Date: Mon, 22 May 2017 14:42:31 -0400
From: Orson Cadell <orson.cadell@gmail.com>
Subject: Lake Desolation 11

Please see original story (www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/rural/lake-desolation/)
for warnings and copyright. Highlights: All fiction. All rights
reserved. Includes sex between adult men. Go away if any of that is against
your local rules. Practice safer sex than my characters. Write if you like,
but flamers end up in the nasty bits of future stories. Donate to Nifty
**TODAY** at donate.nifty.org/donate.html to keep the cum coming.

*****

He cocks his head to the side and looks at me, then shakes his head in
denial. "No, Mr Stettler McKay. It's not that you started loving me. If it
was that, your love for Maria would have done this. It's more. It's not me
loving you, Jake, but you letting yourself love someone else," his voice is
a prayer, quiet, fervent, needful, "letting yourself... love... me?"

*****

Lake Desolation 11: Ravaged Versus Raped

By Bear Pup

*****

I stare, blankly, completely at a loss. I never let people love me? I never
really let myself 'love' others to the point that it was a mutual thing?
Maria's words from the morning hit me like a truck. Logan sees it too. Both
of them.

Logan's voice is now worried and clearly upset. "I'm sorry, Jake. I, I
shouldn't have said that. Please don't--" I silence him with a finger to
those beautiful lips and stare deep into his chocolate-pool eyes.

"Don't be sorry. I..." How do I say this? He'll think I'm insane, won't he?
"I, I spoke to Maria last night. Well, actually, Maria still never really
lets me get a word in edgewise; she spoke and I listened. She told me, told
me... She said that I... don't let anyone love me and she'd waited forty
years for me to see it." The last words come as a rush. I look back and
forth between his eyes, waiting for the disbelief. It never comes. "That
doesn't, uh, surprise you?''

"No. You've told me that Maria was the other half of you. Why shouldn't she
keep trying to help you?"

I hug him to me and kiss his hair over and over. "She also, she made me,
made me promise that I would let you love me." I was crying now.

"Did you?" I nod, miserably. "She shouldn't have done that." His voice is
low and serious. I look at him, obviously bemused. "No one should make you
promise to do something that you might not be able to do. It's cruel."

I sob out, "She said I had to TRY!" and the tears flow for a minute. Logan
doesn't move. For the first time ever, it is Logan with my chin in his
hand, forcing me to look at him.

"Then I'm glad, Jake. She and I just want to same thing. For you to be
happy, for you to be loved, for you to be... complete." It is his turn to
pull me to his own, broad chest and let me sob for a minute.

"Uh, Jake? You're getting the pages wet."

I laugh, roughly, and wipe my eyes and nose on my sleeve (something Maria
spent over 40 years trying and failing to prevent me from doing). He's
right. The way I'd ended up, some of my tears were soaking into his
markups.

I pull back and start to read his edits. For a young druggie, it's pretty
good. I read further and find myself having mental debates over why my
original wording was better and... losing every argument. I look up about
halfway through. Logan's sitting, fidgeting like he's in the principal's
office.

"This is, uh--"

"I know, I'm sorry. I thought I'd try at least. Maybe I can, you know, help
in some other way?" He's blushing and embarrassed to have even tried.

"You done?" He nodded. "Good. Cuz you're wrong. This is easily as good as
the hacks at the [___] House. No, that's not fair. This is nearly as good
as the woman I worked with for decades. There are technical things, like
schools of thought on punctuation (I use Cambridge, you are closer to
Oxford or Harvard), and there are stylistic things that I actually like to
use even though they're flat-out wrong. But, Logan, this
is... uncanny. Let's see how this goes for a while, okay?"

Logan is beaming like I just told him he'd won the lottery. He hugs me
wildly and swings himself down to print what I'd written in the
meantime. His fingers flow over the keyboard, doing in seconds what it took
me minutes to perform in printing the earlier pages. He's out of the seat
before I even have time to protest. I'm a bit shocked to find that I'd kept
that pace; another 40 double-spaced pages started to whir.

One thing that Maria had forced me to do long ago was set a timer when I
wrote. At night, I could write as long as I wanted. But during the day, I
had to break every three hours (the limit of the spring-wound timers extant
at the time). With the laptop, that changed. If Word is open, a little
dohickie in the background dings and interrupts the screen at noon, six and
ten. The noon bell rings and my screen briefly goes black. I've trained
myself (more or less) not to curse when that happens.

I pull away and Logan stands, pushing me back into the chair. "You keep
writing, Jake. I'll wake you when the lunch is ready." I smile. Maria
always called getting me out of a writing trance as 'waking me up'. I'm
back into the travails of poor, benighted Ginny in moments. Some part of me
hears banging and then smells searing meat, both not really ignored, but
subsumed into the story in a strange and magical way. Suddenly, there is a
wide, thin-fingered hand between me and the monitor and I scowl up at the
interloper. Logan is there smiling.

I reach for the plate he holds and he waggles a scolding finer at me,
forcing me to switch seats. Smart, cuz I'd be writing again in seconds. He
takes the seat I'd held and starts to read. The plate holds a sandwich, a
thin piece of pounded pork seared to a wondrous crisp and about as thick as
five ham slices.  Lettuce, tomato, pickles and... I have to smile, mustard
adorn it. Beside it is a quick salad with feta and olives, about as close
to Greek as you can get with the ingredients that I kept on hand. Tasty,
too.

"So what are you thinking of calling it, Jake?"

He's absorbed in his reading. I think for a minute. I often start with a
title and write from there, but usually start thinking about a name a few
chapters in as the characters begin to resolve.

Viscount Westgarth really only had one strong option after a life of
piracy, to be granted land in the New World from which he could harass the
French. Ginny gets there in time to charm and win over the great chief
Tejonihokarawa (who, at the end of the book, will end up meeting Queen Anne
as one of the Four Mohawk Chiefs). The French villain Loup Noir (the Black
Wolf), bastard son of Marquis de Vaudreuil, the Governor-General of New
France, has already killed the now-useless Viscount in a duel and has his
dark and lustful eyes on his victim's wife, our heroine, for eventual
next-to-last-chapter ravishment. Instead, she's set her cap on the hunky
but oblivious Richard Farrier, the rough and tumble fur trader.

"I haven't decided. Something about the Wolf, I suppose."

"Hunt of the Black Wolf', you think? I assume that Richard will eventually
hunt his rival down? That way the title is about both Loup Noir hunting
Ginny and also Richard hunting him?"

I think for a minute and smile. I love ambiguous meanings and wordplay in
my titles. "Logan, you have just named a novel." He smiles broadly and
blushes again. Fuck the novel. I pull him from the chair and kiss him
deeply.  We stand like that for a minute, me bending forward to capture his
mouth. Just as suddenly, Logan is kissing me, pulling me into him. It's a
subtle thing, this reversal, but powerful.

I feel him growl into my mouth as he pushes me backwards. I feel the edge
of the bed behind my knees just as he tumbles me, squawking, back into
it. "It's my turn, Jake. Lay back and enjoy." I squawk again as Logan
literally crawls into my shirt and begins to lick and tease my chest. My
hands are all over him and I hear him chuckle, "No, no, no!" He peels both
long-sleeved tee and sweatshirt up, forcing my arm above me but stops
before taking them all the way off. I feel his hands moving and look
up. He's twisting the bulk of the shirts in a way that basically cuffs me
gently. Can I get loose? Sure. But do I want to?

That question is answered quickly as he returns to the kiss and begins to
stroke my sides and belly with those long, thin fingers, playing my nerves
like a slide guitar. He works his face sideways and refuses to let me
recapture his lips. I gasp when he begins to lick my neck and below my ear,
and I whine piteously and grip the headboard to avoid bringing my hands
down to his head as he probes and teases my earlobe.

He kisses me again on his way to the other side, then leaves me whimpering
when he moves lower. He licks in a slow spiral around my hairy pec,
creeping near and nearer to my areole. My nipples are already distended in
anticipation. Logan sharpens his tongue to a single, hard point as he gets
to swirling across and around the goosebumps at the edges. I start to moan,
but when he dives in full-mouth and begins to suckle, I let out a loud,
gut-deep groan of pleasure... And that is just the one nipple.

He repeats the performance on the right side, twirling in slowly and
deliciously, but he leaves a hand to strokes and pinch and tease the
left. I am biting my lip hard as I feel my balls churning and dick leaking
pre-cum in a steady trickle. My breathing is coming in short, hard gasps as
I try to wrap myself around the sensations. Now both hands are at my
nipples and Logan begins to lick downward along my wiry treasure trail. I
literally hold my breath when he gets to the waistband of my sweatpants and
let out and involuntary cry when, instead of going further, licks his way
up to my lips and draws me into another powerful kiss.

I am panting, desperate with need when he pulls back and looks deep in my
eyes. "Don't you have something to write, Mr Stettler McKay?" I am in
flat-out shock as he rolls my shirts back down over me, taking great care
to brush, nudge, caress and pinch my nipples in the process, teasing me to
distraction then rubbing cloth above them vigorously once they're covered.

"Y-Y-Y-You! You... you..."

"Yes, me. I don't have anything to proofread if you don't write, now do I?"
I lunge for the evil little brat but he scurries away laughing. "Let's say
this. You write really, really well and I'll make your evening very
special."

WRITE? Like THIS? Is he *insane*? I am in the reddish-black area between
rage, lust and sulk as I sit in myself front of the fucking laptop and
started to peck at the fucking keyboard and find out what the fucking
fuckers in my fucking story do next. Logan's teasing was more than simply
effective, it was maddening! A wicked smile spreads across my face. Perhaps
Richard is not as oblivious as he seems.

My fingers fly. I rarely look at the screen since, even after all these
decades, I don't actually touch-type. I hunt and peck very, very
quickly. About once a page, I look up and give the text a perfunctory "red
squiggle" review to see if Word has seriously objected to any of my typos,
then it's heads-down again for another few minutes. Logan is constantly
there, bringing me juice or kissing my ear or running a fingertip across a
nipple. I find he does it whenever I slow down, which makes me really,
really mad so I type even faster.

It turns out that Richard is a complete fucking tease and Ginny can't see
it. She is frantically trying to get the hunky, rough man to notice her,
completely oblivious to the fact that *he's* taking every opportunity to
make sure *she* 'accidentally' sees him sans shirt, or working strenuously,
or laughing heartily or otherwise being the perfect stud of a man,
constantly raising her frustration level to a fever pitch. Even though she
doesn't see what's happening, Loup Noir does, sending him into a jealous
rage.  He prepares to DING!

"Wuh?"

"I think your computer just told you it's time for dinner. I kept it simple
since I'm not sure what you like." He slides a plate into place *just* out
of reach. The aroma slaps me hard. When I'm writing, little outside of that
(except those fucking kisses and nipple rubs) penetrate my cocoon. What I
smell is simply amazing. It's a grinder roll filled with meat, veggies and
cheese, but like nothing I've seen. "Think of it as a South of the Border
Philly."

I take a bite and moan. It's deeply-fajita-seasoned strips of steak with
onions and peppers in a crisp-crust roll, dripping with melted jack cheese
and stacked with lettuce, sour cream and pico de gallo. It lacks spice
because I don't keep jalapenos and cilantro on hand, but he's made do with
parsley, turning it into a sort of chimichurri-pico. It's amazing.

I hear the printer whir and see Logan has started printing out my pages,
and I hear him whisper, "Holy crap," just as I finish the monster
sandwich. I move over to see what he's talking about. I look down and
scowl. 2 500 words for a whole afternoon's work. Pitiful. Then I gasp. I
missed a slim digit: 21 500 words. Over a quarter of a novel in a night and
a day? Holy crap is right. I shake my head to clear it. I pull the first
set of edits from this morning and start at the top of the manuscript,
correcting and adding flourishes and touches to support later events.

I find that Logan's edits are as thorough as any a proofer would do for
me. There are a few places where Logan has circled a word or phrase and
simply put (?), and I find it takes me some time to figure out what I'd
meant there as well. Often, it's one of my signature typos that drops a
bomb in the meaning. Putting 'not' for 'now' in the sentence, "I am now/not
going to kiss you!" is a rather stark difference, especially for a ro--
historical novel. As I get further into the text, there are side-notes I
hadn't seen, and small scratches or hashes in one margin or the other.

"Logan, what are these?" He leans over.

"Oh. Sorry. Ignore those. They're marker-dots."

"Uh, care to elaborate?"

"I learned it from Mom. It's for consistency, so I can go back quickly and
find out whether someone's hair suddenly changed colour or such. Really,
It's just habit. It doesn't mean anything."

I think for a long time and start to flip through, finding identical marks
on various pages, tracking a character through the story. Why have I never
heard of this before? More to the point, why has he? "Logan, what did your
mom do for a living?"

"She did methodology audits for human drug trials. Making sure they didn't
cheat and drop problem patients just so they could avoid side-effect
statements. Stuff like that. She used marks like those to track backwards,
saying that switching patients out was a way they could hide what they were
doing. Why are you looking at me like that?"

I am staring, slack jawed, and suddenly blush furiously. I mumble and try
to go back to the pages by Logan snatches them away. "Why, Jake?"

I am kicking myself so hard I'm gonna leave psychic bruises, "I don't want
to say because I, because I'm an idiot and you'll be offended, and with
good reasons. Can we leave it there? Please?"

"No." That's not a, 'No, I don't think so'. It's a, 'Fuck no and don't even
think of asking again'.

I'm in the purple range of blushing now but I know I have to tell him the
truth. "That's just, um, well, n-n-not what I thought you'd say?"

"And what did you think I'd say?"

I bury my face in my hands so I don't have to look at him. "The day I cut
your hair? Before Pigtails came? You were helping me clean?" Where the fuck
are the question marks coming from? I would NEVER let one of my characters
get away with that! "You did such a good job? I, well, I thought, you know,
maybe, uh? Maybe you helped your mom do maid work." I mumble to the end and
wait for the explosion. I get it, but not as expected.

Logan explodes in gales of laughter, clutching his stomach and whooping,
tears streaming. I watch aghast. "You are SO fucking white!" Every couple
of words is interrupted by either a giggle or a laugh, "Since I'm Latino,
my mom is a MAID?!?" I am now blushing in as much fury as
embarrassment. "Ohmagod, ohmagod, ohmagod. That is HYSTERICAL!" He finally
winds down.

"Well, Logan, I, uh, I'm sorry. That was stupid."

"No, Jake, it was just so perfectly white."

"Part of it, Logan, part of it -- and I know this makes it worse not better
-- was the drugs."

He sobers instantly, staring at me. I know I've completely blown it. "The
drugs were ME. Not my mother." He glares at my abashed and horrified face
then relents, "But I can see where that jumped from. Maybe a different kind
of profiling, not just racists, but just as wrong. It's okay Jake. It
really is. The drugs... the drugs were a big deal for my mom. She g-g-got
me treatment. It didn't work. Almost cost her the job. I was too... weak."
His voice trails to nothing and I am there instantly, hugging him, or
trying.

"Jake, stop. Just stop." He lets me pull him over to couch at least and I
sit beside him. "I have to face what I did. Mom knew. She always
knew. I... I..." He's crying now and finally lets me hold him. "There was a
kid in the neighbourhood. Miller. " He gives me a moderate-to-sever glare,
"A *white* kid. He was a bully and dealer. I was small and he knew my mom
made good money. He. He." Logan swallows convulsively, over and over. "He
had two of his goons hold me down and he shot me up with m-morphine."

I gasp in horror. Who could do something like that? What kind of monsters
have crept into our world? I remember then that he said he was 16. Someone
did this to a CHILD. I start to weep as well.

"He, they did it for four straight days. Kept me high more or less. I was
flying! I was too ashamed to tell Mom; she was out on an audit and I, I, I
couldn't face it over the phone. She came back and d-decided I was ill and
kept me home. I went into withdrawal -- seven fucking fixes and I was
already hooked -- and I told her everything. She pulled me from school and
put me in treatment.

"I came back clean but Miller was always around, smirking. I hit a bad
patch from what I'd missed at school, and the fucker was right
there. Bastard said he was sorry and said he'd give me a fix for free. The
fucker already had the syringe loaded and just handed it to me. Mom tried
everything, but I was always using again within weeks of coming home
sober. And then she d-d-d-d-died and I-I-I-I... I am so fucking useless,
Jake! I am so weak and so stupid!"

I don't know why, but that pisses me off. I slap his wet cheek and his head
pops up, appalled. "You're not weak, not useless and damned sure not
stupid. Except for saying that you are! Look at me! Logan, look at me! That
Miller kid, he *raped* you son. It's no different. You couldn't stop
him. People don't get raped because they're weak or they 'deserve it'! They
get raped by predators who have no soul. He did something worse than rape,
Logan. He raped you in a way that made your body betray you and kept you
coming back for more. Addiction k-k-killed my... killed my... killed my
son, Logan. I will never, ever, ever let it kill you. Do you hear me,
Logan?"

He nods, rubbing his cheek where my slap had landed. "You know, you hit
really hard."

I pull him tight to me. "I didn't hit you, Logan, I slapped your
face. There's a difference. And you have no idea, Logan, just how hard I
can hit. But I will never, ever hit YOU. I expect both of us will be
slapped a few times, we've already been! But I will destroy anyone who
comes for you, Logan. They can come with a warrant or a gun or a syringe,
it doesn't matter, you will never, ever be taken from me. I... I need. I
need your love too much, Logan, and need so, so much to love you back."
Neither of us try to stop the tears then.

<eof>

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Active storelines, all at www.nifty.org/nifty/gay...
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Off the Magic Carpet: 12 chapters .../military/off-the-magic-carpet/
Lake Desolation: 11 chapters .../rural/lake-desolation/
Dear John Letter: 3 chapter .../military/dear-john-letter/
Shark Reef: 4 chapters .../adult-youth/shark-reef/
Culberhouse Rules: 2 chapters .../incest/culberhouse-rules/

Special collaboration with Brad Borris: In God's Love (4 installments)
.../incest/in-gods-love/