Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2003 22:29:39 -0400
From: Writer Boy <writerboy69@hotmail.com>
Subject: boys of summer - part 2

Obligatory warnings and disclaimers:

1) If reading this is in any way illegal where you are or at your age, or
you don't want to read about male/male relationships, go away. You
shouldn't be here.

2) This story isn't based on anyone in particular, alive or dead, so any
resemblance to anybody is unintentional.

Questions and commentary can be sent to "writerboy69@hotmail.com". I enjoy
constructive criticism, praise, and rational discussion. I do not enjoy
flames, and will not tolerate them. Unless I often hear from you and would
recognize your address, please put the story title in the subject, or my
junk mail filter may screen you.

Author's note: This story has nothing to do with my other stories.

***

It seems almost cliche to say that I had strange dreams that night, but
I did. I'd be hard pressed, though, to say exactly what they were. I just
know that I tossed and turned all night, wrapped in my sheets, sweating
even though we had central air. I do remember that the mysterious neighbor
was in them, walking around naked, the parts that I hadn't seen lost in
shadow. Sam was in them, too, and I think for a while I was still in high
school, walking the halls, going to practice, showering next to my
teammates, next to Sam, and next to the guy from next door. I woke up hard,
sweating, my balls tensed and my dick throbbing in my boxers, but I didn't
have any more answers than I had the day before.

My parents were already gone to work for the day when I padded across the
hall to the bathroom, turning on the shower and sliding the doors closed
behind me. My hardon hadn't abated any in the few minutes that I'd been
awake, and it bounced in front of me, slapping against my abs, as I moved
in the shower. As I soaped myself up, the water sluicing down my body, I
thought about how long it had been since someone else's hands slid over
me. I ran my palms over my nipples, feeling them stiffen against my hands,
and closed my eyes, sighing. I rubbed them down my abs, and back up over my
pecs, caressing my own torso, feeling my own muscles bunch and shift under
my hands. At college, like in high school, nobody had ever done this. A few
girls had their hands under my shirt at one point or another, and had their
hands down my pants, the same way I had with them, but that had really been
about it. I hadn't ever really felt anything like this, hadn't felt someone
else explore my body the way I was doing.

My hands, slick with soap and suds, slid along my legs, stroking my thighs,
and as they slid up toward my crotch I leaned back against the wall of the
shower, groaning. I found my sack and fondled it softly, feeling the short
hairs rub against my palm.  During the school year, like most swimmers, I
shaved, keeping my body sleek to cut down on drag, and like most of the
guys on my team I went ahead and shaved everything because it was just
easier. During the summer, though, I let things grow back, and feeling the
short fuzz could be very erotic now that it had stopped itching like hell
coming in. My hand trailed down the base of my stomach, around the root of
my cock, rubbing at the slight rise there, and finally, whimpering, I
wrapped my fingers around myself and began to stroke. I wasn't really
thinking about anything at first, just luxuriating in the feeling of slight
friction, rolling my palm over my dripping, throbbing cockhead and
squeezing slightly.  My shaft thrust through the tight ring of my fingers,
the ridge at the bottom of my head jarring against them on each upstroke,
and I ran my other hand back up my chest to pinch my hard nipple, rolling
the tip of it away from the curved muscle of my chest.

As my hands continued to work myself over, I started to pretend that they
were someone else's. It was easy with my eyes closed, letting the water
beat down on me, moaning loudly since there was no need for me to be
quiet. Those weren't my fingers wrapped around my shaft, that was someone
else stroking me, squeezing, bringing me to the edge.  That wasn't my hand
massaging my balls, tugging them away from my body, feeling how full and
heavy they were, and it wasn't my hand sliding back, either. Those weren't
my fingers sliding through the crack of my ass, pressing toward my hole and
then pressing against it. That wasn't my finger pushing its way inside,
instinctively seeking something that I knew had to be there even if I'd
never done this before. They weren't my hands, feeling that nub inside and
pushing it.

They were his, the boy next door. They were his tanned hands, his strong
arms, and I saw his blue eyes, shaded by that falling hair.

My eyes popped open just in time to see a thick, ropy stream of cum burst
out of the purple dome of my cock, shooting halfway across the shower
stall. I let out a grunt as my hips jerked, my body tight, and my cock spat
another, smaller burst of cum.  I slumped back against the wall, trying to
catch my breath, letting my knees bend and sliding down to the floor of the
shower. The water rinsed my hair and pelted my body, washing everything
away as I panted beneath the shower spray. I'd never come like that before,
never had my whole body lock up like that. It had felt like all of me was
about to explode out of my dick, and it had happened while I was thinking
about him.

That had to stop.

It was one thing to be curious about guys, especially in a sport. On the
team, there was always an element of that, of checking other guys out,
comparing what they had to what you had. That was natural, and
normal. Practicing together, showering together, nobody thought anything of
taking a glance at the guy next to you, and from what I'd seen, everything
I had compared just fine to everyone else. As long as you weren't staring,
it didn't mean anything. It was ok to feel close to other guys, too, to
feel that friendship and camaraderie. If anyone asked me, or asked Sam, we
would tell you immediately that we loved each other, but it wasn't like
that. I didn't think about holding Sam, or touching him, or having him
touch me. Maybe I had once or twice, when we were younger, but that was
little kid stuff. That was something that all guys went through, more or
less, but then you grew out of it. When you got older, when you got to be
my age, you were supposed to be done with those kinds of thoughts. You were
supposed to be buckling down, thinking about the rest of your life, not
letting your brain and your dick lead you off into stupid daydreams.

Maybe I'd never talked to any of my friends about it, but everybody had
these kinds of thoughts every once in a while, right?

I was completely normal, wasn't I?

I got dressed, throwing on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, and walked
downstairs barefoot to see what my parents had left in the kitchen. They
usually put a note of some kind on the refrigerator door asking me to pick
something up, or to start something for dinner at a certain time, or to do
something around the house. I don't know how important any of these chores
really were, but it gave me a nice feeling of helping my parents out. I
wasn't sure what they did without me around. Did they go out? Did they have
secret lives? Did they stay home and watch television every night? I didn't
want to ask them, since it seemed kind of like a stupid question, but I'd
always looked at them as my mom and dad, and everything about them kind of
related back to me. I couldn't really picture what the house must be like
when I wasn't in it.

The note today asked me to stop by the hardware store to pick up hooks so
that my mother could hang plants on the porch. That was fine with me, since
it meant that they'd also left the Jeep keys for me. I looked at the keys
sitting on the table, and the money under it, and wondered when the last
time they'd bought hooks was. Did they really think it would cost twenty
bucks? Regardless, I scooped up the keys and the money, slipped on a pair
of sandals, and practically skipped down the driveway and into the
Jeep. The Beckers' house was dark, with no sign of the nameless motorcycle
boy, and I resolved to put him out of my mind as I took off for the
hardware store.

Besides, I mused while picking out the hooks, "boy" wasn't really the right
way to think about him, not from what I'd seen. He was at least my age, if
not maybe a year older.  And even if I was wrong about that, "boy" implied
a quality that he didn't have. "Boy" was a word for kids, not for someone
with muscles like that, or with strong legs filling out his jeans that
way. No little boy had a build like that, or that trail of hair leading
down from his belly button and into the top of his pants. I'd only glimpsed
it for a second, but that was definitely something you found on a man. It
wasn't just that, though the way he looked, with his strong jaw and the
barest glistening hint of a tiny bit of razor stubble, something I might
have seen if I'd been closer, on his chin. There was also something about
his eyes, that dark stormy blue that almost looked navy, like a pair of
contacts.  There was something in his eyes that looked anything but
innocent. There was experience there, but something else, as well,
something shadowed.

What the hell was I thinking? I'd looked into, no, at, I'd looked at his
eyes for maybe three seconds when he'd looked at me. That wasn't anywhere
near long enough to think those kinds of things, or really anything besides
that he eyes were blue and that he had two of them. Anything other than
that I couldn't really have seen. I shook my head, running my hand over my
buzzed hair as I realized that I wasn't doing too well at all with my
resolve to stop thinking about the guy on the motorcycle. There was just
something about him that kept turning my mind back to him. Maybe it was
just that he was a mystery when everything else here was the same.

I managed to put him out of my head long enough to pick up a pizza at
lunchtime and swing by the video store. Sam was sitting behind the counter
watching some stupid horror movie when I walked in, the only one
working. It wasn't a chain store, just a small, local place, so they
usually only had one person working at a time.  It was a good job, and Sam
liked it, but sometimes I worried a little about him being the only one
working at night, and then having to walk to the bus stop so that he could
get home. He grinned when I walked in, his bright white smile flashing
across the store.

"Hey!" he said, eyeing the pizza. "Is that for me?"

"Us," I answered, setting the box down on the counter. "Half pepperoni,
half sausage."

"Sweet!" he burst, reaching below the counter for a roll of paper towels.
"What brought this on?"

"I'm not allowed to bring my best friend lunch?" I asked, feigning hurt as
I started gnawing on a slice. "What were you going to eat if I wasn't
here?"

Sam looked away a little guiltily, the way he had as a little kid when we
got caught doing something we weren't supposed to.

"I was going to raid the popcorn machine," he answered finally, giggling,
and I had to laugh, too. "But here you are, my faithful servant, springing
for pizza."

"I'm not your servant," I said, hopping up to sit on the counter, so we
could both watch the movie. If anyone came in I could jump down out of the
way, and if it was Sam's manager, she wouldn't care. "And you can thank mom
and dad for the pizza.  They sent me to the hardware store for hooks, and
left a twenty, so I figured I'd put it to good use."

"No complaints from me," Sam said, shrugging as he started pushing a piece,
folded in half, into his mouth. I giggled again, wondering if he really was
starving or just pretending to be. "I'll be sure to thank your parents next
time I see them."

We didn't talk about anything really important while we watched the movie,
a stupid formulaic entry in a series of them. Sam mentioned that he'd been
watching these in the morning all week, and that in the afternoon he
switched and watched cartoons or something from the classics rack. He
wasn't spending his summer much differently from the way that I was, except
that he was getting paid for it. While we ate he went to the cooler and
grabbed us each a bottle of water, refusing my offer to pay for it, and we
talked about nothing in particular, just hanging out and having a good
time, and then, as expected since this was Sam, the conversation rolled
back around to Jennifer.

"I sent the card," he began, looking a little nervous and anxious, "but do
you think it's enough? Maybe I should send her a present or something."

"Is she allowed to get flowers there?" I asked, trying to help him come up
with something. All I had were vague thoughts. Flowers, candy, one of those
little stuffed teddy bears that girls seemed to find so adorable.

"I guess so," he shrugged. "But, you know, she's at camp. She's in the
middle of the woods. There have to be flowers there anyway."

"Yeah, but not from her boyfriend," I said, almost forgetting to add a
friendly insult.  "Idiot."

"Jealousy is so ugly on you," Sam said, rolling his eyes. He didn't mean it
any more than I did. He looked kind of thoughtful, hitting the rewind
button when the movie ended. "I wonder how much flowers cost?"

"I don't know," I answered honestly. I thought about it for a minute, and
about the other things that I'd been thinking about, not just today, but
for the last couple months and even longer. "You really love her, don't
you?"

"Well, yeah," Sam answered. "I mean, I guess so. It's, well, I know that
I've dated a lot of girls, but yeah. I've never really felt like this
before."

"How does it feel?" I asked, curious. "What does it feel like?"

Sam turned to me and patted me on the shoulder. We'd talked about this
before, about me feeling like a late bloomer and worrying that I wasn't
ever going to find someone. Laying in our rooms at night, staring at the
ceiling, I'd told Sam how I felt like I wasn't ever going to meet the right
person, because I never really felt that spark, and I knew that Sam wanted
me to just as badly as I wanted it for myself. He wanted me to be happy,
and he was always promising me that it would happen someday, and that I
just needed to be patient. Sam assured me that I was a great guy, and a
good catch, and that I had a lot to offer the girl who would finally come
along to see it. Some times he sounded exactly like my mother.

"Nate, don't be like that," he said softly. "It'll happen someday, I
swear."

"I know," I agreed, shrugging. "I just, you know."

"Yeah," he answered, squeezing my shoulder again before he let go and
started cleaning up the pizza box. "I know."

We were quiet as we cleaned up the counter, Sam collecting the trash and me
wiping the top down with a paper towel, but I was still curious, and Sam
hadn't really answered my question. It was nice to have his support, but
really I was trying to understand, and I thought he could help.

"How did you know you loved her?" I asked. It wasn't quite the question I
wanted to ask, but it was close. "When did you realize it?"

"When I couldn't stop thinking about her," Sam answered without hesitating.
"I knew that I liked her. We had a lot of fun together, and we'd made out a
lot, too, but then I realized that wherever I was, whatever I was thinking,
my brain kept coming back to her.  Everything seemed like it related to
her, like I'd see somebody and think that Jen would look good in that
color, or I'd hear a song and want to find her and dance to it. When she
wasn't there, I wanted her to be, and I guess that's how I knew."

We both stared at each other for a second, and then busted up laughing. He
was a little embarrassed, but I could tell that he meant what he'd said
just the same.

"Wow, you're really bright for a runner," I said. "You know lots of big
words and everything."

"Flattery will get you everywhere," he said, grinning. "Want a free
rental?"

"No, but thanks," I answered. I was still curious, though. This helped a
little, but it still wasn't what I was looking for. The question I really
wanted to ask, though, I still couldn't. I couldn't even ask myself
that. "Do you believe in love at first sight? Or that there's, like,
someone for everybody?"

"What the hell kind of books are you reading?" he asked, smiling but
looking kind of pensive. "Is your mom leaving the Harlequin romances out
again?"

"No," I answered, shaking my head. "I'm sorry, it was a stupid question.
Forget it."

"No, wait," Sam said, grabbing my arm as I started to turn away. "I'm
sorry.  I guess, yeah, I believe that there's someone for everybody. Maybe
even more than one person, and you just have to meet them. Love at first
sight? I don't know. Maybe.  It's never happened to me, but people talk
about it, so it must have happened to someone."

"Yeah, I guess," I answered, looking at my watch. "I gotta go swim, and
then get home and start dinner."

I went to the community pool in our neighborhood every afternoon to swim
for a while, to keep my form up and stay with it. On the weekends I drove
out to the community college to use theirs because there were less people
there. I'd worked out an arrangement with their physical education
department that let me get in there on the weekends outside the public swim
hours, so that I could time myself, but during regular afternoons I just
went and did laps, to practice my strokes and stay in shape.

"OK," he said, letting go. "Thanks for lunch."

"No problem," I said, shrugging as I walked toward the door. His voice
stopped me when I was almost back to the car. "Nate, are you ok? I mean,
really, is something wrong?"

"No, no, I'm fine," I answered. I don't know if it sounded very convincing.
"I'm just, you know, thinking about some stuff."

"If you need me, you know where to find me, ok?" he asked, but it didn't
really sound like a question, and his face was hard to read. For a second I
felt a flash of panic, wondering if I'd said something to give myself away,
but then I thought that there wasn't anything to give away. Honestly I
didn't know what to think, and I had no idea how Sam would be able to help
me with it when I couldn't even get my own mind around the idea.

"OK," I said, shrugging. "I'll call you tomorrow, ok? My mom says you
should come over for dinner."

"Tomorrow," Sam agreed, watching me go.

I had thrown my swim bag in the car before I left the house, deciding to
just drive and park rather than walking over like I usually did, so it
wasn't long before I was in the water, streaming through what I often felt
was my natural element. Despite the crowd that was always at the pool,
especially with school out for the summer, they managed to keep a few lanes
at the end cleared just for people doing laps, and I sped through the water
in my little blue suit, avoiding the couple of other people doing laps and
blocking out the sound of kids splashing a playing Marco Polo on the other
side of the pool.  No matter how else I was feeling, the water always
cleared my mind, always let me immerse myself in mental calm the same way
it let me physically escape the world.

While I swam, my breathing even, my legs kicking with metronome precision,
I thought about what Sam had said about love. From what I understood of his
and Jennifer's relationship, it had been gradual. They had been
acquaintances, and then had hung out as friends, and then had started
dating, and only then, after all of that, had Sam decided that he was in
love with her. It was a long process, built on experiences and stories and
all sorts of other things. It wasn't a bolt out of the blue. Like Sam said,
true love must exist for people to be so sure of it and to write so many
stories about it, but neither he nor I knew anyone who had just looked at
someone and wanted to be with them. The things that Sam described, the
wanting to be around them and having everything you saw or heard or ate
reminding you of them and emphasizing that they weren't with you, weren't
the kinds of things you felt for someone that you only saw for a second in
the neighbors' driveway.

I broke rhythm as I realized that I wasn't even trying to deny to myself
that I was thinking about him. I wasn't trying to tell myself that it was
just a passing fascination, or a stupid daydream. I didn't know him, but I
had already accepted on an unconscious level that my dick really liked the
guy next door. It was almost like it happened while I wasn't looking, and
as I climbed out, dried off, and got changed, I had to smile a little at
the absurdity of it. My whole life, or at least ever since I'd started to
be aware of sexual desires, I'd had random thoughts about guys and tried
not to, and now it was like my brain was suddenly telling the rest of me
that it was ok to. Just because you thought about something didn't make it
ok, and just because you had a thought didn't mean you had to act on
it. Just because I was thinking about guys, and just because those thoughts
gave me a hardon, and just because I was thinking about a very specific guy
that I'd only seen for the most fleeting of moments didn't mean that I was
gay, and that was my final thought on the issue.

That idea managed to hold all the way from the pool back to my house, and
then something happened that blew the whole thing apart and forced me to
stop keeping so many illusions between what I wanted and what I told myself
I should want.

The neighborhood was quiet as usual, the sunlight and the whole weight of
the summer draped over everything like a somnolent blanket. The houses on
my street seemed to laze beneath it, the heat just substantial enough to
give everything a little bit of a shimmer, like the scenery wasn't quite
real, but not so humid and oppressive as to make it completely impossible
to do anything. In the house it was cool even with the air conditioning
only set on low, and I relished the feeling of the cool air across my skin
as I peeled out of my warm up suit and then kicked off my speedo, heading
into the shower. I took a brief shower at the pool before I left, but that
was mostly just to rinse off the chlorine. I still wanted to wash, to keep
my skin from drying out, and to give my hair a good shampooing, even if all
I had at the moment was a heedful of bristling stubble growing in. I walked
downstairs with my towel wrapped tightly around my waist so that I could
start boiling water and getting dinner going while I got dressed, and I
glanced out the window as I crossed through the living room.

My vision was obscured a tiny bit by the sheer panels my mother had hanging
behind the curtains, but I could see enough to spot him out in the Beckers'
driveway, almost naked in a pair of low riding cutoff denim shorts, wet and
glistening in the sunshine. I walked closer, feeling my towel start to
bulge in the front as my cock stiffened. I caught the end of the drapery in
my fingers and tugged it aside just an inch, barely a crack, but wide
enough to see him, all of him, with nothing in the way. He had backed the
Beckers' car out of the garage, the older white one that they hardly drove
anymore, and was slowly washing it in the driveway.

My eyes roamed over him like he was a private show, there just for me to
see.

The torso that had been hinted at yesterday, caught in glimpses through
flashes of jacket, was completely exposed now, tanned and glistening with
beads of water from the hose, sweat from the heat, and God knew what
else. He had his back to me when I tugged the drape aside a little, and my
eyes roamed over the rounded, wide shoulders and the prominent but not
overdeveloped lats. His back narrowed down to a V as it met his narrow
waist, and his ass, full and firm looking, was hidden beneath the shorts
which were almost cut high enough to flash a glimpse of his cheeks. They
still let me get a good look at the legs, hidden yesterday but now also
bare, with rounded calves and smooth, strong thighs. Staring at them, the
first thought that came into my mind was that they weren't thighs so much
as they were flanks, something not human but instead part of a beautiful,
graceful animal, flexing and shifting above his bare feet. On the side of
one calf, just above his ankle, I could pick out the dark line of a tattoo,
but I couldn't tell what it was.

I was holding the curtain with one hand and had begun massaging my dick,
rubbing it through the gap in my towel, with the other. As he started to
walk around the car, spraying the front as a mist of water recoiled back
off of the hood and onto his smooth bronze skin, I gave the towel a gently
tug and let it fall away to the floor. My eyes were glued to the crack in
the curtain and the man beyond it, and my hand began to work my cock in
earnest, wrapped around the shaft, stroking firmly. I glanced down for a
second and saw my slit pulse, the faintly purple head of my cock flaring
for a second as a fat clear drop of precum rolled down onto my fingers, and
immediately beads of sweat broke out across my forehead.

As he circled around the front of the car more of his body swung slowly
into view, like a prop slowly moving onto the stage in a play. One arm,
tightly muscled, lightly haired with veins snaking across it, held the hose
out, and I traced the swell of the forearm and the rise of his
biceps. Beneath it, I could see a tuft of darker hair, and I wondered for a
second what touching that would feel like. Would it be soft? Crinkly? How
would it taste? What would it feel like to dip my mouth into there, or run
it down his arm, the way I had done with a girl before? It would feel the
same, I imagined, but also different. Girls were light, delicate little
things, all of their hair carefully removed, and he wouldn't feel like
that. He would feel more substantial, more brawny, more, well, more there,
when you got right down to it.

I was stroking my cock even harder now, going faster, a steadily leaking
stream of clear, slick precum smoothing the passage of my hand. My body
felt tight, focused on the man before me, and I wondered what it would feel
like to have his hand on me, to feel his fingers around my shaft, to be
leaking this pearly sticky discharge onto his fingers, onto his soft, tan
skin. Onto him, or, somehow, maybe into him.

"Oh, fuck," I panted, my eyes drilling a hole through the glass.

I took in the rounded shoulders, the way they sat atop the trim body that
slanted to a V in the front just as it had in the back. His neck was
corded, strong looking, and he had a dark hint of a five o'clock shadow on
the top part of it, curving up over his chin and onto the planes of his
face. His lips were a dark pink line, thin, but not too much, and I
wondered how they felt. Were they soft? Would they give a little when he
kissed someone? The blue eyes were watching the car, which I suppose was
really good. If they'd ticked up at that moment he would have seen me, and
the thin gauzy curtains would do nothing to hide what I was doing. His
hair, that chin length fall of milk chocolatey brown that I'd seen
yesterday, was wet, pushed back from his face, the ends curling a little
and sending drops rolling in little rivulets down his chest.

Oh, God, his chest. My balls drew up as I stared at it, my dick jumping and
pulsing in my hand.

I wanted to put my hands on him. His pecs swept down from his shoulders
like fans, the muscles tight and defined but not bulging or out of
proportion. Everything about him was perfect, but the chest was beyond
that. It curved out at the bottom, jutting out a little above the washboard
ripple of his abs, capped in the center of each pec by a dime sized
brownish nipple, the points of both of them jutting out and hard, water
beading all around them. His pecs shifted and danced as he hosed off the
car, undulating in a slow flex as he moved his arms and jerked the hose
back and forth. Below them, I saw the familiar waves of his abs again, seen
once yesterday in the driveway and then twice in my daydreams this morning,
and below those the wet shorts clung to him, molding to his basket,
bunching up just a little before his legs burst from them.

While I watched, a droplet of water streamed out of his hair, rolling over
his forehead, down the side of his face, and onto his neck. Catching the
sun, sparkling like a tiny star, it ran through the hollow of his throat
and onto his chest, trickling down through the middle to slide over his
abs. The trail of hair below his navel, already wet, darkened
infinitesimally more as the droplet coursed through it, rolling lower,
vanishing into the top of his shorts, sliding inside where everything was
warm and wet and tight and full, full of him, full of his maleness and his
scent and his fat, hard cock.

I fell to my knees in the living room as cum blasted all over my hand. I
shot, and then shot again, sending two thick ropy white streams onto the
carpet, gasping for breath, glad I had a towel right there to swipe them up
with. Struggling to compose myself, hearing the spattering hum of the water
hitting the car through the thin pane of glass, I knew that I had to run
upstairs and get dressed.

I'd had enough.

I needed to get outside and talk to him before he finished washing the car
and was gone.

***

To be continued.