Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2002 13:52:25 +0000 From: Java Biscuit Subject: Willow, chapter one This is a story involving teen/boy, adult/youth, male/male graphic sex and not intended for reading by minors. If you are underage, or this type of material is illegal where you live, please stop now, and go read something else! This is a completely fantasized story meant only for the purpose of pleasurable reading. It's not meant to encourage unsafe, unprotected sex, or to condone sex with minors. These people are not real. Feedback: javabiscuit@hotmail.com Willow ~ chapter one by Biscuit I pretty much knew I could swing either way by the time I was seventeen. I was dating a girl I liked that spring but I was about to swing hard in the other direction. It happened almost every May or June. Like the needle of a compass, I'd be homing in on the boy who was the secret north of my life. A boy I dreamed about all winter long. It was May in Standishport and the town was about to explode into summer. Our sleepy seaport home was about to jump from a town of ten thousand to sixty thousand. The year-round population of fishermen, artists and regular folk was about to bulk up with tourists and summer people, a lot of them gay guys. One of those gay guys was my grandfather, my mom's dad. We lived in his house on the bay all year long. He was there from July through the middle of September and the odd weekend here and there in the off season. My dad died before I was born, before he ever married my mom. But I was close to both of my grandfathers, so you could say that I was luckier than most guys who don't have a dad around. My mom's dad wrote for a newspaper in New York. I only saw him in the summertime but I was crazy about him, Jonathan Sterns. My dad's dad I saw a lot. He was a fishing boat captain with three boats, the Belle Yvette, named after my grandmother, who also died before I was born, the Bonnie Prince, named for my dad, and the Little Tom, his newest boat, named for me. Thomas Arthur Sterns Whaite. Even though she never married my dad, she gave me his last name on my birth certificate and nobody ever said I wasn't his. My grandfather says I am, and that's what counts. It freaked my mom out when he named a boat after me. That whole summer she was sure I was going to die. Bad things come in threes, she kept saying. Considering both the other boat's namesakes were dead, she thought I was a goner for sure. I wasn't scared, I was proud. After all, you could also say, third time's a charm. And anything that Manny Whaite did was okay by me. I worshipped him. The real thing about the month of May was Willow, or William, as he'd started wanting to be called. Every year I was scared to death that he and Leon, the guy he called his dad, wouldn't show up. Some years they didn't. You couldn't count on Leon, though Willow had to. The very first time I saw the kid, he couldn't have been more than seven years old. I thought he was even younger. Hard to tell with him, he's so tiny. He doesn't even know for sure, himself, how old he is. To me he looked like he was four or five. He says he was nine. The thing about Willow is, he always wants to be thought of as old, wise and generally grown up. He's never been to real school, maybe a stretch here and there. But he reads constantly, things I wouldn't pick up unless somebody put a gun to my head. I think he's been acting like a grown up his whole life. I was only eleven when I met him, and I believe, no matter what he says, that he was seven, if not younger. We live in a part of town called the Point, where it narrows down to a long spit with houses built right smack on the water. Our house is one of the biggest, built by my Grandfather before a lot of the regulations that keep things smaller even existed. He's been coming to this house for thirty years, since before he married my grandmother. Just beyond our house is a stretch where there are about twenty little bitty cottages that hardly look big enough for anybody to live in from the outside. Inside they're not so bad. Leon owns one of them, and usually he comes for the summer, but not always, which is why I'm a nervous wreck in May. He makes a living, more or less, selling things at flea markets. All kinds of junk, but mainly imported beads and shit he gets from his sister. She has a business in a place he calls the bead district, in New York. His and Willow's real home is Leon's van. Leon's not most people's idea of a good guy. He was the kind of gay guy a lot of other gay guys wish didn't exist. A kind of a boy lover, though he did like grown up guys too. But Willow was his boy. That was their big secret. And I kept it. Partly, because I liked Leon okay, but mostly because I loved Willow. He thought he'd be lost if anything happened to Leon. I don't like to think that Willow loved him, but he did. He's loyal. He believes that Leon was a good man. It's fucked up, but true. I might have thought he was okay but it wasn't going to keep me from stealing his boy from him. No way. Every year I fantasized that Willow would stay with me, not leave with Leon. It was because of Sprinkles, my neighbor's dog, that I got to meet Willow in the first place. It was one of the first mornings with no school and I was out walking the beach with Sprinkles. He was sort of a Black Lab and some other things, a dog that would chase sticks in the water until his mouth was bloody, if you'd let him. Not warm enough yet for swimming, but still good to be out on the sand, getting my feet wet as the tide went out, knowing I didn't have to go to school. We had only spent one winter in Standishport then and I hadn't really made any friends yet. The kids at school were coming around slowly, not sure how to think of me, since I hadn't grown up there and I was living in a neighborhood that was mostly summer people. There were only a few other houses along the spit where you'd see any lights on in the winter. Sprinkles was like my best friend and I was walking with him, both him and me with our eyes open for any kind of stick I could throw. Willow was just about the only other speck on the beach that morning, except for the gulls. He was unlucky enough to have a stick in his hand, that he was using to draw pictures in the sand. Sprinkles was young but big. He didn't mean to hurt him, but a stick was a stick, and he knocked Willow flat, then he did a kind of jumping dance around him, kicking sand and landing his big wet paws right on top of him. The dog looked at me like I was nuts when I ran to the kid instead of to him to get the stick. I was panicked, scared I'd let something bad happen by not putting the dog on his leash like I was supposed to. "Jesus, are you okay, kid?" I was calling out as I got near him. He was lying there not moving, covered with sand and looking up at me with his eyes rounded. I didn't know he was embarrassed, I thought he was hurt. Mainly, I was just staring. I know Willow hates to be stereotyped as a China doll, but for the life of me, I can't think of a better description. He was the prettiest, most perfect thing I'd ever seen in my life. To me, he was hardly real with his long black eyes and feathery brows, his rosy mouth like a bee had stung his lips. His skin was a pale caramel, like candy melted down with milk. I wanted to touch him, so bad. All he had on was a pair of baggy flannel pajama pants, like he'd come straight out from bed to play on the beach. I reached down and picked him up, putting my hands in his warm little armpits. His big coal eyes flashed at me and he blushed as I started wiping wet sand off of him. Sprinkles couldn't stand that I wasn't playing yet and started jumping around me, wagging his head with the prize stick. To keep him from knocking the boy over again, I ran a few steps for the dog to chase me and grabbed the stick out of his mouth. "Sorry," I said to him, "he won't let me give it back right now." I turned and threw it with all my might at the water. Sprinkles took off. When I turned around the kid had taken off. Then I heard someone laughing and looked up. That's when I got my first look at Leon. Not an easy guy to figure out at first glance. He's got this hair that's silver but he's young, well younger than you'd think at first. And he wears it long like a mane. When you first see him you feel confused about how old he is. And his beard's just as silvery gray. He's a big guy, real big. Maybe six foot three or four, and he's the type who seems like he was born muscled up. I've never known him to do any kind of exercise or working out. There's a layer of soft flesh on top of it, but the guy is like a mountain of muscle. And his bare chest was matted up with that same silver hair. He was up on the cottage deck, holding the kid on his arm and I guess that was the first time I was jealous of Leon, but it wouldn't be the last. "It's okay," he yelled down, "keep the stick kid." Then he headed inside with the boy. I started haunting that stretch of beach, just waiting and hoping for another glimpse of the little boy.