Mike and Danny: The Snowstorm
by Rock Lane Cooper

Chapter 8, Part 1

Ellis

The Frontier Airlines flight from Denver is angling against a cross wind as it drops steadily to meet the end of the runway at the Grand Island airport. Ellis looks out the window at the broad frozen channels of the Platte River and the flat expanse of snow-covered farmland that stretches in all directions.

He's never seen Nebraska from the air before, this place where he grew up. Back then, he knew it well from ground level, the miles and miles of dirt and gravel roads, each traveling without a bend or curve between corn and hayfields, straight to the horizon. Straight north, straight east, straight south, straight west.

From up here it isn't like what he imagined. The roads interconnect into a vast grid. It's all squares and rectangles with clusters of farm buildings huddled together in corners or along the edges of fence lines. It's not at all like the unbroken sweep of Montana ranchland he's come to think of as home.

West was the direction he had gone fifteen years ago. Never looking back, never even thinking about looking back. And he still feels the magnetic pull of the west as he makes his way back this way again.

Sitting beside him in the aisle seat, Deacon leans forward, pressing against his shoulder to look out at the ground below. "So this is it," he says, like he's trying to sound impressed.

Ellis turns to him, his young face freshly shaved, eyes bright, a wry smile on his face. He's wearing a western shirt with a leather jacket Ellis found for him at a thrift shop in Billings.

Standing and looking out the big windows during the layover in Denver, he'd been like a kid from the country in his black Resistol and boots, his first time away from the ranch. Ellis had watched him from behind, his weight shifted onto one hip, one leg cocked to the side, hands shoved in his jacket pockets, and his butt snug in the seat of a new pair of levi's.

He'd wanted to come along on this trip, which surprised Ellis. Deacon was like that, hard to call.

"Sure you want to?" Ellis had said. He'd got the phone call from his sister less than an hour before, the news still sinking in that their father was in the hospital with a stroke. They'd found him in the garage, slumped over the snow blower. He was in bad shape. Really bad, she had said.

"It'll just be my family," Ellis had said, meaning they'd be a bunch of strangers who wouldn't know what to make of Deacon—wouldn't know what to make of him and Deacon together. "And if the old man doesn't pull through, it'll be a funeral."

He tried to say this flatly, as if it meant nothing to him. Nothing more than an inconvenience.

Deacon had looked at him, searching his face. Trying to read him. "Then I'd wanna be there," Deacon said. "With you."

He'd showed up at Ellis' place in November, when the winter weather had started really setting in. And for the first time ever, he'd stayed for more than a week.

And something unexpected had happened between them. Ellis had felt his old heart begin to thaw with Deacon there beside him every night. And Deacon had let himself be embraced by the warmth of Ellis' growing affection.

Neither had spoken of it. As the winter snows had deepened around the old farmhouse and the nights grew brittle with cold, they had drawn closer together. And one day Ellis realized he no longer expected Deacon to pick up and leave. He had come to stay for a while.

"Anyway," Ellis had said, thinking of his family and wondering this himself, "who am I supposed to tell them you are?"

Deacon shrugged. "A friend." Like it was that simple.

"They're not dumb," Don said, "They're gonna guess that we probably live together and fuck every night."

Deacon just looked in his eyes and gave him that wry grin of his. Then he slipped into Ellis' arms and pressed his face into the crook of his shoulder, kissing the side of his neck. In a moment Ellis felt his cock responding in his jeans.

Hell, he was thinking, my old man is on his deathbed and what am I doing—getting horny and wanting to get laid.

Then, holding Deacon, he thought of all the unfinished business he'd left behind when he fled to Montana fifteen years before. Maybe it was time to go back and face facts, tell the truth to anyone who'd sit still long enough to hear it.

"OK," he'd said to Deacon. "I'll tell them you're my friend. I'll tell them any damn thing they want to know."

He'd called the airline to make reservations for the next day on the first flight out, and when they'd packed an old leather valise for the trip, they quickly undressed and climbed into Ellis' double bed, pulling the heavy blankets over their heads and pressing their bodies together between the cold sheets.

He'd felt a kind of release and a wave of resolve rush through him as he realized what he was about to do—going back to face everyone as the man he was, with no apologies this time. And Deacon was full of excitement, the trip to Nebraska a big adventure.

Reaching between Deacon's naked legs, he'd found him already hard, his cock hot as a stove lid handle. And when he'd stroked his chest, feeling with fingertips for the tough little knots of his nipples, Deacon had sucked in his breath and arched against him.

His body was always loose and strong, twisting and shifting in Ellis' grasp, constantly in motion. Together like this, they were like swimmers wrestling in deep water. He would feel Deacon's mouth open against his skin, on his chest, under his arms, over his balls, then a warm tongue fiercely stroking across the hair he found there.

Last night Deacon had gone quickly to his cock, sucking it until he was good and hard and wet with spit, then climbing astride him and, when he had Ellis firmly inside, laughing softly and saying, "Let 'er buck."

They'd never mastered coming together. But last night, it had happened. He'd been holding Deacon's hard erection in both hands, the muscles in his thighs flexing under Ellis' arms and his balls lifting and falling again and again onto Ellis' belly.

Then he'd felt Deacon stiffen tight around his cock, the surge of his semen shooting up under his fingers and out over his chest and hands in hot spurts. And at that moment, he'd pushed upward, pressing deep into Deacon and letting himself come in scalding bursts.

He'd wanted then to be on top of Deacon, folding his big frame around him, and he'd rolled him onto his back, sheets and blankets tangling around them, pressing down with the full weight of his body and kissing him hard and long, Deacon's cum a rich, fragrant glue between them, smelling like fresh-cut alfalfa and sweet clover.

You're mine, he'd wanted to say, but knew it wasn't true. Deacon was his own man, and belonged to no one. No use reminding him of that fact. The way Deacon's arms and legs stayed wrapped around him, his breaths settling into a quiet rhythm against his ear, it was more the other way around—like Ellis belonged to him.

And he lay there thinking these thoughts, until his softening dick slipped out and he realized that his naked backside was getting cold in the chilled air of the room.

Now he feels the wheels of the DC-3 propjet touch down on the runway, and Deacon is still leaning against him, their elbows pressed together on the armrest. The ground has risen to meet them, and Deacon is watching the snow-covered cornfields rolling by outside the window.

He smacks his palm down on Ellis' knee and says, "We made it."

They're the last passengers off the plane, stepping onto the stair-ramp into the brightness of the winter sun. As they walk to the terminal, the surface of the tarmac feels hard under Ellis' boot heels, the cold breeze sharp on his face. He pulls the collar of his coat up around his ears.

Inside, while they're waiting for the valise to get passed through from the baggage room, a young man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans walks over to them.

"Uncle Ellis?" he says and introduces himself as Kenneth, his nephew. He's come to give them a ride into town. "Mom's at the hospital with grandpa," he explains. His mom is Ellis' sister Kathy.

Outside in the parking lot, he leads them to a pickup, which he tells them is his brother Don's. "My car wouldn't start this morning," he explains. "Battery's shot." And they climb into the cab, Deacon tossing the valise in the back and sliding onto the seat next to Ellis.

Kenneth is tall and long-legged like his brother but a very different personality. He seems quiet and thoughtful, and it turns out he's going to college at the University in Lincoln. He's come home from school when his grandfather had his stroke.

The truck is new and still smells new inside, but it's covered with road grime and streaks of dried mud and slush. "Don just came back from a trip to Omaha. It's been too cold to give 'er a wash," Kenneth says, like some apology is needed.

"We pretty much wait till spring for that in Montana," Ellis says. "Let the first big rain take care of it."

Kenneth laughs at this, turning the key in the ignition, and then carefully backs out of the parking space.

On the way into town, Ellis watches the houses and fields pass by, looking for anything familiar. This side of town hasn't changed much, but it's different. A dirt road is now blacktop. There's a new cement plant. Across the road someone has set down a doublewide on a raw half-acre. Farther on is a subdivision with new houses set back from the road and long driveways.

He glances at Deacon, who is taking it all in like it was Disneyland.

"What do you see?" he says, nudging Deacon with his knee.

"I'm seeing where you come from," Deacon says.

In town, Kenneth drops Ellis off at the hospital, a new three-story building with smooth, squared-off corners like a big, long boxcar dropped straight out of the sky.

Deacon lets him out and hops back into the cab again. Ellis' father is in intensive care, and only family members can see him. Kenneth will take Deacon home, and they'll all meet up later.

He watches the two of them drive off, Deacon rolling down the window to wave. And he feels for a moment not so sure of himself and not ready for what awaits him inside the hospital. His sister Kathy will be there, and his mom—and his dad. And it has been fifteen years.

Sitting in the hospital cafeteria afterwards with his sister, he washes down a tasteless sandwich with a cup of weak coffee. His thoughts are on the old man, lying in his bed asleep and pale, hooked up to beeping monitors, tubes everywhere.

At first there'd been the shock of seeing this shell of a man, who once was such a robust, barrel-chested, tough old rooster. Then he was surprised that the feeling passed. He simply knew that everything came to this—you live, you finally die, and in the meantime, you keep the fire alive in you, and burning fiercely, as long as you can.

He felt again the intensity of Deacon in his arms, naked, warm, and wet with cum, his heartbeat pulsing under the skin. And standing alone beside the old man before him, he didn't know if the tears that came to his eyes were for his father, himself, or the young man so full of life who had become his companion.

After he didn't know how long, he stepped back outside the ICU, and his mother got up to take her turn with her husband. She was hopeful, smiling bravely, and patting his arm as she passed by him. When he'd first seen her, he almost crushed her in his arms before he realized how small and frail she'd become over the years.

Sitting across from him in the cafeteria now, his sister Kathy picks at a cupcake, looking worn and tired. She is older and seems like someone he hardly remembers.

"I'm glad you're here," she has said more than once, like she can finally put down a heavy load she's been carrying. Not just since her father came to the hospital, but for years and years before that.

For a moment, Ellis felt the same. But just for a moment. To her he is the big brother who looked out for her when she was a little girl, returned now to look after her again. But something in him is fighting that. He isn't the brother she remembers. And the truth of that will get clearer when she realizes he isn't here alone.

"What do the doctors say about dad?" he says, figuring his sister will give him an honest answer now that they're away from their mom. "Is he gonna pull through this?"

"They say his chances are better than even."

"I guess that's good news," he says.

"If he hangs on for another day, he's probably out of the woods." But she seems resigned to whatever happens.

He looks at the rings on her left hand and thinks of her husband, a young loan officer at the bank when he last knew him. "How's Henry?" he asks.

She shrugs. "Fine. They've got him managing a new branch out at Five Points. He must like it. He's never home."

"Life treating you OK otherwise?" he says.

"Well, Don got me started early being a grandmother," she says. "I wasn't ready for that."

"How's he doing?" He thinks of Don coming through Billings last summer, on the run and hell-bent for Calgary.

"Oh, he's back with Carol and the boys," she says. "I guess I owe you some thanks for that."

"For what?"

"Well, whatever you told him, it made him stop and think. He was back here before a lot of people even realized he was gone." She shakes her head. "Not that there wasn't plenty of talk going around."

"He's basically a good man," Ellis says, figuring that's probably close enough to the truth. "Maybe he got married a little too young."

"Is that still your excuse?" she says, not sharply, but sadly, like she still hasn't forgiven him for walking out on his marriage.

"We're not going to get into that, are we?" he says.

"Don't see why not," she says. "I never understood what went wrong with you."

"There's nothing wrong with me."

She just stares at him and pushes the cupcake aside.

They talk about other things, and while he's in town, she tells him he may as well move into in his old room at their folks' house. Besides the sewing machine his mother has in there, it's mostly the same as when he left.

"All your ribbons and trophies from school are still there. Mom never throws anything away."

He looks up as she says this and sees Don coming across the cafeteria toward them. He's got a big smile on his face and holds out his hand for Ellis to shake. He's met up with Kenneth to get his truck back and learned that his uncle has made it to town.

"You brought Deacon with you," he says, still grinning, and pulling a chair up beside his mom, fitting one long leg under the table and letting the other swing wide to the side.

"Who's Deacon?" she says.

"Friend of Uncle Ellis," Don says. "He's a good guy."

Kathy looks across the table at Ellis. "Where is he now?"

"He's ridin' around with Kenneth," Don says. "I jump started his car."

Ellis is sure she'd want to know a whole lot more if Don wasn't here, but she says nothing and just holds him with her look.

He spends a while longer in the ICU with his father, stunned again by how old he's become, his hair gray and thin. In his sleep, there is no sign of the man who used to thunder at him in the rages he could work himself into when Ellis screwed up. Breaking a basement window. Doing a sloppy job of mowing the lawn. Not being able to find a tool for him in the garage. Leaving his bicycle in the driveway.

Ellis used to cringe in fear, and he realizes now that he's a grown man. His father can storm if he wants—if he's able—but Ellis can hold his own with him now. He's not a little boy anymore.

And he's not the young man who was cut to the quick by his father's disbelief when Ellis told him his marriage was over. What was he after all? Not a pillar of will power like the old man, sticking to his commitments, shoulder to the wheel, and not backing down when the going got tough.

It was a lecture he'd heard all his life. He'd never be a real man. Not even when he'd done his duty and served his country. Always falling short of his father's expectations.

And walking out on his wife because—well, what was the reason anyway? Because he wasn't happy? What kind of cock-eyed reason was that? He just wanted to fool around with his musician friends, accomplishing not a goddam thing. When was he going to grow up? And on and on.

But here his father lay, like something struck down by lightning. Struck dumb. Silenced. Ellis could look at him, knowing those ice-blue eyes would not suddenly open and fix him with a cold stare. Maybe never again.

"Go home," his mother says to him and Kathy, when it gets to be late afternoon. "I'll stay here with him again tonight."

And when it's clear their mother will have it no other way, the two of them walk out to Kathy's car in the hospital parking lot and drive across town to her house. There they find Kenneth and Deacon, tossing a football back and forth in the front yard, diving and rolling into the deep snow to make running catches.

Kathy stops the car in the driveway, watching them. Deacon, with a cigarette in his mouth, is slapping the football with one hand before making a high pass that sails through the tree branches and comes down again into Kenneth's arms.

"Ellis, he's half your age," she says.

"More like two-thirds," he says.

"Do my boys have any idea about you and him?" she wants to know.

"It's not a virus they can catch, if that's what you're thinking," he says.

"Then what is it?" she says, starting to sound angry with him.

This is where they were fifteen years ago. And he'd been hoping it would all be water under the bridge by now. But no such luck.

Deacon sees him in the car and gives him a big grin. Ellis waves back, feeling a warmth radiating through him that he's not felt since arriving in town.

What is it, she wants to know. There's a word for it, he thinks, and it will come to him in a minute, a word his sister will understand, even if she doesn't accept it.

"I love him," he finally says and smiles to himself. Yes, that's the word.

She doesn't say anything. The car is still running, the heater fan blowing, and she grips the steering wheel in her gloved hands.

"And as for the question you're not asking," he says, "yes, we fuck."

She still says nothing, but it's a stony silence.

"If you're trying to shock me, I've been around the block once or twice since you left," she says. "And I've raised two boys. That and going on thirty years with Henry, nothing much surprises me about men anymore."

He lets himself wonder for a moment what marriage might have taught his sister about sex, but stops short of imagining her and Henry together.

"But I don't have to like it," she says firmly. "Not when it's my own brother."

"Nobody's asking you to like it," he says.

"And you're not sleeping with him tonight. Not under mom and dad's roof."

He turns to her and touches her coat sleeve. She was always like this—fierce in her loyalties.

"What you did," she says, "it nearly killed dad. He was so ashamed. It was all he could do to go back to work. He could hardly hold his head up."

He feels a burning in his chest and turns again to look at Deacon, who's fallen into a knee-deep drift and is laughing, holding the football tight against his side. Kenneth runs from across the yard and dives onto him, and they wrestle together in the flying snow.

"A man has to live his own life, Kathy, no matter what his father wants," he says and looks back at her. "No matter what anybody wants."

There's supper that night at Kathy's, with her husband Henry and with Kenneth. Don drops by with Carol and the boys for a while. The house gets full and noisy, and whenever they get the chance, Kenneth and Don want their uncle to tell them more about his life in Montana.

Henry is politely quiet, like an outsider, and Kathy mostly listens, with one eye on her grandsons playing roughly in the living room, getting up once to rescue a teetering floor lamp. Every now and then, Ellis catches her watching him, and he realizes that she's inherited their father's eyes.

After a call from the hospital from their mother—the old man is still sleeping, his vital signs holding—the evening winds down, Don and his family go home, and there's talk of how late it's getting.

"Stay here tonight," Kathy says to Ellis. "The two of you can have the boys' rooms. Kenneth can sleep on the couch."

He studies the expression on her face for a moment and then says, "No need to put Kenneth out. The two of us will be staying over at the folks'." He gets up and goes to the kitchen where his coat and hat hang by the back door.

The look of firm composure on her face hardens, but she doesn't insist. Just lets them go as Kenneth pulls on an old letter jacket and gets his car keys to give them a ride.

The night is sharply cold and the streets are deserted. They stop at a bar, The Silver Bullet, where Deacon goes in to buy cigarettes. Kenneth and Ellis wait for him in the front seat of the car.

"I like Deacon," Kenneth says. "He's easy to talk to."

Ellis thinks about this. He's never found Deacon all that talkative.

"Maybe I just have a lot to get off my chest," Kenneth explains.

"You got troubles?"

"Aw, just girlfriend problems," he says, and pushes back the hood of his sweatshirt as the car warms. "I got dumped."

Ellis looks at Kenneth, whose face is lighted by the sign over the bar's front door. He has the same eyes as his mother and grandfather, but instead of seeming coldly distant, they give him a hurt and lost expression.

"I find that hard to believe," Ellis says. "I'd guess just about any girl would like being around you."

"Well, this one doesn't," Kenneth says. "That's for damn sure." He wraps his fingers hard around the steering wheel. Ellis saw Kathy do the same thing this afternoon as her frustration with him grew.

"But Deacon had some good advice for me," he goes on. "He helped me see a few things."

Ellis wonders what Deacon might have had to say on this subject. He's never said anything to Ellis about having girlfriends or being involved with women.

"Have you seen his tattoos?" Kenneth asks him.

"I have," Ellis says and wonders at the innocence of the question. Kenneth clearly has no idea about the two of them.

"We were lifting weights in the basement," Kenneth says, explaining, "and he took off his shirt."

He describes the thorny red rose on the inside of one forearm and the cactus heart on his bicep, and on his other arm the snake winding down from shoulder to elbow. "Mom would kill me if I did anything like that," he laughs.

Ellis feels a shiver pass through him, and he's aware of how deeply Kenneth trusts them both. In his gut there's a gnawing fear that anything or anyone could now betray that trust.

And then he realizes the irony. He's come from Montana to confront his family with the truth about himself. And here he sits protecting Kenneth, as if the truth would destroy all his illusions.

Kathy was right. His old room has hardly changed. There's the same tiger print wallpaper and the patchwork bedcover made of old scraps by his mom in the Depression years. A gooseneck lamp arches over the wooden desk where he used to do his homework.

The memories of high school swell around him as the door swings open and he switches on the light. At first, there's a weightless feeling, and then as he enters the room, he feels the past close in with a familiar and long-forgotten pressure in his chest, his breath tightening.

"You had this room all to yourself?" Deacon asks, stepping in beside him and setting the valise on the floor. He takes it all in and then steps to a bookcase on one wall, wanting to know about the three shiny little trophies that stand on one shelf side by side.

"American Legion baseball," Ellis says, remembering hot summer afternoons playing first base, sweat soaking through his uniform. "We went to state play-offs a couple years." Deacon nods, impressed.

On the wall above are purple and blue county fair ribbons and a framed photo of him at the age of sixteen with a fat Hereford steer.

"Where'd you keep the steer?" Deacon asks, looking around the small room with a grin and then at Ellis. And Ellis explains that he was in 4-H and raised calves on his grandfather's farm outside of town.

Deacon hangs his Resistol on the closet doorknob and takes off his leather jacket. Then he starts unsnapping his shirt.

"Achievement award for biology?" he says, looking at a framed certificate on the wall.

Ellis laughs. "My mother put that up there." She'd wanted him to get an education, and it was a reminder that he was, in her opinion, college material.

Deacon pulls his shirt out of his jeans and unsnaps the sleeves, bending forward to study a picture of a dance band. His wrinkled shirttail hangs out over his butt. "Is that you playing the piano?"

His heart starts to lighten now. "That was the Western All-Stars," he says. "We did everything—swing, country, polkas, square dances." He was just out of high school and against his parents' wishes, he'd gone on the road with a bunch of musicians, all older than him, still single and full of the devil.

"No rock and roll?" Deacon asks, pulling off his shirt.

"Hadn't been invented yet."

Deacon pries off his boots, with one toe behind the heel of the other. Then he stands there in his undershirt and levi's, his belt unbuckled.

"You were a busy guy," he says.

"It kept my mind off of other things, I guess," Ellis says.

Deacon pulls his undershirt up and over his head. And all Ellis can think is that in the countless nights he slept in this room, he was always alone with nothing but his thoughts, his yearnings, and his loneliness.

"Come here," he says in a quiet voice, as if there's someone else in the empty house who might hear them.

"Yes, sir," Deacon says, grinning, and walks over to him.

Ellis puts his arms around him, his hands opening against the warm, smooth skin of his back as he pulls Deacon tight against his chest. And he feels Deacon's hair brush against his ear as he nestles into Ellis' body.

He wants to tell Deacon what he told Kathy that day, watching him and Kenneth throwing the football. He wants to say, I love you, but he's never said it to him before, and the words remind him too much of another time—when he was married, and thinking he really meant them.

Anyway, love is not a word Deacon even seems to know. He never uses it.

"Get undressed," Deacon says. "I've been waiting for this all day."

He steps back, as if to prove his point, and unbuttons his levi's. There falling from his open pants is a full hard-on that lifts to meet his belly as he pushes them down around his ankles and then steps out of them.

He turns and bends to pull back the bedcovers, then sits on the edge of the mattress to pull off his socks, his balls shifting loosely between his legs as he lifts one foot and then the other.

Ellis starts undressing, in no hurry, just watching this amazing thing take place—a naked man here in his old room, sliding into the sheets of the bed where he had slept alone so many years.

Deacon watches him, lying on his side and stroking his hard erection with his fingertips, like Ellis is doing a strip tease. And Ellis wonders how he must look, the old muscle tone and his athlete's build both slipping. Down to his underwear, he flips off the light switch.

"Hey," Deacon says.

"Hold your horses," Ellis says and switches on the desk lamp, which sends a pool of light onto the polished surface and the wall behind, bathing the room in a soft glow. Then he quickly pulls off his tee shirt and boxers and gets into bed with Deacon.

The bed, of course, is small. Just a single. And there won't be space for any sprawling maneuvers. Sleep, when they get around to that, will be close and intimate, too, Deacon's butt tucked neatly into Ellis' crotch.

"Like two guys in a phone booth," Deacon says as he makes room for Ellis.

Now they are skin to skin, faces on the same pillow. The touch of Deacon's hard penis hot against his own makes him even harder. He kisses Deacon on the mouth, their tongues pushing together, and he feels Deacon's hand gliding over his naked hip and onto his thigh.

Then Deacon pulls himself down, driving one shoulder into Ellis' chest and twisting against him, his whole body squirming in a kind of delirium, like he could turn himself inside out. The bed springs squeak and groan under them.

He rubs his whiskery chin into Ellis' arm, hugging him fiercely, then searches with his open mouth and tongue across Ellis' chest, stopping on one nipple to suck on it, growling from deep in his throat and groping between his legs to grab for his balls.

Ellis lies back for a moment and then pushes on top of him, forcing him back onto the mattress and pinning his arm between them. With one hand he reaches under Deacon and grasps his naked butt, pulling Deacon tighter to him, their hard cocks now pressed together. On his skin, Ellis feels dollops of precum that could be Deacon's or his own.

Catching his breath, Deacon falls still under Ellis' body, throwing his free arm out to the side, his head buried in the pillow. Then he suddenly tries to twist free, pulling his knee up between Ellis' thighs. But Ellis stiffens his body, unmoving.

"Hold still," Ellis says, the bed rocking under them. "You're squirmy as a greased pig at the county fair."

Deacon laughs and then snorts and snuffles, trying again with a thrust of his hips to slide out from under Ellis.

The bed shudders, and with a jolting crash it collapses under them. There's a heavy thud and the sharp crack of bed slats hitting the wood floor.

Now they are both laughing.

"I told you to hold still," Ellis says, rolling onto his side.

Deacon sits up and looks around. "Damn, you didn't say nothin' about bustin' the bed." Then laughing and snorting some more, he wriggles under the sheets and wraps a hand around Ellis' dick, giving it a couple quick tugs before enclosing it in his warm, wet mouth.

"I can see where this is heading," Ellis says. Deacon has stretched out beside him, his naked legs kicked out from under the covers and angling up toward the head of the bed, one bare foot already braced against the tiger print wallpaper.

He leans into Deacon, pressing his face into Deacon's hard erection, which stays firm against his belly, unyielding. His balls fall softly against the bridge of Ellis' nose, and the end of his cock where it touches the trail of hair on his belly is wet with precum.

Ellis marvels at the hardness of the young man's cock and lets himself remember how rigid his own throbbing erections used to be, when he took them for granted—before middle age began to set in.

As he touches Deacon's hard-on with his tongue, tasting the salty-sweet slick of precum seeping from it, he feels Deacon jerk with sudden pleasure. And engulfing the end of his cock with his mouth, he is aware of a rippling spasm coursing through Deacon's body.

"Mmmmm," Deacon says, his mouth firmly closed over Ellis' cock, sucking in his gut and lifting one thigh to brush back and forth against his face. His nose is now buried in Deacon's crotch, and the smell of him is rich and musky.

They lie together like this, cocks locked into each other's working mouths, Deacon's hip quivering under his arm as Ellis strokes his butt, his fingers slipping between Deacon's legs to nudge against the backside of his balls. Then he strokes back again between his open cheeks this time, resting his fingertips on the knot of muscle pulsing there under his touch.

"Ahhh," Deacon says, arching backward in what sounds like a wave of ecstasy. Then he goes to work again making hungry, animal noises as he pulls harder and harder on Ellis' cock, hands roaming in a kind of fury over every part of him he can reach, knuckles kneading and digging into muscle.

Like a tornado, Ellis had once told him. He loves sex like some men love a drunken fistfight.

Finally, he begins making tiny thrusts into Ellis' mouth, pressing deeper against the back of his throat. Then, against his lip, Ellis feels the rush of cum erupting along the underside of Deacon's cock. And in a moment his mouth is filling with the thick, salty taste of it.

"Ahhhhhhh" Deacon says again, his voice higher and tighter, almost sobbing, as the last surges of cum empty from him. Then his body gradually relaxes, his leg falling loosely away from the side of Ellis' face, and Ellis lets his cock, still hard, pull slowly from his mouth and flop onto his belly.

Ellis sits up and finds Deacon sprawled beside him, eyes closed tight, his head turned against Ellis' leg. Spent, he is now unmoving, like a dead man, only breathing heavy.

"Holy fuck," Deacon says, his eyes slowly opening. "We gotta do that again."

Ellis pulls the blanket and sheet from the foot of the fallen bed and draws the covers around them, leaning out to pick up the pillow from the floor. Then he gathers Deacon in his arms and lets him fall into a deep sleep.

End of part 1. More to come. . .