the
middle of his broad back.  More of the marvel that had transpired was
tumbling over and over in his mind.  How maddeningly wonderful it had
felt to at last have handsome, brown-skinned manhood not only alive and
impetuously squirming in his arms but also coming awake to grow long
and hard inside his hand.  Dogging the trail of that thought came his
distinct recollection of the incensing grab the close interiors of
Harlan's slim backside had placed on his sex.  Feeling bullishly hot
from the mere thought of it, the suddenly glassy-eyed young preacher
vividly recalled how the strong, virginal squeeze Harlan's ass exerted
on his swollen cock had robbed him of manners and compelled him to jam
himself all the way home over and over.

All of it -- everything -- had come back to Clay but unlike the
visitation of lesser recollections in frustrating times past, this
night, he would not for a moment resist their approach.

Clay abruptly threw the sheets and blanket off his naked, roused body
and rose from his bed into the dark room's comfortable warmth.  He
swiftly made his way to the dresser as his sex thickened and stood,
boldly wagging to and fro before him.  At the dresser, the young
preacher hastily reached for the light, switched it on and then
retrieved the same jar of Vaseline he'd earlier used to oil Harlan's
ass.

While Clay stood eying the little translucent plastic vessel, almost
lost in his big hand, he thought more broadly on the secret union that
had come to be in his bed that night.  Unable to see any blasphemy in
the opinion, the handsome young preacher somehow sensed that a profound
blessing had been rested upon him through the true specialness of the
intimacy he and Harlan had shared.

About to reach for the light, out of the blue, "No," Clay muttered most
decisively as, deeply wistful, the preacher determined that to lie down
among shadows again would be a real defilement of the memory of his
first and possibly only time to love.  Feeling so, he left the lamp
burning and returned to bed, ready.  His cock was throbbing and risen
to full stand.

Plumping a couple of pillows and propping up his head with them, Clay's
brown eyes sparkled brightly in the light.  He lay stretched out on the
bed with his legs splayed wide, scrutinizing his slow maneuverings of
the hand he employed to dress his thick standing member with petroleum
jelly.  Lazily, his other hand lay at rest on the broad rolling plain
of hard muscle beneath the taut honey-gold skin spanning his hairy
chest.  Its thumb casually traipsed, boundary to boundary, the breadth
of one of the nipples that lay there much resembling a bright copper
penny.  Much farther down the broad-chested man's body deep his bronze
hued erection acquired a gleam all its own in the light after a
thorough application of lubricant.

More and more of Clay's rather unwillingly entertained apprehensions
over what was to come with morning fell in temporary collapse.  They
fell asunder as other thoughts erected themselves once he'd set his
big, firmly clasped hand traveling up and down the length of the
well-oiled root of his manhood.

As that same unrelenting hand's sweep shepherded a loud gaggle of
anxious meditations elsewhere, every new smear of pleasure that its
movement wrought issued a souvenir of the short time prior within which
he and Harlan had at last truly found one another.  Each piece of that
memory was laid on a stockpile already a hundred dreams high.

A deep moan softly slipped from Clay's parted lips.  The lids of his
eyes had become heavily weighted down by carnal inebriation.  Distant
in his mind, Joyce lived nowhere in his remembrance that night as he
continued gaze between his fidgety legs, mesmerized by the motion of
his hand and the past ....

*********************************************

Without a doubt, Clay Adderly was internally built every bit as much a
man of virile inclination and drive as the underlying fleshly prowess
his robust and athletic physique hinted at.  Be that as it may, should
he want to stray, ordainment allowed the young minister none of the
excuses other men might employ to set aside their failings.  Through
holy rite he'd been sworn a soldier and pressed into the service of an
army which wielded Bibles, not guns, on the battlefield.

He genuinely strove to prove faithful in all things per the code of
that calling even if it meant the denial of his flesh.  In sincere
accordance with aims as honorable as this, Clay forged an earnest
battle.  Although full-faced self-confrontations made him uneasily
conscious of himself and his hidden longings, the diligent young
preacher skirmished honestly against the draw of anything that might
cause him to give in to indisputably real urges and stray from the path
of conduct that befitted his calling.

Meaning to seek refuge from a life of solitary burning per Good Book
recommendation, Clay had even gone so far as to choose marriage.  Not
so much because he wanted to but at least because he believed he could.
 Yet the awful truth was that even if he'd left himself to burn alone
it would never have been for a woman.

Through the years since college, until Harlan and that fateful night,
Clay had resolutely forced the vigorous exercise of the rituals of
belief before himself, like blinders, to screen the outer edges of his
easily drawn vision.  Most determinedly, he'd endeavored to prohibit
the line of his sight from straying off the narrow way he'd been
commanded to walk.  It was a grave misstep to wander into the mire of
longing and set aside the faith for other fulfillment.  Quite some time
before, while a student at divinity school, Clay had struggled to
harden himself to unsuppressible voices.

Just barely twenty during his first days of religious study, if Clay's
heart could have been laid open like a book no one perusing its pages
would have found dark turns in the story written there.  Through his
faith, a true kind, there was no epic inscribing of vengeful
contemplation there; no unfoldings of desire that inclined him to lay
hold of anything not rightfully his own; no vignettes of his delight in
the crafting of falsehood.

Yet a man's actions with respect to other matters, especially those of
the heart, he found weren't as easy to decide upon.  In his private
deliberations of one specific grey area of morality Clay's personal
opinion challenged the wrong perceived in it and it's unacceptability
by those in the church and in the street although he'd been strictly
taught the physical expression of homosexuality was sin.

Not only had he been wrestling with the matter of physical expressions
of the heart's desire.  Even though a minister, for quite some time and
of course for his own reasons, Clay had yet to reconcile in his mind
the genuine fairness of it.  His faith, a method of living which
encouraged honesty denied an honest man, no matter how unsatisfied, the
freedom to heed basic and simple yearnings of the heart.  At any rate,
in spite of his feeling on the issue, he conceded to doctrine and to
what he longed to trust were wiser, higher minds.  Though he could not
bridle his thoughts, the young minister kept his silence and forced the
yoke of obedience to church upon his shoulders of his own volition. 
Far more perfunctorily, Clay set a like example as a husband.

Meaning to keep himself centered in the right lane of the straight and
narrow way, Clay Adderly forsook temptations for adventure and plodded
through acts of sexual congress solely with his wife.  Until Harlan,
Clay had wholeheartedly managed to follow all that had been ingrained
in him as right and good -- and to believe himself content in the
doing....

There wasn't a thing at all boyish or masculine about Joyce Adderly's
slender, small-breasted body.  It was merely that her practical,
unaffected demeanor's expression made it appear not imposingly feminine
in kind.  On their wedding night, it was mostly this saving grace that
had enabled Clay, an anxious but reluctant twenty-four-year-old
bridegroom who'd never been with a woman before, to tether his mind
somewhere else and go about taking on the physical and ritual duties of
a husband.

Yet sex had never become an issue in the marriage.  Joyce was to all
appearance quite contentedly given to wifely concerns as regarded
Clay's ministry and their home.  Before and since their marriage she'd
never communicated a need for -- or for that matter -- an interest in
things of sensual substance.  Clay had sensed this early on.  For
reasons that might have made another man reconsider had he felt aware
of the same, it had made it easy for the young minister to ask her to
marry.

After their wedding, with time, the green preacher and husband grew
used to having a female form at his side through his nights and days
despite his underlying but unarticulated contrary desires.  And with
time it came to amaze him how the pretty woman he'd wed for all the
wrong reasons had turned out to be his friend.  She'd proved it most by
being his shoulder to lean on when both his parents lost their lives in
a car crash barely a year after they'd married.  She went on to prove
it even more so by willingly working with him and looking to his
interests.

An essentially bright woman, as well as being his sounding board, she
also provided him with the best of her counsel which he often took. 
But never in the four years since their wedding day had it been within
Clay to come to Joyce in the night for fulfillment in a romantic
sense....

As an aside ... not every female member of Clay's large Philadelphia
congregation maintained a fixed focus on Bible study and prayer.  In
moments of distraction by the warm, somewhat brooding brown eyes set
like shining gems in their pastor's handsome face, the minds of many
women wandered.  Intent female eyes often noted the potent appearance
of his large frame and the assured, seductively bullish manner with
which he moved about in their midst.

With knowing little laughs, the more vociferous church gossips among
these women whispered veiled speculative commentary regarding the
good-looking young preacher's sexual talents.  They ultimately were led
to presume, by what they saw, that the sex life he and his pretty wife
shared must have somehow been well above the norm.  Speaking but not
knowing, they gave no consideration at all to good lovemaking's
dependence on the soundness of the desire found on both sides of the
bed.

Fact was that for all his virility, the young preacher only slid his
muscular body to his wife's side of the bed when the basic, functional
urge to jettison seed he'd carried too long would coax his sex alive
and no longer allow itself either to be set aside or afford him sleep. 
Though never intentionally rough with Joyce by manner or method, Clay
was clumsy by way of being so practical in purpose.  Always mannered,
he'd wait in the dark to determine Joyce's disposition to the gentle
placement of his hand on her slim thigh.  Once aware of a gentle nudge
of her elbow, her unspoken issue of consent, he'd modestly undo the fly
of his night things, lay on her and fit himself in her quickly then
pull away once he'd achieved the aim of the swift, rabbitlike jabs he
made between her legs -- an ejaculation.

In her own way, prim Joyce was offhandedly just as utilitarian in
sexual matters.  She'd feel Clay turn her way in the dark and in
anticipation of his intention she'd cooperatively draw up her
nightgown's hem and spread herself open with her fingers to facilitate
his entry.  Then, she'd lie quiet beneath her man's ramming bulk with
wifely patience, demanding neither kisses nor fondling as Clay sought
to satisfy his need.  She never once questioned her husband's stops and
starts, as he'd go soft inside her or the several times it would
require the jerky motion of his hand on himself to help him finish. 
Once done, certainly ladylike and efficient in matters of hygiene,
she'd immediately flit away to wash herself.

Clay invariably would quietly exit to the bath directly on her return
to bed, not so much with the intention to make himself clean.  Never
fully satisfied in mind or body, he'd search his soul almost as
routinely as he'd soaped his groin and pendulous genitals.  Standing at
the ancient pedestaled sink in the bath, as always Clay was forced to
confront his replicate, opposite himself.  Perpetually hungering for
more than Clay had so far found, the man in the mirror never stopped
sending an intent gaze the young preacher's way from inside the mirror
beyond the hot running water's rising fog.

Clay was a black man and after all it was Nineteen-sixty-four.  Wanting
a rightful allowance of equal privilege that duly demonstrated the
insignificance of a skin's hue was an imperative sought by everyone of
color at the time.  But there was the rub.  Clay was covetous of
something even bigger -- real freedom.  He didn't want to be doled out
just the liberty to ride buses or run banks, buy houses in the suburbs.
 He hankered for freedom that swept a clear path for honesty; freedom
tailored so as to allow honest men free choice to live their lives
without reprimand or worry from others ignorant of their ways.  Yet for
all the shine his idealism might have put on this private picture of
freedom, despite his formidable size and stature, the man of muscle and
bone standing on the mirror's real side had little liking for trouble.

This seemed odd even to himself sometimes, there being no match-up in
his force of conviction about the issue despite the confrontation it
might mean.  He'd taken on other other issues just as unacceptable to
some -- race and religion as a start.  Yet on the other hand, Clay saw
it as understandable.  It was better to be a black man that at least
some small part of the world would be willing to know than be a man of
any color wanted to be known by none at all because of where he was
known to sleep.

Accordingly, the young preacher found himself strongly disinclined to
relinquish the safety of a potentially easier ride through life on the
currents within the straits of conventionality.  All things considered,
it seemed to him that he and Joyce had a happy enough unspoken
arrangement.  Neither had yet put qualitative questions or requirements
to the other.  Maybe that wasn't half bad he'd thought ....

As Clay lay alone as the slow rise and fall of his hand trailed his
greasy fingers the impressive length of his rigid dick.  Exasperation
almost crept in on his enjoyment of this small pleasure.  He'd begun to
wondering what it would be like to be on his own, to be free to avail
himself of touch when he pleased, with whom he pleased.  It being his
first time to be alone in four years, he realize what a long, long time
had passed since the last time he lay alone as he did then, exploring
the possibilities of touch in solitude.

Masturbation, such a simple thing, had always been a surreptitiously
administered regimen for allaying the recurring fevers of youth that
rose in him during adolescence.  Through privacy having become even
more a rarefied gift once he'd left home and set up lodging within one
of the small dorms at college, he'd generally found himself forced to
curtail the exercise during his nights and days ....

Anxious to succeed in fulfilling his devout parents' expectations of
him from the start after he'd enrolled as a freshman at the Bible
college he'd attended in the heart of the mid-west, nineteen-year-old
Clay Adderly had immersed himself solely in the study of theology --
per duty, and football -- per allowable pleasure.

During his first three years there, the good-looking and bright student
excelled as he worked diligently and without great problem toward a
degree with lofty hopes of making both his parents proud by ultimately
following in his father William's footsteps.  When at last there lay
just a year and half ahead of him, confusion fell in beside him and
matched his every stride.  The home stretch of his race suddenly began
to be piled high with obstacles.

Quite a healthy, physically normal young man, none of the accouterments
of a male nature had been excluded Clay.  Though he'd staunchly tried
to apply himself only to study, his young mind proved extremely fertile
ground for thoughts of sex and naturally love.  In just a little time,
Clay began to be robbed of the ease with which he'd previously run the
academic gamut.  Although he'd gotten on quite well with the other
young students attending the all male seminary, he'd constantly
experienced an underlying sense of loneliness and the want of a good
friend.  Someone who could be a confidant -- someone special.

Despite having generally kept his eyes forced front and center in and
out of class, attraction and arousal were difficult thing to quash in
the gymnasium's locker room after football practice.  In the showers
varied views on the spectrum of masculinity in its prime were presented
daily by his unclothed, unwitting academic associates.  Never farther
away than the corner of an eye, there was too much male attraction
about to be avoided without making himself obvious.

Some of the noisy drove of other young men he so often found himself in
the midst of were tall, some short.  Some were slender built, then
again, others husky, some quite hairy.  All were as varyingly
attractive and different one from the other in personal makeup as the
sizes and weights of their contrastingly dissimilar limbs and sexual
parts.

Clay's taste in men, as far as which ones aroused him were concerned,
was naturally diverse since he'd never slept with one despite his
conscious awareness of where his feelings drew him.  He secretly
enjoyed all men, long-legged or short, lean and narrow-assed or husky
and wide.  Sometimes Clay found stirring evoked in himself merely by
the set of one man's chin, the posture of another's mouth as he paused
for serious thought, the charming manner in which some young man's nose
might crinkle when he'd laughed.  On occasion, all it took was the heft
of a man's hand to peak Clay's curiosity and cause heat to rise inside
him and set him wondering about the manner of its touch.

In any case, Clay had all along been content with just being one of the
guys.  Such revealing sights as found in the locker room could have
proved particularly menacing to the sense of security of one who was
naturally drawn by them yet never once had his cock rose to betray him
during those first three years.  But eventually, a door to knowledge
was opened to him.

Clay's severance of his ties to his ignorance of men came about very
late one night, around two in the morning, just a week or so prior to
the third year student's return home for spring break.  Occasional
snores and murmurings of the other men asleep around him could be heard
in the dorm.  Attempting to lie as quiet as possible, Clay had been
restlessly squirming in a lower bunk.  By then, some time had passed
since he'd, at first almost absentmindedly, begun to toy with his dick.
 He hadn't specifically intended to, but initially finding he rather
enjoyed the mildly titillating sensations that the easy, hedonistic
play of his hand had evoked he began a private little game beneath the
blanket to offset his boredom.  He'd wondered if he could keep himself
on the knife edge of the pleasure he felt and not come.

Although the warning had been posed as a suggestion and veiled in
generalities when put to them by their counselors, the issue of
masturbation had been a matter the school's young male alumni had quite
quickly and intentionally been led to understand as being a practice
not particularly acceptable for those seeking to bear the Word.  Yet,
that night Clay had thought that, "As long as nobody knows, maybe just
this one time...," there'd be no harm in what he was doing, that it
would be all right as long as he stuck to his intention to stop before
he shot.  Having forgotten because he'd abstained so long, the muscular
young student marveled at how every motion of his hand supplied stoked
the fire low in his belly.  But, in time, he'd lain frowning and full
of silent self-chastisements when fully ablaze with heat he'd become
unable to leave off the game.

A resultant brawl between angels and demons unfolded in the young
theologian's head.  In a schizoid sortie with guilt, his own lustful
thoughts came under assault by the stern haunting dictum of theological
mentors.  Their imprint on his conscience magnified the viewing screen
for his thought while reflecting stilted regard for human exercises,
even acts in final analysis seemingly as harmless and simple of sorts
as Onan's.  The young confused student, suddenly feeling ashamed,
attempted a leap to the high road to thus leave his seed and his purity
unspent.

When he'd begun to touch himself Clay had believed abandonment of the
prolonged self-subjected teasing of his sex along with all thoughts
accompanying it would be no problem.  Another erroneous thought on his
part had been that a final capitulation to sleep also simply meant the
withdrawal of his hand from the crux his hard, sweaty thighs.  At last,
stop Clay did but his loins, stressed and sore, would allow no such
simple recourse -- or sleep -- for long.  Nagging insidiously, an ache
emanated from Clay's sweaty groin and tight, sore nuts and plagued the
tense-bodied young student to hastily apply the remedy he knew well. 
But valiantly, he'd forced his attention and his hand away from its
call for a time.

When the insistent itch for release had become absolutely unbearable
Clay gave in to his body.  He'd snatched a towel off the back of a
wooden chair kept close at bedside.  Draping it on his arm, before
himself, to hide the lift in one loose leg of his pajamas once he'd
risen, he stealthily exited the dorm for the showers meaning, wrong or
right, to finish what he'd started.  But, once again relenting in
intention with a sudden burst of zealot's will after he'd gotten there,
Clay swiftly stripped off his pajamas and entered one of the double
stalls.  Resolutely, he turned the shower head's single valve to the
cold position with a hard twist of his wrist and thrust himself beneath
the spray....


1964 - Part 5

Solemnly whispered, came the wise insight, "If only that was the way to
get beyond it," from someone standing directly behind Clay just as the
rush of ice cold cascading water had begun pummeling his broad back. 
Startled and embarrassed, Clay spun around.  His hard-on, which had yet
to be dampened by the cold rush of water, swung into full view. 
Mortified yet agile of foot, he found a handhold before nearly slipping
on the stall floor's wet white tiles and quickly found his balance
though not his composure.

"Easy, Adderly -- easy," Dan Coleman whispered.  There was something so
obviously unjudgmental in the face of the newly arrived ruddy-cheeked
freshman who stood there facing him that Clay instantaneously lost some
of his chagrin.  Dan, a sandy-haired young Iowan, had moved into the
seminary dorm at the beginning of the semester.  "There's not a soul
here but me and you."  Trying to comfort the flustered, good-looking
burly young black man before him, the short, easygoing youth smiled
understandingly at the nervous look Clay shot his way.  "Don't worry,"
he said, "I'm not the kind to run around with stories."

"I was just --," Clay began.

"Look, I said you don't have to worry about it.  There's nothing to
explain."  The square-shouldered young man's head all at once dropped
shyly bringing Clay's attention to the protrusion at the front of the
thick towel wrapped around his hips.  Then, timid himself in the
admission, "You can see that I know exactly how it is," he said.

Yet bravely enough, Dan looked up at Clay again.  This time directly
into the deep brown eyes of the muscular young black man still standing
naked and aroused inside the shower stall.  Slowly, Dan undid the towel
and let it fall off the ends of his fingers to the floor completely
leaving unmasked his own emblem of like need before he entered too.

Dan moved forward; just close enough for cold droplets of the spray
deflected by Clay's broad shoulders to begin spattering like the flecks
of copper on the pale white rise of his chest.  "Come on," he said,
solicitous of his fellow student's common sense, when he plunged all
the way into the chilly spray.  His hard dick, a short pink spike,
grazed Clay's thick hairy thigh as gingerly, he reached around Clay's
large shivering form and gave the control valve a quick twist in the
opposite direction, well past the warm mark.  "Go a little easy on
yourself.  There's enough out there to beat you down that nothing can
be done about," he'd continued.  "Even though we're to set our minds to
rise to the heights of angels, my God man remember, all we are is flesh
and bone."

Dan, seemingly speaking as much to himself as to Clay, fell silent as
though closely considering the thing he'd just said.  But quite
abruptly, he took a bold step forward that brought the upraised head of
Clay's swollen sex against the heavy frost of pale, wiry hair covering
his groin.  Clay, just as abruptly, backed away.  The chance he'd
yearned for had just jumped out at him like a jack-in-the-box and left
him too unnerved to avail himself of it.

There was powerful mesmerism in Dan's whispered assurance, "It's okay."
 The farm boy from Iowa understood what Clay needed as well as his fear
to ask for it.

Momentarily the young black novice theologian conjectured that "it's
okay" might well have been the literal translation of the very words
the serpent uttered at man's beginning in Eden.  Somehow Clay couldn't
focus on that or any notion for long.  In an instant the sum total of
his already scant resistance had given way.  He bestowed no more
thought to serpents or judgment once Dan's slowly extended hand had
gently taken hold of his cockhead.

In turn Clay reciprocated, offering no resistance, when his dormmate's
free hand clasped his wrist and drew his hand toward the dripping wet
wedge of sand-gold pubic hair in his own crotch.  Willingly, he
received the glowing pink staff that jutted out stiff at the apex of
the freshman's short, sturdy slightly bowed legs as it slipped into the
loose circle of his finger.  Clay made no comparisons of their dick
sizes but marveled at how warmly Dan's cock burned in his grasp.

"Yeah -- like that -- do it just like that," Dan gasped in a broken up
whisper.  His flint grey eyes closed as Clay's big fist churned about
the head of his sex .  Standing in the warm rain of spray that fell on
them from the nozzle overhead, he let his flushed cheek fall on the
warm gold skin of Clay's wide chest.  With slow, unison motions, each
continued stroking the other's cock.

The requirements of passion rose, demanding more than Clay knew how to
ask for.  In a short time it was the gleamy-eyed freshman who mused out
loud, "Wow, it's kind of big but --"  Scrapping the remainder of the
comment, he at once let go of Clay's cock and snatched a bar of soap
from a chrome holder on the wall.  "We'll have to be quick," he
whispered urgently.  "Here, go ahead but soap me up good first."

Clay hadn't comprehended until Dan had firmly pressed the bar of soap
into his palm and turned his back toward him.  The Iowan's smaller hand
instructively guided Clay's fingers into the warm cleft of his small
smooth-skinned and milk white rear.  Dan bent deeply at the waist to
allow Clay better access for applying the lather.

Clay's closer inspection of the split in Dan's ass, caused his sex to
leap for his belly all of its own volition, .  For the first time in
his life, with absolute fascination, he found himself beholding the
wrinkled pout of another man's fundament.  In time to come, while
laboring to visualize the key for release as he lay over his wife, he'd
use repetitions of it's recall to bring him to the boiling point.  He'd
come to remember, unfailingly, how beautiful he'd thought that sight
and how incensing the feel of it had been to him under first scrutiny
by his curious fingers.

Nervously poised on tiptoe like a dancer awaiting his cue, Dan somewhat
less tall than Clay, had leaned back against the husky youth's bigger
body for partial support.  His short, thick legs strained and trembled
as much as the hand he'd used to reach between his backside and Clay's
belly.  It trembled as he'd grasped Clay's dick mid-shaft to properly
seat the dark, swollen head within the thoroughly soaped divide of his
tail.  As willing as he'd been eager, the young freshman had set his
jaw and clamped his lips tight to stave off the natural reactionary
gasp he knew was bound to burst forth from himself when the big man at
his back, seeking sanctuary inside him, would begin pushing up into the
tight envelopment of his ass.

From the start, the hurtful stretching of the seductive Iowan's pale
ass had made itself unmistakable to Clay through Dan's rapid, ragged
breaths although he'd fought hard to render his pain voiceless.  "I'm
sorry," Clay whispered hotly into Dan's ear.  His acknowledgment had
been sincere but he was overcome with need.  "... so sorry," he'd again
moaned apologetically to the trembling freshman.  "I can't seem to help
myself ... just can't stop now."

The warm coil of Clay's big arms tightened viselike about Dan's chest. 
Then, with a deep grunt he'd hoisted Dan clear of the floor, burning to
penetrate him more deeply.  Suspended in the air, the freshman's feet
no longer made contact with the wet, white tile below and his splayed,
muscular legs dangled puppetlike, flailing with urgency when Clay,
holding him fast, had suddenly begun faster and deeper upward drives
into his ass.

It wouldn't be long before Clay's claim on the comely freshman's pale
ass would to end.  Not many hurried, deep thrusts into the sweet grip
of the tight channel in Dan's backside would be needed to swing open
the floodgates inside the man desperately lunging into him.  Clay
staggered backward, holding Dan's burning body against himself with all
his strength as his ass mashed against the cold tile on the wall. 
Gasping for breath, the ardently ambitious freshman in his arms by then
was totally speared on the thick dark column of his sex and awkwardly
churning his ivory pale backside to add to his taker's pleasure.

The press of one big hand against Dan's hard midriff kept the
sandy-haired youth's pale ass jammed into Clay's groin.  Incredulous at
the high sensation each spike of his dark, unbending rod into the
cream-colored orbs reaped and powerless to hold his peace in awe of it,
Clay's mouth fell agape.  Just in the nick of time he pressed his lips
hard against the side of Dan's neck.  He muted the keen howl that
expressed the extreme of his sensation as he began free fall from the
height his voracious lust for more and more of the clutch of Dan's tail
had led him to.  Bending Dan's trembling body with his, Clay slammed
his thick sex into the sheathing of the freshman's tight ass one last
time as an orgiastic sledgehammer blows knocked him nearly to his
knees.  Hunched and bent over Dan, the smooth contours of Clay's deep
gold body resembled a large block of dark polished stone as he urgently
embraced the willing young white man impaled on his sex.  His powerful
frame lurched each instant his distended member throbbed out a new
cannon blast of his seed high up Dan's insides.

Fighting to control his gasping, Clay, half-dazed continued to tightly
hold onto Dan until his penis finally went soft and was grudgingly
expelled from the freshman's tail.  Shakily, the large youth slowly
lowered  Dan to the floor.

The young freshman spun about panting, eyes on fire.  His strong chest
was rising and falling just as hard Clay's.  "Now me ... turn around
for me," he whispered urgently.

No questions outstanding in his glistening eyes, Clay mutely obeyed. 
Dan rested his hands on Clay's waist and he at once acquiesced to their
guidance by slowly turning around.  Subsequently, the gentle slide of
the bar of soap up and down the divide of his heavily muscled buttocks
began.

Dan tutored Clay in whispers, "Lean forward and bend your knees some." 
Then, pressing firmly downward on his tall pupil's broad shoulders from
behind, "Yeah that's it ... that's it ...," the eager freshman said,
"Squat down some more ...."

It being that throughout his upbringing his religious parent's had been
a closemouthed sort as to the subject, Clay knew little of sex of any
kind, in any form, other than his own childishly askew assumptions
regarding the matter while a boy.

That accrual of his sexual knowledge had been garnered by the same
manner of osmosis as most children's -- inadvertently from television
and movies, surreptitiously from fragments of adult conversations.  Of
course, the lion's share was erroneously gathered from just as
misinformed young friends, especially other boys, who could only
properly school him in all the wrong words for male and female anatomy.

Though somewhat better advised during his teens, the like of such
sketchy secondhand detail remained all he'd had to fill in the gaps for
himself once the mechanics of the issue became better established.  All
his acquired data of course referred to the usually known history and
workings of sex -- boy meets girl -- more or less.

Yet, the thing which provoked Clay's deepest though most sensibly
undeclared interest was the innocent enough  inquiry regarding what
happened if a boy happened to meet boy.  He remembered only one
in-depth mention of this issue which had at last given him an inkling
that it was indeed possible for men to be together.

During a summer holiday gathering, a couple of his uncle's relived
escapades from their army days in a far corner of the Adderly's
backyard.  Each of the grey-haired brothers stood sipping whiskey from
a paper cup as one puffed on a fat cigar, assuming all the while their
twelve-year-old nephew and the rest of the young ones at the family
picnic to be off at play and out of earshot.

Clay passing on the opposite side of a high fence had heard familiar
voices near.  Traditional in regard to time and place, the rural south,
"grown folks talk" was something strictly forbidden to children's
scrutiny.  Clay knew this but stopped to listen even though he knew a
whipping would be coming if he was caught.  Grown-up voices, cautiously
lowered in tone, those of Clay's uncles Gilbert and John, were the
irresistible lure that had drawn the boy to creep near.  Initially at
some distance, he'd no clue as to what they were actually talking about.

"Well sir, seems they went and sent the lot of us from where they had
us stationed to someplace way out in the pine woods to bivouac for ten
days or so.  Now, Murphy was our platoon leader.  We used to call him
Bulldog behind his back," the boy had heard when he'd crept nearer. 
"Great big ol' burly man too believe you me.  I'd have sworn that big
bruiser was damn near tough as nails and would have called anybody a
liar said he wasn't.  Tough, I say.  When he spoke there was no doubt
about whether you'd be listenin' or not.

"Then first night out, lookin' for a spot to take a leak right quick, I
heard a funny sound, like a bear or somethin' gruntin and rootin' round
out there in the dark. ... Well sir, that's just how I came up on `em. 
There was both of `em in the moonlight, naked as jay birds Gilbert. 
Murphy was on his back with his big ol' self laid on the ground, legs
drawed up and heels just dancin' in the air.  This new recruit was
hunched over him and buckin' like a horse.  Fella had his root all the
way up Sarge's rump and was puttin' it to him somethin' crazy out there
in the tall grass not ten yards outside the camp ... and then ..."

Gasps accompanied the nasty snickering between them as the elder of the
 two brothers, Uncle John, sneeringly continued his narration of a
certain young Corporal Dinwitty's and Drill Sergeant Murphy's
unfortunate discovery while out on maneuvers.  Young Clay, who'd been
privy to the tale's relation merely by advantage of his hiding place on
the opposite side of a high redwood fence, had been swiftly and
thoroughly taught the general low appraisal of such a thing.

Nonetheless, despite the apparently negative view in the telling of it,
this seemingly vast body of knowledge which had accidentally been
spilled into Clay's awareness through that gap in the fence stoked the
boy's privately kept wondering further.  As he'd continued to grow,
seen and unseen manifestations of normal male libido made him more and
more aware of himself and as well, other boys.  Wondering still, he'd
been full of unanswered questions by the time he'd arrived at college. 
He'd neither known nor been fully able to imagine the familiarity of
the design of the comfort found in another man's arms nor the like of
lying abed with a male as though a compatriot, close and ardent ... but
he'd begun to learn ...

Using a shower rail as his handhold for support, Clay assumed a
hunkered stance as Dan moved in on him from behind.

Eager for his turn at pleasure, the eager young freshman anxiously
ground his firm, pale belly against the gold and tremulous rise of
Clay's tail.

Clay steadied himself further to accept Dan's weight as he felt him
begin to fold his body over his.  Unsure of what degree of pain or
pleasure was about to come, the athlete's heart inside the virgin
theologian was racing full throttle.

Dan lifted himself a little on the balls of his feet.  His hurried and
fumbling fingers slipped the hot, swollen head of his short fat dick
into the rift in broad-backed Clay's rear and brought it in line.

Clay's big body shuddered as he uncontrollably uttered a soft, low
whimper at the rhythmical nudges he felt against the small opening in
his tail.

Expeditiously, Dan gripped Clay's shoulders tightly and himself
trembled when the muscular youth bent before him again shuddered
violently as the tight ring of muscle buried in the rise of his ass was
first pierced.  The freshman sighed ecstatically for want of more of
the feeling, stilling himself to bask in the tantalizing warmth that
was suddenly all around the tumid head of his manhood.  Dan's respite
lasted for merely a short chain of elapsing seconds.  He quickly
abandoned his lingering and proceeded all the way inside Clay with a
steady, slow push of his groin.

As far in as he could get in the depths of the bigger man's tail, the
young Iowan didn't allow rare pleasures to rest as his alone.  He
snaked a pale arm under Clay's bent body and reached with spread
fingers for his sex.  Soft and dangling, Clay's cock swung into Dan's
open, searching hand as the two of them began to move together.  As
warm water continued falling over their stooped forms pumping forms,
Dan tantalizingly rolled the head of it tenderly in his soapy
fingertips once he'd made the capture.  Quickly, it began stiffening in
response to his touch.  Dan's fingers left off teasing and he seriously
set to energetically pumping the thick, elongated mass with his small
fist once it was fully erect.  Fast falling in synch, his jabs into
Clay's backside caught the cadence of his plunging hand.

Despite the high and dizzying elevation to which they and their passion
had climbed, the coupled novitiates maintained the commitment to
silence and clamped their mouths shut.  Knowing the grave danger in
discovery, they still endeavored to minimize their disruption of the
quiet inside the empty shower room.  Except for the reverberated fiery
blasts of hastily coursing air in and out of their nostrils, the only
noticeable sound to be heard outside in the corridor was that of
falling water.

The thick, deep brown rod of firmed manflesh grasped by Dan's pale hand
had grown hard as a staff of Mpingo wood.  Erratically, it pulsed once
or twice as he'd held on tightly.  Then came a sudden urgent squeeze on
his own sex as its warm surroundings spasmodically began to contract. 
Working Clay's sex furiously with his hand because he desperately meant
them to meet same time, same place, somewhere high in orgasmic nirvana,
Dan too hurried toward its gates.  His taut belly hooked and connected
with hard, fast slaps against Clay's backside.  Abruptly, within the
rush, his own sex began spouting warm jets of his seed into the well of
sensation from which he'd drawn.

An instant later, the rippling sea of musculature on Clay's bent back
froze over.  Though each and every clenched muscle found a pose all its
own beneath the gold veneer of the satiny skin there, each knit and
combined with the rest in a broad, detailed relief which surely and
succinctly portrayed man during his most profoundly beautiful moment --
the ebullient unfoldings of culmination at an ardent striving's end.

Throb by throb, another copious flow of Clays pearly seed burst forth
and dribbled off the end of his pulsing bronze-hued manhood.  Every
delivery was spun out in short, gleaming crystalline chains that
intermittently broke as they'd shone in the light from overhead,
immediately lost to sight once they'd landed on the white tile between
Clay's parted feet.  So camouflaged, his issue ran into the drain with
the spray of water that streamed down from the shower head ....

The vision of his classmate instantly dissolved behind the young
preacher's eyes.  The reality of Harlan's want of him was again upon
Clay as he lay there threading his tight fist with his sex.  All at
once a view of future love and joy seemingly too bright to be obscured
by gauzy reminiscence, leapt from behind Clay's reveries of dead and
bygone time and appeared clear as day within his eyes again.  It
usurped his faded visions of the few resulting brief encounters he had
with Dan.  Flashes of heat -- exquisite heat -- lapped at his belly
making him eager for the climb toward Harlan's naked lithe form;
suddenly all there was to be seen in the moment's dreamscape. 
"Youngblood," he suddenly commanded in loud summons in the empty room
as urgency rushed overran him and his big body spastically jerked on
the bed.  "Ooh ... youngblood!"  This time he almost screamed for
Harlan as he furiously plunged his tightened fist up and down the
length of his sex.  Each hammer of his fist fell with a thud onto the
thick pad of coarse, black hair that dressed the joining of his knotted
thighs.  The drives of his hand landed hard enough to cause the readied
and tightly contracted mass of his scrotum to jiggle with each hit.

The young preacher was ready indeed.  A complete occurrence wholly
inside a millisecond, Clay's sweaty body bridged the length of the bed
in a tremulous, swaying arch of tight muscle as he desperately dug his
heels down into the mattress as if further spurring on the uproar of
sensations carrying him off.  Nearly every part and piece in the span
of his straining and primed visible flesh was clearly defined on his
frame when he cried out for Harlan one last time.  Geyserlike,
expulsions of the big man's semen shot high up into the air above him
and then plopped down again in sticky drops that wet the hairs on his
heaving chest and belly like warm, spattering rain.

The last pennies of physical passion spent, Clay's sweaty ass crashed
back down onto the bed as a strange, groggy and bewildered moan seeped
out of the handsome preacher's lips.  The lids of his slowly closing
eyes were the curtain fall on the lonesome man's act of yearning.  Eyes
fully closed to the bare stage his empty room made, Clay quickly
surrendered to the enticements of deep, dreamless sleep and lay for the
rest of the night covered only by soft lamplight ....


1964 - Part 6

A few minutes ahead of five that next afternoon as dusk grew, Clay
Adderly's front door upended an eternity of waiting for Harlan with a
welcoming inward swing.  Breath steamy, the youth hurried inside the
house from the cold bearing a grin and elation, both of which beamed
bright in contrast to the dreary leavings of late day outside.  Again
face to face but this time no longer shepherd and one of the fold, new
lovers instead, the tall, lean teak-skinned youth and the big framed
young preacher composed quite a comely pair.

Though such a simple thing, no other gift was as great to either as the
other's nearness.  Both silently rejoiced, gratified.  Neither Harlan
nor Clay uttered a single word or even moved as just for them time
kindly stretched the next minute or so thin, piece by piece, before
stealing by.

The city and its workings, all just outside the thick wooden door at
Harlan's back, were all at once vague and distanced in the handsome
youth's awareness.  Clay's firm, flat-handed shove on the heavy door
had cleanly cut off the lean, newly made man before him from
Philadelphia's stoic face, the chilly weather and all else in the
outside world with a dull thud.

Though he and Clay had been separated not even a day's worth of hours,
to the youngest of these two new lovers the expanse of the time so far
elapsed between the prior night and then was tantamount to days, maybe
even weeks.  Thus having come across a seeming abyss, naturally, the
tall youth's light eyes were not only full of love whetted keen by time
and distance but questions too.  He was especially eager for the answer
to the greatest among them but didn't quite know how to ask and had to
think on it in silence for a moment or two.  Finally, no other
knowledge essential to him but this, shy, Harlan tested Clay's eyes and
stumbled on the words, "Rev, I was kind of wonderin' whether ... I mean
..."  Harlan looked away to shyly complete the question.  "Did you miss
me?" he asked.

Deeply taken by the charm of Harlan's boyish uncertainty, so clearly
real and evident, the big-boned, honey-colored man at first playfully
feigned surprise but then murmured quite seriously, "Good God,
youngblood how could you think for a minute I didn't?"  Clay reached
out and reassuringly clamped Harlan's shoulder with a big hand. 
"There's no way for me to tell you even the half of it," he sighed,
shaking his head incredulously as though attempting to shake the
cobwebs of ignorance for words away.  "Why, if I was to sit myself down
right now and start doin' the necessary figurin' up of all that's
inside me, counted up, the feelin's would come to a sight more than
just my missin' you.

"I've been hungerin' for you all through the day, in ways so big and so
different, I'd need a month of Sundays to make it all plain.  One
minute there'd come somethin' like an achin' in my hands that I knew
there'd be no healin' for til you were here and I could have another
feel of you.  Very next thing, my eyes would commence ramblin' about
like I was a lost child lookin', if for nothin' else, just the ease in
some reminder of the last look I had of you so it wouldn't seem like I
was so far from home."  The big man's handsome face colored up when he
shyly added, "And, well you know -- everything -- about last night
keeps comin' cross my mind.  Even so, it still comes to more than just
a cravin' to be up on you.  My need's been deeper than that -- sure
nough."

"For all of today I've had as much of a soul deep burnin' to have you
near me as I've had for a drink of water or my next breath of air."

Harlan marveled at what he heard and whispered,"Really?".

The oath was unquestionably reavowed inside the solemn attitude of
Clay's brown eyes.  "Oh yeah ... really," Clay confirmed, nodding
earnestly as he slowly drew Harlan all the way to himself in the little
vestibule.  The well-built preacher nuzzled his returned companion's
clean black hair, sucking in the wonderful smell of man and youth on
him as he grinned contentedly knowing his new love, his true love was
harbored safe and secure inside his arms.  "But let me tell you
somethin' -- you know, there's more than water and air I feel a need
for right now," the velvet rumble of the big man's softly made known in
Harlan's ear.  "All of a sudden a mighty powerful yearnin' for a taste
of sweet brown sugar's come on me too.  Can you see your way clear to
servin' up a little ... please sir?"

Responding with speed, Harlan pressed his trim build harder into
Clay's.  "Here, take all you want," the youth accommodatingly murmured
as he offered his mouth to Clay.

The grasp of Harlan's gloved hand on the books he carried slackened
and, one by one, they slipped then fell away from him as easily as his
cares.  Each landed dully on the entryway's sisal mat.  With equally as
little compunction, the youth let loose the reins on the impatient
amorousness he'd ridden on through the day and began, despite
preliminary shyness, an eager retest of every ridge and hollow of the
preacher's solid outer anatomy with his flattened palms.  Nonetheless,
despite all the force with which his lean, hard belly strained against
Clay's, it seemed at that moment, to Harlan, they'd never be close
enough....

Two desires, one to quest the high peaks of closeness again, the other
to become good friends with the truth were born and risen with Harlan
early that morning at seven.  Responding to his mother's unwitting
felony by way of her relentless call from the bottom of the stairs,
he'd reluctantly pried his tan eyes ajar in irritated silence at being
robbed of a last twilight vision of Clay.  Nonetheless, that's when
he'd begun to think of Clay all over again and the roots of love's
principles began to bore into his consciousness.  Since his chance had
obviously come, longings to love well and love deep, grew as rightfully
foliate in Harlan's vision as the little informed young lover's
aspiration to better acquaint himself with choicer words of love and
deeper wisdom in the ways of connection.

To the eye, sparks of this true revival were scant in evidence as,
sleepy Harlan trudged to the bath and in a daze stepped beneath the
shower's spray.  Even if low voltage, the aura of a new frame of mind
was surely cloaking him.  As his light brown eyes gathered life and
light, finally opening all the way in acceptance of the coming day, his
intent did not wash away.  Inside the chrysalis it had cast around him
he'd quite contentedly jostled about during the long bus ride north to
school.

As the day had worn on Harlan, too distracted to effect proper
studiousness because of his extracurricular memory's frequent
preemptions, had wandered class to class through a wishful mire of
luxurious ponderings of love, sex and his future.  The tally of
meaningful scholastic effort times time spent totaled his day at school
as a mere sojourn.

As in the aftermath of the rites of passage for many, there was the
radiance of a brand new being all about the handsome youth's smiling
face that shone too bright to hide.  However, the whole wonderful thing
beginning to seem almost surreal, he found himself unable not to
question whether the night just passed had truly been a real occurrence
or just illusion.

Grateful to be alone at lunch to ponder it, Harlan at last permitted
the very private bundle of thoughts linked to the prior evening's
events to fall wide open inside his head.  Yet, each time he'd done so,
he found it immediately necessary to slam the cover shut on his
meditations by reason of the physically stirring effect of their
content on his blood.  The reaping of even bits and pieces of memories
planted all through the preceding night were more than enough seed for
arousal.

Curatively speaking, all the remedies for killing a hard-on that he'd
offhandedly gleaned in the locker room proved more comedic relief than
reliable prescriptions.  Intermittently hard-dicked and embarrassed
throughout the day but nonetheless giddily amazed and secretly pleased
at the strength with which the mere recall of lying in bed with Clay
held sway over him, Harlan found himself unable to suppress boyish
giggles at the state he was in.

Despite every trick he'd tried; clamping his bottom lip between his
teeth as hard as was safe, holding his breath, even constructing
macabre tableaus inside his head, nothing seemed to squelch the rapid
flourish of erections that sprang up and bloomed any time -- and
anywhere -- he happened to envision the preacher's bare body.  This was
evidence enough to lead one so young to finally surmise, it had all
been more than real and that he wanted another taste of it ...

Shivering with eagerness and ecstatic to at last have and hold each
other again, each of the young dreamers made himself warm at the fire
of the other's ardor.  The two of them stood merely pressed tight for a
good while, too much in love to think of or fear discovery and too
absorbed in their intimate examinations to be the least bit disturbed
by the patter of rushing feet continually passing in the cold outside. 
Surely it was through luck, not clairvoyance of any kind, that the two
new lovers correctly predicted neither harm nor danger would beset
their secret celebration of one another that night.

Standing so close, eating the warmth of Clay's body and his hot, dry
kisses, in the heat of the moment Harlan's dick thickened and went
hard.  Just as quickly his mind and will turned quite malleably
plastic.  So inclined to the follow the lead of his guide, the
dreamy-eyed young man hastily coiled his strong arms round the
preacher's broad back and unconditionally surrendered, offering himself
with an impetuous whisper.  "Teach me some more."

The tall youth's teacher, so big, so steady, gladly but shyly began to
teasingly suck at his charge's full lower lip, ultimately drawing it
betwixt the two of his with a slow, pensive pull.  As he took
possession of Harlan's mouth, his big hands boldly swooped down to cup,
then knead, the firm muscle in the half-spheres of the handsome youth's
slim tail end.  The doing of that caused the even tighter press of the
tall, leggy youth against the big man.  Automatic masculine instincts
set each to a studied slow chafing of his primed and swollen crotch
against the other's.

Lesson by lesson, both started taking serious note of their trailing
fingers' every discovery, alerting themselves of little things they did
that appeared to please the other as self-schooling progressed. 
Neither of the pair of handsome young men learning the other's ways in
the confines of the cramped classroom that the tiny foyer made could
imagine anything more important from where he stood.

The more feverish Harlan's return on the preacher's investment of
kisses grew, the more the turned-on youth mashed and ground the hard,
aching knot of bound up sex between his legs against the mammoth lump
risen at the front of Clay's paint stained khaki pants.  His firm butt
continued to clench then loosen in Clay's two-handed grasp as arousal
spurred him to take initiative.

Harlan swung a long leg sideways, fitting one of the preacher's thick
thighs between the two of his as he leaned into his body.  The youth,
bending his knees slightly and bearing down hard, began short, brisk
slides of his aching crotch on the hard muscle atop the big man's thigh
with jerky hooks of his gut.

Handsome honey-colored Clay was as much surprised as turned on by
Harlan's growing show of ardor.  "Mercy now youngblood, looks to me
like I'd better get you the rest of the way inside real quick," he
whispered huskily.  The preacher shot out and hand swiftly pushed open
the vestibule's inner door and began to draw the younger man holding
onto him to the center of the living room.  "Looks like we've got
ourselves some powerful big business to tend to," he said in a knowing
voice.

"Hold up a second," Clay abruptly instructed as he reached for Harlan
who stood there in the middle of the floor, waiting ready and still. 
His golden man's big hands shoved Harlan's open jacket off his broad
shoulders.  Pinching the leather jacket's sleeves high at their fronts,
Clay deftly drew the jacket straight down the youth's strong arms. 
Instantly released, it fell to the living room carpet, ignored.

Electric jolts of arousal, on his uncontrollable desire to view all the
beauty hidden beneath, compelled the preacher's strong, thick fingers
to fly along the vertical row of small buttons at the front of Harlan's
heavy shirt.  Each was speedily undone and the shirt, once flung open
wide to set Harlan free, was as well cast to the floor after being
removed.

An upward shove of the preacher's flat palm and spread fingers hiked
Harlan's tee shirt high up his wide chest.  Clay, with thorough care,
guided the pink tip of his tongue across his lips to make them
thoroughly wet just before bending to plunge his mouth against the
nipple first exposed on the satin span of warm brown skin on Harlan's
chest.  He voraciously slid his mouth and darting tongue on and off one
of the deep bronze hubs of energized nerve ends there to hungrily
nourish the ripening lust inside himself by sucking at its tiny nub of
a point.  As Harlan gasped and squirmed in reaction, his feet commenced
a quick-stepped dance of joy purely inspired by Clay's mouthing.

The bull-necked preacher straightened his bent back abruptly and laid
claim on Harlan's mouth once more.  The rise of their hearts' racing
spiraled higher as this new kiss endured.  Clay, in love, in heat and
ready to do all things to please his love, tore his mouth off Harlan's.
 "Goin' down youngblood," he intoned like a man bewitched as his eyes
fell to Harlan's crotch.  " Bout to get on the case just like a
doctor," he uttered, throaty and incensed.  Moving his lips yet closer
to the youth's unquestionably attentive ear, "Headin' way, way down
here," he whispered, gently rubbing the lump, hard as stone, at the
junction of Harlan's legs.  "Gonna see if somethin' can't be done to
cool down all this hot blood in you."

Similar in abstract, thoughts of being dipped in the pool the day Clay
had baptized him flashed across the aroused youth's mind the moment the
big man seized him by the waist, hard, and bodily hauled him down onto
the pale green sea of carpet under their feet.  All in a flurry of
Clay's big hands and the few following seconds, Harlan lay stretched
out straight on the living room floor, pants undone and snatched down
just past the middle of his thighs.

Still completely dressed, Clay quickly knelt over leggy young Harlan,
straddling his knees.  More alive and sex bent than he'd ever imagined
possible for himself or any man, the big man slowly reached down for
Harlan's cock, man-steel and heated under his touch, and clenched it in
his hand.  The young preacher contemplatively eyed it with
slack-mouthed curiosity as the long, dark erect staff of manhood
throbbed, sometimes twitched within his grasp.

The handsome preacher's broad, powerful shoulders shuddered as he
slowly bent low, angling the thick black shaft of Harlan's cock toward
his lips.  It was then that he noticed a droplet, clear and gemlike,
appear almost magically before his eyes atop the wide crown of the
youth's sex.  Clay bent his body the rest of the needed distance.

One lick, just one.  That's all it took -- merely one light but tender
swipe of his tongue made the little crystal bright jewel his.

Raising his head a second later, the salty, viscous droplet dissolving
on his tongue tip, Clay again ponderously gazed at his slowly lifting
and descending fist and at the dark, blunt headed man-flesh protruding
from it.  He passed his tremulous free hand between his legs, giving
his own yet unbared and burning sex a squeeze as he made an intent
study of the tiny glistening path of moisture marking his tongue's
first trace on Harlan's dick.

Stretched out under him and anxious that he do it again, Harlan
burrowed his ass deeper into the softness beneath himself and sultrily
moaned up at him like a hungry nestling.

Hearing the call, Clay haltingly dropped his head for another taste. 
This time he let his dragging tongue set about a slower, more
venturesome kind of wandering while he stanchioned the swollen flange
on the tip of his whimpering young love's sex with the press of his
full lips.  The more the big man at work, all muscle and gold, sent his
tongue traveling the more adept he grew for the task at hand.  Again
and again, he lapped round the circumference of the youth's throbbing
cockhead, occasionally probing then mopping away more of the
preorgasmic crystalline outpour from the tiny sensitive slit in the cap
of the tower of flesh clasped tightly in his mouth.  Incrementally, the
stirrings in Harlan's body were deepening.

Though the ardent young preacher's tongue wagged slow and light, there
was force enough in its action to prompt the jerky drift of Harlan's
tensed ass off the rug.  Quite readily, the youth offered up his dick,
wanting all he could have of Clay's warm, wet mouth.

Duly noting the favorable responses his actions elicited, Clay set his
tongue to whipping the tip end of Harlan's sex faster.  His cheeks
caved in as he sucked harder on the rigid flesh in his mouth.  Rasping
in the air above the preacher's rising and falling head, the rough,
studish grunts and groans of a young man much delighted by his
abandonment of self to pleasure ground out from Harlan's throat.

Eyes glazed and his countenance raw with rut, Harlan lifted his head to
gaze down his taut, ridged gut and witness the production of the
broadcast of the incredibly voluptuous emanations coming from between
his legs.  The youth clumsily propped himself up on one elbow to see
more, fixing his gaze on the crown of Clay's head which bobbed in place
over his crotch.  Then all at once, his head thudded on the carpet as
his flat midriff seized up, forcing out a small whimper out of him as
agitatedly he began digging heels and fingers into the carpet while
Clay attempted to fit more of his thick shaft inside his mouth.

A puppet to the tongue that flogged his dick, Harlan groaned out
amazement from deep in his gut. "I didn't know there could be so many
ways to feel so good ... so good.  Ah!" he suddenly cried out as his
lean body jerked again in response the next swipe at his tongue-lashed
cockhead.  "I just didn't know," he reiterated, dazed as he lay there. 
All his reactionary moans came as pure and sweet to ear as his face was
to the eye.  His pelvis continued to involuntarily buck as his long
lean legs quivered.

Clay's head abruptly shot up and he sucked in a gutful of breath,
allowing Harlan's sex to spring out of his mouth and stand and cool in
the air.  "Lay on your side," he hoarsely panted as he swiftly lay down
to settled himself on his own.

A light caress of Harlan's hip guided his turn toward him.  The big man
sucked his thick middle finger into his mouth and extracted it,
glistening wet with saliva, from the loose grasp of his lips.  Holding
the moistened finger stiff, the preacher hurriedly wedged his hand
between Harlan's thighs and twisted his wrist, feeling for the tiny
pouting hole not far beyond the youth's drawn up balls while his mouth
eagerly reclaimed the his hard sex.

Small serpentine twists and bends of Harlan's agile body propelled him
farther into the draw of Clay's suctioning mouth.  The envelopment of
overwhelming warmth was once more on him.  "Mmh ... yeah," he grunted
loudly, grabbing for Clay's hard shoulders as the big-handed man's
moistened finger abruptly broke through and began slowly slipping up
into his tight backside.

At its onset, Clay's finger struck a chord, resonant and incensing in
its lascivious sensation.  The trigger for that feeling lay in a
particular place inside which Harlan had never before realized the
existence of.  Too young and too much a novice to be well-versed in
names and quick descriptions, what he experienced at each flick of the
preacher's stiff finger admittedly seemed odd but felt so good to the
youth he instinctively and vigorously sought the advantage of double
pleasure.

The sinewy youth clamped the top of Clay's head tightly with his fanned
out fingers.  Then, after each capture of another sweet reward at the
end of a forward drive of his rod into the handsome preacher's waiting
mouth, with sharp little grunts, the lissomely moving youth
determinedly pushed his ass back against the hard fist which held
Clay's thick, stiffened finger ready for another plunge up his tail. 
Its continued wiggling and prodding inside his butt  drove him wilder
by the thrust.

Further excited as well as enthralled by the urgent expression of power
in the rise of Harlan's climbing passion, Clay took a more solid grip
of the youth's slim, tensed ass and incrementally magnified the
manipulations of his busy finger to stoke the fire higher.  The veins
in the preacher's thick neck rose and pulsed as the muscle in it set as
he steeled himself to accept the heightening frenzy of Harlan's strong,
urgent thrusts to his mouth.  The rigid shaft of deep-shaded flesh
rapidly sliding in then almost out of his mouth seemed to be hardening
all the more.

As expected, since in such matters a man usually requires no special
expertise other than merely being a man to judge, the preacher could
tell from the intensity of his handsome young love's lustful delvings
for rarefied pleasure inside his mouth what was soon to come.  Securing
him for the approaching storm of passion, Clay hugged Harlan's
beautiful, hard brown thighs more tightly and stepped up the movement
of his tongue.

Harlan was on fire.  The youth, beginning to sweat and gasp, no longer
could manage calm, mannered movement and, by then, had no wish to
travel that far back to the beginning of the love they were making if
he could have.  Gritting his teeth, the thoroughly turned on young man
growled like a young lion as he determinedly pitched his lower belly at
Clay's face.  Fragments of new feelings swept in on the waves of
voluptuous in the rising tide of orgasm.

Clay made no attempt to distance himself from Harlan and his physical
need although the eager, jolting delivery of hard manhood into his
mouth, once or twice plunged too deep, had nearly caused him to choke.
"Some more!  I need it like that ... Like that some more!  Hurry man! 
Hurry!," Harlan suddenly wailed.  Helplessly and swiftly falling down
into sensory chaos, the youth seized Clay's shoulders as he pumped his
mouth with a fury.

"Oh -- I can't hold it back!" he yelled, straightaway grabbing the
shaft of his throbbing dick then shoving as much as Clay could take
into his mouth.  "You've got me bustin' man!  You ..."  Further words
escaped Harlan and a loud, stretched-out whoop took their place as the
trembling fingers of one strong hand dug deep into Clay's shoulder
hard.  His lean legs jerked straight and quivered as the insides of his
slim ass convulsively snatched at Clay's still jabbing finger.

Clay himself lay shuddering but kept a grasp on one of the youth's
straining thighs.  Though surely expected, the first spurt of Harlan's
semen into his mouth gave the big man a start.  Nevertheless, he
swallowed each following issue as though being nursed.  His relentless
tongue caused Harlan to cry out and his hard body to lurch with every
movement of it.

After some time, the preacher reluctantly permitted quieted Harlan's
soft sex to slip from his lips, then rolled away to sit upright. 
Keeping silent, meaning not to disturb either the force of the
exquisite bewitchment cast upon themselves or their shared sense of a
rare peace just come in the room, he gazed at closed-eyed Harlan as he
lay smiling contentedly, midriff bare, sex lying limp and long across a
leg still wet from his mouth's work.

Slowly preparing to show himself and his own need to Harlan, Clay
raised his strong arms and drew the worn, paint splotched sweatshirt he
had on over his head.  The brawny young preacher's thick black chest
hair shone in the light and sheerly veiled the underlying play of
rippling muscle as he tossed it aside.  In a minute or two, shoes
shucked off, socks shed, he rose to his feet and unfastened the belt
cinching the waist of his loose work pants and unzipped his fly.  Free
in their speech, there in the quiet room his eyes' silent orations
began to tell his young love more of the things he'd always wanted the
chance to tell another man before.  Clay left his gaze to rest on
Harlan and pushed the pants and his boxer shorts past his hips.  His
cock sprang up, hard and throbbing.

Immensely enjoying the feel of the thick carpet against his bare ass
Harlan stared up at the big, gold skinned man standing over him, turned
on and hard.  His own sex commenced a speedy revival, swelling as his
curious gaze made a lazy journey up the insides of Clay's hairy calves
and thighs to the pendulous seed sack wedged at the meeting of his
powerful legs.

The comely brown youth paused for a brief look back at the night past
as he once more came to look upon the hard, dark jut of meat which had
so thoroughly effected his farewell to virginity.  His stiffening dick
lifted higher off his leg.  His eyes rose too for another viewing of
the thick planting of glistening, kinky hair covering Clay's flat, rock
hard abdomen and wide chest.  Harlan felt the feverish itch he'd just
assumed allayed start all over again.  But, of all he saw, the most
arousing sight was the true and real desire for himself that he found
in Clay's face.

Clay, once freed of the encumbrance of clothing, squatted at Harlan's
feet.  His thick sex stayed hard and bobbed and wagged straight out
before him as, first, he methodically went about the removal of the
boy's shoes and socks.  One by one he tossed them into the growing pile
of things strewn on the floor.  As he rose off his haunches to stand
again, holding the slim-legged chinos by their hems he drew them off as
Harlan raised his long legs in accommodation.

"Now that I'm up lazy bones, I'll leave it to you to get that tee shirt
off," he made plain in an affable tone.  The handsome man's brown eyes
were warm and alight with want as he looked down at Harlan wriggling
free of his undershirt.

Clay bent forward meaning to extend a hand to naked Harlan but halted
midway.  Their eyes had met and the lovers found themselves silently
communing all over again.  For both of the pensive pair, breath all at
once came slow but of size as they caught a newer more dizzying glimpse
of the depth of their feeling, one for the other.  Beyond the first
time each of them had occasion to learn the greatness of the other's
feeling, the sensation that a current look at the same realization lent
seemed, by far, wonderfully new and mysterious.  And, each was innately
sure the other felt the same thing.  Positions frozen, they studied it,
they weighed it, but knowing no words with which to paint the wonder of
it for the other neither attempted to speak of it.

The two young men's sense of the feeling and the moment threading their
way through their awareness seemed as though viewing a slow, long
awaited silver train's passage from somewhere up high.  Once the long
moment passed, its gist hanging behind in its wake, Clay reached out
the rest of the way for Harlan's uplifted hand.  "What -- think I'm
just gonna leave you to lay there?" he inquired with an enigmatic grin
as he helped him up and then he shook his head to let the contrary be
clearly made known.  "There's more for you," he added with an assured
nod toward the stairs.

Both the handsome young men, naked and hungry for each other, headed
toward the staircase.

Following behind as they mounted the stairway, Clay lay a warm, heavy
hand on Harlan's bare shoulder.  The other swept upward, glancingly
caressing a muscular orb of the lean youth's flexing ass as they rose
the stairs.  Halfway up to bed, Clay abruptly closed the gap of the
stair step or two between them.  The urgency of his grip on Harlan's
shoulders halted their ascent.  Resting his brow on the back of the
younger man's shoulder, the handsome preacher fervently pressed himself
against Harlan causing his dry, throbbing dick to slide into the warmth
of the narrow space between the beautiful youth's muscular thighs as he
bound him up in his big arms.

Moments later the preacher let his young love go only to reach for him
once again at the stair-head.  He greedily regathered the youth and the
warmth of him close within his strong arms and rushingly whispered
down-home metaphor, hot and sweet as fresh-made candied yams, into
Harlan's ear as he ground his sex betwixt his belly and the youth's
firm backside.

The handsome young preacher told Harlan about every new emotion he felt
growing inside minute by minute, told him that at last he believed
himself surely in love.  Then he released him again, backing down a few
of the steps.  Perching precariously on his toes on the edge of a step,
the preacher squatted and leaned forward to leave a ring of dry kisses
on the small of Harlan's back.  The youth's soft, thrilled staccato
murmurs came falling on Clay's ears like tinkling silver fragments of a
song as he quickly grabbed for the banister to hold himself steady. 
Folding his brawny frame the big man dressed the sides of Harlan's
lean, bare behind with more satin kisses ... then his thighs ... and
then the backs of his knees.

Springing erect and rushing close again, Clay ebulliently captured the
young man in the warmth of his full embrace once more and quickly
guided him into the bedroom.

Harlan stopped just inside the master bedroom's entry and took
everything in all over again.  Gazing at the big bed, "Yeah, this is
the place all right," he thought out loud as though reassuring himself
of the particulars of where and how he'd been with Clay only a night
ago.  Honoring the memory, he gripped one of the virile young
preacher's wrists and pulled a big hard hand to his lips.

Pressed into the boy's back, Clay lent no comment as to his own
memories but swiftly turned Harlan round inside his arms to face him. 
Careful as always in his way with Harlan, it was near amusing how
unsure the big man appeared as he set his mouth on the willing youth's.
 Then again, he was doing something he'd always wanted to do for the
very first time.

For all the forcefulness his size suggested the amorous young preacher
capable of, the premier insinuation of his tongue into Harlan's mouth
commenced rather timidly.  Gentle as he was large, he tested and probed
Harlan's full lips as if very carefully laying open the unfolded petals
of a flower; as if their bruising would prove the ruin of the nectar.

However, Clay's confidence quickly received the boost it needed from
the jolt of surprise that whipped his ardor to frenzy when the youth,
hard muscled and warm in his arms, emulated him.  Thus encouraged, a
man in love unreservedly uttered his appreciation with a husky grunt as
brawny of figure as he.  He hugged the tall, slim youth so tightly
against himself that had Harlan held lesser faith in there never being
danger in anything Clay did to him, the hot-blooded crush of the
preacher's powerful arms might have proved frightening.

The two truly radiant male beings lingered long in the doorway touching
each other as they pleased, where they pleased, yet speechlessly they
voted the separation of their lips too dear for mere lovers' vows, or
praise.  Naked and honest in every simple way, they contentedly stood
together kissing and continuing to learn the feel of each other in
complete silence, save for the rush of their breath, until Clay broke
the kiss.

"Today everything's meant to be more for you than me youngblood," he
pronounced with an earnest but soft emphasis as he reached atop the
dresser for the little jar of Vaseline and planted it Harlan's palm. 
The young preacher tenderly cupped his young love's mystified face with
both big hands and gave him one last deep kiss before he,
matter-of-fact, walked away to the bed.

"Dag -- he's so damn fine," the youth thought, body on fire, head
reeling and growing voluptuously besotted on the knowledge that all of
this beautiful bull of a man he was beholding really was his.  Tall,
naked Harlan angled his slim, well-muscled build against the inside of
the doorjamb and drew in and blew out his breath long and deep through
flared nostrils as he gave his deepest consideration to the awesome
sensory potential waiting for him just a few footsteps away.

Remaining at a distance, with relish the youth made a close study of
the swaying expanse of Clay's shoulders, the complex play of the muscle
in his broad back and the alternating lifts and falls of the comely
preacher's hairy backside's as he easily ambled toward the bed.  Lances
of sweet heat found a mark low on the randy youth's belly.  Each
incensing hit him caught him in the groin area as, raptly, he looked on
as Clay lay himself facedown, just for him, on the bed.  When his dick
flash pulsed in reflex reaction to Clay's silent offer, Harlan swung a
hand attentively to himself, iron stiff and standing ready. 
Dry-handed, he stroked the length of his dry cock once and sucked up
another deep breath of air as it throbbed and reared higher upon his
touch.

Ass up and spread-legged, the youth's golden man lay waiting for him. 
This sight and its meaning proved so awesome to Harlan that in spite of
the raw lust it whipped awake inside him, his advance to the bed was
slow and measured as though an approach to a sacred place.  His long
cock, fully hard, seemingly thickened and swelled more.  Masterless
through anticipation, it roguishly reared at the lithe young man's
tensed belly with every near trancelike step placing him nearer the big
man on the bed.

Halting, Harlan eager eyes visually caressed every round and hollow of
the muscle mountains -- hairy, gold and orbed -- that composed the
handsome preacher's tail.  He moved on to the bed seconds later when
their lure would no longer let him abide at a distance.

Seating himself on the opposite side of the bed, Harlan drew his feet
off the floor and sidled crab-style on the heels of his hands and feet
across the mattress to the middle of the bed, next to where Clay lay. 
Drawing his long legs beneath himself as he sat, he gently reached out
and rested a hand on the warm satiny skin in the middle of the
preacher's back and let his open palm go sliding off to wherever his
whim took it.

After a short stretch time to merely absorb, for memory's sake, the
feel of the man's flesh and his bone, the aroused youth bent his lithe
body in the direction of the lower end of the bed as both his hands,
pilgrim travelers, journeyed farther down the preacher's back toward
his hips.

Fingers spread wide as they'd go, Harlan pushed his hands up, over and
down the pliant hills of flesh under them and dragged them back again,
same fashion, following each forward passage.  A last stroke of his
hands came to a slow halt at the apex of the mountainous, warm nether
region of the brawny preacher's body.

Without hesitation Harlan began dividing the two rounds of Clay's hairy
ass with a slow push of his straightened fingers.  The more their
parting revealed, the closer forward the youth leaned, anxious a better
line of sight into the deep valley between.  All of it at last laid
open to him, the youth's gleaming and mesmerized tan eyes locked on the
brown, puckered hole centered between his trembling thumbs.  Now and
then it would nervously tense, then relax as if apprehensively awaiting
his attention.

Without looking away, Harlan reached beside himself for the little jar
of lubricant and let it fall into the shallow well at the center of his
folded legs.  The jar would have fallen on its side again after his
one-handed loosening of the cap had there not been the strong support
of his raging hard-on to hold it upright.

Harlan folded deep at the waist and analytically rubbed his smooth
cheek against the smooth skin and rough hairs on one hill of Clay's
ass.  He pleasured himself with the feel of it for a while before he
once more sat erect and dipped a finger into the jar of Vaseline in his
lap.  The young novice inexpertly started spreading the greasy contents
he'd gathered up and down the divide in Clay's butt.

Clay who'd patiently lain still and quiet the whole time Harlan had
pored over his body began to stir, issuing out low grunts each time
Harlan's greasy, testing finger slid over the small, tight hole in his
tail.  The youth wasn't sure just how much Vaseline was enough and to
be sure, extra cautiously applied a gob or two more which left the
entire crease in the big man's backside slick as ice.

Once more the lean youth bent his body deep to stretch an arm over the
end of the bed and set the jar of grease on the floor.  Looking about
for something with which to wipe off the residual lubricant clinging to
his slim fingers but seeing nothing available, boyishly practical,
Harlan wiped them clean on the side of a thigh.  Just before he
stretched out on the bed to lie on his back beside Clay he asked the
young preacher, "Can I ... now?"

"Yes," the handsome man awaiting him said. "Right now"

Harlan slowly rolled onto his side and dragged a smooth muscled leg
across the luxurious field of hair on the backs of Clay's thighs and
calves as he made ready to mount him.

"Ooh -- daggone," the sex flustered youth throatily groaned in the
prone preacher's ear.  The swollen flange of his dick had just easily
plowed the tight divide in the big man's hairy tail as he sprawled his
lean body over him.  Wriggling his tall frame to settle himself on top
of Clay, Harlan reverently rested the offering of a single soft and
thankful kiss on the vein he saw pulsing on the side of the preacher's
thick, bullish neck.

Clay's body for a good while a mildly rippling sea of muscle for Harlan
to drift afloat on, showed its force belied by the big-boned young
preacher's state of patient quiet when he forcefully wagged his ass
side to side, once or twice, and sandwiched the burning root of the
youth's manhood solidly between its halves.

"Dag -- ain't nothin' like a man is there?" Harlan contemplated out
loud with true wonder as his lungs let go a sudden gorge of air that
had been laden with Clay's scent.

"From where I sit, right now youngblood there can't be." Clays murmured
response was muffled by the bed things as Harlan's searching hand began
burrowing under him.  "Just can't be," he said once more.

The tantalizingly potent masculine scent of Clay's wiry black hair had
adhered to the insides of Harlan's flared nostrils as the titillating
prickling from the late day growth of stubble on the young preacher's
jaw against his cheek added to the thrill of laying over him.  Testing
and considering every part and piece of the man his grasp or awareness
happened upon, the youth chafed the face of his smoother thigh against
the rough haired back of the preacher's.  Briefly, he clenched Clay's
big shoulders and then let his exploring open hands sweep the groaning
preacher's hard sides until they dipped into the hollows of his firm
hips.  Harlan's fingers squeezed the flesh there as slight hoists and
drops of his lean ass continued to send his sex shuttling back and
forth on test excursions through the snug furrowed track cut betwixt
Clay's clamped asscheeks.

Uncannily wise and practical despite his limited experience, the more
lithely Harlan moved his long and lean brown frame over the big man
whom willingly presented him his ass, the less he troubled himself as
to not having yet discovered and tied together the proper words of love
he'd been seeking to voice.  Instead he let each feverish breath he
took speak for him as he simply lay savoring his golden man's body
quiet-style.  That in itself might be proof of love enough for the
moment he thought.

The random nibbles Harlan had so far taken of the varied and tiny
pleasures of foreplay inevitably made his appetite great in a short
time and he reacted to its force.  Ambitiously arching his spine and
gyrating his slim, dark ass he maneuvered his probing sex, like a
divining rod sans a guiding hand, inside the crack in Clay's ass. 
First too high, then too low, Harlan's ready cock prodded muscle,
sometimes bone.  Two tries more and his blind cockhead caught on a spot
that pleasingly yielded to it's pressure.

Instinctively marking and the poising himself over the spot, tail end
wagging puppylike with anticipation the youth eagerly brought his lean
ass high and, assured of his aim, slowly let the weight of his body
drive the long, thick shaft of his cock down into the softness he'd
searched to find dead-center in the preacher's oiled ass.

Clay's head jerked up but even though his legs trembled violently he
held them wide open and kept quiet as Harlan began bearing down more,
insistent to know what it was to have his ass.

The young preacher's loud but choked-back outcry didn't come until the
drilling of the head of Harlan's sex all at once burst open the tightly
pursed ring of muscle which locked away the exquisite treasure to be
taken.  Rousted from his prior ease, the young preacher's basso croaked
groan bore resemblance to successively breaking timbers as all his big
frame shuddered when the beginnings of Harlan's abundance began
stretched the hole in his ass wide.

Truly amazed and his arousal growing fat from feasting on the thrill of
new sensation, "Oh -- it's almost like I'm up inside a furnace," Harlan
gasped loudly as the glans of his cock was suddenly grabbed, viselike,
in heat.  "It's feels just like fire," he repeated with fevered awe as
he sank deeper between the mounds of shivering muscle under his belly.

An eruption of more overwhelming warmth sheathed the thick, continually
submerging shaft of his sex.  About to touch bottom, Harlan gasped and
whimpered a mix of great pleasure and great dismay as highly keen edged
sensations began to spear his groin as stars burst behind his closed
eyes.  "Uhn," he grunted as his lean frame stiffened.  "No! Aw man --
don't let it happen yet!  Dag, Clay what am I gonna do?  I think -- oh
I'm about to bust off again.  I don't --"

"Hold still -- don't move!" Clay called out.  Lightning fast, the
preacher's big hands flew back and clamped down on Harlan's thighs with
a loud slapping sound as he yanked them tight against his own.  "That's
it," the young preacher's deep voice authoritatively rumbled up to the
youth who by then was so close to the brink that  his long dick, fully
alive, literally pulsed and leapt in his ass like a wild creature just
caught in a snare.  "That's right -- that's all you've got to do --,"
he said soothingly as Harlan obeyed, "just lay on me real still -- the
feelin'll die down in a little bit."

For several minutes they lay joined anxious but still.  Harlan's breath
was still coming strong and fast.  His dick, fully distended and
throbbing, was hooked deep in the sweet squeeze of the handsome
preacher's ass end like a spur.  "Pull out easy," Clay instructed
quietly after a little more time.

Instantly surprised and disheartened at what appeared the apparent loss
of a finish for what had begun, Harlan reluctantly began bringing
himself up on all fours.  He cast his eyes down and looked longingly
between their bodies as his cock, greasy and gleaming from all the
Vaseline he'd spread inside the tight crack in Clay's hairy tail
slipped out into the light again.  Balls tight and achy, the youth
wanted to ignore Clay's request and make an impetuous plunge right back
in.

Abruptly, the bed began to rock.  Clay hurriedly set his powerful frame
in motion once Harlan was pulled all the way out of his insides. 
Though puzzled, the youth agilely danced about the bed on his knees to
move clear as the preacher bent and drew his long legs up into his
chest while turning onto his back.

Harlan still on his knees looked down at Clay somewhat bewildered as
the preacher pulled his knees apart bracing each under a big hand at
its respective side of his wide chest.  His thick cock, lazily at
attention, leaned and swayed over the field of coarse hair on his belly
as gravity draped the loose, low hanging sack laden with his balls
before the little hole in his muscled ass.

When the youth made no immediate move toward him, "Well, what you
waitin' on boy?" he chided gently.  Suddenly coming to understand
Harlan's quandary by the look in his eyes the big man softly explained,
"Even if you can't hold out for long youngblood, I want to be sure I
get a good eyeful of those eyes and that face while it lasts.  Go head
now, slip it back in me easy ... real easy," he warned as Harlan
directly came scrambling into position over him.

Harlan's wide shoulders shook as his sinewy back arched over Clay.  He
carefully began tapping the well of heat in the young preacher's tail. 
His shoulders weighted down the backs of the big man's thighs and
pinned them against his chest.

The eager novice, serious to be thorough, endeavored to leave nothing
forgotten, not even a kiss.  Awkward as it was to get his arms about
Clay's shoulders he nonetheless contrived a way to hug Clay as he
brought his lips down to his.

First -- one quick kiss.  It's electric effect made the youth suck in
just as rapid an intake of wind as its power to stir elicited a pulse
of his dick, clenched tight by the preacher's upturned ass.  The next
-- long and deep, the very way he'd seen male peers, equally as primed
for sex as he, tongue and lap their way about the mouths of
accommodating female partners as they'd dance the slow drag at
impromptu parties thrown in dark, smoky living rooms or basements a few
phone calls past some brave young host's being left to teenage mischief
and an empty house on occasional Saturday nights.

Sometimes analytic, sometimes serendipitous, the youth probed his
golden man's mouth soulfully with his tongue just as he'd seen. 
Growing a lover insatiably more hungry for the big man in the doing,
Harlan unsparingly filled Clay's mouth with his exploring tongue as he
as well packed more of himself into the young preacher's tight backside.

In time the wild sensations that Clay's probing had priorly unearthed
inside him came to Harlan's recall.  With the full intention of
bestowing all the best of love's service on the man lying under him,
Harlan pulled his arms from beneath the preacher's shoulders and moved
to action.  Swiftly pushing himself upright, the lanky young man backed
off three or four inches from Clay's body.  A goodly portion of his
dick was still seized by the preacher's grasping tail and he set to
jerky pendulum swings his lean ass as he squatted, tiptoed.  Pleasured
in the investigation the youth's muscular body bent and twisted, his
ass wagged as he poked his dick about in search of a spot inside the
preacher's tight ass similar to the special place found in himself that
had so greatly turned up the heat in him.

Harlan, tightfisted, gripped Clay's raised ankles and held them wide
apart with strong outstretched arms.  Choked up by the rising pleasure
he derived inside Clay's clamped ass, "Is it good?" he asked with a
shuddering voice the second occasion a quick experimental jab bumped
the tip of his dick against the lump just inside the panting preacher's
hairy ass.  The action extracted low bass tone howls from Clay.  "Am I
doin' it right?"

The big man, too much ablaze to issue a coherent reply, lay there able
only to blurt out incredulous little cries and murmurs at the pleasure
he was gaining from the youth's toiling, over him and in him.  Eyes
closed and beads of sweat sprinkled like crystal fragments on his brow,
the handsome gold-skinned man sucked in then blasted out long whooshing
draws of air up to ceiling through puckered lips.  Gasping, his
handsome head lolled side to side as, buffeted by waves of pleasure his
muscular form twisted and wiggled as he too investigated new angles for
the vestibule of his turned up ass to better receive benefit from the
soft hammer taps of the ample knob of the eager younger man's prodding
cock.

Gazing down on him, panting and wide-eyed, Harlan in a while set to a
vigorous tooling of the big man's tight ass.

Clay's chest urgently heaved high as he lay and let the handsome young
man straining between his hoisted legs learn on his own how to work his
ass.  Wallowing in the sheets, the preacher's big frame was all ajitter
as Harlan, back slowly bending, began to cover his body with his once
more.  The low light played on the youth's fine features as his
beautiful face descended slowly.  Their lips merely inches apart, Clay
abruptly whispered, "No youngblood -- no -- stay right there.  I want
to see your face ... got to see that face."

"Are you okay?" Harlan panted.

"Oh yeah -- it don't get no better than this," Clay gasped so assured,
he needed not a moment to think on his answer.  Looking deep into
Harlan's eyes he said, "You'd best believe I mean to show you just how
good it is," in a voice knotted up by his passion.

In the demonstrating, the big man cast off the role passivity's
limiting duties.  He grabbed behind himself for the bed's headboard as
he assertively kicked out hard, hooking his heels on Harlan's wide
shoulders.  The young preacher began to maniacally grind and pitch his
upended tail at the tip of the boy's hard cock, grunting hard at each
stroke Harlan put to him.  The brawny sweating preacher's own sex was
standing and throbbing at the base of his sweaty belly like a leaning
tower between his tensed, raised thighs.

Harlan's golden man cried out strong and loud, then let out an even
louder one a second time as ardor spiked in him, renegade like fever. 
"Oo-wee youngblood, it's gettin' good,"  Clay suddenly blurted out
through tight lips as he arched his back.  He relinquished his hold on
the headboard to shoot his trembling hands through his lifted legs,
grabbing for Harlan's waist.  Sweat laced, his brow knit.  His
astonished dark brown eyes were agape and pleading he be taken the
remainder of the way to the heights.  "Put it on me -- you've got what
to figured out right," the turned-on young preacher beseeched again.

Answering the call of his golden man's need and his own, Harlan punched
the insides of the big man's hairy ass with short, fast thrusts of his
dick.  In a matter of moments the continued driving of his virility
proved to be the key that tripped the hidden lock on the floodgates
inside the preacher.  A copious spill of the preacher's seed came on
with a rush.

All the muscle on Clay's hairy belly abruptly bunched in hard ridges
cut by shallow furrows.  Shakily, he kept his tail raised to the prod
inside it, gritted his pearl white teeth and groaned a roar.

Though something far above and beyond the euphoria afforded a man by
merely wine or potions, the ultimate phenomenonal feeling of sexual
release bowled the young preacher over with a druglike wave.  It came a
cropper like a heavy swipe to the gut, taking away both the burly man's
breath and his hold on lucidity.  Clay's groans of pleasure mounted all
the more as, near stunned, he was swept farther asunder a center point
of logic and reason by the outwardly spiraling current of an eddy of
sensation stronger than anything he'd known coming to be like before. 
Mouth wide open as he and the room around him whirled and his seed
poured out, all that was of clarity in the handsome big man's mind was
that Harlan was the author of all this pleasure.

Low on the moaning preacher's sucked in gut, its fleshy helmet flared
wide, hot and gorged with dammed up blood, Clay's hard dick flicked and
right angled itself each time it pulsed out a gob of pearly male
essence.  These spurts of the moaning preacher's warm semen blasted
upward like cannon fire and painted his young and eager taker's
tight-muscled heaving chest and belly, and then wet the thick mat of
shiny black hairs blanketing his own squirming torso as it dripped down
off Harlan's chest as he lay below.

The freshly jetted seed left clinging to Harlan's flat belly in essence
was an unguent aphrodisiac spur that heightened the young man's very
natural, virile compulsion to exorcise the sweet radiating ache above
his balls.  Heart racing, Harlan fell on Clay, no longer bridling the
thrusts of his cock as he madly sought to come.

Roughly flinging tangled bed things this way and that to better ring
the preacher's broad back and shoulders, with a stallion grunt Harlan
slammed Clay's knees tight against his chest though it took all his
strength to collect the heavier man close in his arms again. 
Completely given up to frenzied impatience, he rushed on his way to
catch a ride aboard the same wind of pleasure Clay rode.  The beautiful
youth gasped his own pleasure when he drove his swollen root all the
way up his golden man's clenched insides.

Counterpoint bass and baritone, the clamor and potent harmonies of the
two young men's voices as they made passionate love crammed any void
the giant experience might have priorly left remaining inside the room.
 They began to speak in the tongue of a pair journeyed far and
awesomely near a beautiful destination.  All of it was lovers' talk:
hasty directives -- where to touch, how hard to squeeze -- to spice the
love they made came mumbled hot-breathed; the telling of the joyful
execution of prolonged, stop-and-go tricky feats of balance on the
cliff edge of orgasm interpreted in the crescendo climb of wired whines
and whispers; loud chest-register affirmations that all the right moves
were being made as, in the mix, the ingredients in a recipe for
intimacy at last began to gel.  This was the language with which both
frantically communicated as each ground his body against the other's on
the big, rocking bed.

The youth and the preacher's entwined bodies, undulous and bent, turned
and grappled as if they were men in contest there in the center of the
loudly creaking bed.  The slippery feel of the sticky wetness on their
bellies from the big honey-colored man's pour of sperm added height to
the excitement of the moment.

Harlan let out a screech.  Masculine nature came down on him like a
lightning bolt.  Second by second, the roaring of a lion pride swelled
louder inside his ears.  Then, all at once, his lean, muscular body
lurched from the overpowering force that snatched him into Clay's
orgasmic slipstream.  "Oh man -- mmh -- I can't hold it!" he wailed
hoarsely, marveling at the size of the feeling he felt overtaking him
as he zoomed down sensation's fast lane.  He fucked Clay's ass for all
he was worth, hard and deep.

Wanting to be spared nothing, Clay broke the iron circle Harlan's
strong arms had formed around him and arched his back, righting himself
enough to grab up two handfuls of the youth's lean, trembling tail. 
Holding on tight, with one stevedore yank and a groan, the young
preacher's powerful arms hauled the full of length of the boy's girthy
cock up his ass.

"All of it youngblood, give me all the man nature you've go," he
coaxed, possessively plying Harlan's hard, bucking ass with his thick
fingers.

The squirming youth roared out at the involuntary squeeze of his gut
that expelled of first lob of his seed, willing to give Clay all he
could supply.

Lying there in the thrall of love's delirium' the young preacher
repetitively whispered for, "More," each time another throb of Harlan's
cock spat a jolting surge of liquid warmth high inside his squeezing,
churning bowel ...


1964 - Part 7

"Why?" Harlan searched through his whisper to Clay an hour later. 
Snuggled close against Clay as he lightly breathed in, the youth
assessed the mingled aromas of his savior's after shave and the musky
smell of sex under his arm that scented deodorant could not quite
subdue and liked it.  Liked it so much ... the stirring of a phantom
feeling began to radiate from the core of his soft dick.  He'd very
much liked to have had the strong, bull-necked preacher roll his way
and kiss him again, start making love to him, slow and sweet, all over
again but his need to have his question answered felt of great
importance just that moment

Brown eyes slowly traveling the faint traces of silver on the patterned
paper covering the ceiling, Clay grunted, "Huh?"  The query had
abruptly rousted him from slightly drowsy meditations inside the bubble
of contentment he'd not known the like of before.

"What made you get married?" Harlan asked, this time making his
question clear.

The young preacher clamped his lips together as he ran a fingertip
along his thin mustache and frowned, deeply thoughtful.  Yet, it only
took a passing second or so in his weighing and choosing words from
which to constitute a clear answer for him to realize he himself wasn't
sure why.  Then, after honest consideration of the matter, the minister
gave the only truthful answer he could supply Harlan.  "Because I
believed I was doin' what the Lord say do'," Clay Adderly replied
blunt and to the point.  The response was the echo of his own father's
teaching -- as well as his drawl.  He'd cited the  quote to Harlan with
slow care as though he too might after all come to understand.

"But, now that I'm made to think on my reasons again," Clay added as he
rested his tender gaze on Harlan's face, "truth's more likely I went
and did it cause I'm a coward."  Frowning, he looked away.

The handsome man caught the look of real astonishment on the face of
the trusting young man beside him from the corner of his eye.  "Come
here to me," he ordered tenderly as he slightly turned his big body
Harlan's way and craned his neck to kiss his lips with a loud smack. 
Yet the prior light of joy inside the handsome preacher's deep brown
eyes nonetheless suddenly set to dimming to just a glimmer above
sadness's own low light.  "Youngblood, you can't know how much I love
it, how much I need to have you show me that you really think I'm
somethin'," he said gently, "but remember -- all I am is a man and
that's all I'll ever be.  From now on, all we have is the truth to hold
us together and make us right.  So, let me be honest.

"If I can't do it today then back then I sure nough wasn't up to
takin' on other people about my wants and their expectations of me back
then either -- not as a man and certainly not as the minister I claimed
I wanted to be.

"You see, to make it, if a preacher could put together a tool kit for
himself -- other than a Bible and a prayer book -- to tote all around
with him the way a carpenter or mechanic'll do, then a wife -- a good
one I'm sayin' -- would be the best tool in the set.  As much as
anything he does, to everybody lookin' his simply havin' her at his
side sets him an upright man in their eyes.

"I mean to say it gets people thinkin', Well now, here we've got a man
that's livin' a life like ours.  One that surely knows and understands
the way and the ritual of our tribe.'  So there you go buddy, a
preacher's association with a woman who's of a mind to be a help to a
man lookin' to gain that kind of appearance is a badge of approval that
signs, seals and delivers him to the leader's seat.

"Most folks don't put much confidence in guidance about buildin' homes
and families if the man givin' it ain't done the same.  Don't take my
word for it.  Look around for yourself," the handsome preacher's deep
voice boomed in recommendation.

Abruptly covering his eyes with the same hand as though the teaching
could be blotted out Clay went on, " Better to marry than to burn,' so
the Good Book's sayin'; and so my father said to me soon as he'd seen
I'd sprouted a few extra hairs here and there.

"Well sir, believe you me," he chuckled dryly, "burn I did then and
burn I do now ... all the time," he openly confessed on a sigh forced
out by the weight of his exasperation.  "Get to feelin' just like a
house on fire sometimes," he added, "but not cause of needin' a woman.
 Don't matter no how.  I had no chance to follow whim or fancy keepin'
with my ideas of divine because it's written in that very same book,
Lie not with a man as with a woman' and I positively did not want to
disobey."

"I'm the first guy for you too?" Harlan asked, turning belly to belly
with the handsome man he was in bed with.

"Uh-uh," Clay answered simple and true, "you're not the first --
although it felt a thousand times better."  Smiling, he grunted and
lifted himself slightly to snake his other arm around Harlan.  "There
was a guy, just one; both of us lonely and both of us needin' ... you
know.  We'd slip off every now and then at college but I knew -- I mean
the both of us knew -- it couldn't continue long.

"Can't say ... I might have decided different and stuck with him if I'd
had some time to think on it and seen some kind of way without the
world havin' to know.  Anyway, it wasn't long after he and I gave up on
it that Joyce came along."

Clay shrugged his bare, wide shoulders.  "There was a little bitty
church not too far from the seminary and I met up with her through the
-- speakin' for myself -- unwanted help of some very motherly-minded
ladies I'd come to be acquainted with there.  Knowin' it was gonna look
real funny for a young man to be backin' away from a girl that pretty,
I ended up quietly goin' along with things, even when the women folk
got it in their minds, after a little while, to start coaxin' me and
Joyce toward the altar.  I don't know how much she knew of it or
whether she minded or not.  She's never once said a word about it you
know.

"But, after we'd spent a little bit of time around each other I
realized, strange as it seemed, I kind of liked the girl and got that
feelin' she liked me too.

"Lord it's all of so hard to explain.  It's just that I didn't see any
harm in the notion of callin' myself goin' with her for while."  There
came a tiny lift at the corners of the young preacher's mouth as he
said, "Most we ever did anyway was go to the show or sit on her
auntie's front porch, Sundays after suppertime.  We never got all hot
to be up on each other like some fellas and girls.  Never touched her
until we were married.  Besides I was safe.  I had Jesus to hide behind
... til my weddin' day.  That suited me just fine.

"Anyway, I stayed around her long enough to start me believin' that, if
we did get married, we'd get by because right off I saw she was a woman
who wanted a marriage more than she did a husband -- if that makes any
sense."

Harlan pressed himself against Clay and hesitantly inquired, "Clay ...
could I ask you somethin' else?"

"Of course!  Anything you want."

"You ... you won't get mad?"

"No!  Why would I get mad?"

"Well ... just what's it like ... doin' it with a woman?"

Making no reply at first, Clay delicately fitted his mouth to his young
lover's.  "I guess I take back what I said.  Of all things, please
don't ask me that," the minister gently beseeched the naive youth his
arms enfolded after withdrawing his lips a minute later.

"Ain't a thing wrong with the question.  You've certainly got every
right to know anything and everything you feel you need to about sex,"
the preacher quickly made plain.  "But, seems to me, it would be way
better if you put that question to a man who's truly able to love a
woman.  Ask some guy who's got a woman who gets his eyes to shinin'
when she comes round him cause her ways are just like wine to him; ask
a man who honestly can't see the sides of a day as bein' completely
connected without her.  Now a guy like that --" the young preacher
said, giving the attentive youth a nod and the thumbs up sign, "he's
the one to ask.  He's the man who knows best how to tell you what it's
like to lay down with a woman."

"How could a man like me, livin' behind a woman and a phony face, give
you a right answer?"

"Don't let me be misunderstood, please," Clay hastily continued, seeing
clouds of confusion form on Harlan's quite readable face.  "I do care
for my wife.  That woman's been a good friend to me you know.  No,
she's been better than that -- and surely better than the likes of me
deserves.

"Joyce came into my life not askin' for much more than a weddin' ring
and a new last name.  Nonetheless, right off, she put her shoulder to
the wheel with me anyway; a whole lot like a sister lookin' to make a
life for herself through her brother's.  And ... I can't tell you how
deeply I've come to appreciate that or how much it's meant.  But, by
everything I know to be holy Harlan -- if it's love we're talkin' bout
-- love with some kind of root, real and wide; love that's got a heart
way down in the middle of it, in all these four years we've had
together, I've never once felt anything for her that holds a candle to
half of what you've kicked alive inside me all in just a day."

Melancholy, odd in kind to Harlan looking on, momentarily sailed the
handsome preacher's liquid brown eyes as he noted, "Hmph ... looks like
the truth makes you glad and sad all at the same time.

"Never a night when I laid this bed and put my hand out to touch her
did I hope or need to find desire for me in her or wanted it to be
high.  I do it cause I just have to.  After all, I said I'd be the
woman's husband before a preacher and a church full of people.  So,
even though I may not necessarily want to be one I at least try to act
like one.

"I do it because I'm a man and my body needs somebody -- another man --
but that can't be.  So I keep my eyes closed while I lay on her and I
dream deep bout what I can't have to keep myself hard enough to finish.

"At least I've mastered the trick to that one thing.  The hard part is
tryin' not to feel ashamed.  Even as much of a struggle as it is to
carry on with somebody that don't bring your nature up, it's worse when
you know it's all really seems more like some kind of mean joke made
all at her expense."

"I've got me a good wife.  She can clean; Lord, she can cook.  But
there's nothin' in her kiss about to ever make me feel like a dead man
risin' the way yours does.  Ain't no leapin' in my chest when she calls
for me."  Lingering long in afterthought, Clay frowned pensively and
said  "Then again youngblood, lookin at how she and I began, when did I
ever want any such thing from Joyce?

"I made myself satisfied with the simple way we've found for gettin'
by.  She has too -- I believe.  Considerin' the all-out catastrophes
I've seen since I've been ordained, as a married couple, we've done
well enough by each other.  It wasn't until just yesterday, my fault
not yours, that each of us had been satisfied with what we had to give
to the other and willin' to make ourselves content with what there was
to be taken.

"There's no way I can presume to speak for my wife but it's plain it
certainly wasn't me who married lookin' for thrills.  It was somethin'
that I did purely cause it was more than clear I was supposed to and,
more than clear, the only way to keep folks off my back."

"That's it?  That's all it really is?" Harlan asked in bewilderment. 
He didn't know whether it was jealousy he felt or that he'd been in
some way cheated.   He believed the man he loved had been lost to him
long before he'd ever been found.  "You got married and hid your self
from even yourself just cause somebody said you had to?  Who said it?"
the boy punctuated the inquiry shaking his head negatively in disbelief.

"Aw man!  Dag," he moaned in adolescent exasperation that was sided by
surprise and sorrow, "how could you do that to yourself just for the
sake of makin' folks believe you're part of their doofy program?  I
don't understand, can't imagine somethin' like that.  I mean -- it's --
it's your life.

"Girls never make me feel anything," Harlan said, pressing his smooth
cheek into the hair on Clay's chest.  "I mean I like em, but as
friends.  With me it's not like the other guys; I've never been
interested in provin' how big and bad I can be to em or in dreamin' up
lies to get me under their clothes.  So -- if I've never as much as
wanted to kiss a girl, why would I want to get marry one?"

"Besides, my mother always says it don't matter what you do.  You can
bend over backward tryin' to keep correct in other people's sight but
there'll always be somebody in the bunch who'll get more than a good
feelin' off pointin' out every little thing you don't get right.  I
should know.  Hasn't Daddy proved that for me over and over?"  The
handsome youth's unaimed question rang bitterly sardonic.

"But, swear to God, the youth added, fire in his eyes, "That's one
thing I'm never doin' to myself.  I'm not about to let my life become a
misery just for the sake of keepin' newsy people from worryin' bout
what's none of their business in the first place."

In answer, Clay's bare, woolly belly jiggled Harlan's as it shook. 
Chuckling wisely, the big man pointed out, "Do you really hear
yourself?  All you're tellin' me  is -- Mama said ...'.  Well sir,
what mama' was talkin' to you bout don't quite apply here."

"Life ain't that easy in general and certainly not in a case like ours.
 Soon enough you'll learn it -- me too I'm afraid to say.  Before last
night, youngblood how often was it that you'd wanted to sit down and
talk with somebody you knew -- just one somebody you had the feelin'
you could put some kind of real trust in; friend, relation ... anybody?
 How many times?  A whole lot more than a little I bet.

"Now, I want you to think back and remember all those times you were
just about to push the truth off of its perch right there on the tip of
your tongue and let it fly, when all of a sudden somethin' inside
warned you off the idea or your courage just up and failed on you. 
Why'd that happen?

"Air's free and talk ... well that's cheap as can be.  You could have
gone on and sat down with me or anybody a long time ago and spoke right
up but you didn't.  Tell me -- what it was that made you deny yourself
by holding your tongue?  Why?"

"Guess cause I didn't think anybody would understand ... cause I was
afraid of bein' pushed away." Harlan sheepishly replied.

"Exactly."

"But --"

A quick slice in the air by the handsome preacher's broad hand cleanly
lopped the head off Harlan's next argument.  "Bein' round a place as
big as Thesselonian, or anywhere else, after a certain amount of time
nobody would or could come to an understandin' of how what they figure
to be a natural man could be livin' without a woman.

"Thinkin' it mighty strange, sure thing, they'd start wonderin',
What's goin' on with the man'.  Then, allowed a little bit more time
to roll it over in their minds, beyond the rise of curiosity, most
likely there'd come doubt regardin' my ability as a man in other ways
and that's the one thing a preacher can't afford to lose -- his
congregation's confidence.

"Why would they doubt me?  Simply cause they'd have no way of seein'
their lives mirrored in mine -- exactly what I was tryin' to make you
see before.  No matter whether you've learned it for yourself or from
goin' by what mama said, you did say you've got an understandin' of how
hard it is to please people.  Well if you do, then you can pretty well
guess it wouldn't take long before the hounds would be on my track
sniffin' around for details.

"A man's need to get close with somebody is just as much common
knowledge as it is regular.  Why, wouldn't take no time at all fore
some folk got to wonderin' where and how mine was bein' seen to if I
stayed single.  Who's he seein', they'd start askin' --"

Exasperated, Harlan cut him off stubbornly, "Clay, I don't care.  It's
not like I want somethin' for my pocket.  I'm not askin' or expectin'
life to make me a rich man, well-known or any kind of stuff like that. 
I just mean to have this one thing my way -- even if I have to fight. 
This is for my heart."

Cajolingly styling his tone, Clay once more tried persuading the young
and eager beautiful brown warrior caught in his embrace not necessarily
to accept but at least consider his point.  "Come on now, don't go
takin' too hard a line on a thing like this til you're a little piece
down the road.  It's a whole lot easier in the sayin' it than the
doin', believe you me.

"Life gets hard and sometimes bein' perfectly understood and respected
can't compare with just simply bein' able to get along day to day. 
Youngblood, you're smart as a whip I know, but up to now nobody's been
callin' on you to be responsible for anything other than makin' sure
that what's in your schoolbooks stays in your head.

"Don't go and get me wrong -- It's nowhere in my intentions to try and
put a damper on all that fire rushin' round your veins.  No way," Clay
said quite surely though chuckling apologetically as he comfortingly
pressed his lips to Harlan's deeply furrowed brow.  "A little fire
burnin' on the inside's a good thing to have -- a real good thing.  All
I'm sayin' is, for the time bein', I don't suspect you've had much call
to worry over what the man signin' your paycheck happens to think or to
study bout leavin' open the easiest avenues of dealin' with the people
in the house next door so that, day to day, things halfway swing in
your favor.  But wait," the young preacher said, signaling the youth's
caution with an arched brow, "give it a little time.

"One day you'll be out there scufflin' with the rest of us --
scatterin' seed here and there and beginnin' to believe you're reapin'
account of there bein' a whole lot of things you'll have managed to
gather round yourself.  All of it will seem like it's too important to
let go.  Maybe then you'll feel the need for a second look at things.

"It'll probably be the very same day that somethin' precious and
special you've really had to bust your behind for and would hate like
hell to lose stands in harm's way.  Turn the thing another way," Clay
sighed thoughtfully, "and maybe it'll be just at that minute you've
finally laid your eyes on the golden gate of someplace you've been
wantin' to be so bad you'd give most anything, do most anything to get
there.  You'll break into a run toward it but might come to find that
for all that, just as you get up to the threshold your ticket to come
cross is restin' in another man's hand -- and that he don't have to
give you a thing if he's not of a mind to.

"Either way, you'll learn firsthand just how much can depend on the way
someone else sees you -- then test your bravery."

"Mean spirited people get down on you just as bad when they just think
they know your business as when they really do.  Now, that wouldn't
mean all that much except there actually are folks in this world that
are darn near dangerous cause they're almost as wise as they think
when it comes to makin' close guesses.

"Such folks generally go round with bad in mind anyway, estimatin'
circumstances by what they suppose they see or don't regardless of
who's business it is.  After while in their estimatin', if they judge
the company you've been keepin' with another man amounts to peculiar
they'll not only stop to take a keener look and talk all the more,
they'll shut you out too.

"Wouldn't go so far as to claim everybody will.  In my heart I want to
believe no matter where you are, who you are, there'll be at least one
somebody willin' to be some kind of friend to you, but still you'll
find friends precious and few.  Even though those willin' to stand by
you will mean well but most likely won't understand a thing about what
makes you feel alive.

Harlan, who'd listened intently as the story boomed into the ear he'd
rested on the preacher's hairy chest raised his head and nonetheless
declared, "That won't be me and it sure won't be us."  "Not us ...
never us ..." the youth insisted as he tightly ringed the young
preacher's thick neck with his strong arms, "we can't let it happen
that way."

"God only knows how much I hope we won't youngblood," Clay sighed as
his cock began to rise against his young love's thigh.


1964 - Part 8

All loose impressionism, early morning painted it's highlight on the
contours of sleeping Harlan's teak brown cheek.  Curled up on his side
the lean youth lay dreaming half-adolescent half grown-up dreams,
hearing neither the coos of scavenging pigeons nor the chirps of
flitting sparrows outside nor the rattling of the few cars that
constituted  the sparse traffic passing over the bumpy street before
the house.  Silver-edged as the spears of sunlight leaking in round the
curtains at his window, pieces of the somnolent young romantic's newest
dreams had built a stout hard-on for him.  Stirred in his sleep by
other bodily agitations as well, the slender brown youth's smooth brow
bunched momentarily and he reached for the fork of his long legs and
briskly scratched his balls.  A moment later his lips spooled out the
thin strand of a sigh as he floated back toward his dream.

Making ready to plunge deep into the surrounding quiet's sea of
spontaneous visions, Harlan's body uncoiled as he slowly turned onto
his stomach.  He moaned like a pleasurably pestered boy and wagged his
firm, lean ass a little as his erection came to be caught in the press
between his flat belly and the mattress.  For a moment he unconsciously
executed slight physical motions he'd learned to use to nurture love
but must have soon realized that it was only his bed he lay grinding
against.  The youth sighed again then became still once more and
dreamed on . . . . .

*********************************************************

Deacon Frank Creely had quietly left his bed and his wife's side at six
on the dot that morning.  He shaved and rimmed his mustache, showered,
then quickly ate his usual bowl of corn flakes; mulling over his plan
of action for the day as the water in the small enameled pot he'd set
on the gas range for his instant coffee heated.

By seven the deacon was out of the house and headed down the street
toward his parked car, well before even early rising Cleotha would sit
up on her side of the bed that weekend morning.  Neither Harlan nor the
rest of the later risers left at home would rise with the slightest
inkling of the head of the house's plans for the day.  But, that was
never an uncommon thing.

*********************************************************

Without doubt that morning, all things seemed to be wonderfully made
and precious in value in the bright, tan eyes of the lithe and comely
brown youth standing in the tub.  Full of his secret love and grinning
from ear to ear under the shower's spray as he soaped himself, Harlan
trifled with a mad urge to right then and there fling aside the shower
curtain and bolt from the house out into the city.  All on his own --
balls naked -- he'd run a one-man marathon straight to Clay through any
street that led the way to the north of town.

Harlan's handsome face was upturned in the steaming water's steady
cascade and his cheeks, impetuously aglow, bore heat warmer than the
spray.  Though attempting to prod himself toward a more sober attitude
by sardonically putting himself down for foolish thoughts, the tall
youth couldn't help but treasuredly realize just how much in love he
was that morning.

It took Harlan's sudden estimation of the hour to snatch his thoughts
from romance.  Not much earlier, he'd jumped out of bed and run down
the hall into the bath.  The clock had read close to nine.  Harlan
started rushing to finish.  As he hurriedly soaped his body he also
fervently prayed for every available bit of the coming day to belong to
himself and Clay.  All of a day had passed since they'd last been
together.

*********************************************************

By nine o'clock, Deacon Creely was keeping a watchdog eye trained on
Willard Jackson, the cleaning contractor who came to his office every
weekend along with a helper.  As the wiry man sat at his desk he also
managed to continue fastidiously tying up loose ends as regarded the
paperwork necessary for his staff of three's payroll and the coming
week's collection schedule for outstanding moneys.

Ever conscious of the least thing owed him, Frank Creely shrewdly
flirted with the intention of a trip to Germantown in the back of his
mind.

*********************************************************

Cleotha Creely spotted her eldest son poised and ready to slip out
through the vestibule up front.  "Hold on mister!  Oh no you don't,"
she loudly commanded over the anti-rhythm of clattering of pots and
pans from her usual Saturday morning post before the kitchen stove. 
"You're not about to leave out of this house with nothin' on your
stomach other than that glass of orange juice you gulped down."

"But Mom --" Harlan whined, impatient to be on his way.

"But Mom nothin'.  Don't take but a minute to make an egg and some
toast -- should have done it yourself."  Then, his mother abruptly left
off the scolding to curiously ask, "By the way, sir, where are you in
such a rush to get to this time of morning?  Mighty strange I'd say,"
she said as her brow wrinkled suspiciously.  "Usually it takes me all I
can do to pry your butt out of bed by ten come Saturday mornin' -- and
here it is only quarter after nine."

"Well I have to . . . ."  Protest and impatience were stain of the
timbre of the scowling youth's voice as he prepared to forge an excuse
for a get-away.  His mother, hands on hips, was desirous to hear none
and squelched its continuance.

"Hush up and get some bread out of the cupboard," Cleotha snapped.

Despite the gnawing insistence inside that he be on his way, with a
hard hand, Harlan forced a downshift on the face of his mood.  He
masked the fidgety manner that was shaping his demeanor with the veneer
of a more outward calm.  It wasn't particularly cleverness that led him
to do so but common sense.  Knowing well that an over-amount of
agitation on his part would foster inquiry which his likely inept
answers would only cause to be intensified, in no way did Harlan want
to instigate hard to fool Cleotha's rigorous probing.  He was no match
for the woman.  Silently, he got the bread and sat down at the table to
wait for breakfast . . . .

*********************************************************

Frank's plan to facilitate the earlier receipt of a large check due him
from a longtime client was conclusively decided upon after a brief
phone conversation at about nine-forty-five . . . .

*********************************************************

Everything that morning appeared to take an eon to come to pass, even
the nine-forty five arrival of the PTC's beige and green bus.  To
Harlan, the bus's agonizingly slow transit of each city block during
the long ride to Germantown seemed another large and costly bite out of
the eternity that he meant to spend with Clay.  The young man in love's
torture on the rack of time -- and the bus ride -- came to an end at
ten-thirty.  By ten-thirty-five a short, brisk run to Clay's door
rushed the two into each other's arms again, leaving them with no time
to think of time . . . .

*********************************************************

Cleotha Creely hastily mashed the round switch on top of the vacuum
with her foot.  The metal end of its hose inadvertently slipped from
her hand and whacked the leg of an armchair as she quickly left off her
Saturday cleaning to dash for the phone when it rang at eleven.

She answered her husband's brusque inquiry simply.  Harlan was out of
the house, she informed him and, as far as she knew, must most likely
be downtown at the library.  "Yes, yes," she agreed it might have been
quite a good experience for him to accompany Frank and meet one of his
better clients in Germantown.  "Yeah I will," she assured him.  She'd
tell the boy to call if he got in before Frank had locked up.  Married
to the man too long not to know he'd be irritated, she heaved a sigh
and dutifully sought to soothe the deacon by reminding him, before he
could begin grumbling, that there'd be lots more Saturdays for such
things.

*********************************************************

The handsomely paired lovers lay on the wide bed holding each other. 
Their bare arms and legs were an intricately entwined tangle of dark
and light-hued well-formed masculine musculature.  Their clamorous
jubilance, just prior as their rushed union had peaked, had turned into
a placidly quiet kind.

Both the youth and the minister had shed their things all in the minute
it took them to race from the front door to the bedroom upstairs.  The
minute they were inside Clay, on impulse, had pushed Harlan down onto
the bed and dived for the joining of his thighs.

Making up for the day of separation they'd suffered, the young preacher
had begun to hungrily suck on the head of Harlan's ready dick.  He
lashed it wildly with his tongue and sucked at it all the harder as
though trying to derive sustenance from the marrow in a bone.

The strong sensations of Clay's frenzied mouthing manufactured carried
helplessly squirming Harlan frighteningly high.  Frantically, he began
to push at the preacher's bobbing head begging, gasping wildly as he
broke out in a sweat, "Hold up ... hold up!"  Clay of course
immediately desisted but plunged his head again downward like a shot
the moment still panting Harlan sheepishly grinned after a few seconds
respite saying, "Well maybe you could do it just a little bit more --
it did feel kind of good."

Within a few passing minutes, Harlan' hands were full of Clay's head
once more.  Sudden hoarsely stammered commands that Clay, "Keep on
man!" were the precursor of the boyish squeals and grunts that heralded
the first burst of his seed on the brawny preacher's delicately
fluttering tongue.  The youth locked the big man's head tight in the
vice his thighs made until the cycle of sublime bodily turbulences that
orgasm instigates were complete.

Calm again and grateful as though just having stepped off a bus after a
long, wildly careening ride, Harlan luxuriously stretched his long arms
and legs and eventually all-the-way exited the sweet dream state where
the last pulse of his spasming cock had left him and lazily rolled over
on his side.  Harlan's hand on Clay's muscular shoulder gently ushered
the young preacher upward on the bed.  The youth gently planted a kiss
on the full, moist lips that had sucked in his sex and his seed.  He
tasted the remnant of his sperm there and offered Clay a soft, "Thank
you."

As he'd sat up, meaning to slide over to allow Clay more room beside
him, Harlan noted the small electric clock on the dresser indicated the
time as eleven-ten . . . .

*********************************************************

Frank locked up his store-front office at one, got in his car and drove
off.  Six blocks away he lucked-up an a parking space and dropped off a
pair of his best black shoes to be reheeled at a repair shop .  On foot
and ticket in hand, he made one more stop to pick up some fruit from a
nearby grocer.  He slid behind the wheel of his parked Cadillac again
at one-thirty.  A turn right at the next corner headed the car north,
the direction of his expectant client's home.

*********************************************************

The front bedroom had come alive with sound of vigorous lovemaking once
more.  Clay lay on his back, grunting as each hammerlike fall of
Harlan's energetic thrusts lambasted his upturned ass.  Miraculously
standing erect despite the fast, deep dicking he'd had been taking, the
underside of the blunt head of the young preacher's cock was sweetly
being chafed by the hard, ridged muscle that faced the flat of Harlan's
sweaty belly.  The bed rocked and groaned reciprocally.  Raptly, Clay
lay there looking up, unbelievably turned on by the excitement in
Harlan's light eyes.

Babbling a river of praise and endearments so much like a boy in love
but moving inside the thick-thighed preacher just like a man, the
handsome youth's strong hands clutched Clay's hairy thighs tight
against his smooth chest.  The youth's work was not in vain because the
preacher cried out and thrust his tail higher to offer him more.

Broad shoulders flush on the mattress and shivering as if he lay on
ice, the preacher began to speak his joy with vociferous delight. 
Love-talk between himself and his young taker began to escalate.  Their
sound somehow breaking through his moans when Harlan reached between
their straining bodies and caught hold his dick., in the distance the
young preacher had discerned two vague-strengthed chimes of the clock
kept downstairs on the breakfront.  The sudden, swift incorporation of
the drive of Harlan's tight, plunging fist into the mix of their
frantic pleasures instantly tapped and burst the reservoir deep inside
Clay.  Up pulsed a thick steady flow of semen that streamed off the
crown of his cock onto his heaving belly . . . .

*********************************************************

Frank Creely and Vernon Deerfield, the client the deacon had made the
trip to Germantown to see, hadn't had a chat since early that spring. 
Frank, never of the sort impartial to small talk -- especially if
flatteringly focused on him -- readily accepted Mr. Deerfield's
hospitality and blandishments when he arrived at two-ten.

His business man's awareness that his host's pains were largely being
taken with the intention of encouraging a better future arrangement of
coverage for his two cars made no difference to him.  He crossed a
long, thin leg over the other and leaned back after centering himself
on the living room sofa to wait for coffee and gossip . . . .

*********************************************************

Neither of the new lovers could get enough from or give enough to the
other it seemed.  Once he'd zested the preacher's convulsing ass gut
with his seed, Harlan dismounted then reciprocally laid down and spread
himself open for Clay.

Feeling incredibly loved, Harlan lay on his belly, turned-on and
happily secure beneath Clay's weight a second time.  Yet the muscle in
his back and ass involuntarily tensed and he winced when his golden man
lifted off his ass and reached between their bodies to gingerly probe
the tight rift in his ass with a finger.  His cock rock hard, the young
preacher  ached to be seized inside Harlan's ass again but out of
concern decided not to pursue the effort till later on.  Slowly Clay
rolled away.  "Better hold off on that for a while youngblood," he
said.  "I don't want you gettin' anymore sore than I've already made
you."

"Hey, what did I say about callin' me youngblood?  I'm an old-head
now," Harlan growled in playful protest.  Holding onto the irritated
scowl he also adopted, the youth  scrambled on top of Clay and pinned
the big man's shoulders to the mattress.

"All right!  All right -- I'm sorry man ... I'm sorry!   I surely do
beg your pardon sir!  Tellin' the truth, ain't a thing bout you that's
boyish," Clay added after he'd forced his hand between their bodies and
squeezed Harlan's dick.  The rushed and fevered press of Harlan's lips
on his denied him further assessment of any situations size.

Harlan slid his warm hand back along one side of their bodies, to find
and grip Clay's.  He slowly guided the preacher's big warm hand along
his thigh and atop one of the firm swells of his smooth, slim backside
and pressed it against himself with his own.  He felt Clay's gentle but
eager fingers, first knead the muscle there and then begin to explore
the valley in his ass once more.  The sustained kiss muffled Harlan's
gasp as Clay's thick middle finger slipped down into the crack in his
asscheeks and then inside him.

Probing deeper Clay touched spots that made Harlan feel ready again,
that made him feel as if he'd come again.  Harlan broke the kiss.   "Go
ahead -- do it again," was all he said once he'd slid from atop Clay
and settled prone beside him on the bed again waiting to let his ass be
taken a second time.  It was two-thirty-five . . . .

*********************************************************

The main purpose of Frank's sojourn, the collection of Mr. Deerfield's
check, had been managed and the social side of his extended visit was
drawing to a close.  The greater part of his concern that afternoon was
owned by an aim to have Joe Jenkins, his mechanic, take a look at the
well-tended two-year-old maroon Caddy he was more than a little proud
of.  There'd been a knock in the engine that morning -- he was certain
he'd heard one.  Yet, always acutely aware of the extra managerial
responsibilities his deaconship called for, a few matters of unfinished
church business came across Frank's busy mind as he prepared to leave.

At first he was about to shrug off dealing with the matters outstanding
at church, being they were only of minor importance.  Then again, being
a man who was equally as thrifty with his time as he was with his
money, the prudent deacon thought it better to not put off until
tomorrow that which he could do in the same day.

"Fine just fine.  My oldest will be in college this time next year," he
replied quite proudly in answer to Mr. Deerfield's query as to how his
two fine son's were coming along.  Then, giving his client a final
dignified nod goodbye, at three on the dot, he entered the large sedan.
 The car's engine caught promptly at the turn of his key and the deacon
set off to consult with the pastor of his church before a westerly trip
home.

*********************************************************

Rather sore and spent by three-ten, the two lovers decided on
temporarily foregoing the strenuous sport they'd so enthusiastically
pursued abed for that on the little television.  They lay together
still clinging to each other and more than content the way they were,
neither Clay nor Harlan felt quite prepared to let the other go. 
Though all of each young man's body had by then become quite familiar
to the other, alternately one's roaming hands still lazily tested and
surveyed any part of the other that easily fell into his grasp . . . .

*********************************************************

Phoning before calling upon someone at home is a helpful stratagem that
aids smoother footing in the introduction of one's product, thus
certainly serving salesmen's purposes.  Frank, a stubborn but wily
insurance man had learned years before that the soured ambience
produced by the unwelcome surprise of badly timed a sales call lent
nothing in the negotiation of the sale of his wares .

This exercise of protocol had become so ensconced in Frank Creely's
ever business like way of going about everything that no falsehood
could be found in calling it automatic reflex.  Yet, because he was so
close to the Adderly's home and also because he was the possessor of a
haughtily stanced pride in self-sufficiency which strongly prohibited
his requesting even small favors -- like the use of a client's phone --
he decided to stop by for a brief chat setting aside usual
preliminaries  . . . .

*********************************************************

At three-thirty, a brawl was suddenly breaking out among the two teams'
players during first-half of the broadcast basketball game on TV
upstairs.  One of the favored teams major players had just taken a
swing at an opponent found guilty of a foul.  His fist had connected. 
Harlan, laughing raucously at the resulting free for all, grabbed
Clay's bathrobe and came rushing down from the master bedroom to share
the description of the fracas going on.

Although they measured the same size in bed, there was an approximate
difference of an inch or two between the heights of the new lovers and
surely one in their builds.  Thus, the preacher's bulky multicolored
bathrobe was too large for leaner Harlan.  Open and mantlelike, the
heavy terry cloth clung only to Harlan's broad shoulders as the hem of
the robe and its undone sash trailed in the beautiful youth's wake
while he ran the course from the hall above to the kitchen below.

The hard, smooth muscular rise of his dark broad chest, the ridges on
the flat face of his taut belly, and the shadowy hued, pendulous
adornments of manhood that swung seductively betwixt his muscular
thighs were naked and exposed as he traveled with haste.  All of that,
a visual feast of masculinity most comely in kind, was abruptly
presented to Harlan's father's startled and totally unappreciative eyes
as he burst through the kitchen's entry laughing and calling loudly to
Clay.

The silent kitchen all at once seemed cluttered with statuary when both
father and son froze in the spot where he stood stunned, as did the
preacher who'd just appeared in the basement's doorway . . . . .

*********************************************************

Bare-chested, the young minister had come downstairs merely to retrieve
a couple of cans of soda.  But, in afterthought at the bottom of the
stairs, he'd turned back to the kitchen.  Quickly he gathered together
crackers and some leftover odds and ends, then set them on a tray for
Harlan and himself to eat while they'd take in the third portion of a
televised championship tournament.

Barefoot as well, Clay  had scratched his hairy chest now and then as
he happily ambled about the kitchen.  He was clad only in thin cotton
pajama bottoms that loosely masked his flaccid dick and the crease in
his full ass which seemed to hold perpetual allure for the youth
waiting upstairs in his bed.  He'd lazily donned them not long after
the respite in the non-stop lovemaking they'd begun the latter part of
the morning.

The knock at the kitchen door came just after he'd slammed the
refrigerator door shut .

*********************************************************

Waiting upstairs and at the front of the house, Harlan, intently
viewing the basketball game had missed the sound of that knock. 
Neither had he heard voices when Clay, taken completely off his guard,
greeted Frank Creely apprehensively but of course allowed him in.

Disconcerted, the moment's priorities appeared as a smudged list in
Clay's mind.  He noticed the partially opened door to the basement as
he was about to excuse himself and head up the stairs.  A hasty shove
of the door to kill the draft jarred the upended broom kept leaning
against the adjacent wall just behind.  It tumbled with a loud clatter
from the top of the narrow stairs.

"Excuse me just a second Deacon Creely," he said, wrongly opting in
anxious confusion to lend a few seconds of valuable time to the
retrieval of the broom instead of running up to warn Harlan . . . . .

*********************************************************

"Harlan, wha ... what on Earth are you doing here?" was the first of
Frank Creely's astonished queries.  "And what are you doing here with
not a stitch on you?" he asked his son and then he shook his head
abruptly as though his eyes might be playing tricks.  Growing leonine
with anger, the deacon's narrowed eyes swept from the kitchen's
entryway where his son stood, apparently too incapacitated by surprise
to draw the large striped robe about himself, toward Clay framed by the
basement's adjacent doorjamb.

The one and one of shrewd and quick calculation summed up to two when
the fuller interpretation of the scene fully unfolded during the wily
deacon's analysis.  Mere seconds later, the tall nattily dressed man's
entire frame seemed to visibly shrink as he let loose a long and
quavering ungodly sound, low in pitch.  It sounded almost as if he'd
just caught a hard punch to the gut.

The kitchen door rattled as Frank Creely reeled back against it feeling
for support and powerless to add voice to the accusations his lips were
forming.  Nonetheless, words of some significance did come after a
brief and tense interval.

"Harlan Creely, go find your clothes.  You're coming out of this man's
house -- now."  The cold, quiet, even tone Frank acquired for the
issuing of the command set his eldest son more on edge than had it been
a lion's roar.  The elder Creely lowered the aim of the instantaneous
revulsion his eyes expressed from his son's as he took serious
inventory of the knuckles studding his clenched fists.

Though panic set in as his senses returned, Harlan at last thought to
snatch Clay's robe of many colors close about his nakedness.  He was
also speedily became aware that without doubt he stood snared by
evidence factual enough to require no witnesses to aid in the surmising
of the truth.  But, despite all the confusion and fear that rushed in
on him that moment, he did not want to lie -- he only wanted to begin
to be understood.  And so he tried.  "Daddy, let me explain," Harlan
pleaded in a hoarse, near whisper.

Much the same as he'd done when he'd been younger and called forth to
bear the weight of Frank's displeasure, Harlan futilely made ready to
seek out even the least conciliatory road with his implacable father
and logic out what he and Clay felt for each other.  However as in past
efforts during his early youth, when pleading his own case while
striving to be acquitted of some childhood crime -- meaning an escape
from the dreaded sting of his father's strap -- the success of a like
effort had no appearance of likelihood.  "Listen to me, Daddy!" Harlan
beseeched his father again.  "Will you please just listen to me?  It's
-- 

"Go find your clothes Harlan Creely," Frank literally snarled, cutting
his eldest short before more could be said.  His manner did not change
an iota nor did his voice become louder by a decibel but the color of
the danger lurking within it had intensified tenfold.

Knowing no way to fight, Harlan backed away in numb disbelief at all
that had just transpired and climbed the stairs with leaden feet.

Glaring at Clay, Frank's bile and scorn sifted through his clenched
teeth.  "And as for you -- there is nothin' you can say to me.  Do you
hear?  Nothin' at all."

The deacon set his mind whirling like a potter's wheel, silently
attempting to rough out the shape of a plan of action.  All the while
approximating the width of possible legal avenues and assessing the
weight of the probable scandal underlying the matter a mile a minute,
he slowly approached Clay.  He'd have taken the chance to soothe his
ire by lashing out at Clay with his fists had the tall,
broad-shouldered man appeared less able to hold his own.

Nevertheless, if not with his hands then some other way, Frank decided.
 The man who remembered everything owed him had it in his heart to see
to the thorough reduction of the big man before him and said so.  "Let
me tell you, I don't know how this came about but I've got every
intention to find out all about it," Frank threatened, still
incongruously outwardly quiet in contrast to the rage seething so
inside him it caused his hands to tremble like leaves in the wind. 
"But even if I don't find out what led up to this, my boy gets off the
train right here."

Frank stepped back, taking a head to foot view of the bullishly built
young preacher.  The deacon incredulously eyed all of Clay's naturally
muscular build; the proud lift of his upper chest, the bulging of his
arms, the apparent potency.  "Good God Almighty, I'd have never thought
for a minute a minister, a man like you with a wife would --"

The play of afternoon light through the kitchen window's panes
heightened the gold sheen of the skin on Clay's bare shoulders as by
then he'd come all the way into the room.  Maybe it was sunlight
blinding his eyes within as well as without that kept him from seeing
some defense to offer for himself, he merely stood in the middle of the
room, still and saying nothing.  However, despite the mire of confusion
which he was in up to knee deep, the young preacher's broad shoulders
remained drawn back and his head did not drop.

In love for the first time in his life, the young preacher began to
edge his way out of the bewilderment he was in, moving toward judicious
thought.  Every part of him yearned to execute an about-face and rush
up the stairs to Harlan, dressing overhead, to pick through the
shambles of the last moments they might ever have together and find
something golden ... a last touch ... a kiss.  It was solely for
Harlan's sake, not his own, that with considerable effort Clay
temporarily staved off giving in to the urge.  Just at the moment
self-restraint became unbearable and he was about set heart over
wisdom, Harlan's slow footsteps sounded on the stairs.

The mute deacon, strangely maintaining counter-character to his priorly
contemptuous manner, laced both his rage and his words with quiet when
Harlan, teary-eyed with frustration, appeared in the doorway fully
clothed.  "Let's go," was Frank Creely's only solemn command though he
used the shove of a hand to roughly usher his son by the shoulder
toward the back door.

There were no outcries, there was no pleading from either in their deep
grief but how both the new lovers began to mourn.  To Clay and Harlan,
Frank's stern order knelled the passing of everything newly come into
their hands.  Their stirred up dreams lay near death.

From inside the house, through the glass panes on the kitchen's door,
Clay could see a bright crown of the sun's last light rested on
Harlan's bowed head.  It set his young love's clean, black
close-cropped hair glistening.

From outside, Frank Creely firmly pulled the door closed behind himself
with chilling finality.  A minute later Clay was knocked to his knees
before the toilet bowl by a wave of nausea that had sent him racing up
the stairs.  As he began to retch the big man also began to cry . . . .

*********************************************************

It was near dinner time.  The Creely household was warm inside and
there was a tacit aura of cheer to be derived from the wafting aroma of
a roast in the oven.  The living room overflowed with the sounds of
gunshots and pounding hooves.  Young Buddy Creely was watching a
western.  He lay on the living room rug, chin rested on his piled up
fists, when the vestibule door burst open and the rough, forceful
propulsion of Frank Creely's hand sent his elder brother stumbling into
the room.  Though given quite a start, the boy didn't ask what was
going on lest his angry father's attention swing his way.  The TV was
turned up louder than it should have been.

Rendered mute by a lump in his throat and cheeks blazing with
indignation, Harlan started upstairs to his room.  "Oh no sir, your
little show's not over yet.  We've got a good amount of talkin' to do
before day comes.  Just you turn around and head yourself straight on
down to the cellar," Frank growled.

Buddy, cautious and silent, watched them move away.
In the kitchen, Cleotha looked up from the asparagus she was trimming
in the sink.  "You found him?  Where'd you two meet up with each other?
 Did --"

Ignoring his wife, Frank nodded toward the cellar door and coldly
reconveyed his desire, "Downstairs." The solemn procession of two took
a sharp turn left and then headed downward.

In the basement, silence offered Harlan respite for but a short for a
time.  The fuming deacon paced back and forth before the coal furnace
saying nothing as he stood watching, waiting.

At last the senior Creely dragged his palm across the thinning grizzled
hair on top of his head as he paused his pacing, after a minute or two,
to suddenly turn round and confront his son.  "Harlan," he began
querying with a knifelike edge on his voice , "do you have any idea of
what this man was tryin' to lead you into; what people would say, not
only about you but me, if word gets out about such a thing?  Why it
could turn out to be the ruination of everything I've tried to build
up."  Frank's face turned hard as rock, "and I'm tellin' you right now
I'm not about to have no such thing."  The fire in his constrained
voice rose.  "I'll dash your damn brains out first."

Meaning to stem possible future scandal, the deacon's tone shaded
slightly conciliatory.  He suddenly sought to do business with his son.
 Looking Harlan up and down in assessment, he nodded and said, "Well --
you're surely not a boy anymore but way too young for marryin' -- I
know it.  I mean -- bein' a man with a certain vitality myself," the
deacon said pulling himself up a little straighter despite low ceiling
in the basement, "it's no secret to me how regular and strong a man's
need can come on him.  Any natural man's gonna get that wantin' for a
woman but there'll be times he can't always have what he wants. 
Still," Frank said adamantly pointing a finger at Harlan, "there's no
substitutin' for it -- it goes against God, not to mention how people
look at such things.

"Besides, if you hadn't found it out on your own by now, at least, I'd
have thought one of your young buddies would have told you how to go
about -- why you know -- doin' somethin' for yourself with your hand if
it started to get to you.  Even so, if your nature was on you that
doggone strong and you just had to be with somebody you should have
gone out and found yourself a little girl somewhere.

"I don't understand.  It always appeared to me you had some sense in
you cause I've never seen you tryin' to get in too close with the
girls at church.  Just as well, I think, cause there's no need in a
man messin' where he eats.  But nonetheless, there's plenty girls
around that are willin'," Frank added, sounding a little too knowing
despite the hue of his exasperation.  "Why you didn't go try to find
one, I don't know.  There's plenty of em right outside the church door
that's round-heeled and easy-minded.  Believe me, it don't take but a
little lookin' to find one and as long as your careful and don't get no
diseases or leave no babies in em--"

Frank's cold and indelicate perspective of the expedient handling of
the male sex urge instantly ceased.  Perplexity once more upstaged his
anger and he scratched his head, confused.  "Why for the life of me you
got so hot in the britches that you'd go to a man for service I can't
understand.  I'd never condone such filth and you know it.  Any way,
how'd he persuade you to let him be handlin' your private parts?"

Slightly calmed for the moment, without waiting for a reply, out loud,
puzzled Frank mulled over more to himself than Harlan, "As for Adderly,
I can't understand him at all.  There's nothin' womanish about him. 
He's a strappin' young stallion of a man, played football in college
and got a mighty good-lookin' young woman for a wife.  Besides that,
I've seen for myself there's more than one woman cuttin' her eyes his
way on the sly when church lets out.  I tell you, I just don't know.

"Anyway, I've heard tell before of men supposed to be that way but
never in my life did I come across one until now," Frank contemptuously
proclaimed to Harlan.  "They're the kind of men that have unnatural
appetites that lead em to like milkin' young boys' wee-wees and such
mess.  Heard tell they even try to -- wait a minute --" Frank halted,
appearing suddenly even more stricken.  "Harlan he didn't try to -- ?"

Harlan made no answer until the last stressed fiber of the peace he'd
tried to hold snapped from the weight of his silence.  "I did anything
he wanted me to Daddy -- just like he did for me.  I wanted to be with
him."  His father appeared too stunned to fill the gaping pause that
followed.  "That's the truth," Harlan finally added, not at first
believing it was really himself from whom the declaration burst forth. 
"I wanted to be with him."

"What?" Frank hissed in disbelief.

A single tear certified Harlan's confession.  It slowly rolled down his
cheek like a pure crystal bead, leaving a glistening strand in the wake
of its passing as the younger Creely straightened himself to state his
point more emphatically.  This time Harlan met his father's fiery gaze
directly.  "I wanted to be with him."  A moment or so passed before
Harlan's next solemn repetition of this serious, very true fact came. 
It rode forth aboard a louder voice, not with the menace of challenge
but instead the unadulterated clarity of straightforwardness.  Though
he knew no matter how many times he said it there'd be no way to make
his father see, literally drunk on the truth he couldn't stop himself
from saying,"I wanted to be with him."

The older Creely's spare chest heaved as his fury again took mount at
his son's defiance.  "Shut your mouth boy!  Shut up your mouth I say,"
Frank screamed with rage.  At first he clamped both hands over his ears
to block out the sound as before his eyes the lips of very the fruit of
his loins continued their seditious recitation.  Then, suddenly
grabbing a handful of the front of Harlan's shirt, he violently shoved
his son away.

The score for this odious scene in the ugly drama was instrumented by
shattering glass jars and the nails and screws that spilled out from
inside them when they crashed to the floor in descant pitch to the
oaths that Frank was growling.  This macabre symphony cacophonously
played out when Harlan, capable but unwilling to offer physical
resistance in spite of his father's manhandling, fell back against a
dusty storage unit butted against a bare brick wall.

His son silenced, several moments elapsed before Frank, seething inside
like a cauldron, recovered enough for a coherent further examination of
the method by which he saw his name being brought to dishonor.  "You
mean to tell me that you -- Frank Creely's very own flesh and blood --
laid down and let that man put his dick to you like a woman?"

Nothing else left to buttress or reward his eagerness not to believe,
Deacon Creely snatched his hands off his son's shirt collar, as though
it were soiled and laden with serious contagion.  Glass crunched under
his feet as he slowly backed away and, dull eyed, saw the complete text
of the dread news he'd already sensed written along with the hate on
his silent son's face.

"Good God in Heaven -- you did," he gasped incredulously, his
forefinger became a trembling scepter of judgement pointed straight at
his son.  This acknowledgment of his realization accentuated the
bitter, scathing disgust within him that had accrued with each
revelation.  "You actually laid down and spread yourself out for him
like some chippie out there on the street," he nearly muttered, more
confirming the point to himself than posing a question.  He'd said it
in a low but intense voice, fearful that the final analysis of his
examination might per chance leak out through the basement window for
some passing neighbor to hear.

Frank, all at once dumbfounded by fate, fell silent after over and over
uttering a madman's whispers to the four walls around him, "He says he
wants it, he likes it that way -- "

Seemingly rooted to the spot, the deacon stood facing his son shaking
from head to foot.  Seconds later, his face twisted into a picture of
every ugly thing in the world.  And he all at once vehemently roared,
"I'm a man who fathered sons -- not no damn girls."

Frank Creely swung hard at his son's face.  The result of the sudden
connection of his open hand with Harlan's cheek brought about a loud,
pistollike report that was heard at the top of the basement stairs.

"Frank what in the world is goin' on down there?  Tell me right now
what's all this yellin' and carryin' on's about," Cleotha demanded as
she hurriedly started down the stairs from her kitchen.

So furious that large beads of sweat were formed on his dark brow, the
deacon wheeled around in his wife's direction.  "Go back upstairs
woman," the enraged deacon thundered.

"I'm not about to go anywhere.  I'm the boy's mother and I want to know
exactly what he's supposed to have done Frank," Cleotha answered back
just as loud.

"Get back up to your kitchen woman," Frank yelled out again, every vein
in his neck visible.  Then with a  laugh as mean and bitter as it was
icy, he informed Cleotha, "Exactly what you're the mother of I can't
rightly say I know.  Worst of all, there's not a thing in this world
that can lead me to believe such a piece of trash was ever any part of
me.  If he is," Frank sneered, "then it would have been better that I'd
played with myself and left the makin's of him in a snot rag than in
your belly."

"What?"  Though thoroughly shocked and confounded by Frank's ranting,
Cleotha paid no attention and proceeded, in a rush, the rest of the way
down the worn, painted stairs.

Harlan was picking himself up from where he'd tripped and fallen beside
the ancient concrete laundry sink.  He'd hit his head on the sink and
his hand bore a cut from a shard of glass that lay on the floor. 
Though lined with trouble, his young face was as much ablaze with wrath
as from the sting the blow his father had dealt.  Forgetting Sunday
School advisements to honor his father the tall youth suddenly feeling
it time for balancing the score, not just for this but many things,
began making slow but determined steps toward his father.

Cleotha forced her way between them but every vein in Frank's neck
stood out again as he rabidly shouted past her, "No nigger, no!  Don't
even let me think you mean to raise your hand to me.  I'll break your
neck boy!  I swear by all that's holy I'll -- "

Harlan's ever gentle eyes had narrowed to vicious slits.  "There's not
another damn thing you'd better try to do me again except leave me the
fuck alone," he hissed, swelled up with rage that surpassed his
father's.  Both his parents were taken aback.  He rushed from behind
the barricade of his mother's girth to confront his father face to
face.  "Do you hear?  If you ever as much as lift one finger to me
again, I'm the one that's swearin' to God if any neck breakin's gonna
be done I'll be the one to do it -- you son of a bitch," he spat.

Frank lunged at Harlan but Cleotha leaned into him with all her
strength to push him off-track.  "Harlan!  What's happenin' here?  This
is your father your talkin' to boy," she wailed shrilly as she
continued struggling to keep the two apart.

"What did you say?  Father my eye!" Frank bellowed.  "Woman, I'm a
natural born man livin' the way any natural man ought to and know it. 
How could a man have anything like this waste of seed come out of him? 
Get out of my house," Frank said, all at once swinging a trembling arm
toward the stairs.  "You're a useless piece of filth!  You hear me?  An
abomination on the face of the Earth!"

"You don't have to worry, I won't be back this way until it's time to
put your black hypocrite self in the ground," Harlan snarled as he
wheeled about toward the stairs.

Frank's braying sneer trailed after his son as Harlan reached the
bottom step, "Go head then.  Go on back and play woman with your
supposed to be man."

"What's goin on?  What in Heaven's name is he talkin' bout?" Cleotha
wailed, again begging an unseen authority for an answer. Wracked with
sobs, she solitarily found physical support by leaning on the old
laundry sink but no comfort for sorrow in the chaos.

Harlan looked back in pain at his sobbing mother bent over the sink
only to hear Frank scream for him to get out again.  Hesitating no
longer, hot tears all at once streamed off his burning cheeks like hard
rain as he rushed past Buddy who stood stunned inside the kitchen just
at the top of the stairs.  "What's wrong?" his little brother whispered
frightened but Harlan was gone for good from the house on Walnut Street
in an instant.  The slam of the vestibule door rattled the banjo clock
hanging near it in the living room.  It was ten past five ...

*********************************************************

Still dazed, Clay lifted the receiver of his telephone when it rang at
five-thirty but found that he was unable to form words for either an
inquiry or a greeting.  No matter.  The voice on the other end of the
line proceeded despite silence or lack of acknowledgement.  Even though
distorted with loathing and venomously disdainful condescension, it was
thoroughly familiar to the preacher.  It was Frank Creely's.

"Well, sir if makin' whores out of other men's sons is what you're
lookin' to do in life I guess you've got one to your credit.  It's all
right, you can have him," the voice said after a long pause,  "I'm a
full-blooded man.  I'm not about to own a faggot son."  Those last
words were bitten off and spat out like husks on sure fact.

The voice taunted, "If I was you I'd be at my window keepin' watch.  I
suspect, right about now, he's on his way there lookin' for you to
squeeze and hold him like a little girl.  Might even be ready to spread
his hindparts for you some more too since he says he likes tryin'
please you.

The barrier holding back the deacon's wrath broke.  "Do whatever the
hell you want to with him.  Dress him up in ladies clothes, let him
paint his face.  Just understand he's been told never to cross my
doorstep again.  Never!  I'll try to knock his brains out if I find him
here at my house again."

"In one way, it looks to me like you might end up gettin' off easy. 
Far as my lawyer says, bein' the boy's nineteen, it puts him a good
year beyond me and the law bein' able to have the least bit of say in
any of this.  Even so, bless God, I still have one whole son and it may
prove best not to have this stirred up in court.  There's never been
any such trash as this goin' on in the family and I'm not about to have
it known all over town and in church that all of a sudden a he-she's
grown on my family tree.

"So, mister, for just this minute, all you have to think about is bein'
sure you have your mess out of that church office no later than Monday
night -- every last bit of it -- and you've got your new girlfriend all
to yourself.

"To save us all more inconveniencin' talk, it's best you go in and
preach tomorrow -- if there's any kind of way you can gather up enough
nerve to walk into a house of God with your head up.  I'm thinkin' all
this out on the run but don't worry, I'll make your excuses come
Tuesday and handle the arrangements for a visiting pastor next week set
up by Thursday."

"Deacon Creely --"

"Reverend Adderly -- nothin'-- don't say nothin'," the deacon hissed
warningly into his end of the phone.  "Didn't I tell you that before? 
Listen ... just listen to me and save yourself some trouble!  I've got
no ear to lend you for denials or excuses nor pleadin' or apologizin'. 
You've gone and messed up somethin' that's out of me.  You'd both
better thank your lucky stars that Frank Creely's got greater concerns
than a homo son and his boyfriend to think about.

"But don't you forget what I said -- listen well.  I've got a feelin'
you'd better be packin' up real soon and lookin' around for new huntin'
grounds because there's not goin' be much in the way of work for you in
Philadelphia.  And should it just be you've got your mind on a new game
plan, forget about runnin' to somebody else's church offerin' your
services -- if that's what you call it.  Even though what we both know
may not hold much sway with the police, don't think your hankerin' for
boys' behinds is going to be allowed to pass by the bishop or any
church looking for your recommendation from Greater Thesselonian."

"Remind that thing comin' to your house he's never to come nowhere near
me or my house again."  That was the last Clay heard of the voice on
the other end of the line before the receiver was slammed down.

Later, at a quarter to seven, not long after Clay had exited the shower
the doorbell rang ...


1964 - Part 9

Upstairs in the bathroom, his lips set determinedly, silent Harlans
broad shoulders quaked now and then as he struggled to remain standing
upright underneath the immense weight of his first great heartache.  He
held his body straight and stiff, fighting with a fury but failing not
to yield to tears again while Clay carefully saw to the swelling at his
right eye and lower lip.  No matter how forcefully Harlan tried to will
them away and though hed never once actually sobbed outright, tears
and more tears soundlessly dripped from his cheeks with no indication
of their remedys soon arrival.  Each time the handsome preacher would
gently daub a salty stream off his face with the cool wash cloth in his
hand, without fail, a new tiny river of scalding tears promptly
appeared in its place.

Facing up to how rapidly things were changing, becoming difficult, was
a hard enough thing in itself.  Hidden truths first turns in the light
had proved a far more jarring gathering of momentum for progress than
the beautiful youth priorly imagined.  Ousted from the nest suddenly
and painfully, though his life was without doubt at last his own it had
been handed back to him in a fashion he hadnt quite foreseen.

The worst of the days outcome hadnt been the shock of his fathers
unexpected discovery or the resulting bomb blast of a showdown in the
basement with the deacon at home.  Neither had it been the blows and
injury hed come to suffer by his fathers hand and hate for the small
cut on his hand now cleaned and bandaged, his swollen eye and bloodied
bottom lip would all heal in a little time.  As if his own grief wasnt
enough to bear, it was the devastating, nightmarish manner by which his
gallant adoption of outright honesty had caused the pain of those given
him to love to become his too.  His little brothers fear and
confusion, his mothers anguish both were become part of him ... all
his ... haunting him, hurting him all at the same time.

Yet strangely enough had the somber-eyed youth not been brim full of
the dark ache of bitterness, right then and there, Harlan might have
found himself reduced to raucous, side-splitting laughter at the
stupidity he all at once saw.  Suddenly quite bewildered by himself,
Harlan wondered how could he have even briefly believed that he and
Clay might be allowed to circumvent the dangers lurking behind every
tree and bush in a forest as big as fate.  If the tall, lean new man
hadnt felt so near to falling to his knees like a felled tree, hed
have surely bent over laughing at the idea of their being allowed to be
together unbothered or lucky enough to slide by -- even for a little
while.

He popped you a real good one on this jaw here, Clay confirmed with a
slow emphatic nod in the continuance of his painstaking inspection of
Harlans face.  That swellin by your eyes kind of bad but theres
just one little-bitty cut.  Wed best be sure it dont get the chance
to fester.  Harlan flinched and jerked his head back.  Come on, hold
still now, Clay cajoled softly.  Iodine always carries a bit of a
sting with it.  The young preacher serving as best he could as doctor
for Harlans ills, stepped back a bit to examine his work as he tore
the wrapper off another band-aid.

Clay picked up the washcloth hed been using,  and, one-handed, rinsed
and squeezed it dry.  He carefully wiped Harlans bruised face yet
another time.  His patient, continued to hold himself straight and
stalwart without utterance and tried to show himself as much a man as
the man he loved, even though quiet tears still kept on falling.  But,
the need to cry wasnt possessed by Harlan alone.

The big honey-colored man instantly recalled that first kiss hed let
the youth taste only four days before and ruefully saw his acquiescence
as the root of Harlans pain.  Deep inside Clay felt as though any
minute he might just break down and cry too.

As the young preacher warned but had himself come to forget the more
the steeping brew of his and Harlans passion intensified: though love
couldnt be bought it wouldnt come cheap.  The sum total of all the
prior accruals of achievement the young minister had set stock in would
soon rapidly dwindle to nothing; his future in the clergy and his
marriage -- once Joyce was confronted with the truth.  Even if his wife
proved of a mind to forgive and go on, Clay knew he himself could not. 
At its magnificent best, at last love he wanted had been placed in his
hand, his eyes had been opened.  Nothing else would ever suffice.

Regardless of all the sorrowing roiling his insides, the young preacher
set further thought over it aside.  There was no time for indulging in
a luxury as big as tears of his own just then.  It was going to take
all he could do to see Harlan through this first long night . . . .

*********************************************************

Harlan silently sat on the beds edge, downcast.  Passing minutes had
stemmed his teeming tears to occasional drops.  Squatting in front of
him, Clay gazed reassuringly into his young loves reddened eyes as he
began to undress him.  The preacher slipped Harlans scuffed brown
penny loafers and thick white socks off his feet then, Stand up for me
a minute, he gently directed.  Rising as well, the big man reached to
hurriedly fling back the bedspread and sheet once Harlan was on his
feet.

With patience, the big man slowly went on undressing the lean, battle
weary youth, first helping him out of the treasured leather jacket he
hadnt shed since his arrival, then his sweater and shirt.  Upon his
thick fingers agile undoing of belt and pants, the downward force of
Clays big hands on Harlans wide shoulders sat him down on the bed
again.

The young preachers large hands tenderly gripped those strong brown
shoulders and guided Harlan to lie back on the bed.  Raise that pretty
behind up a little, Clay said as he grasped his sad-eyed young loves
opened jeans by the waistband and finished the rest of the job.  Harlan
lay on his back with his long legs dangling off the beds edge,
stripped of everything except his briefs.

Doctors orders: the handsome preacher let it be known with a
succinct but gentle attitude of voice as he began to gather up Harlans
things, you just let yourself lay and try not to worry -- youre here
with me now.

The tall, brawny mans eyes momentarily traveled the sinewy,
teak-colored body of the youth lying on his bed.  His mind was all at
once full, contemplating love fine in kind despite all the
inevitability of further tragedy ahead.  But, the preacher wasnt left
to travel a plane of thought that high or sweet for long because
realitys continuous resurfacing set in on him like a recurring
troublesome ache.

Looking left then right, Clay made an intensely thoughtful retrospect
of the room almost as though only becoming acquainted with the design
of it -- and all things -- for the first time.  Its doubtful well be
here long but pay it no mind youngblood, he said quietly after a long
minute of looking and thinking, appearing to have just read the sky. 
No matter where, no matter what, youll be with me.  All you have to
do is say you know thats what you want.

Harlans arms lifted and stretched out, straining as they reached for
the preacher.  The young pilgrim began crying outright and his soft
sobs continued as Clay settled him beneath the covers.  Clay pulled the
sash on his robe tighter and then lay down next to him atop the bed.

Theres healin in tears, the young preacher whispered wisely as he
drew Harlan close against his brawny frame and kissed his forehead
lightly, ... a whole lot of healin.

*************************************************

Harlan was just awaking from a brief sleep.

Oohwee youngblood, the trials of the day have left you kind of ripe in
the aroma department, aint they?  Clay, laughing, had just lovingly
nuzzled his face against Harlans shoulder and gotten a whiff of his
underarm.  The youths scent, actually not repellent to the young
preacher despite his jocular inference, to the contrary surely bore an
exhilarating masculine bouquet.  Harlans smell was so seductive in
fact that it almost looped and caught like a ring in the brawny,
bullish mans nose as he was bridled and led by sweet circumstance into
physical want of the youth again.  The feeling was upon the young
preacher so speedily that he was taken by surprise as a sudden rush of
arousal caused the prime piece of his virility to swell between his
legs.  However, remaining clear-eyed with respect to immediate
necessities, the young preacher in love deemed a little jovial teasing
and something to eat a far better treatment for Harlans ills than sex.

For no particular reason, out of the blue the muscular, honey-colored
man issued a warning chuckle just before he pounced on the leggy youth
like a cat ravenous to devour a mouse.  They began to play.

The big man took to tickling any rib his lean, young friend happened to
leave undefended.  Harlan retaliated in kind, and in no time the two of
them were on the bed making quite a commotion and a mess of the bed
things as they rolled about wrestling.  Laughing and howling, they
became gleeful like small boys -- no sorrows, no wounds remembered.

For two people who felt so much for each other this spontaneous bout of
play, inevitably transposing, might well have segued to sex.  Despite
their pain, whether individual or shared or of the heart or of the
body, their two strong bodies began responding to the change in
atmosphere, quieting in some ways, stirring in others.

Clay became still and lay sheltering his eyes in the curve of Harlans
long neck saying nothing, doing nothing.  He simply held the young man
he loved with all his heart close as he could.  Lying pressed against
him, the hard-dicked young preacher finally abandoned silence and
growled huskily into his young loves ear, Aint nothin or no one
like you in the world, youngblood, I do declare.

Then . . . this is really it, huh?  Love? Harlan responded
soft-voiced and pleased.

Yep, I believe it is -- rough start and all, Clay answered solemnly.

Wary of the boys swollen lip, Clay kissed him lightly on just one
cheek and then made himself let him go.  He sat up abruptly.  Hey now,
dont go changin the subject on me.  Get your butt in the shower. 
The order was issued with a playful slap on one side of Harlans slim
ass.  Feeling accomplishment on discovering Harlan enough removed from
his troubles to muster easy though minor-sized giggles made the big man
suddenly unspeakably happy though deep in the midst of his own . . .

Harlan took the fresh towel Clay handed him out of the tiny closet in
the upstairs hallway.  While you get cleaned up, Ill see what I can
rustle up to eat.  Feel like eatin dont you? the preacher asked, his
brow again interrogatively gathered and risen for a serious pause.

Yeah -- kind of, Harlan sighed as he nodded.

Yeah?  Clay smiled wisely.  Thats a good sign, my man --, he told
him, a sure nough good sign.

Harlan, half-believing, nodded but didnt require him to explain, of
what.

Grinning wide, Clay bossily chided,  Get on bout your business.  Put
on the TV when you come out, he said as he headed for the stairs. 
Maybe theyve got a game on tonight.

The big man ambled around the kitchen checking the refrigerator and
cupboards for food to fit the occasion -- a  feast to sustain two
strong virile lovers.  Finding nothing suitable that could be quickly
made, instead of endeavoring to cook, the preacher rushed upstairs
again to change.

He left the Buick parked and instead sprinted to a small neighborhood
restaurant two blocks north of the house.  In quick order hed arranged
a lesser feast of two steak hoagies, some fries and a few cold bottles
of orange soda.  Within the hour Harlan and he were once more side by
side in the middle of the big bed.  Both bare-bodied save for their
underwear sat backs leaned back against the wide beds veneered
headboard as, laughing, they shared a tray and an old movie being
screened on the black and white TV.

Even though Harlan was outwardly of a brightened disposition he was
nowhere near moving toward a further unraveling of all that had taken
place between himself and the deacon.  Once hed finished his hoagie,
grateful, he smiled at his golden man and curled up on the bed,
contentedly resting his head on Clays warm, hairy thigh.

The TV, on a small table near the corner of the bed, held neithers
attention for long.  Eventually as his interest in it began to wane,
Harlans fingers, seemingly aimless, wandered the preachers bare, hard
thigh as black-and-white images that sometimes said things, sometimes
sold things continued traversing the screen scene to scene.  However,
it wasnt by happenstance that Harlan overreached to scratch the back
of his head.  The tips of his slim fingers began a teasing path across
the top of the thin cotton bound bulge the preachers cock and balls
formed just behind the crown of his head.

Clay said nothing but sent his own thick fingers tenderly furrowing
rows through the field of black, woolly hair on Harlans head as his
dick went hard.

Blind travelers journeying beyond his range of sight, Harlans long
brown wiggling fingers felt out a path that led up a loose leg of
Clays boxer shorts.  The lovers touch on his thigh caused the young
preachers tumescent dick to hurriedly finish its straightening and
lengthening to push its fleshy head along his muscular leg and meet
Harlans searching fingers more than halfway.

A little surprised, You really feel like it? Clay inquired.  The
question was lightly tinged with caution.

Yeah Big Man, Harlan replied, drawing his hand off Clays hard-on.

Big Man? the curious preacher responded.

Youre mine now?

Yeah, the preacher sighed.

Then thats what Im callin you from now on, the youth said as he
grinned, then yawned and stretched as he turned belly up to gaze at
Clays face.  Not so much cause youre big on the outside . . . and
in certain places . . . its cause theres so much good stuff about
you on the inside.

Well then, move over a little.  Ive got good stuff aplenty for you,
the handsome man said as he promptly began sliding all his muscular
frame down into bed.  Once they lay close, Clay quite gently laid his
lips on Harlans.  That help take some of the hurt away? he asked
with a whispered as inspected the swollen corner of the Harlans mouth
a long kiss later.

Yeah, the youth replied breathily.

Diligent in his care, the gold-skinned young preacher then put his lips
to the bruise beside Harlans puffy eye.  As if suddenly and somehow
uncannily advised that great healing power lay in kisses, Clay rolled
his hard body onto Harlans with the firm intention that his wounded
young lion should have a full supply.

The young preacher gathered and cradled Harlans head in his big hands.
 Aroused and ready for duty and wasting not a minute in the delivery of
the cure his lips held, he fervently began a rushed application of
tender kisses all about the lean youths face.

Clays actions continued to grow even more in this intense rendering of
his service when he felt steady throbs of Harlans dick, rock hard
under his hairy belly.  Giving a great groan he scooped the
wide-shouldered youth into his big arms and kissed and sucked at the
satin smooth brown skin along his neck as he progressively lowered his
mouths position on Harlans firm body.  Clay wagged his head to and
fro and brushed the tiny peak of one of Harlans nipples with his
mustache.  Zealous in their labors, the preachers full lips tweaked
the small dark nipple as he gingerly mopped it with just his tongues
tip.  This elicited a breezy moan from Harlan.  The preacher moaned too
as the youths slim fingers lay lazy veering trails through the wiry
hair atop his head.

Then, after having lingered on the tiny nut brown nipple for a time, as
Clay prepared to move his mouth on to its mate he realized Harlans
cock was gone soft under him.  Bringing himself up on an elbow, the bed
began to jiggle as the brawny man chuckled softly.  Harlan had fallen
asleep.

Lord knows its been a rough day baby-man; couldnt hold out could
you? he muttered just before planting a kiss on peacefully slumbering
Harlans flat belly.

The young preachers first intention was merely to roll off and get to
sleep himself.  Who under Heaven could tell what new burdens and
turmoil were arriving with the next mornings sun would start brewing. 
However, when he raised up on all fours, poised protective and bearlike
over the beautiful youths slim sculpted form the longer he took in the
sight of him the more he became reluctant to move away.  The longing to
touch Harlan just one more time again overcame him.

A soft velvet rumble sounded in deep the young preachers throat with
the rise of the sweet ache invading his pendulous nut sack.  Hanging
low and swinging between his thick, hairy thighs they jiggled as Clay
slowly let his head and shivering shoulders drop.  The gold orbs of his
ass sat proud and high as his lowered lips gently pressed into Harlans
warm belly, Clay let his lips gently drag across the firm, flat plain
of muscle a second time, and then once more.

As sleepy as he too felt, the big man sighted an incentive for staying
awake just a while longer.  It spurred his cock, thick and long, to
lift up toward his gut as he backed a bit farther down the bed. 
Another lovers kiss came drifting down and this time fell dead-center
on Harlans navel.  Thoroughly aroused, Clay couldnt resist returning
his mouth to the shallow little well in Harlans belly.  He probed it
with his tongue.

Lifting his head, Clay peered into the shadows that his broad muscular
frame cast over Harlan beneath him and painstakingly studied the bare
head of the zigzag of dormant sex that lay across the lean youths
belly.  Caught in a kind of curious rapture, he brought his head down
again and with no difficulty, sucked the tip end of the Harlans
flaccid sex inside his mouth.

There came no stirring to life as the preachers fingers lightly
gripped its limp length near its tip.  Not really expecting much
reaction from his sleeping bed partner anyway, slowly tonguing the head
of it, the big man was content to considered its taste, then the feel
of it inside his mouth.  When his moist lips let it go a few minutes
later to gently nuzzle and lap at the loose, warm brown pouch swollen
with Harlans balls the saliva slicked top half of the the sleeping
youths long soft dick flopped over his grasping fingers .

The soap sweet and must scent of the young mans sexual parts fueled
the preachers passion.  Not ready to resist the feeling, the big man
divided the sleeping youths legs with the slow but firm urging of a
knee and then planted a hand at each of his sides.  Nimble and quick,
the well-built man established support for the weight of his upper body
on his strong arms as he unbent his tall frame.

The big mans thick dick was jammed hard into his gut and dragged along
beneath him over fold and clumps in the sheets as he shimmied on his
belly until hed backed his way near shoulder deep in the wonderful
warmth radiating inside his young loves opened thighs.

The lamplight inside the room played on the dusting of glistening black
hair across the preachers honey-hued backside as the travel of his
husky form halted halfway off the bed.  Clay eagerly fitted Harlans
dick to his mouth once more.  Taking as much as he could of the soft
mass inside his mouth, the big man resumed gently swabbing Harlans
cockhead with his tongue while his hands lightly kneaded both sides of
the boys ass.  In the touching, the young preachers recall of what
fucking the long-legged young man was like was instantly prompted. Low
on his body, Clay felt his cock buck upward and slap his hard belly.

Harlan sighed in his sleep and stirred slightly as his own cock slowly
swelled up inside the preachers mouth.  The big man wondered at what
Harlan might be dreaming of as he felt it grow.

Quickening with the rise and fall of Clays mouth on it, the
broad-shafted man-flesh between Harlans long legs went all the way
hard.  Harlan murmured as his dick reached full stand but Clay did not
know upon whom he called.

The hour was growing late and the street outside becoming a still, dark
world all to itself.  There was as little sound to be heard in the room
removed from the outside hush other than the big beds soft, steady
groans and creaks as Clays head bobbed and his wide shoulders weaved
rhythmically.  Noiselessly, he sucked on the head of the rigid dick
captured in his mouth and pumped its lengthy shaft steadily with his
hand.

There came sudden but slight tremors in slumbering Harlans fingers
after a sizable span of more quiet within the room as Clay continued
making love to the youths motionless form with his mouth.  Upturned
and ready to receive the gift of the moment, Harlans hands and fingers
fluttered at his sides like fallen birds on the blanket just as a
breathy gush of mumbled blessings escaped his lips.  His head lolled on
the pillow and he began to speak in the cryptic tongue known only
beyond the waking world as his balls tightened in Clays warm cradling
palm.  Slow exhalations brought forth more of Harlans pleasured
whimpers in commentary to the dream he lay dreaming as the tip of the
preachers tongue danced around the tiny slit his cockhead.

Inside the preachers mouth a tiny spill of fluid leaked from the
little opening in the crown of Harlans cock.  So minute it was, Clay
would have missed the single droplets birth and passing had it not
been for the hint of salt it left on his tongue.  Like a magical elixir
this infinitesimal outpouring rallied the tired preacher to more
vigorous action.  He knew what was soon to be.

The unfurling of the sleeping Harlans orgasm came about in as gentle a
way as the passing soft, long sighs that slipped from the sleeping
youths lips as the first of a peaceful rivers pulsations, a gentle
gush of warm semen, instigated a slow creeping flood inside the
preachers mouth.  Harlans cock throbbed in synch with his heartbeat
and was firmly ringed by the big mans fingers when his shoulders
shuddered and his pelvis jerked involuntarily.  Lean legs quivering
like reeds in a brisk wind and with gasps and little jerks the youths
comely brown body delivered up more seed past the preachers pursed
lips.

When it was done, Clay remained where hed come to kneel for a minute
or so longer.  Pensive and perfectly still, the young preacher tilted
his head back slightly and swallowed the ample spill of the warm sticky
fluid inside his mouth and then pulled the youths soft cock free of
his lips and deftly lay it down on Harlans easily rising belly with
his fingers.  The big man rose and climbed into bed with his young love
once more.

Lying there while Harlan drifted deeper into sleep, the young preacher
pondered the lingering taste in his mouth and the sound of the youths
easy breathing in his ear as he thumbed a nipple on his bare chest. 
His own cock, hard and neglected the whole while hed ardently mouthed
and sucked Harlan, was still standing strong and tenting the bed covers.

His feelings, amorous and sexual, were wide awake in disregard of the
hour.  There was something in the moment that made the young preacher,
highly turned on and impetuous, want very much to kiss his sleeping
young prince awake to loving surprise.  The back of the handsome mans
hand slowly brushed up and down his stiff cocks top side as he
pictured it.

First, hed rise again and oil his dick and then come back to bed and
pull Harlan close.  Hed finger and feel between the smooth brown orbs
of his ass until he felt the tiny hole hidden down in the firm muscle
they were made of soften under his touch.  Then, knowing all was ready
hed slowly work his cock into the tight recesses of the youths slim
tail and set to killing the fire raging around his nuts.  He envisioned
what it would be like to have Harlan slowly awaken and find himself
engulfed by all his passion and all his love as he gently fucked his
ass.

A moment more of thought made Clay admit to himself what a sweet dream
it was indeed but the imperative was that Harlan rest on.

Abruptly deciding on another course for his stirred up need, the randy
young preacher hastily took hold of himself.  He lightly put the
squeeze on his aching dick as he pensively set his hand to slowly
pumping the shaft.  Equally as abrupt, he left off and released his
cock.  How could he settle on his hand when Harlans provided him far
finer sensation he wondered.  It seemed a real waste to him and so he
gazed at Harlan, asleep under his wing.  Mornins comin,  he thought
as he closed his eyes.  Therell be time.


1964 - Part 10

Believing the rattling of the storm door at the back of the house
indicated Clays return from the local grocers, Harlan gave no
particular thought to his state of dress.  For the week theyd been
together, the handsome pair had known little need for clothes or much
else, except themselves.  Each of the new lovers so much involved in
gorging himself on the feel of the others body and intimacy, theyd
both found themselves hard pressed for time to venture farther from the
house other than for short trips out for food.  Thus it stood the
greater part of all the young outcast possessed, pants, shirt, socks,
were downstairs tumbling toward a state of clean in the wash.  One of
the brawny preachers clean undershirts, a bit too large, and his own
thin briefs were all Harlan wore.

The storm door rattled again and, smiling, the long-legged youth leapt
up from his place on the rug before the television to go and see if
Clay was in need of help.  It didnt occur to him, until just that
moment, how hungry doing it late in the afternoon could make someone.
 Single-mindedly, the long-legged youth ran down eager to see what
would constitute the makings of that nights dinner.

Oh!, Harlan gasped, shocked as he swung the kitchen door open. 
Cleotha, his mother, stood facing him from the other side the threshold.

The normal level of warmth in the attitude Cleotha Creelys usually
amiable light brown eyes plummeted, degree by degree, to chilling cold
as they narrowed to slits.  All in one brusque circuitous sweep, the
short, stout womans icy gaze raked a trail from her sons astonished
face to his bare feet and up again.  She bit her lip, then tilted her
head to one side and said quite to the point, Your daddy told me, all
of a sudden, youve got a real bad problem bout keepin clothes on
yourself.  I see for myself the man was right.

Um -- Mom . . . come in, Harlan stammered, clumsily moving back from
the opened door to let his mother in.

As she stepped forward, Cleotha gave him the same piercing look she
always gave her sons when judgement time was due.  Darlin dont you
worry bout that none.  I certainly do mean to be comin in here, she
said tersely.  Carrying a leather traveling-bag of good size at her
side, she came across the doorway.  Inside, looking behind herself,
Well dont just stand there lookin.  Close the door before you let
all the heat out to the house.

Once inside, the portly brown-skinned woman made no immediate effort to
further address her son.  Instead, in a momentary and womanly sort of
survey of the Adderlys tidy kitchen, she stood in the middle of the
white tile floor eying furnishings, cabinetry, and the printed cotton
curtains at the windows.  Harlan guardedly watched at a distance.

Without offering estimation or approval of the place, Cleotha Creely
subsequently turned about-face to rivet her attention on her son.  Her
voice was reined in and quiet but of a timbre the same stern shade as a
storm cloud.  Boy, I dont have a snip of a notion bout what else is
in this mans house but I know for sure your clothes must be up in here
somewhere . . . and the other thing I know is that youd better go put
em on -- right now.  You hear me?

All my stuffs in the basement; in the washing machine, Harlan
quietly apprised her.  I really dont have anything else to wear, he
added, trying not to let all his reawakened sadness show.

The fire in his mothers eyes died that moment and the anger on her
face abruptly waxed to dismay.  She quite knowledgeably sighed, I
know.  Thats why I brought these things from the house, she said,
nodding at the bag set at her feet.  Now get on upstairs and find
somethin to put on.

Without comment, Harlan complied by hastily turning in retreat.  Hed
just reached the staircase when Cleotha, more than a little nonplused
at his absentmindedness, demanded to know, Where has your mind gone
Harlan Creely.  Boy, bring your butt back here and get this thing. 
Frowning and irritated all over again, she snatched up the leather bag
and paced, heavy footed, as far as the dining rooms entry once her son
retraced his steps.

Oh, was all embarrassed Harlan could find to offer in admitting the
silly oversight.  Skittishly swinging his own line of sight clear of
the cutting edge of his mothers, the nervous youth reached out and
gingerly grabbed the brown bag by its handle and took it from her.

Oh, nothin.  Cleothas sharp retort followed her son as he rushed
for the stairs again.  Just get yourself on out of my face and look in
that thing for some clothes to put across your narrow behind, she said
as she watched him head upstairs again, patting her foot impatiently.

Her sons footsteps fast fading in her as he rose the stairs, the
stout, worried mother turned from the doorway and placed her large
black handbag on the kitchen table.  She removed her gloves but only
unbuttoned the heavy woolen coat she wore and did not remove her hat.

Left to think and to wait until Harlan came down again, preoccupied
Cleotha Creely slid one of the four wrought iron chairs in the set away
from the table and took a seat.  She sat there examining her plain
wedding band, twenty-three years old; her blank stare greatly devaluing
it.  However, an instant later, her attention was drawn in another
direction as her brow gathered.  Behind her, the rasp of a key quickly
shoved into the kitchen doors lock interrupted her quiet meditation. 
Swiftly twisting round in her chair, she faced Clay just as he entered
the kitchen with a large, full brown paper bag cradled in each arm.

Clay came to a cautious halt just inside the door once he laid eyes on
her and in awkward, telling silence sorted out words but found none
appropriate except, Welcome, Sister Creely.  Though he said no more
than that, an unspoken apology at once expressed itself inside his
embarrassed eyes.

Cleothas searching gaze pored over every line and angle of the tall
handsome mans face with care.  Well now Reverend Adderly, you look a
mite surprised.  Didnt expect youd be seein me? she asked with a
subdued but knife-edged sarcasm as unnerving as the puzzlement her
small smile caused the big man.

He knew the storm on the rise inside her angry eyes would soon engulf
them all.  To stem the flood of instantaneous wonderings over what was
to be left him in its wake, Little things first, the young preacher
reminded himself, judiciously keeping silent.  There was not a thing to
do, not a thing to say, just await the confrontation.

Despite the step-up of uneasiness that churned inside his gut, the big
man set about seeing to it that the full grocery bags, about to tilt,
remained upright at the back of the kitchen counter.  Done, Let me get
somethin for you, Sister Creely, he offered.  A cup of coffee or
maybe some --

No sir, not for me, she broke in on the invitation.  Im not in need
of a thing, thank you.  Cleothas voice lost its hardness and she
appeared almost wistful when she spoke again.  Seems to me the thing
Im wantin most is somethin both you and I know Ill never be able to
have -- again.

Offering her attention, the large woman straightened in her chair,
anticipating the young preacher would take the opening shed allowed
him and openly concede at least his comprehension of the problem at
hand.  She meant to use that same acknowledgement as the vantage point
from which to begin to state, in detail, her feelings but received no
such quick satisfaction.

Of course, Clay instantly realized where he was being led but thought
better of following.  He remained mute in spite of the allowance,
neither ready yet to abet nor stomach a dig into the past several days
occurrences.  Instead, he turned on the gas jet beneath the large
aluminum kettle at the back of the range.

Save for the rattle of cups and saucers being set down on the kitchen
counter as Clay took them from a cabinet above, nothing disturbed
troubled silence.  The sudden rending of the pall of near complete
quiet draped all about the kitchen first came with the start of the
monotone hum from the refrigerator and seemed almost cheery.  Several
minutes later, the kettles louder whistle started a spiral trill of
overshadowing harmony.  It was reaching its crescendo as Harlan
returned, this time completely dressed.  His mother studied the manner
of his slow entry with deep curiosity.

The sight of Clay standing at the stove made thoroughly unnerved Harlan
feel strong inside again.  Raising his chin a bit, the handsome,
enamored youth greeted the man he thought the most wonderful of all in
the world with a half-smiled Hi.  Though his expression was
controlled, his voice was unabashedly tender.

Hi.  Priorly edgy Clays response bore the exact same brave face.

Swinging her gaze from one end of the kitchen to the other, Cleotha
carefully scrutinized both her handsome son and the man hed given
himself to in ways she did not want to fully consider.  However,
evidence of feeling of a kind shed herself long lost sight of was so
obvious between the two she was not allowed the ease of ignorance.  She
plainly saw there was no doubt that theirs was an affair involving more
than matters of the heart.  Worse, for her, the strength of it within
her own sons eyes tore her apart inside as she watched him raptly look
across the room.

On the other hand, Harlan nowhere near so capable of studying or
maintaining dead-on meetings with his mothers eyes for long, very
quietly seated himself in the chair directly across the clean white
tables top from her.

You havin tea, Harlan?  Clay near whispered the inquiry across the
room.

Uh . . . Yes, please.

Cleotha dragged her purse off the table and into her lap as Clay made a
slow approach, balancing empty cups and saucers for three on his big
hands.

Please have a sip of tea, the big man gently implored.  Theres even
fresh-made pound cake I brought in.

Cleotha heaved a sigh.  All right then, she consented shortly and,
apparently meaning to show she intended to stay a while, began to draw
her heavy arms from her coat sleeves.

Cups filled and some sugar and napkins set out, the young minister also
took a seat.  Yet, very, very conscious of himself, he uneasily leaned
back in his chair and began studying his hands, folded and at rest in
front of his cup.

All parties constituting the strangely related threesome sat silent
around the table until, taking a deep breath to face duty, Clay began,
Sister Creely, I dont know exactly where I should start.  I -- 
Every one of the seemingly simple words the young preacher had quietly
hand picked for a clean-lined assemblage of heartfelt thought and
sentiment he ardently wanted to make known to Harlans mother suddenly
piled up like a log jam in his aching throat.

Pursing her lips, Cleotha sat up even straighter in her chair; the
undulating channels across her brow resembled streamers waving in the
winds of yet contained rage.  Well then, why not let me see if I cant
steer you in the right direction, she said,  Ive got a pretty good
idea about the place to start.  Cleotha ominously leaned toward him. 
Why dont you start by tellin me just how long this mess -- whatever
it is youve been up to -- has been goin on between you and my boy.

Harlan protectively blocked Clays response.  Wholeheartedly meaning to
represent himself as a responsible party in the discussion he speaking
up immediately, telling his mother, Its not like we were sneakin
around or somethin.  Its only just happened -- just a couple days or
so before Daddy showed up here.

Harlan, when did I ask you?  Be quiet! his mother irritatedly
dismissed him as if he were still a small, worrisome child.

Hes tellin the truth, Clay swiftly attested.

Instantly crossing her arms as she feigned shock, Lordy, Lord!
Cleotha exclaimed.  Man, I wish to God youd been this fast at lettin
as much truth be known back when Thesselonian started scoutin round
for a man to fill old Pastor Jamisons shoes.  An addendum, Specially
bout your likin for layin round with little boys, was nastily
slapped onto the thought.

Im tellin you, if the trustee board had only had a piece of notion,
it sure would have saved us a whole lot of time in the weedin out
process and looking straight at her son, maybe me a whole lot of
grief now.

Maintaining her steely gaze, Cleotha projected a, surprisingly cynical
inquiry linearly across the table to Harlan.  Youre tellin me this
stuff has only just now started between you and this man? she asked.

Honest, Mom, Harlan answered, nodding his head solemnly.

She suddenly twisted toward Clay again.  Well then, knowin how men
will go out and rut around, who elses boy have you had your hands on? 
What made you decide on mine?

Mom!  Hes nothin like that and Im no kid.  We --

Clays waving hand shot up, demanding Harlan be silent.  Its all
right youngblood.  I thank you but I can speak for myself, he said
outright as he looked Cleotha straight in the eye.  Theres no way in
the world I can prove this to you Sister Creely, I know, but as God is
my witness no such thing has ever happened before in my life.

Well then if its somethin youve never done before -- what in the
worlds led to you want him now?  Cleotha was not buying Clays
disclosure.

There are a hundred reasons why.  All of em special and most from the
very best part of my heart, but Ive got no way to offer understandable
explanations about such things to you.  I --

Mom --, Harlan valiantly burst out, rashly believing he could settle
the thing once and for all.  This is somethin Ive wanted to happen .
. . all along . . . since the very first day I saw him, the lean,
young man said as he directed a worshipful gaze at the handsome
preacher that told his enchantment to both those there to see.  Turning
to his mother again, he reiterated his point.  I wanted to be with
him.  Thats the truth pure and simple.

Parallel and recurrent horrific words and phrases had been passing in
and out of her mind.  Theyd been haunting every environ of Cleothas
imagining every waking hour since three days before when Frank had
forced a venomously righteous recitation of his accidental discovery of
their son upon her.  Despite the sincere and benign intent in her
oldest boys delivery of fact, knowledge of Harlans uncoerced consent
arrived like fulfillment of a dread but denied prophecy.  It rained
down dousing her like acid, caustically searing her ears, even her soul.

The impact of her sons revelation had visibly jolted her.  Despite her
dismay and the tears she was holding back, the portly woman continued
sitting there, chin stubbornly up, bottom lip the stiff ledge seating
her indignation.  She braced herself against the chairs straight back
trying to keep a grasp on composure.  Stunned, her face turned an
unreadable page.

A minute later, seemingly in recovery but obviously refusing to easily
believe, she probed her son.  You mean to say that youve been out
here runnin after men, Harlan?

Harlan answered in a quavering voice, No, Mom -- no.  Its not like
that either -- I

Dadblame it boy, then what is it like? she demanded with a venomous
snarl, meaning to have absolutely no truck with embroidered tales. 
Tell me, whats it like! she shouted once more.

Remembering Clays telling him that only truth could make what they
felt for each other right and keep them together, Harlan breathed deep.
 Theres been nobody else Mom but him.  Never was . . . never could be
. . . not for me, he replied respectfully and thoroughly forthright. 
For a son just trying his wings in independent flight, the depth of the
bottomless well of judgment Harlan saw inside his mothers eyes was a
terrifying sight.  Nonetheless, the young man in love forced himself,
this time, to meet her gaze directly and tell her, Mom -- I love him.

Pure and primary, the utterance was molded by the odd voice belonging
to one who exercises faith in awesome dreams.  Yet for all its clear
beauty and honesty, the declaration failed to entreat his mothers
understanding.  Harlan could instantly see that in her eyes.  Moments
later, the youth suddenly grew as angry as he was hurt when his
mothers sustained mocking silence amounted to a dismissal of
tomfoolery.  It is really love, he objected, hot voiced.  Why cant
it be?

As if the fury shed carried across Clays threshold had somehow been
miraculously neutralized during the last second to flash by; as if the
prior importance of what was happening between her son and the man
beside him at the table was all at once escaping the moment by
trivially drifting upward like a puff of smoke, Cleothas head fell
back and her hat was jostled askew.  The palm of her hand loudly
smacked the top of the table and her large body started shaking like
jelly as she commenced laughing loud and raucously.

In love?  Youre in love?  Boy, what in Gods name are you talkin
bout? she asked, this time with astonishment of the purest kind still
laughing.

When the resurrection of seriousness came after the death of her
laughter, What would you know about love other than that junk you and
Buddy see on the TV? she asked.  Pretty words and huggin and kissin
aint what loves about baby.  Aint never been.  It aint about layin
around in bed either, she added swiftly casting a scornful glare from
Harlan to Clay.

Love is havin the common sense to go out and find somebody you know
you have a real chance make yourself a life with out there in the world
-- hard as it is.  Love is goin on with livin together anyhow, even
when it gets to lookin like the love you had aint the love youve
got.  Its seein that garbage goes out come trash day and holdin your
peace in spite of yourself.  Day by day, its months and years of
nights passed sittin up with young ones.  Its payin bills and
sufferin' and still stickin it out -- if for no other reason than just
to have a door you can call yours to walk into.  Thats love, boy.  On
top of which, none of its got nothin to do with no man lovin a man
mess?

Now I want you to answer me and I want you to answer me right, she
ordered, pointing a finger directly at Harlan.  Who have you been
talkin to?  What kind of storybooks have you been lookin at that I
aint seen?

If not in charge of, then surely in full possession of her outrage
again, Cleotha leaned toward Clay ready to accuse.  Is it you puttin
this junk in his mind? she asked sharply.

Sister Creely this isnt exactly somethin you can just plant in
somebodys mind.  Its a natural feelin.  Comes just as natural I
suspect as your skin tone or how tall you grow.  Its in him, its the
way he feels -- naturally.  Ive felt this way all my life and this one
time I didnt tell myself no nor did he.  We acted on it naturally. 
Thats the important thing to understand.

I dont give a hoot if it was one time or a thousand.  Why am I
supposed to understand? Cleotha heatedly inquired but did not wait for
an answer.

Looking up at the young preacher as he rose from the table to distance
himself a little from her wrath, Im really supposed to understand a
thing thats hurtin me so bad Im not able to explain even half of why
I feel like Im bein split apart?" she seethed.

Split apart I say! she shouted slamming her purse on the table. 
"Today, this mess has got me bearin pain that seems ten times as bad
as the pain I had goin on twenty ago years when Id have sworn nothin
was bout to be left of me but the two halves of my black behind the
day I birthed this boy into the world.

Mom!

Shut up boy, Cleotha growled in warning.

Silent and plagued by his own pain, lead-footed, Clay trudged slowly to
the other end of the kitchen.  Leaning back against the refrigerator he
shoved his hands in his pockets and cast his eyes to the tile floor. 
Cleotha trembled with rage as she rose from the table and measured step
by measured step pursued.

When she faced him, Cleotha looked up at the tall man and simpered,
Understand, with mocking, exaggerated effeminacy.  My, my, my,
mister preacher man!  Youve been peddlin the love of Jesus so long
that understand pops out of your mouth right easy.  Understand, you
said?  Get the hell out of my face with understand!

Just like that, huh?  She snapped her fingers just a fraction of an
inch from Clays nose.  The whole things supposed to be put together
for me all one-two-three quick and simple like store-bought cake? 
Hmph!  Nigger you sure ought to get out of my face.

Harlan began to bolt up out of his chair to protest again but the chill
of menace in his mothers glare froze him midstance.  Harlan, sit your
ass down at that table before I go ahead and do what I stopped your
daddy from doin, she snapped and then shot her gaze back to Clay.

Now, let me tell you exactly what I understand, she said slowly and
emphatically.  I understand that a little more than a week ago I was
just another Negro tryin to content myself with whats supposed to be,
realistically, a decent lot in life for just another Negro.

And thought I was doin somethin too!  Runnin back and forth to that
little job of mine feelin kind of good about myself since they gave me
my little title; tryin to get my bills paid up and keep food on the
table.  Yes sir . . . there I was all along, goin bout my business
tryin to do for my two boys and that ornery man I got as well as
attemptin to do for myself.  But, what a natural born fool Ive turned
out to be.  All my tryins meant nothin.  Then again, good Lord only
knows, maybe it was me.  Maybe I didnt try hard enough.

For all my attempts to teach him right and a good way to live; what is
it this boy of mine learned?  For all my bendin over backward lately
to keep some kind of peace between him and Mr. Know It All Frank; what
on Earth happened?  Sunday after Sunday, on time every time for twenty
years, Ive hauled em to Sunday School at that same church you get
your money from so they could learn the Bible and hear the Word.  What
has that meant?

After all of that, my oldest son -- my first baby -- cant come home
because his father wont have him in the house.  And why is that? 
Cause my son, still nowhere a man  dont care how grown he might
think he is  has decided to lay up with another man, Cleothas voice
acquired a steam like hiss, and the man hes messin with aint nobody
but an out of work preacher . . . with a wife!  Ha!  Wonder will she
understand?

And you know, heres one more thing, Reverend sir.  Speakin of all
this playin house and layin up mess, a burst of bitter laughter hued
identical to the ugly color of the irate mothers festering contempt,
cut then relinked her inquiry as to, what in the world ever made you
think Id understand why my sons been leavin the stuff thats
supposed to be creatin my grandbabies up your butt?

Clays face flushed crimson as Cleotha spit the salvo of hard words and
mean sentiment straight at him.  No way to avoid being peppered by
shrapnel the young preacher grimaced in the fall-out of motherly rage. 
He squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away as his pain bloomed
but Cleotha wasnt quite finished.

Look any which-way you feel like, Mr. Right Reverend Adderly but hear
me.  I want you to catch hold of a real good understanding of just how
much I hate you today!  I hate you down to soul deep for bein the root
of the mess thats spoiled my life and that surely will ruin Harlans.

Then, quite abrupt in the changing, the anguished mothers voice
softened significantly as she suddenly spoke her deeper thoughts.  God
knows, even though in my heart I believe what youre doin is vile and
damnable, I probably could have lived through finding out the two of
youd been laying around, if it was only me who had to know.

Tears welled at the outer corners of Cleothas hopeless, tired eyes. 
Only her bottom lashes tenuously stayed their spill.  Believe you me,
Im tellin the truth . . . I believe myself a Christian woman and
aint about to lie about such a thing . . . I honestly believe I could
have dealt with it.  Yeah, it would have hurt me to my heart but if
its comin to light meant losin my child, right or wrong, Id have
tried my level best to keep his daddy from knowin.

Cleothas momentarily subdued voice renewed its prior impetus once she
stepped back inside her rage again.  But let me tell you one thing,
even though its Frank, this boys own father whos put him out in the
street, youre the one whos caused him to be taken from me.

Yes sir, you're hearin' me right.  Im holdin nobody responsible but
you.  When you took my son for your little playmate you took any
snippet of a chance for harmony the so-called Creely family had left
too!  The loud slap of Cleothas purse against the side of Clays face
emphasized her confidence respecting that last remark's
fact-worthiness.  Although the forlorn young preachers eyes were
turned askance, hed seen the blow coming.  Knowing judgement greater
was coming hed neither made the effort to dodge it nor turned to meet
her hot eyes once shed landed it.

Mom, please! Harlan nearly screamed in anguish.

How surprising it was . . . the amount of pain a simple kitchen so
warm, so friendly in appearance could hold.  My Lord! Cleotha wailed
adding to the chorus of woe as she raised her large brown arms up
toward the vacant plain on the ceiling overhead.  My sweet Lord Jesus!
 Look at what theyre makin me do!  Sobbing, she stumbled back to the
table and sank heavily into a chair.

Harlans tan eyes, for a long time clouded by befuddlement, suddenly
cleared.  Without question, he saw time had come to show himself as a
man and no longer the boy spared from full responsibility of his ways. 
And just like a man, he wanted to be seen as not as one perpetually in
need of help but, rather, one who was able to rescue.

Harlans smooth brow wrinkled as he pursed his lips and, silently
ponderous, looked back down the road of fear and pain hed already
traveled and on seeing how far hed come eked the strength and mind to
travel a little farther.  All at once disrobed of fear and confusion,
the handsome youth rose from the table and stood straight; decided on
what he must do.

It was Clay that Harlan first approached.  Hed known his mothers
heavy-handed clout now and then in his growing up and deftly inspected
the hot, red blotch it had left on the tall mans left cheek with
tenderly scrutinous fingertips.  Assured no grave injury had been
suffered, with a voice soft but open as the passion inside his light
eyes, Harlan smiled and told his new lover -- his first lover -- Big
Man . . . I loved you yesterday . . . I love you today . . .  and Im
gonna love you tomorrow.  I dont want anymore than that.

Knowing full well Cleotha heard his every word and resolute about
making of a man of himself, the tall youth solemenly turned from Clay
and retraced his steps across the kitchen.  At the round white table,
he gently let his hands drift down to his weeping mothers quivering
shoulders and let their comfort rest there for a time just as shed
done so often for him during childhood sorrows.  Then, bending over
her, he tightly circled her shoulders with his young, strong arms and
kissed her plump cheek hard.  Mom, I love you too . . . God knows I
do.

Gingerly rubbing his cheek, still reddened and smarting from the blow,
Clay slowly approached the handsome youth he loved as he knelt to
comfort his sobbing mother.  He laid his hand on Harlans head and in
the lending of the strength within himself seemed to be bestowing a
blessing and silently stood over the mother and son at his table.  
Waiting and praying in his heart for an ebb in the hurt they all were
swimming in, it was obvious to the preacher that he himself could be no
less brave than the young warrior he taken to be his.

In time, as Cleotha regained her composure he spoke.  Sister Creely,
as far as nature goes, no matter bout the direction, Im the same as
any man but Ive never been one thats doggish and never have had much
use for the like either.  Since Ive been ordained and married, no
matter what I might have felt or who I felt it for, Ive tried my best
to follow the rule book down to the letter and do what Ive been shown
was right.  From all this time of knowin him, I believe Harlans done
just about the same, the preacher added nodding in her sons
direction.  If I know that, Im sure in your heart you know it too.

Maybe I misused the word, when I asked you to understand.  Im really
askin -- if you can find it anywhere in your heart -- forgive him . .
. forgive me . . . us . . . for any pain weve caused you even though
nothin can be taken back or made the way it was before.

Mind you, its not my intention to try to make you see any of this as
bein right.  Its just that I want you to know that whats happened
hasnt come out of low-down doggishness but love in its most human form.

I apologize from the bottom of my heart for your sufferin' but look
at us.  What is it that the two of us have done?  Whats gone on
between us? Clay asked, quietly surprised that he was able to continue
finding words.  Why, just about the most wonderful thing in the world,
Sister Creely, strange though it may look.  Two people came to find
what they believe is both their hearts desire and theyve said yes to
lovin each other in all ways with faith enough to try and see to its
lastin.

Looking up, teary-eyed Cleotha frowned deeply but let the tall sad-eyed
young preacher go on to have his say.

Do what you want, do what you will -- no maam, I wont lie to you. 
Your son and I listened to more than our hearts and I was more than
willing to follow when the feeling led us all the way upstairs to bed. 
Yet, for any joys, any pleasures passed between him and me these last
few days, theres come just as big a heartache too cause theres
nobody -- and never will be -- to even say, Were happy for you, or
celebrate it with us.

Suddenly Clay dropped to his haunches, joining Harlan at the large
womans side.  Whats comin for us is a whole lot of mean
spiritedness and nasty talk once all is known.  As we can see, the
Deacons been first in line.  Regardless, Harlan and I have already
talked it out and as much as Ive tried to dissuade this fine, strong
young man of yours, he says hes got his mind made up and he believes
hes able to deal with it lick by lick.

 Course that, like anything else, only time can tell but thats all
right by me too.  I mean to be right there by his side either way
because above anything else hes said, most important, the young man
says he loves me.  And that Ill never argue about, he said bluntly as
he looked into Harlans eyes.   No sense in it anyway.  Youre not the
only one whos lifes ended up bein turned upside down over night,
Sister Creely.  Look at me.  The way things stand, once I lose him
everything Ive got is gone.

I know and you, his own mother, has to know here sits a young man with
somethin of a head on his shoulders.  Hard-headed sometimes I agree,
but no ways simple-minded or a liar.  Thats exactly the reason why Im
about to take him at his words and go head on to see what the ends
gonna be, the young preacher vowed earnestly.

Guided by what you know, which I wont doubt as bein considerable,
youre worried over whats ahead for him, lookin ahead and thinkin of
the danger in his way just like a mother should.  In the doin I
realize your minds on weighin right and wrong as you see it, and
physical things, and peoples opinion but my mind dwells most on
things that have happened in the heart.  To hear him tell me how he
feels about me is like a blessin to my soul, a near bout holy thing. 
It makes me happy even though I've got nowhere to go and tell it.

Clay slowly reached for the hand Cleotha had rested on the table and
laid his own upon it.  He felt it, though small, tense iron hard at his
touch but let his own hand remain in spite of that and said anyway,  I
guess among everything else youll have to think me as much a fool as
he is because I feel exactly the same about him, always did.  I love
him.  I loved him enough to chance losing my place in the church and my
private life as I knew it to have just this little bit of time weve
had and even though maybe Ive lost in one way, I love him enough to
say Im not sorry.

If youre wonderin why now all this is goin on its because, beside
the twelve years difference between us, it was never on my mind to try
and lead him into somethin as confused as all this has turned out to
be by makin plain things I didnt believe hed a mind for
understandin or feelin.  Meanin -- I never dreamed Harlan was
studyin bout me.  I thought it was all just somethin in me, the big
man said.  Awe, almost boyish, was lighting the preachers face as if a
curtain of clouds had just been lifted from before the sun.  Believe
it or not, its all a matter of circumstance thats caused us to come
to know each others mind.

It took some time but the tense air about the three at the table
lessened.  They left off examinations of their respective positions
and, letting common sense guide, began to talk over essentials.  Where
was Harlan to stay, and then the completion of his last year of high
school.  Even college was skirted.

Not waiting any longer for Harlans mother to broach the issue of their
living together with her own words, Clay spoke of his plan for his and
Harlans quick relocation to some small hotel until either an apartment
or another house could be secured.  Once Harlan graduated, he thought
they might return south to the house and property hed held on to since
his parents death.  Theyd stay there until Harlan was set for college.

Although not pleased but seeing herself left with little choice but to
trust Clay would tend to her sons needs as he assured he would,
Cleotha softened somewhat.

Cleotha pushed herself away from the table and prepared to go home.  As
she slipped on her gloves she instructed her son to, Go up again and
take a look in the little zip-up compartment inside that bag Ive
brought for you.  Took me a little doin but I managed to move a little
kitchen money and some of my own around unbeknownst to your eagle-eyed
daddy.  Theres near bout three-hundred.

Dont you let him him go hog wild with it either, she directed Clay
with a stern look.  Ill do all I can but hes gonna have to be
careful, we aint rich folk.  Even so, she added, you be sure you
keep close in touch with me.  Rich or poor, aint no way a child of
mines goin round needin -- Frank Creely or no.

Sister Creely, whatevers mine is his.  Anything he needs I --

Lord, its mystery to me which one of yous the bigger boy, Cleotha
said with a heavy sigh.  An eyebrow arched as she looked up into the
tall young preachers face.  Still forgettin bout somebody aint
you, Rev? she reminded him.   Your settlin up aint nowheres near
done yet by a longshot.  Youve got a wife on the way home youll soon
have to reckon with.

Clays own deep sigh confirmed that that point had just become clear
again.

Cleotha turned away from him and hesitantly stepped toward the kitchen
door.  Harlan silently crossed the kitchen and was at her side just as
she reached the kitchen door.  For just a sudden moment a boy inside
again, unsure of himself and stiffly awkward he swiftly wrapped his
arms around his mother.  He hugged her with all his might.  Thank you,
Mom he whispered.  Maybe you dont understand but thank you.

The stout woman broke into tears again.  Aw Mom, no . . . please
dont, her son softly petitioned.  You dont have to worry bout
nothin, its gonna be all right.  Trust what I say.

I cant see how, sobbed the plump woman.  Aint no way in the world
I can see how . . .

Harlan, always remember that no matter what, youre of me and as long
as theres strength in me I mean to be there for you.  Hand on the
doors brass knob, Cleotha halted for a long last look at her son and
the preacher standing side by side.  She still saw the love shed no
way of making sense of and shook her head, her countenance pinched in
the limbo betwixt pity and anger rising all over again.  Nonetheless
she withheld further criticisms as well as addendum to her prior
thoughts.  Pulling her coat about herself, Mind my child well, was
all the stout woman said as she  looked back at the young preacher. 
Hear me now . . . Mind my child well.

Harlan and Clay watched Cleotha slowly descend the back steps and head
for her car as their future walked in.

So ends an odd fairytale . . . 
by Harry Schultz