The following contains descriptions of graphic sexual acts between consenting teenage boys. It is a work of pure fiction and has no basis in the real world. Any similarities between people and places is just simple and plain coincidence. Do not read this story if you are under 18 or the legal age in your area; or, if it is just down right illegal to read this material where you live. And, don't go any further if you don't want to read about gay/bisexuals falling in love and having sex.

The author of this story retains copyright to this story and its characters. Reproducing this story for distribution without the author's explicit permission is a violation of that copyright.

My deepest apologies to all who have been reading this series for the long delay in continuing the strange adventures of these characters.  A lot has been going on outside the story in the real world and it has taken me a while to refocus ideas and actually be able to sit down and get back to writing.  Hope you enjoy this chapter and those still to come.  The next three are definitely the darkest of the entire series.  They are all apart of the flashback the central character, Taylor, is having.  Thank you for reading.

Please, feel free to email me with your comments, questions, or just general thoughts for this story at mavjk99@yahoo.com.

Strangers on a Train

by. J. A. Adkins

Part 16-Meeting Max Aralia

So how does a nine year old get over a day like that one?  Not very easily or successfully?  How did I do it?  I don't think I ever really did.  Denial became a significant factor.  And then, eventually, another event would come to play that would supercede this one by leaps and bounds.  No matter what, those two boys took advantage of me.  They used me and abused me.  They hurt me, badly for a time.  The excuses I gave my parents and their friends, the stories I created of alternate events for the goings-on that fateful day I convinced them of so much that I began to try and convince myself that the reality was only a dream.

A fantasy, perhaps, which is what is scariest of all.  No matter how much they hurt me, in a strange way they also freed me.  But I wouldn't know this until the hormones were activated.  And it would be a few years into that stage of life when I would finally act on my new-found sexual freedom.

His name would be Max Aralia.

I had first seen Max late in the summer before my first year of high school.  He was a tanned, well toned boy with short, bleached hair hinting brown at the roots.  He was sixteen that day I saw him walk past me near the football field and well on his way to becoming a god.  I felt a stirring in my pants like never before.  I was glad to have left the hub of activity at the front of the school.  It was freshmen orientation.  I was to shake hands with teachers and peers.  Instead, I found myself staring at pure lust unabashed.  I was looking towards my fate.

A week would go by.  Then another and then even a few more.  School had started by this point.  The fall semester opened on the warmest day in the state's history.  The first several days in each of my six classes was a continuation of orientation.  There were seating charts to be adjusted, schedules to be amended.  Each period a new chapter in the school's neon-yellow Code of Conduct booklet had to be covered.  Then there were the expectations of each teacher.  There were class rules and grading systems.  Textbooks that weighed more than bricks and made cinder blocks seem less a challenge were handed out.

In gym, our uniforms arrived near the end of the second week.  It wasn't until that point that we actually began to use the locker rooms.  I had been anxious the first several days, wondering how I was going to control myself.  I worried that the young boys I had grown up around, that had seen me staring at their naked flesh with undeveloped desire would suddenly remember my gazes.  When a week and then two had gone by without the threshold beyond the double metal doors being darkened by our shadows or trampled by our name-brand footsteps I was able to breathe a little easier.

Then, it was Monday of week three.  I felt the world suddenly shift.  I awoke that morning knowing that something was going to be different.  I had no idea how accurate my feeling was.  Running late, I moved through my morning routine in a dizzy haze of motion.  Dialogue with my parents was short and forever obscured by the environment beyond the house that morning.  Bands of sharply contrasting reds and oranges sinuously wrapped along the edges of clouds hovering over the horizon gave a beautiful hint to the slowly rising sun that was already peaking above the brownstone walls and rust-colored gutters of the hexagonal theater building at the edge of campus by the time I approached.

Blasts of ear-popping music screamed through open windows on passing cars and from the student parking lot.  Rock crashed against rap as I approached the crowding rows of gravel covered spaces.  Country music twanged softly from inside the sedan of a cheerleader and a violin chord somehow reached my attention from a pick-up truck two spaces away from the curb.

As I walked closer toward the first grassy patches of campus bordering the student parking lot and surrounding the cement pathways leading into the queer architecture of the school's five buildings, the first wafts of cigarette smoke tickled my nostrils.  Juniors and seniors mingled within the silver haze of smoke, giving the rear of the theater building the feeling of a dragon's cave.  I had half-smiled to myself more than once in those three weeks, imagining the hord of overbearing, overconfident upperclassmen surrounding me on all sides as greasy, scale-skinned dragons.

But my smile didn't survive long.  My gaze traveled along its usual course, passing quickly over the cement loading dock shrouded in the shadow of the wide, heavy awning above it.  Normally my eyes would have looked over the collection of faces obscured behind the thicker cloud of tobacco smog and glinting, soda cans without stopping before moving over the bricks of the building, the grass, the sidewalk, and then more students.  This time, they met the puddle of silhouetted faces illuminated by the crimson glow of cigarette butts and stopped-locked into place on a single face.  My pace slowed and suddenly halted.  It wasn't just because fro the first time in three weeks I had caught a glimpse of the boy near the stadium.  It was because he was now staring right back at me.

The mangled mix of music; the smoke and voices, the pollution of the early day suddenly came together and fell away at once.  Time froze, leaving two buddies alone in the universe.  A single heartbeat took a thousand seconds.  I looked at him and he looked right back.  We fought a war with no winners in our mutual gaze.  It seemed so intent, so heavy, so beautifully powerful that it went beyond my understanding.  It seemed all too brief.

The morning mix that made up the universe exploded back into real-time under the lead of an angry car horn blaring into my ears.  I had jumped at the new sound, nearly tripping over myself as I turned in a startled panic to see a stubble-faced senior anxious to get his BMW into his parking space.  With my face burning red with embarrassment, I finished stepping onto the sidewalk.  The audible giggles from the conglomeration of upperclassmen sent me retreating further onto campus; but not before I had taken one last look toward the dock.  He was gone.  The space on the rusty railing where he had been sitting was empty.  The thick, metal door leading inside the theater clicked closed, hiding the sound of my sigh.

My first class was lost to me.  The image of the boy on the dock permeated through the endless lecture of colonial America.  My match class hadn't gone any better.  I stood with my back to my giggling classmates as our teacher worked me step by step through the problem he had written on the board and of course had called on me to solve.  And don't even get me started on English.

Thank God for lunch time.  Well, at least that was what I had thought when the bell finally rang.  I walked out of class lost in thought and the hungry crowd of handfuls of each grade.  Cell phone ring-tones tickled the air only slightly above the monotonous din of endless conversation that floated all the way to the already crowded cafeteria.  I worked my way through the twisting, mile-long line to grab only half a tray of the barely-edible food.  I sat in my usual spot at a table in the center of wide, rectangular room.  Beside me on each side and across the sea of greasy, tasteless pizza and lumpy, lukewarm mashed-potatoes were a group of students I could have loosely called friends.  I barely remember any of their names.  They were just faces and voices.  They were pointless conversations that helped pass the time.  Mostly.

That is, except for Jessie.  Jessica Heenan was a girl I should have fallen in love with; if I could fall in love with members of the female persuasion.  She had soft, dove-white skin that tanned subtly in the summer.  Her cheeks were rose colored.  She had perfect white teeth-or would once the braces came off in a few months from that day.  Her eyes were a strange, enticing shade of blue that sometimes looked almost purple.  Her hair was a very light brown, bordering on dirty blonde and hung down past her shoulders in the back.  Her breasts were firm and round, hugging the underside of any shirt she wore.  Many a-guy were caught by both she and I with their gazes locked awkwardly below her neck.  She had no trouble being beautiful.  It came naturally to her and only enhanced the ease and grace she displayed in life...and would reflect in death.

Normally she and I chit-chatted our way through the lunch period.  But with my thoughts distracted by the sighting of the boy this morning, Jessie had given up on trying to hold a conversation with me.  I was staring absently around the cafeteria, glancing slowly, randomly around the room and leaning back in my chair when it happened again.  Time slowed down to a crawl before stopping completely.  The conversations became muted.  The air froze but couldn't muffle my heavy heartbeats that seemed hours apart despite my racing adrenaline, testosterone, and endorphins.  He was leaning on the window at the far end of cafeteria.  His entourage surrounded him on both sides.  Faces were turned toward and away from him.  Attention was being given to him but he was looking only at me.

I couldn't read the expression on his face.  I didn't have time.  The universe doesn't like to be kept waiting for very long and came rushing back with reality just as hastily as it had a few hours before.  And it brought a friend: gravity.  I had passed the point-of-no-return.  I had leaned backwards too far.  The chair's back legs slipped forward, sending me sailing backwards.  I hit the dirty, linoleum floor with a painful crash that silenced the cafeteria in ever-expanding waves only a second or two before the entire room erupted with laughter.

At the same time that I had disappeared from her peripheral vision, Jessie shot to her feet-along with a few other members of our table.  "Taylor!" I had heard her yell upon impact.  "Pick him up," she said to somebody beside me.

A pair of hands helped me off the floor.  I didn't bother looking at who had helped me.  I absently said, "Thanks," returning my gaze with desperate haste toward the passing train of students blocking my view of the boy.  When they had finally moved away, the spot near the window was empty.  Above me, the handful of speakers mounted in the ceiling throughout the room sounded the teeth-bending bell.  As our table collected its things and the other students shuffled away, Jessie lagged behind with another freshman-Sam, I think was his name-to walk with me.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Fine," I replied quickly.  "Just...distracted."  I tried not to smile.  Jessie saw right through it.

"Uh-huh."

"I just...thought I saw somebody."

"Who?  Jessica Rabbit?"

I smiled at Jessie, shaking my head as we walked past the double doors leading out onto the senior courtyard.  "No, dear.  You are Jessica Rabbit."

Jessie laughed, punching me hard on the shoulder.  Our trio broke apart with Jessie and Sam walking to their own classes and me heading to mine.  The rest of the day passed slowly.  My thoughts constantly wandered back to the boy from the cafeteria.  Who was he?  Why, after three weeks, was I suddenly seeing him everywhere?

Again and again I asked myself these questions, completely missing things around me like the date for a chapter test or the day for yearbook pictures; or even Sam staring hungrily at me from two seats back and one row over in my last two classes before gym.  I can't help but wonder, now, how different things would be had I just turned around.  If I had met Sam's desperate gaze and returned it with a smile.  He was cute, with a nice fourteen year old body that would develop into something worth dreaming about.  And, he had a heart of gold.

But I never paid attention to Sam.  I wanted something else far too greatly.  I had officially become obsessed.

Finally, after what had started to feel like the longest day in my with but one exception, my last class of the day arrived.  In the damp, sweat and moldy smelling locker room I dressed into my gym shorts and shirt in a quiet daze.  The other boys in my class laughed and talked loudly around me in a white and blue cloud.  These were our school colors: white, blue, and green.  The only green on our uniforms was the small, raised image of our school mascot on the right leg of our shorts.

A few minutes later I was sitting in my assigned place on the dusty, dull wax-coated floor of the gymnasium, still lost in my own thoughts.  My classmates whispered and chatted quietly around me.  Our coach walked slowly up and down the out-of-bounds line, taking roll.  I don't remember how long after he walked past me that I heard one of the doors leading out of the gym snap and squeak open.  I just remember looking up at the sound of it slamming into place behind who had entered.  I remember my heart skipping a beat and my private parts feeling as heavy as anchors.

The coach turned to face the boy who had entered, stopping his pacing.  He narrowed his eyes at the young man approaching him but whose own eyes were passing over the assorted cluster of naked arms and legs barely hidden by loose white shirts and short blue shorts.  "Well, Mr. Aralia," the coach called out, barely catching the boy's attention.  "What can I help you with?"

The boy stopped barely half a foot in front of the coach.  Both were nearly right in front of me.  I wanted our coach to take a few steps to my right, his gravity thus pulling the boy to stand directly in front of me.  It didn't happen.  The boy handed our coach a slip of paper.  I could make out the faded image of the school seal on it as the light passed through the thin sheet.

The coach read over it quickly then returned the slip back to him.  "Well, Max...I thought you said you'd never darken those doors again."

"Something like that," the boy I now knew as Max said.  His voice had an edge to it.  I liked it.  The hardened mass pushing against my briefs and the soft, nylon of my shorts liked it as well.  "But it turns out I need the credits after all.  So don't think it's because I missed you or anything."

The coach crossed his arms.  "Alright, Aralia.  Take a seat and see me after class about a new uniform."

Max didn't say anything in return.  No, "Yes sir" or "No sir".  No witty remark or humorous jab at the coach's expense.  Instead, he simply turned away from the older, heavier man with scratchy, red stubble on his face and walked toward the half-court line where a few empty spaces remained in the lines.  My skin came alive with goose bumps and my spine tingled electrically with the wildest chills as he did this.  I swear I had seen his eyes first pass and then hang on me for a moment before he turned all the way around.

I didn't really get to see him for the rest of class but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being closely, even keenly watched.  Thirty-eight minutes later, our coach sent us off to the locker rooms.  I rushed down the steps into the tepid, gray room and to my locker, anxious to see Max one last time before starting for him.  I was about to skip showering when coach marched through the damp air and decreed it was mandatory for us to rinse off since the plumbing had finally been fixed.

I silently cursed him and my luck.

Almost fifteen minutes later, I was hurrying back up to the surface of the world.  But Max was no where to be seen.  I looked for him on the concrete loading dock behind the theater building.  But was absent of any life.  I sighed, feeling defeated, before hesitantly wading through the dragons migrating to their cars.  The next day, after a night of white-wetness, I saw him again.  He was sitting on the hand-railing lining one side of the concrete dock.  Although his face was partly obscured by the sunlit curls of silver smoke stretching into the cool morning air, I knew one thing was certain.  The boy I now knew as Max Aralia was staring right at me.

It would not be the last time that day.

After my second period class, I stopped off at my locker-a daily ritual.  The narrow, metal cabinet was one of about two hundred in the basement of the Science building.  It was always muggy and always crowded.  The air reeked of teenagers and was polluted with their noise: dull, pointless conversations with too much drama and too little reality or truth.  I busied myself with collecting the books, notebooks, and other random things I would need for my next few classes.  So it wasn't until I closed the thin metal door that I got the feeling I was being watched.  I turned my head at the same time I was trying to push the lock into place.  I felt my heart skip and my penis flash-harden once again.

Ten feet away, amongst an eclectic crowd of students moving swiftly passed, Max Aralia was leaning against the doorframe of a classroom staring right at me.  His face was alien to me.  I had no idea how to read it.  I suddenly couldn't figure out or decide how to interpret his stares.  So, I panicked.  I doubled-back and hurried against the flowing current of students out of the building and to my next class.

He was in the cafeteria at lunch, standing in the same spot and looking in the same direction at the same thing: me.  Then, in gym class, I almost fell down dead from shock.  I already knew he would be in our class from now on.  I had spent the entire night trying to figure out how I would hide the almost guaranteed erection I would get from seeing him in any state of undress.  So that is why I thought my heart wasn't going to restart when I reached the locker room before class to find Max Aralia standing in only his underwear one locker over from mine.

And it wasn't until I heard my mother's voice somewhere beyond my line of sight, talking with another woman-the school nurse-that I realized I had passed out in the locker room.

The next day played out in almost the exact same way.  Only this time I was able to keep from loosing consciousness at the sight of Max Aralia in his underwear.  I had to fight hard though because at the end of class, I saw him naked and only one shower head away from me.  I tried to not look at him.  I tried to keep my dick from stretching to full mass.  But even when I wasn't looking at him, I felt him staring at me; his eyes traveling up and down my exposed flesh.

Each day the rest of that week was an almost exact repeat of the one before it.  I kept seeing Max around school in more and more places, watching me, getting closer to me.  I kept seeing Max naked in the locker room, his motions getting a little slower as if he were biding for time.  And each day, when I would come out of the locker room, I would see him hesitating near the curb; talking absently with someone or just looking at nothing in particular.  Then, he would start walking away, heading in the opposite direction I take to get home.

Finally, on Friday of that week, I decided to do something brave.  I wasn't given much alternative.  I knew what I wanted-at least I was pretty sure about what I wanted-and by the end of the school day I was fairly confident Max knew what he wanted.  In the showers after gym class, Max finished washing up his slender, tight five foot-nine inch body and had started to walk past me.  Another boy was making his way down the line to an empty shower head.  As the two passed each other, Max moved over, subtracting the open space between he and I.  I felt his fingers lightly and quickly glide across my naked ass.  I jumped and watched his muscular buns and thighs as he walked through the locker room to his locker.

A few minutes later, on the surface of the world, I saw Max once again at the curb.  When he saw me emerge from the gloom of the sub-level locker room, he finished his conversation before turning towards his path for home.  I stood where he had been standing.  The air around me still faintly held the scent of his cologne.  I watched him walking slowly, evenly away.  He wasn't looking back to see if I would follow him.  It felt like I was standing there forever.  When I finally did take a step, my back was facing home and my eyes were locked on Max.