Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 11:39:40 -0700 From: Paul Dyer Subject: THE BALLAD OF AARON AND STEVIE I AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental. If reading or downloading such works is against the law where you live, or if you are not old enough, by law, to read or download this work, please refrain from doing so. I originally posted this story here a few months ago and I wish to thank all the readers who sent me such encouraging emails. But something bothered me about the narrative. I'm all for fantasy, but I have a hard time breaching psychological verisimilitude and a section of the second installment bothered me as just such a literary breach, so, when it is back up here, I will excise that section. I've tweaked a few other things I didn't like, but the meat and huevos of the tale remains undisturbed. I have conceptualized this story well into the future of these characters; now it only remains for me to write it. If you like my story, please check out my author pages at Smashwords and Amazon: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Marchpane http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005O0CXW4 THE BALLAD OF AARON AND STEVIE I [1] Aaron Wolf is all C Major. I overhead someone say that about my brother at a party in Los Angeles, when we were both adults, and I think it was meant as an insult. Race is a funny thing, especially when you start mixing it up. I've passed for White all my life, but I've never quite managed to pass for straight. Aaron and I lived in the same house till I was seven and he was eleven. Then our parents took a plunge off a rickety bridge on the outskirts of Boyville. There was a kind of shantytown there, by the beach, on the edge of the reservation, where they had gambling tables, and nightclubs that allegedly played some of the best Native American Jazz in the country. If you ask me, I won't be able to tell you, even today, what Native American Jazz sounds like, but our parents loved it enough, apparently, to give their lives for it, driving drunk across a condemned bridge over an estuary of the Logan, the chief river in these parts. When I was ten, we discovered I had trouble remembering details about the Civil War because our parents had been driving a Lincoln. Our mom was Mexican with a pronounced Spanish twist, which meant she had blue eyes and sandy-blonde hair. But there was some Aztec stuff in there too. Our dad was half Yupik, one quarter Italian, and one quarter Swedish. You would think that, having sprung from such an ethnic swamp, I'd've had some racial reason to be marginalized, but I had blue eyes, buff-colored hair, and milky-pale skin, so the only reason people had to torment me was my love for men. Aaron, on the other hand, came out with espresso-brown eyes, darkbrown almost-black hair, and olive-rose skin. An ethnobiologist could've pegged us for brothers instantly, but we never managed to run into one at the Boyville Galleria. I adored Aaron unequivocally. He was oxygen and sunlight to me. I felt antsy at the mere thought of being apart from him. From as far back as five years old-though I would not've been able to articulate this then-I imagined there was a metaphysical connexion between us that had a fixed range and that if our disseverance ever exceeded this range, the immaterial nourishment I received from being near Aaron, with him, within sight of him, would cease, and I would sicken and, being left disconnected from him for too long, eventually die. Aaron was a star, and not just in the feverish allegorical universe of my imagination. He'd always done sports and by the time he was eleven he was a little-league wunderkind. He'd been working out from a young age too and he'd always been uncannily strong. Anything that required energy and activity and physical power, Aaron was into. I, on the other hand, had no interests except tinkering with the family piano, and collecting and reading comicbooks. Some of my childhood's most blissful moments had been spent cuddled up with Aaron, my head on his chest, while he read to me from Spider-Man or Thor or Captain America. Aaron didn't seem to mind my slavish devotion to him. In fact, I don't think he saw it as devotion; from the start he took it for what it was: latent eroticism subsumed into the adoration a lackadaisical dolt such as I could reasonably be expected to feel toward a brother such as he. To me, he was every superhero I'd ever read about, and when, on Halloween, as if to amuse me, he usually picked some superhero to be, I was in ecstasy. When we fought, or when he threw me out of his room for being a brat or for bothering him, I felt as if he'd left me wandering through a beautiful but barren snow-smothered landscape with dead trees etched in mesmerizing silver filigree around my horizon, a child alone and bereft of all protection, yet free, in his very destitution, to imagine his rescue in the most enchanting ways. On the few occasions when Aaron actually experienced some contrition about his godlike cruelty to me and came to my room to apologize, I felt as if his unexpected presence had suddenly flashed like an aurora borealis across my mind's niveous landscape, painting a polychrome message of wonder and deliverance across its previously desolate sky. I often felt I hadn't been planned, that all our folks'd wanted was one child. In fact they seemed more and more inclined to let Aaron take care of me while they went off and did their things. Aaron often saw that I brushed my teeth, went to bed on time, or drank my milk. Homework he didn't much care about, so our mom or dad stepped in to make sure that got done. If I was sacred, or had a bad dream, I went to Aaron's room, not to theirs. Sometimes he told me to go away, to stop being a baby, and sometimes he moved over and let me sleep with him. Once or twice, lately, I'd woken up with my head on his chest and his arm around me. And in those moments stories would flash through my mind of his having saved me from some monster and taken me to his bed for safekeeping and cuddlement. Even in the cold brutal world out there, Aaron remained my protector. He had rescued me from bullies in school, in the parkinglot of the public library; and in the alley behind the Matinee Mogul movie theatre, which played black-and-white fantasy and superhero movies and serials from the days before our parents were born. You know sex is the cornerstone of all narrative, of the entire Bible, when the distant point of sexual desire your mind is too underdeveloped to identify and articulate suddenly glows more brightly inside the delicate shell of childish fantasies you've woven around it. And soon the whole series of frantic delusional surrogates burns away and simple glittering-if ultimately ephemeral-eroticism butterflies from the charred cocoon of all your parables and allegories. [2] One day during the Spring of the final year we spent in the same house, Aaron and I were alone at home because our parents had gone over to their favorite Native American Jazz club. We'd eaten dinner and were lounging on the couch reading from the latest X-Men. As usual, I was snuggled up to Aaron, my head on his chest and his arms flung out along the back of the couch, while he read and I turned the pages. Suddenly he asked, "So what do you like about these comicbooks so much." I said, without thinking, "The muscles." "O, yeah?" He was grinning. "Yeah," I said. "What about these guys," he flexed his biceps. Now here was no Arnold, I rush to assure you; here, if you want celebrity muscle as a frame of reference, was something of Hiroyuki Tomita at his competitive prime, perhaps; for what faced me then, in all its glory, was the slightly above-average biceps bulge of an eleven-year-old athlete who pumped a decent amount of iron on a daily basis and swung a baseball bat like no tomorrow. But, in that instant, those modest domes of beautiful well-defined muscle filled up and transformed my entire world. "Go ahead," Aaron said, still smirking at me, "feel em up." "Yeah?" "Yeah." "Yeah?" "Kiss em if you like." I did the less daring thing first. I turned to his left biceps, the one on my side, and kissed the hard faintly-glossy bulge of it through that smooth olive-pink skin of his, which made him darker than I; and, at barely a few degrees away from my Nordic pallor, seemingly from another race. "Sweet," he chuckled. "What about this guy," he gestured with his still flexed right arm. "Come on. You know you can do it, Stevie," laughing his head off, his glossy brown-black hair flopping over his bright espresso-brown eyes. So I was off the couch and scrambling around to the other side of him to kiss his right biceps. And while I did that I got a whiff of his pit through the gaping sleeve of his tee-shirt and I popped wood instantly. It was an amazing tingling feeling that came straight from his armpit to my nose and rushed down my body to burn and tingle in my crotch. If he noticed my tent, he ignored it. He relaxed and then flexed a few more times, working up what he told me was a good pump for his babybro. "Feel it now," he said. His face was contorted a little, and he was panting slightly. I hesitated, terrified of exploiting this enthralling privilege. "He's a big boy and a bad one, Stevie, but he's not gonna crack your fingers. Jeez." At seven, you can't quite reconcile the erectile tingling with the emotional charge of such sacred moments. You're a girl, you're a lezbyun-you even read Stephanie Meyer-everything's disadvantageously knotted into a single kaleidoscopic experience you can't unravel into sober empirical strands, even if, like the real man you hope someday to be, you want to master the curiously masculine art of emotional disentanglement. I felt his biceps, the airy smoothness of the skin so taut and supple over the marble hardness of his bulging young muscle, the mesmerizing purity of it. As my fingers traced its faint but already confident lines, my young mind perceived and struggled to articulate-like that of some ancient savage from our father's side witnessing the northern lights for the first time and wrestling with inexplicable wonders-a phenomenon I would soon learn was called muscle definition. Then he relaxed and we went back to the comic, I now cuddled into his right side, sensitive, as never before, to the leanness and hardness of muscularity I was suddenly feeling everywhere on him with a mixture of cloying adoration and mute sacred terror. Again I rush to assure you this was no Steve Reeves. This was just an eleven-year-old boy who played a lot of sports and worked out a lot and had not an ounce of babyfat left, so that his muscles all showed up nicely, with a respectable ripple of ridges in his flat belly, a finely outlined and chiseled thickness and depth to his chest, and long shapely quads I would later realize were incredibly thick and sculpted for a kid his age, though his calves, at least back then, lagged somewhat. When Aaron tucked me in that night, he crouched near my bed. My erection was a strange device, left there by aliens, which I didn't know how to operate. Nervously I murmured, "You're my superhero, Aaron, more'n any in a comic," grateful for the room's prevailing gloom. "Don't go all damsel on me now, Stevie," he smacked my head, grinning in a way that seemed to suggest the prospect excited rather than repulsed him. That was my first lesson in semantic ambiguity. "You always take care of me," I explained, snuggling into my pillow, feeling maddeningly safe and warm with him there in the house to protect me. His blazing white grin, luminescent in the darkness, shortened to a museful smile, "Yeah?" "Yeah." Then he reached out a hand and stroked my cheek, "I'll always be there for you, Stevie," he said. "I'll always take care of you." Despite my unvocable apprehension that he knew some dark secret I didn't, I was the one who started giggling then. He spread his arms, "Fuckin bein all grown-up and manly here, an you're laughin at me, dickwad?" But he was laughing too, or grinning again. He did seem more grown-up than the rest of his friends and teammates. "Awright," he said, "you have a nightmare tonight, go find someone else's bed to crawl into." He ruffled my hair and stood up, filling my room, the biggest strongest most beautiful superhero ever. He stood there looking down at me. "What if they don't come back tonight, like that one time." He slung his hands on his hips, "You don't need em. You got me." This time I didn't laugh. I nodded. I would never need anyone but Aaron. "Close your eyes." "Leave first." "Close your eyes. "No." "Stevie?" I closed my eyes. "Sleep well, muffin." My eyes snapped open, "Muffin?" "Cause you're soft like a muffin and I'm hard like a man," he flexed again, obviously more enchanted by my new and more upfront adoration of his beautiful well-built eleven-year-old body than he cared to admit. "So I'll be the muffin and you'll be the man?" I hadn't a clue what I'd just said, nor-do I now suspect-did he, except perhaps at some subconscious level. "Sounds about right to me. Sweet dreams, muffin," then he turned and strode out of the room, leaving the door slightly cracked behind him. I fervently hoped I'd wake screaming, in flight from unspeakable horrors that would conveniently deposit me in his bed. But that particular night passed uneventfully. [3] I wanted to feel and kiss his muscles again. Everyday. Everywhere. Now, when his unclad arm brushed against me in passing, I popped wood. The sweaty whiff of his body after a workout or game plunged me into delirious longing. Little League Baseball was almost on us. I knew noone would-could-hit it out of the park like Aaron. My blood shimmered at the prospective vision of him on the green, geared up, swinging his bat with all the power of those precious muscles, which I-and only I in the whole world-was privileged to feel up or kiss. One day he left the bathroom door open while he stood above the toilet, shirtless, in his jeans, barefoot, taking a torrential piss. I imagined the yellowing water boiling in the clean white ceramic bowl with the amazing force of it. Why that should've got me going I couldn't say. I was incapable of tracing the voltage between the conventional stance, action, and sound of that commonplace bodily function and the onset of a strange longing in me. But I wasn't sure what I was longing for. Did I want him to flex so I could kiss his muscles while he pissed? The notion amplified the charge and suddenly something was happening in my stiff little pee-pee, and in the zone around it, I'd never experienced before with such calamitous intensity. A few days later, hanging with Aaron and his buddies in the younger-kids corner of Rosecranz common, reading my comicbook and content merely to be near Aaron, where I could see him, warm in the knowledge that I was where he could keep protective watch over me, my ears suddenly bristled, tweaking my attention away from Norrin Radd. A conversation had sprung up concerning the arcane rudiments of a boy's most sacred possessions. "Yeah, but Zane Ellis has the biggest dick in Fifth and Sixth." "No way," someone else said, "Aaron has." "My dad has a huge dick. It's at least eight inches. I saw him jerking it once." "Yeah, but he's a dad. It gets bigger when you grow up." "Only eight?" "How big's yours, Terry. Big as a sparrow's turd?" "And yours's," Terry snarled, "yours's," he turned away, changing course, addressing the group instead. "Robins's as big as a booger." This elicited greater mirth all around than you can possibly imagine. Aaron glanced at me, but merely sat there, smiling; again as if he was a little older than they, amused at their various encomia, pleased with their psalms, but existing at a few inevitable removes from complete immersion in this juvenilia. And because I had to be exactly like Aaron, I was learning to exist at that same sapient distance from silliness. Aaron was growing me up. Aaron was a sportsman, not a buffoon. Aaron was a hero, not a clown. Aaron was all C Major. I played the scale up and down the piano, thinking of him pissing or playing baseball or curling weights in the garage, and I was hard with the knowledge and aromatic proximity of him, fantasies upon fantasies woven about my glorious big brother. "Hey, Aaron," Terry bellowed, "you wanna do a pissing contest Saturday?" "Sure," Aaron said. "If any of you could even compete with me." "But you can't bring Stevie," Terry said. "This is a grown-up event." "You wanna come to a pissing contest, Stevie," Aaron called out to me. "Dude," Terry protested, "it's not for kids." Aaron was up in Terry's face, "You do not tell my brother where he can and cannot go, man." The poor little sleeves of his skintight black Metallica tee-shirt suddenly seemed less capable than they'd been all day of containing the sleek bulging of his bies and tries as he unconsciously arranged his package with one hand and slammed an indexfinger toward Terry's face with the other. Of course, Terry had a fifteen-year-old brother who was on the football team at Boyville High, who could probably take Aaron as easily as Aaron can taken Terry, Robin, Mike, Ethan, Dwayne, or all of them together, but that was inconceivable to me, and to the other kids Aaron's age who worshipped him. "Kay," Terry stepped back. "Jeez. Stevie can come too. What's your problem, man. Not like he's your fuckin girlfriend." "What'd you say, man," Aaron almost on top of him then. "What the fuck'd you say, asshole." They went at it then, and I was crying, with adoration and terror, because they were fighting over me-because of me-not simply because Aaron was saving me from bullies but because he was saving my honor. And his own. His tee-shirt rode up his body, revealing the taut molten ripple of his abs, which were far more vivid in action than they were at rest; the strangely thick-they never seemed so at rest-whirlpools and wedges of muscle writhing under his immaculate dusky-pink skin all up and down his beautifully vee-shaped back. Terry was no match for Aaron, who soon had him pinned. Something about the way Aaron straddled Terry, took total command of his body, Aaron's wild mane of glossy near-black hair flopping everywhere above Terry's babypink face, exhilarated me and drove me mad with obscure jealousy. "Apologize to him," Aaron pointed behind himself at me, holding Terry pinned with one arm. "Okay," Terry yelled. "I'm sorry, Stevie." "Invite him to the pissing contest," Aaron commanded him. "Stevie," Terry gasped, "will you please join us at the pissing contest on Saturday." "Tell him you want him there to see his big brother piss harder hotter further than anyone else." "We don't know," Terry launched a feeble protest, believing these claims were yet to be substantiated- "Tell him, dickwad," Aaron jerked his forearm against Terry's heaving chest. "Stevie, please come and see your big brother piss," but Terry'd forgotten the list of qualities Aaron was going to demonstrate his excellence in over everyone else who showed up to that dubious backyard tournament, which Terry's big brother Rusty'd taken the credit for inventing, about four or five years ago, and in which he and some of his buds still engaged, though they tanked up with beer, more often than not, rather than with water or pop. "-see your big brother piss harder hotter further than anyone," Terry, his memory painfully refreshed, was winding up the last of his verbal debts to Aaron for daring to try and exclude me. Then Aaron got off him, though he stood over him for a few seconds, hands on his hips, as if to remind Terry who was king of the yard. For a moment I thought he was going to whip out his huge pee-pee and urinate all over Terry, and my heart swelled with jealousy and resentment. He was my brother, so why would any other kid be honored with his piss. But my emotional outrage proved to be unfounded. Aaron put his sweaty arm around me as he walked me home and my body seemed to hover above the sidewalk in the delicious vapor of his boymusk. "Can you really piss harder hotter further than any of em," I asked him, because I'd had the qualities memorized instantly. "Course, buddy," he said. "Wanna help me practice." But there was suddenly something in my throat that kept me from speaking. That night, when he tucked me in, he said, "You're a wonder, Stevie." "Yeah?" "Yeah. You're a wonder." It took me years to realize there was wordplay in there, and that he'd derived it from our parents extensive CD collection, which probably explained their staying out late so often at that club down at the edge of the reservation, jamming till the break-up down. He sat on the edge of the bed-I wanting to touch and kiss his muscles and help him practice pissing harder hotter further than anyone, without any clear sense of how I was to accomplish this, especially with regard to the second characteristic in that peroration, which echoed and reechoed through my head all through the following day, keeping me from concentrating on anything else, as if the mere fact of my having a big brother such as he was enough- He sat on the edge of the bed, I was saying, leaned his elbows on his spreadwide knees and regarded me once more with that same keen gaze in his almost-black eyes that told me he knew something I didn't-not just baseball or repping or pissing outrageously well-but something deeper than that, from a realm of experience that remained unfathomable to me-and he said, "One day I'm going to be a lumberjack. I'm gonna have my own rig-" "What's a rig, Aaron." "Don't interrupt, Stevie. It's rude." "Sorry, Aaron." "Sokay, buddy. And I'm gonna take that logging road between Boyville and the border and all the way into Canada until I get to see the northern lights. I'll be a nightrider, Stevie, blasting Metallica or Iron Maiden or Deep Purple." "Will you come back before morning, Aaron." "I'll always be back, buddy, to make sure you're okay. You don't ever forget that." "I won't," I assured him, holding his hand timidly, wanting so much more. "Promise." "Promise, Aaron." "You're a wonder, Stevie." "You keep saying." "And so you are. Swhy I'll always be back before morning to fix you your cereal an o-jay." "Who'll take care of me at night." "Noone'll mess with you, buddy, cause you'll be the sidekick of Lumberjack-Man. Or maybe," a sultry smile lit up his face, "Lumberjackoff-Man," laughing his head off inscrutably, so he had to clear his forehead of a wealth of glossy black sheaves of hair that flopped all over his face, flashing brown gleams in the gloom. "Why you laughin, Aaron." "Never mind," he smacked my ass, quite casually. I liked it in a way that wasn't casual, I soon decided, as that intractable thing called an erection put in a hasty but discreet appearance inside my p-jays. His extemporized superhero name had, of course, by then lost all verbal grace or literary facility, and I was getting tired, as if his future, like everything else about him, was so beautiful and comforting it combined with the general legacy of a grueling day to be more soporific than the most soothing fairytale. And then he did something he'd never done before. My eyes were closed and I was imagining him sitting in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler, running his timber across the border, funneling thousands of dollars back this way-though why Canada needed to import wood remained obscure-and he leaned over and kissed me softly on the side of my head, above my ear, "Goodnight, Stevie." "Goodnight, Aaron," I said, imagining him huge and invincible in his truck, though he wasn't yet even five feet tall. [4] The journey to the pissing contest was a short but tempestuous one. Two nights before the GUS-which is to say, the Great Urination Standoff-I was awaked at about midnight by yelling in the livingroom. Our parents were never abusive-how could they've been considered abusive, since any parents who left me in the care of a brother like Aaron were obviously shortlisted for some national parenthood award-but they were blithely neglectful, so Aaron was the one doing the yelling while the parentals remained, as always, softspoken gentle and placatory. "You can't do this," he bellowed at them. "Son," my dad's voice was like that of some great shaman priest expounding mysteries urban folks couldn't grasp, though I wasn't sure the Yupik had shamans, "it'll be better for all of us." "It won't be better for me and, for that reason, it sure won't be better for him." When you come in midway-more with adults than with kids-you sometimes have to wait for pronouns to disclose their contents. Adults seem to love pronouns, whereas kids're far more name-oriented, as if it takes them awhile to become disenchanted enough with their own personhood to relinquish a name to the dubious grammatical glories of he or she. "Nothing will ever change the fact that we're your mom and dad," our mom said. "Except that mom and dad themselves, seems like," Aaron said. Then our parents saw me at the bottom of the stairs. Aaron, following the sharp jerk of their attention towards me, spun around. He was shirtless and sweaty, as if they'd yanked him out of bed. Despite our dad's being there, and so much taller than Aaron, with even our mom outpitching Aaron by about five inches, my big brother filled up the room with his beautiful body and gently glowing olive skin and the delicate aroma of his sweat. His arm was around me as he turned silently to face them, "Don't worry, buddy," he said, "everything's going to be okay." "Yes," our mom chimed in, "everything'll be just fine. Aaron, take Stevie up to bed and make sure he falls asleep." "Come on buddy," he turned me around, his hand trailing casually over my ass." "Why were you yelling." "Nothing, Stevie. Don't pry." Somewhere across the banister, my dad was saying, "I think I need a drink," and my mom was agreeing with him and offering to fix them Martinis. My woodpecker barrage of questions naturally overtook all Aaron's powers of ligneous mendacity and when we got to my room, partly to deflect my inquisition and partly because he was Aaron and only he knew what really calmed me down, he asked if I would like him to hold me while I fell asleep. "Sure, Aaron, I'd love that more'n anything." He'd barely gotten into position when I curled up into his strong arms, with my head for the first time against his naked chest, my cheek soft against the slim hardness of his muscle. And it was muscle-make no mistake-obvious muscle, with all its fine chiseling. The back of his thumb lightly stroked my cheek, "You can kiss my pex," he whispered. "What's pex," I said. "These guys," he said, flexing them, so I felt a surge of amazing power against my face, as his chest muscles swelled into low rigid domes, awaited my kiss, then subsided into their thin hard outlines. I felt at peace, safe, all the good things, my little pee-pee hard and tingling in my jammies, for him, only for him. [5] It was the night before the pissing contest, but Aaron hadn't mentioned the event, or resumed the subject of my helping him practice. The almost uncomfortable acceleration of my heartrate, accompanied by a strange laryngeal blockage, everytime the thought of these urinary Olympics crossed my mind-in a soaring arc of gold-prevented my bringing the matter up myself. Our parents were out again, it being a Friday night, and we had the place to ourselves. Still wanting to soothe away the recalcitrant fears he supposed-and rightly in many ways-had taken root in me the previous night when his yelling at our folks had woken me-Aaron asked if I would like him to flex for me so I could feel up his muscles again. Apart from the previous night's casual somnolescent chest-worship, we hadn't revisited this ritual since that accidental moment on the couch, about two weeks ago. Aching all the while to make it the focus of every morning noon and night of our lives, like the prayers of fanatics, I didn't know how to broach the issue. He left me in the livingroom and raced upstairs. Within moments, he was back, wearing only the briefs of his Aquaman underoos, bringing with him an illustrated book of exercises by some famous bodybuilder. To my mind not even Alan Ritchson-to whom Aaron had introduced me a few months earlier-had anything on Aaron in the muscle department. That's one of the benefits of childhood; which is probably why the Bible recommends the same kind of infantine subservience to improvable ideas if one wants to enter the kingdom of heaven. With Aaron in the room, wearing only his underwear, I was already there, so scripture abruptly became irrelevant. Aaron opened his workout book to the last chapter where the bodybuilder was showing people how to pose. He told me to sit on the couch and watch as he struck pose after pose. My pee-pee was plastered to my belly, hard as a stone. As he posed and flexed, he came closer and closer to me until he was standing over me. He'd worked up quite a sweat and his smell was everywhere. His skin gleamed just a little more strongly, the matte lacquer of his sweat enhancing its natural olive-pink glow, which it somehow retained even in the siccative depths of Winter. "Touch my quads," he said, flexing them in my face, which is the only reason I knew what quads were, aside from gathering places in schools. My hands reached out as if he were offering me the keys to the world's largest candy warehouse. "Yeah," he breathed, as my hands touched his quads, small against unbelievably thick well-defined muscle, at least when he was flexing, which he was doing just then. There were many separate muscles in his thighs, which he instructed me to feel-and to kiss, if I wanted to. Holding my hand, he used my fingers to trace the clean if shallow grooves of silky separation that emerged when he flexed. To my mind-one, at seven, more esurient than prurient-his muscle definition was every bit as spectacular and dynamic as that of the model in his book. "Kiss it more," he instructed me, though it came out like a command. My mouth moved up the lean bridges of muscle projecting between his groins and his knees. To me the bodybuilder in that book, lying instructionally open on the coffeetable, was merely inhuman; my big brother, flexing and sweating, was muscle-poetry. I was rubbing my cheek against his quads now, feeling the exhilarating hardness of his muscle, so large and powerful against my little hands. "Lick it," he said, as his crotch-musk enveloped me. The sanctity his package derived from its generic forbiddenness escaped me; because his whole body was similarly sacred and I had no doubt that, when he chose, his big pee-pee would be as accessible to me as every other part of him. "Your tongue and lips feel amazing," he groaned. He pressed his hand against his musky mound. I wondered if there was the same magic chain of connexions-(starting from my lips and tongue, moving through his muscle and his straining package-I could see his cock bucking in there now-and erupting into his mind's urge to press down on his mound)-as there'd been, the other evening, starting from his armpit scent, moving through my nose, and erupting in the quick stiffening of my own pee-pee. He collapsed on the couch near me after his exertions and just slumped there, panting, a few tempting rills of sweat running down his silky sinewy torso. They looked so good, trickling over and pooling in the fine shallow trenches under his chest and in the slats of his shallow abs, I didn't wait for his lead. I leaned down and started licking his sweat, the boyish tang of it so steamy and delicious I felt I would never again seek nourishment from water juice or pop, only from the fluids of my brother's amazing body. My mouth saturated with the warmth and flavor of his sweat, I was shuddering then, pitched forward against him and shaking with indescribable pleasure, the skin of my painfully-rigid pee-pee tingling as if with electric charges. I was terrified. I clung to him, my head on his warm humid pex, which were still heaving, still a little pumped. His right arm went around me, his left hand stroked my moist heated face, "Sokay, baby," he whispered, kissing my head, "sokay. I just made you have an orgasm from touching me." He'd never called me baby before, the way older boys did on TV, though there the endearment usually served to underscore some subterfuge a boy was contemplating or had already committed against his girl, such as I knew Aaron would never commit or even contemplate against me. But in the sudden surge of semantics, while the endearment may've warmed me up and down my spine and through my rehardening pee-pee in mysterious ways, another term claimed my attention. "What's orgasm," I asked Aaron, feeling how big and powerful, slick and hot, he was in my small arms. His voice was soft and soothing, "It's when you have pleasure in your cock and balls," he murmured. "What's a cock, Aaron." "I'll show you in a minute. And when you're older, this amazing white stuff comes out that's called cum. Rusty's girlfriend says Don't cum in me, Rusty. I told you, don't ever cum in me. That's bad news." "Why's that bad news, Aaron." "Cause a guy's cum makes babies, Stevie." "O," I said, riven with sudden awe, because there was still the suspicion that I hadn't been planned. That was my first lesson in orgasm, in its words and sensations, and abstract chemical reactions, without the evidence of extrusible matter; all of which precipitated the distinct but inexplicable notion that some forms of materiality were less desirable than fantasies. "Can you cum, Aaron," I asked, believing instantly that Rusty'd have nothing on the projectile hardness heat and range of my Aaron's whitestuff. "You wanna feel my bies again?" "I wanna feel you everywhere, Aaron. All your muscles." "Yeah?" "Yeah." "You're a wonder, Stevie." "You're a bigger wonder, Aaron." "You're the biggest wonder, Stevie. You know what happened last night, baby," he stroked my shoulder. "I like when you call me that." "You're not just my babybro," he whispered, kissing my head, "you're my baby, too, Stevie." I thought of the fight last night; of his rushing to protect me, as if from something our parents were contemplating. "Whyzat, Aaron." "Cause I'm the man and you're the muffin." "What happened last night, Aaron," I snuggled deeper into him, molding my light envelope of persistent babyfat to his lean alabaster hardness, my pale skin making the beautiful pink-olive complexion of his seem darker and more exciting. "Come round this side," he patted the couch on his left. The way he sprawled there-nearly naked, in our livingroom, the briefs of his underoos bulging up between his strong farflung quads-was so thrilling, so manly, my awe of him ceased to be a separable sensation and became, like the sweaty effluvium of his body, the air that I breathed. When I was on the other side of him, little knowing why this was necessary, "Close your eyes," he said, "and open your mouth." I felt his muscles flex and bulge, faintly, here and there, as he moved me into position. I felt his skin hot and moist against my open lips, slightly rough. "Close," he whispered. I closed my mouth-surprisingly-on his nipple. It was hard and slick between my lips, such a lovely contrast to the slightly coarser skin in that neat chocolate-brown disc around it. The discs around my nipples were ridiculously pale and smooth in comparison. I didn't have to be told what to do next. It came to me as naturally as it comes to baby animals, or the instinct to hunt comes to adolescent ones. I began to suck. "Yeah," he groaned loudly. Now this seemed to me the most exciting thing we'd done. He was flexing his muscles again, but almost as if he couldn't help it, or they were flexing on their own. His pex mounded up the way they did, into low finely-muscled domes, harder than any wall rock or floor, warm and silky. "Feel my muscles, baby," he gasped wildly, "feel em," lifting my hand and running it over his flexing torso, the tightening abs rippling like molten iron just under his silky skin. I'd watched Dwayne feel Aaron's muscles once-only his bies-but I was sure noone else at school had sucked Aaron's nipples. He was rubbing his bulge furiously, as I sucked on his nipple, his right hand all the way inside his briefs. It was difficult to keep sucking while sneaking downward glances, so I gave up trying to watch him work his pee-pee, and just kept sucking, graduating from that ridiculous plane of human experience where vacuous notions of some future joy are enough to one on which I was experiencing pleasure directly. As directly as any human ever does. Pleasure always involves some kind of detour through the Other, of course, but the idea that Nietzsche's entire corpus could've sprung from-and certainly dignified-such passions as those steadily evolving between me and Aaron on that couch only occurred to me fourteen years later. When Aaron finally slumped back on the couch, gasping, he lifted his hand to still or divert the motions of my head and mouth. I let his nipple slip from my lips and lay there against him, quietly enthralled, smelling him. He explained that the previous night, in my sleep, I'd begun sucking on his nipple and he'd started jacking off. "What's jacking off." "I'll show you." That made for at least three promises awaiting fulfillment. "Promise?" "Promise. Stay here." "Where you going." "To get water." I lay there, smelling his sweat off the couch, in the air. He came back with a full pitcher and two glasses. He poured and we drank a glass each, then settled back, my body molded to his, his arms around me, his cheek against my head. "Who's my baby, Stevie." "I am, Aaron." "Who's my baby forever, Stevie." "I'm your baby forever, Aaron." He tilted my face upwards and we looked deep into each other's eyes. Then he bent his head and softly kissed my mouth. [6] Whether it was because of the sexual agitation and intemperate bodyheat combined with the sudden infusion of cold water, or because of fate, I couldn't say-I was something of atheist, even at seven-but I had a fever the next day. When a kid's body isn't upto snuff, he has no power of dissemblance; he just lies there in his feverish lethargy, caring about little else. So I missed the pissing contest-and, what was more, didn't mind missing it. My mom didn't have to work at the furniture store on Saturdays, so she sat with me and read to me, took my temperature and fed me hot soup, and I wallowed, missing Aaron, wanting to be with him, see him win, but strangely content to lie there awaiting his victorious return from the battlefield. When he did return, in the late afternoon, our mom said, "Now don't get too close to Stevie, Aaron. Can't be taking care of two sick kids," and then she went back to one of her college books. She was always reading college books, in philosophy mainly, because she'd gotten pregnant too soon and had missed not getting her degree or going as far as she wanted to. Hers was the classic case-I would learn, or realize, when I grew older-of the intellectual who couldn't keep her hands off the blue-collar stud and had sacrificed her life to indomitable forces of nature, which, no matter how smart we become, will always have us in their power: thankfully, for those of us who learn how to negotiate with them, in those areas, outside great natural disasters, in which they tolerate or even invite negotiation; regrettably, for those of us who collapse under their remorseless ravening passage across the earth and through the querulous corridors of the human mind. The very idea that our mom could've aborted Aaron made me shudder several times, even in later life, but even that was not enough to convince me, as a voting adult, that a woman has no rights over her own womb. Aaron had to be born, of course. Aaron personified another force of nature, which, willy-nilly, would've manifested in human form, would've been born, was destined to be my brother-and the most amazing lover and man I've ever known-no matter what anyone did. Aaron disobeyed her, while she stayed lost in her book, popping her head out of the text's perilous and enchanting foliage, a short while later, only to issue one fortunate command, or suggestion. Kneeling by my bed, "Feelin better, Stevie," he laid a hand on my forehead, then slid it down to let it rest against one side of my face. "Always feel better when you're here, Aaron." "Yeah?" "Yeah." Within minutes he had his shirt off and I had my mouth on one of his nipples. "Suck it, baby," he groaned, "suck it. Yeah. Just like that," and before I knew what was happening, he'd slid his hand into my briefs and was gripping my cock. Within seconds it was raging in his hand and he had what he wanted, I guess, my mouth's increasing ferocity against his nipple. This was another chain of reactions, not accidental, but manipulated; though I couldn't articulate the process, the fact that we, as humans, were capable of such complex responses was apocalyptic to a seven-year-old. His other hand was soon inside his jeans, moving furiously enough to outdo the tempo of the hand holding my cock. The fact that he was so wonderfully in command-not only of my body, as an aspect of the natural world, but of my psychological responses, as an aspect of civilization-launched me into a stratospheric realm where language became immaterial. The door was cracked, but the boards creaked, so we would know if our mom was imminent. Shortly before her imperious but gentle voice intruded, Aaron suddenly pulled back, "Stop." I made my chagrin known. "I don't want to cum too soon," he said. His smooth muscular body was radiant with sweat and I was in ecstasy touching and licking it. This he allowed, even required, to cool him off while keeping his arousal from slackening too far off the level to which we'd together elevated it. "Will your muscles be like that man's in the book," I ventured, touching them, feeling up his delts and biceps, while he knelt there by my bed, panting, allowing me unrestrained access to his amazing body; his lovely well-defined chest flexing under the urgent bellows of his ribcage. "Bigger and bigger, Stevie," he gasped. "Will there be those ropes on your biceps like the bodybuilder has in your book." "And damn near everywhere I can grow em. My cock's already popped a couple," he added, with obvious pride, from which I concluded noone else in sixth-grade was thusly endowed. And there was that magic word again, cock, whose explanation couldn't be verbalized, only illustrated. "Wanna see?" I nodded as eagerly as my general weakness and diminishing fever allowed, though as to how much heat I owed to the latter and how much to the ardor of our clumsy rhapsodies I couldn't've said. He stood up and unzipped his jeans. Still languishing in that stratospheric zone where language had thinned out to a series of simple carnal signifiers, I divined that a cock was a pee-pee. He was just about to pull his out when our mother's voice bellowed from the bottom of the staircase, paralyzing all pleasure, calling out for him. "Yeah, mom?" "Aaron," her voice was clear-she had a powerful voice, would make a great professor, our dad always said-"honey, could you give Stevie a hot bath. And if he still has no appetite, see he gets something warm to drink. There's some tortilla soup in the fridge you can heat up." "Sure, mom," Aaron bellowed back, his powerful lungs broadcasting from under those powerful pex. "Thanks, hon. I'm going to the library. I'll be back in an hour or so." She was never back in an hour when she went to the library. Why someone who had floor-to-ceiling books in three rooms in her own house still needed to go to a library neither Aaron nor I could've told you. It had been years since I'd been completely naked with Aaron, and after all the stuff we'd begun doing lately, the prospect held such weight that my puerile mind, unable to savor its various components, wallowed instead in a strangely comfortable if unwieldy fusion of foreboding and jubilation. "Okay," he said-I loved when he took command like that-"I'll run the bath and then I'll come get you." He stripped off his jeans. His strong shapely quads emerging from the ragged denim refueled my trucker fantasy. My pee-pee-cock-jerked a few times in my tented jamjams before coming to a throbbing salute. [7] Seven minutes later, Aaron called me into the bathroom. Steam hung everywhere, clouding the mirrors. He was still in his underwear, his thick cock outlined in humid navyblue cotton. He pulled me into his arms. He was the Empire State Building and I was a tepee. He bent to kiss me on the mouth. His kiss was as strong as his arms around me. He pulled back and ran the tip of his tongue around my lips. "You like that, baby," he said, his hand sliding down between us to feel my rigid little bud. "Yeah, you do. Me kissing your soft little baby mouth. Mmmm." His lips were on mine again, his tongue slipping past my happily defenseless lips. His tongue slid maddeningly against mine, sloshed and stroked against mine for a few pulse-pounding moments. Then he pulled back, letting a thread of spit fall between us, smiling gently, his shaggy brownblack hair clotted into glossy sheaves over his forehead and hanging over his gleaming espresso-brown eyes. Then he sat down on the closed toilet and pulled me close, "Going to unwrap my little angel," he said, kissing my lips again, quick and soft this time, unbuttoning my pajama top. "If you start feeling bad again-" "No," I protested, overthrowing his caveat before he could speak it. "I want to be naked with you, Aaron," this apparently being the extent of my expression of a longing for union with him so unfamiliar there were no words in my young vocabulary that could adequately express its febrile intensity. Children, I realize, as I recount those distant events, aren't born with a yearning for religion the way they're born with a yearning for communion with a lover. At whatever age they awaken to it, sexual curiosity always comes naturally to them, whereas they have to be corrupted into dogma. Saints are simply more adept than the rest of us at disguising the intricacies of that corruption. His mouth traveled freely between my nipples, which were much less dramatic in their stenciling than his cleanly drawn milkchocolate-brown haloes and bullets, so that every time he sucked he drew the whole delicate pink composite of areolas and nipples into his warm mouth, doubling my pleasure, doubling his fun. The pleasure-not just of the action but of his performing it on my body-was so inflammatory I thought I was going to lose my mind, but, trusting him as completely as I did, I knew he would never hurt me or allow anything bad ever to happen to me, much less be the conduit or source of the damage. "I'm going to make you cum again, baby," he lifted his head to murmur, his gaze intense and a little drowsy in the steam that drifted or lay everywhere, scented with jasmine and his studly boysweat. I bobbed my head excitedly. Caressing my naked back with his strong hands, tracing my spine, kneading the slight pudge lingering around my waist, he kissed me again, softly, massaging my tongue with his own, though my tongue had no notion of its ability to wrestle with another's for profounder pleasures. My passivity, my pale body's taking soulful shape in his strong dusky-rose hands, was as much a thrill to me as it was to him, in a way such a pitch of surrender to a lover would never again be for me as I grew older. As he continued kissing me, he pushed my pajama pants down and lifted me out of them and kicked them expertly aside with his naked foot. He kissed my chin, my throat, and licked his way down my torso, my two-inch erection straining upward between us. "I want you to cum in my mouth," he whispered, his strong hands kneading the soft plump little globes of my pliant asscheeks. "I want to cum in your mouth," I groaned. Then he had my hard little love-lozenge in his mouth, sucking and slurping it around his tongue. He stopped to look up at me and say, "Your pee-pee tastes so good, Stevie." Then he kissed the head of my cock, to bring this glancing verbal interlude to an end, before his mouth engulfed my little cock again. I wondered if he'd tasted anyone else's and instantly hated these putative rivals for their having beaten me to this level of intimacy with my big brother Aaron. Soon the piquant fantasies of his being with others, his establishing a less gentle command over them-the way the wheels of his huge silver truck would someday establish their fierce authority over the highways and forests-their having seen his piss-stream arc harder hotter and further than any other boy's, dissolved into the hardly new but by no means quotidian tension and shuddering of my whole body. Of course, there was no whitestuff-how could there be when Aaron, the ultimate stud, wasn't yet capable of any himself-but the sensations were there, magical as ever; conjured now by this incredible intimacy between brothers that defied all orthodoxy or calculation. I couldn't stand. His arms received me into his lap and he held me there, kissing me wherever his lips landed, his hands stroking my naked body, "Yeah, my little baby. You make me so happy." The fragrant previously scalding water in the bathtub had by now subsided to a safe temperature. Aaron carried me-and for those few seconds, I was in the arms of the strongest superhero, adrift on aromatic clouds, in flight above a burning landscape to his distant sanctuary-and deposited me in the jasmine-scented foam. "You ready to see your first cock," he grinned down at me. I nodded deliriously. "Cause until you've got veins on it, Stevie, all you've got's a pee-pee." More nodding, enhanced delirium, neither of us sure whether the veining up of a pee-pee and its graduation thereby to cockhood was a remarkable achievement at eleven or not. When he popped his wood out of his clinging undies and tossed them aside, my heart jolted into overdrive and I felt dizzy. "Five-and-a-half solid inches, baby," he swaggered it above my rapturous face. "Touch it. Kiss it. Come closer and say hello to those veins." His cock was darker than the rest of his body, not as dark as his milk chocolate nipples, but a kind of rosy coppertone, and this dramatic clash of skintones only made it seem huger. At least an inch-and-a-half thick, it sported a trinity of thickish veins, originating from a more or less common point at the root of his cock, one going down the top of the dramatically upward-curving shaft and one flowing down each of its sides. "Now that's what you call a cock," he said, as I took it, trembling, in my reverently frenzied hands. His balls hung lower than mine, too, much lower, each one large and shrinkwrapped in slick silky envelopes of copper skin. "Go on, baby," he said, "sniff that bud at the tip." His foreskin not only encased the entire head of his cock but projected beyond it in a kind of warm rubbery spout. I closed my eyes in ecstasy and nosed his foreskin, inhaling its piss-ripe scent. He had, after all, like a sweaty gladiator fresh from combat, come to my bed straight from the pissing contest, not ready to wash the grime of battle from his triumphant body and genitals. "Taste that skin, Stevie. Go to town with it." The taste of his cock was mindblowing. Its dormant varnish of dried piss and sweat, not only in the pouting part of his foreskin but over the whole head's bulging helmet and down the shaft, reviving sharply in my mouth, turned my spine to rubber. My big brother's Aaron's erect funky cock was the hugest warmest and most savory popsicle I'd ever laid against my tongue. "Saved all those flavors just for you," he groaned, somewhere above my passionately sucking and slobbering head, "cause I know how much my little baby loves his bigbro's flavors. Yeah, baby. Suck that big veiny cock. Warm, did she say. Yeah. To drink, did she say. Hope you're real thirsty, Stevie." A trickle of hot sharp piss spurted into my mouth. It startled me and I pulled back. But all I had to do was look up the slender muscular length of that body looming over me, dusky-pink and dark-haired, sheathed in steam, and at the gentle reassuring smile dawning above that beautifully-sculpted totem of vivid boyish sinews, and I knew I was in his hands and this was just another aspect, another flavor, of our shared ecstasy. He stroked my hair, fondled my ear, "Tanked up just for you, baby. Cause you had to miss the contest. Brought you back a whole bladder of prize-winning piss. You're gonna love it." His cock had declined a little from its peak. "Skin the head back, baby." I was confused. He lifted a hand and yanked at his turgid shaft from its base. His thick foreskin snapped back off the head, which shot into sight, gleaming hard, a warm lavender color, offsetting the coppery-rose of his foreskin and shaft; his piss-slit deliciously gaping. "Thirsty, Stevie?" "Yes, Aaron." "What's my piss like, Stevie." "Harder hotter further." "What's it taste like." "Better'n pop." "Better'n o-jay?" "Better'n any drink in the world, Aaron." Assured not only of the fraternal fitness of this but also of the immense pleasure it gave us both, I opened my mouth wide, while he maneuvered the head of his heavily-flopping cock against my lower teeth "Never have to go thirsty with me around, baby. You can have your favorite drink all the time. There you go. Yeah," he groaned with the release of it. His piss flowed more easily now, down into my throat, hot and tangy, starting almost hesitantly but rapidly evolving into a shameless torrent. "Don't worry if you can't swallow it all, Stevie," he said, caressing my hair and face with both hands, while some of his piss, more than I cared to admit, ran off on either side of my mouth and was wasted. "I'll teach you to drink it all, baby. Slowly. Gonna be my number one pissboy, aren't you, Stevie. Yeah. Slowly, baby," his voluminous piss-stream flowed undiminished, while I lost more and more of it, thirsty for every drop and mourning the tragic inexperience that had precipitated, along the way, this unforgivable waste of his sacred fluid. When I started coughing, from the tartness of it, the struggle to swallow more than I could, he pulled me up slowly and began kissing me, while continuing to piss into my bathwater. His tongue slurped his piss from my mouth. "No wonder you couldn't get enough," he said, still pissing into the tub. "That's gotta be the most delicious fuckin piss ever. Now you'll smell of my piss, too, Stevie," he looked down and flicked off the last few drops into the bath. I was down there in a flash, sucking on the head of his cock, taking the last of it, while he chuckled indulgently overhead. "Feeling better?" I nodded, as he lifted me up again and held me. "Better'n tortilla soup, right?" "Loads." "Fever gone?" I nodded again, hugging him, my head against his chest, his arms circling me protectively. He let me go long enough to climb into the tub with me. Then I crouched again and sucked him to hasty hardness again, relishing the tangy ripeness of his piss and genital musk, the manly veins of his cock pulsing against my tongue. He finally let go with the orgasm he'd been holding and allowing to build for almost half an hour, his muscles like projecting cables of iron in his thighs, straining into magnificent clarity everywhere else. Then he sort of collapsed into the foam and pulled me into his arms again. I sat half submerged in the sudsy water, in the circle of his arms and legs, absurdly content. When we'd both recovered from our exertions, he began soaping me, kissing my neck softly here and there, flicking his tongue into the delicate super-sensitive hollows under my ears. One soapy hand caressed the mound of my tight little balls. His hand ventured deeper and deeper until three fingers were massaging my sphincter. "You like that, baby?" His voice reverberated against my ear and cheek. "Soon you're going to be ready for me to fuck your little virgin ass." As he said that, he slipped one finger into my pucker. I tensed and jerked against him, unable to compute the extent of this intimacy, this vertiginous openness to his delicately invasive virility. His left arm was tight and reassuring around me as he finger-fucked me with the soapy water, nibbling on my neck. "Can you come for me again, baby." Arching back against his strong comforting body, I groaned and vowed I would, as often as he wanted me to. Half an hour later-because, as Aaron informed me, humans can't live on orgasms and fresh air-we did resort to the infamous tortilla soup. Our dad, who was foreman at the sawmill, came home and found us at supper, Aaron reading to me from the new Spider-Man. "You're a good boy, Aaron," he said, ruffling his hair, "the way you look after your baby brother." "Yeah," Aaron growled back. "And I don't resent having to do it either." Resent was too big a word for me, but there was an ominous light in Aaron's eyes which exploded or at least seriously fractured the bubble of luminous self-sufficiency in which our hours of sexplay and comicbook reading transpired, and I found myself longing to retreat into that world again, that dubious stratosphere, where noone and nothing mattered but Aaron and I and the mindblowing happiness each of us gave the other with his body.