Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 14:04:59 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: bisexual "Human Sublime"

			      "Human Sublime"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


Patrick was in love with Ms. Pendrake, so the only thing he could
do was to become her son's lover. Ms. Pendrake was not as
formidable as her name implied. She was tall and regal. She had
early gray dusting her hair as though it had always been just
recently snowed on. Patrick was 14. He was smitten. Ms.
Pendrake was his teacher. She did not know he was alive, he
thought. She had a soft voice. She let him clap the erasers when
he stayed after school to help her "tidy up" a bit. Her son, Jeremy,
was a slightly more masculine copy of his mother. He was a wisp
of sunlight on an autumn afternoon. He was quiet and reserved
and thoughtful as was his mother.

Patrick had figured it out long before he had come to Ms.
Pendrake's class that first day of school term in September. He
had seen her often in the lunch room, in the hall way. She seemed,
as did Jeremy, somewhat wounded about something. Somewhat
saddened that things were the way they were. Not that this was
not a prestigious prep school. Not that pretty much all the boys
and most of the male instructors were equally as smitten by her.
True, she was the only female instructor on campus, but even if
she had not been, those high cheekbones and musky perfume
aroma counted for a lot. Just there seemed in her the boy she
could not be. And Patrick was one for discerning, to be sure.
Jeremy seemed sad as well. Though he was well enough liked. Of
course, he was the star of the debating squad and lead tenor in the
boychoir there at Eastfield. Other than that, he was just Jeremy.
He seemed discontent, did Jeremy, that he was boy instead of girl.

It was now deeply into autumn. And people pretending each was
someone else, well,  this was a way of identification, and certainly
not endemic to this place alone. It's a time honored game. If
identifications were concealed by the students' school uniforms
that conjured up images set in British films of boarding schools,
then the way to Ms. Pendrake's heart was through Jeremy. They
made love on the commons at midnight when the moon was bone
white. Two boys who had never really had anyone but families
that didn't particularly understand them. Not that Ms. Pendrake
did not love Jeremy, it was just that he upstaged her too often,
was more like her than she could ever be, and this caused her to
turn her somewhat miffed face away from her son far too often on
corona nights when mothers looked too closely at their children,
and saw everyone's mortality up ahead, and never quite forgave
them that awareness.

Not that Jeremy wasn't a good kisser. Not that his wan pale pearl
skin did not appeal to Patrick, for it did, and Jeremy was a
passionate boy beneath all that marble upbringing that said the
forces of life were to always be kept mutely inside, though this
was not of a snobbishness as much as a desire to keep things
simple, a desire not to flame out emotionally and let everything
get all mixed up and disturbed. Of course Patrick knew that
Jeremy wanted to be with his own mother rather than Patrick.
And of course Patrick knew that both boys wished to have her
long cool fingers and hands and her cooler gray eyes on them as
they hugged each other and groped each other, and touched
under the clothes, with an invisible Ms. Pendrake giving silent
instructions on how her son should be made love to and to say all
the words both boys were too shy to say themselves to anyone,
even in the privacy of their own minds.

It was a nice conjecture to tower to erections and thinking a nice
lady with a sable smile and a series of crinkly laugh lines at the
edges of her eyes, with that little white discolored ski patch at the
bridge of her nose, would be guiding her son and his lover who
was Patrick who wished so much to be loving Ms. Pendrake
rather than her son. But make love to him he did. And undress
him from those silly pants and shirt and tie and shoes and socks
and have him on the ground that was cold this time of year and
the grass brass brown, to feel the cold wind on his flanks as
Jeremy undressed him, as they whispered each other's name, and
called each other "sweets" because this was an expensive place
and Salingerisms were somewhat required here, even
quasi-Salingerisms.

Not that Patrick was adverse to feeling a boy beside him. Not that
it did not turn him on to kiss and pinch and tweak and lave that
boy's dusky nipples on that slender chest. He did like to feel
Jeremy's mouth on himself, for of course it was exciting being
enveloped by him, by the mouth that had once years ago a whole
lifetime ago sucked on the teats of Ms. Pendrake much the way,
Patrick imagined, he sucked on her son's tits. There were no
songs for them, these boys, just that part of the puzzle that was
constantly missing. Not of course that Patrick believed that
Jeremy would want to have sex with his own mother. Or on
another level, to literally make love to her. It was different
ground. It was hypothetical and secretive and one of those things
a boy goes to his grave long years away refusing to admit to on
point of death.

But both boys knew their thoughts were on her, on her bearing,
her expressive hands, on her hips that were slivers of sharp bone,
on her breasts that were narrow canals through the Venice of
their dreams. And their legs entwined in the confusion in the
circle that was never to be. They delighted in holding each other's
still warm balls close to their eyes and they delighted in feeling the
hot heat between each other's thighs. They were  becoming
crystalline in the cold November air. They were all the deeds boys
are supposed to do but somehow they had never gotten even this
far in the equation before. Their mouths tore at each other and
their mock passion toward each other, their laughing good
graces, their feeling somewhat silly about the whole thing, took a
certain timber that neither of them knew quite how to deal with.

Jeremy and Patrick found it quite exhilarating to be naked with
each other, and God on a nighttime shift somewhere in heaven up
there or around the vicinity, and they pretended to penetrate the
other though both found the actuality of it very off putting. But
they did love to hold each other in their mouths and get their
penises wet and warm and straining at the material that covered
them. They compared sizes in the bright moonlight with a walk
way lamp near by that meant they could be seen from the dorms if
anyone was looking and chances were someone was. Which
turned them on even more. And Patrick knew that Jeremy was
caught in his spell. That Jeremy would never quite get over
Patrick, which suited Patrick just fine because there was a slight
coil of anger in all of this somewhere. There was nothing beached
and concealed in their eyes as they plucked at each other, and lay
side by side gazing into each other's eyes, there in the shadows of
the night and the bodies that were quiescent and quivering with
anticipation at the same time.

Daring was not daring. Daring was old hat. Daring was the first
time for both and out in public too. But each wanted Ms.
Pendrake. Each wanted to be small children and each wanted to
be bathed together or separately by her as she knelt by the tub
naked,  to reach their faces up to her as she reached down to
them, holding their unrepentant hard ons, as they sucked her
breasts, while she was scrubbing their skinned arms and elbows
and knees. But mostly they saw her in a Mother Courage role
more than a lascivious one because such thought really don't bear
thinking about too deeply. Because it can be somewhat repellent
if you think about it long enough, but Oedipus was dreamt of
long before Jeremy and Patrick and Ms. Pendrake came along.

The boys stretched and rubbed their tummies against each other
and their packages and they felt each other's buttocks and they
were to the point of firing both their missiles onto now becoming
chilly fields of flesh that were filling up with goosebumps
regardless of how tightly they held to one another and shared
body heat, but that didn't matter, thanks to the sheer magicality
of finally not having to do this alone in their respective beds. The
boys came this first time, and were amused and were very far
from satiated. They were quite let down actually. Patrick however
keeping his ultimate goal firmly in mind.

Doubtless they would have been intrigued, if somewhat
discomfited, to know right at that moment what the luminous
especially dressed in blue or gray, can't live without her Ms.
Pendrake was up to. She was giving her husband a bath which
seemed comical in the saying of it, and was even more comical in
the actuality of it. For Mr. Pendrake was a man of stature and
bearing and had a face that was so craggy and so lofty it seemed
it should have been on Mt. Rushmore, and there he was, this
blocky muscular man being bathed by his wife who looked
positively like a little girl next to him as she knelt on the floor
soaping his penis and rubbing his balls. Mr. Pendrake was lazed
back against the tub and he was sighing and smoking a good
Cuban cigar, luxuriating with the smoke easing out of his mouth
in rings and then he would lick his lips before putting the cigar
back in his mouth. It seemed ridiculous this man of such pomp
and import would dare to have a naked body. It seemed
impossible to believe--how dare he??? He did, however, like it or
not, have one. And now, his eyes dreamily closed, he was
unconsciously murmuring "mommy, I'll never be bad again, if you
will just make me..." and then drifting off for a time.

She had to tell him of course, his wife, who was indeed naked as
imagined by Patrick, and who was soft and creamy, but whose
breasts were somewhat larger and more round and firm than the
boys imagined and were not narrow canals in dreams at all. Her
husband would occasionally put his right hand on her breasts, on
her nipples, and squeeze them gently and not so gently, as she
masturbated him with soap and water  and washcloth, as she was
whispering to him, "it's all right, mommy understands
snookums." Which made him smile. She was perspiring as was he
in the hot bathroom with the heat waves coming off the very hot
tub water that was making the parts of her husband so submerged
lobster red. She had to tell him that she was terribly much in love,
and that she was tired of his high handedness. That she was tired
of his letting his being Dean of the school run roughshod over her
and their family, mismanaging her and her son, both of who
deserved a better life, a life less pushed than her husband allowed.
She wanted to tell him she was in love with a student. Patrick.

That he made her giddy when she was around him. That she was
so smitten and so desperate she got through the day by holding
onto the fact Patrick would stay after school to clap erasers and
help her tidy up her school room. The thing was she stuttered
around him. The thing was she kept finding her eyes drifting to
the crotch of his school pants and how she longed to take them
down and find that he was wearing nothing under them but
himself, that he was already erect, because he thought of her night
and day and she was the constant fever dream of him. Oh she
didn't like him that much. But she craved his body. He was a
snob. He was much like her husband in those respects. Never
letting her finish a sentence. Always out to solve the mystery of
her when there was no mystery and in the process of searching
out, making sure she knew he had found nothing at all, as though
this was news to her. Well, Patrick was already on the road to
being what her husband was and she supposed cheap psychology
would tell her that she was attracted to the boy for that exact
reason. She however did not think so.

The little bastard's body was just so hot.  She had never before
realized how shallow she could be. She wanted him. She wanted
to peel him like Salome peeling a grape. She wanted to feel him
all over. She wanted to passionately put his hand on her woman
parts. She wanted to rub him all over her and on top of her and
his little or not so little wiggle worm searching for home like the
worm in Eve's apple trying to get back to Paradise and I didn't
mean anything by suggesting eating of the fruit of knowledge at
all, honest.

So one night last week, Ms. Pendrake, who never seemed to have
a first name, though she was far from authoritarian, it seemed just
right she had no first name, feeling so awkward and
self-conscious, she, after thinking about it a great while, while not
daring to think about it at all, had walked into her son's bedroom,
for something far different than she had ever walked into it
before. It had been after ten or so. The boy was asleep. She had
sat down on the rocker, in the secretive dark, next to his bed and
had smoothed the top of his sleep matted hair down and touched
her long fingernails gently on the boy's porcelain face, tracing his
outline. She wanted her son to be her husband. She thought about
this as she brought, perhaps a little too harshly, (though he
seemed to like it), the man Himself off,  this imperialist Czar of
the world and who, before, during and after being jacked off, had
still been puffing so knowingly on his cigar and was most
certainly and forever more his own god. She didn't want to bed
her son because of her sexual love for him.

She loved her son still, yes, but not sexually. She loved Patrick
and the only way she could get to Patrick was through Jeremy.
She had slid down the covers of her son's bed and she had looked
at him, alarmed, for she had not known he slept naked. Breath
caught in her throat, her heart skipped a beat. She had never
known there was so--much--of Jeremy there, or how daunting he
looked. Her clit hardened. The moon and a street lamp bathed
him in bone shadows, his bony body, his bonny body, she even
saw his little firm asshole peeping out, as he moved his legs
about, bicycling in his dream no doubt and other boyish things.
He had had an erection, a most prominent one, that she stared at
unconvinced as to what she was seeing. His hands occasionally
touched it, softly, like sleepy winds, and then away. It didn't seem
right for her son to have a hard on. It was more wrong, in some
undefineable way than that she was sitting there staring at it. She
thought of the song "Sunrise, Sunset" from "Fiddler on the
Roof." "Is this the little boy I carried..." Show tune. She was
sitting by her naked son and she was playing a show tune in her
head. Christ! Well, so much for being able ever to listen to that
movie soundtrack with a straight face again.

It was the same hard on that Patrick was now sucking and ready
to take the ejaculate of another boy in his mouth the first time.
This one--though it was not a mother looking at her son's
erection and getting aroused, for, she kept this firmly in mind, she
had pretended that it was Patrick's. Nice balls too. She had no
idea about the homosexual quotient at this prep school. She had
heard rumors but they always seemed distasteful. Their had been
no "incidents" since she had been here. No professor was let go.
Not boy went public. It happened surely. It just was not talked
about. This night, in this sweaty bathroom, the walls seeming to
weep with condensation,  while Mr. Kong was getting his thick
sausage thingee pumped of its milk to a farethewell with wash
cloth and soap, as the hard on diminished and diminished some
more, she wondered, as she tried not to look at his Majesty and
his little king, in the tub, if Patrick and Jeremy could
somehow--get together. If somehow they could be--an item. If
somehow they might--make love and in the making of that love,
be thinking of her.

Of course she knew how crazy this was. As cracked at the world
globe on the desk in her classroom. She also knew she was a
coward and no matter how many times she had rented and played,
alone, "Murmurs of the Heart,"  Louis Malle's sweet funny
endearing film about incest, she could not sex her own son and
she certainly could not bed Patrick. Her husband was making
motions of getting out of the tub, he being limp and spent and
dizzy. "Coming mother" she almost imagined hearing Henry
Aldritch saying. She got up, her knees popping, not getting
younger, she said to herself, and held up a big fuzzy bath towel
for him to dry his ponderous body on and got his white for purity
terrycloth bathrobe for him as he dried off and slipped into his
slippers.

"I wasn't expecting you to come quite so much. I had to swallow
three times."

"I had to swallow twice. You win."

Both boys were dressing now. Somewhat hurried. More than a
little ashamed of what they had done. The pinkness of their
penises had intrigued them.  The different sizes. The different
shapes. Jeremy's penis was sans foreskin and so smooth and
curved. Patrick's was still sheaved in foreskin which gave a bell
shape to it. And how tough that foreskin had felt. Prickly like a
cactus. And now the need of the warm of the dorm and
something hot to drink would be nice. But Ms. Pendrake's
bathroom was even more pink than the two boys' penises, and the
color of the room upset her stomach, reminded her when she was
a little girl, how her mother used to make her stand in that also
pink bathroom so long ago, when the little girl had been naughty,
and how it was always a sick color because it had made her
scared and ill when her mother went into a tantrum and locked
her in there. She wanted things black as night, now, pink was like
Pepto Bismol, which always made her queasy instead of defeating
the queasiness. Why had she done her own bathroom in that
miserable color?  She dipped her jack off hand in the tub and
washed it with disdain.

And she was deucedly hot,  wanting to dress and go outside and
be in the blessedly revivifying cold. She was wiping her brow, her
skin misty, her hair flyaway and in a tangle at the back for when
she had pinned it up when her husband told her it was time for
their bath ritual. But...he never bathed her. He never gave her a
massage like she was always giving him. He never went down on
her, which is what he wanted her to do to him almost always,
knowing she always was willing (he thought she was eager, she
thought he was a blockhead never to figure this out, any of it,
momma's boy indeed)  to give him what he wanted sexually, that
she dared not defy him or he would fly into his own tantrum.
After sex, she always powdered his butt. He never powdered
hers. It was all so unfair. As he walked, weakly, trying for stately,
from the bathroom to the MASTER (of course) bedroom, Ms.
Pendrake stood wilted flower naked, watching his ponderous
progression. As Patrick was headed to his dorm, and as Jeremy
was coming home, this being Saturday and no classes on Sunday,
so her son was allowed out late, she let the water out of the tub,
straightened up the towels, and remembered her son in his bed
that night when she watched him sleeping naked.

His chest a little flutter of breath. His hands at ease on his
stomach,  then, dream following, conducting his own private
personal symphony.. Then his right hand moving, its index finger
put to the hollow of his chest and scratching as he still slept. His
thin long legs open. His sac large, his penis erect and trembling
with such gossamer life. His body a triangle of her love for
Patrick. The doorway to Patrick if she could ever somehow figure
out how to go through it. A love that had deepened as Patrick
had become more obnoxious and obvious in his contempt for her
and for the other students and the school in general. She wavered
on total hatred for him. But mostly she wanted his hands on her.
She wanted to suckle him. She wanted to feel his hardness against
her delta of crotch. She wanted him mapping with curious fingers
her naked body. She wanted him to explore her naked body by
exploring Jeremy's which of course would be stupid, for she
would never forgive herself if she pushed those two boys
together, but if it was their idea.... She felt her panties wet, as she
looked down at her son. As Patrick. She wanted him to put his
fingers inside her, to feel the depths of her lust. Patrick.  And if
Jeremy found them this way some time and was jealous, that
made her wetter.

Well, she would kill Patrick of course if he laid a hand in any
emotional way, no, make that any way at all, on her son. Of
course, it was ridiculous to think Jeremy was a pouf or anything
like that. Even boys experimenting with each other which meant
nothing at all, even that her son would not do. He was just--shy
and bookish and he was melancholy because of his taskmaster
father and his inability to measure up to the totally incorrect
impression of her good breeding and the way she always had of
staring in the distance as if no one else could see whatever it was,
no matter how hard they tried. She had an especially ethereal look
to her at such times. But mostly she wanted to get laid. Mostly
she yearned, and that night as her son slept, she reached down,
with an oddly steady hand, to touch the tip of his swollen penis.
And she quivered, wondering, filled with dream, desperately
wanting her son to be awake. Of course it was wrong. She
thought of the Nabokov novel about Humbert Humbert, who, as
a young boy, had lost the only girl he would ever care about, for
who he would search forever. It had flash frozen him at the age
when the loss happened. That would lead him to his downfall,
thanks to the ultimate nymphet, Lolita..

But enough of this. She had to dress in her kimono that she had
bought in Japan three years ago when she had her husband had
gone there on his Sabbatical. He wanted her to be a geisha. He
wanted to enact games with her. He wanted her to tell him he had
been a bad boy and she had to suck all the bad boy poison out of
him.  Jeremy had gotten home and to his room without anyone
being the wiser. Jeremy lay on his bed, underneath his posters of
rock stars and football pennants from colleges and universities
worlds away and lifetimes ago, the pennants foisted on him by his
old man who took it as a matter of course that his shy frightened
bunny sensitive son was somehow or other just like him.

Jeremy waited. He lay on his bed. His heart thumped. He still felt
the shadow of Patrick's mouth on his penis. He remembered with
fondness Patrick's cum in his own eager mouth. These were all
preternaturally intellectual kids who maybe deserved a punch in
the head now and then instead of all this currying that was going
on. He put his arms around himself in the dark toasty warm room,
he dressed only his white briefs, and hugged himself tightly.  In
time, his sister would be in here. She had made Jeremy not too
long ago. His nine year old sister, in her sheer nightie, girl woman
she was meant to be, would open the door, in a dim nimbus of
backlight, exhibiting her naked body through the gown as though
she were being x rayed and would close the door quietly. His little
sister turned Jeremy on. Which worried Jeremy tremendously.
She would tell him secrets, as she sat on her brother's bed.
Creepy kid. Whispering skin pricking gnomish voice from a very
scary little almost weightless girl. She would tell Jeremy how
momma and daddy did sex tonight, with their children supposedly
being none the wiser, but good little gnome ferret she was,
Jeremy's sister watched it all through a small hole in the wall
between their parents' room and the little girl's own. Jeremy tried
not to have a hard on with his sister. Each and every time. And
each and every time he failed.

The games varied that she told about, though they didn't vary all
that much.  She would have him demonstrate what she had
described seeing, on her. She would say, as always, Jeremy could
pretend he was her father and she had been a very naughty little
girl, just  like mother. And when they were into their game, which
always culminated with his spanking her less hard that she wanted
him to, she would, lying over his legs, with her gown up and her
bare bottom under his hand, begin to weep and say she would
never be a naughty girl again, as he pushed her from him, said
"you see to it that you don't," knowing damned well that she
would not see to it at all. You got to be with somebody. You got
to have someone reaching back for you. And Jeremy knew he was
his sister's only life line. She was the only one he had ever
been--intimate with, until Patrick. He and Patrick had done all
these things Jeremy never had dreamt of before. But that was fake
and over. He had discovered he liked boys very much and now it
was finished for him before it had really begun. Thanks, God.
Remind me to do you a favor sometime.

This night, Jeremy felt as though he had betrayed his sister, by
being with Patrick. It was stupid, but he felt guilty anyway. And
knew he would never be with anyone but her ever again.

Till Patrick let it slip to a friend, that he got into Ms. Pendrake's
pants by getting into Jeremy's first, and from there it was a hop
skip and a pull down grope. Patrick, not what you would call
generous, or trying to help Jeremy out, just simply assuaging his
own gigantic ego by telling the story to one friend who told it to
another and then to another...and Jeremy had started getting some
hot action, as more than a few boys discovered the reason--or the
excuse--that they were just doing this to get to Jeremy's mother,
therefore the guilt going out the window--thank you!!!--and it
was to be a very warm winter that year.  The boys who were
bedmates of Jeremy found it an extreme turn on to see him in
ruffled pink panties with roses on the waistband and his erection
straining inside.

Jeremy was soon better at sex with the boys than he had ever
dreamed possible. Patrick had given up his dream of screwing
Ms. Pendrake, because for such a smart ass he was also such a
coward. He did the occasional boy, but Jeremy was the star of
that movie, so Patrick scowled alot, stayed in his room a lot, and
at the end of term, went to some other school or killed himself or
something. Some of the boys discovered this sublimation thing
really worked well from a number of different angles. They
wanted Jeremy, so they scored with Ms. Pendrake. They did get
to Jeremy through his mother. Who finally loosened up and
became the greatest teacher in the whole wide world. Others did
indeed get to her through her son. There were so many land
mines skirted around in this way. It was a pity Patrick didn't stay
around longer. One or two persons actually bit the bullet and
made love to the real exact person they truly wanted to in the first
place. But they were the oddballs of this all too human group.

Ms. Pendrake's boy bedmates found she liked to have them call
her "Butch," especially at the ultimate sexual moment. She had
also had her long auburn/gray hair cut severely and had a tattoo
on her right hip that was the talk of the campus. She also became
a great baseball coach and was, she surprised herself in
discovering, the best short stop the school had ever had, bar
none.

Mr. Pendrake finally got the boot from Ms. Pendrake, who,
thanks to the boys, had finally understood she was one hot babe.
And those high cheekbones pretty much got to everyone. Really
great cheekbones. Honest. The last thing her soon to be ex said
before he picked up his suitcases and looked at her beseechingly
at the opened front door of their house was, "Mommy?" He chin
trembled. Which was funny on that granite face of his. To which
she replied "Daddy, hit the road. And by the by, I'm taking you
for every dime you have." And that was the end of that. And the
beginning of such sentimental educations I haven't the words to
tell you.

				  the end