Dear reader, please treat the following nonsense as precisely that. A little diversion, a mere spot of mild entertainment. It is, of course, 100% fictional. I've never straded a stock in my life!
Love, as always,
Zack McNaught
tiberiusnaught@protonmail.com
Autumn, 1984
Was what we were up to illegal? No. Was it immoral? Certainly, yes. Did some of us make an enormous amount of money from it? Well, of course.
Everything you've heard about the excesses of stock traders in the 1980s is true. In fact, you've probably not heard the half of it. Me, personally, I never did a line of coke off a hooker's tits, but that's only because I didn't really react well to coke, so I stuck to other things. Speed was my favourite, although to be fair so much of my memory of those years is missing that I might have taken anything and not know.
Getting in to the hedonistic lifestyle was escapism for me. I was getting away from from some fairly unpleasant shit in my past. These days perhaps I'd see a shrink about PTSD, but then? It wasn't even a thing. And it turned out that the self-destructive streak I'd always fought with was a positive benefit in the world I suddenly inhabited. As was having no emotional ties - I was young, free and single, and making more money a week than I could spend in a year.
The fun lasted for three years, four months and sixteen days, from the moment I was hired as a ground level runner, to the moment that my friend and colleague Gary jumped from the ninth floor of our office block to his death on the grey London pavement. He was wearing his favourite pink tie and diamond studded cufflinks that day. Dressed for the occasion, you might say. It's strange, the details you remember; those cufflinks had cost him a pretty penny from a jewellery shop on the Marylebone Road one afternoon when we should have been trading, but were actually meeting up with Gary's dealer. The week he died Gary had lost big, and it took everything from him. Others were to follow, and before long the bubble burst.
I got lucky. I fluked one last payout betting on the fact that everyone else would lose, and though I was going to have to be careful I ended up with enough spare capital to get out. Plenty of my friends didn't. Several `did a Gary'.
I didn't get out a moment too soon. I learned from an associate that my name had come up on some SFO paperwork he'd seen. Not that he was meant to see it, but back then it wasn't what you knew, but who you knew to bribe. Dan knew someone on the inside, and told me that I was a `figure of interest' in an investigation. That alone was enough to put the shits up me, and I started to look around for a plan.
It was Geoff, a mutual friend of Gary's that suggested the way out, when we met up for lunchtime drinks in Holborn one grey, blustery October day.
"America, that's your option," he said, with a completely straight face.
I peered at him curiously.
"They have an excellent record of collaborating with the SFO, and an extradition agreement," I replied. "If the hammer's coming down, surely I want to be somewhere like Colombia."
"Not if you know who I know, and what he can get you."
"Like what?"
"Like fake papers and a real green card, but under a false name. Put your money offshore, relocate, set yourself up doing some small, boring business, and disappear."
While at first the idea seemed absurd, the more I thought about it, the more it appealed. I'd always had a soft spot for the States, and in the mid eighties it was still a cool place for Europeans to travel. The shine hadn't quite come off its chromium coating at that point, and the more I thought about it over the coming days, the more attractive it became. I watched Smokey and the Bandit, and the idea of doing the coast to coast in a muscle car with the roof off while I chose somewhere to settle was a very attractive one. Within the week, I was committed.
The cost of the paperwork stung - fifteen grand back then translates to more than three times that much these days, but what I got for my money was impressive. A completely new British passport, with an associated US green card under the name Zachary McNaught.
Zachary. Like Paddington in the book, I tried it out, rolling it around my tongue. Not very British, but then who in the States would know that? Apparently it was the name of someone who had died at birth within a few years of when I was born. So, a birth certificate (or at least an official copy) was forthcoming, and that made getting the passport easy. A small amount of the bribe went to an insider at the US embassy, and the rest was history, including my old name. I never much liked Peter anyway. No, Zachary - perhaps Zack? - was rather cooler. More than that, it gave me an opportunity to become a new person.
That was more relevant for me than perhaps it was for many others. I'd had a chequered past, and could do with leaving some of it behind. My mum was dead, my father in jail for strangling her, and I'd been caught with my hands in the cookie jar at university. I was smart enough to get into Oxford - my dad's money had paid for a decent secondary school, at least, even if he was a murderous old bastard - but once there things seemed to just go wrong. I wasn't expelled from the university, because you had to do a little more than just steal from the bursar's office, but I'd certainly had a black mark against my name. The money had been to pay back a gambling debt, and that tells you all you need to know about how reckless I was. For a while that was a huge positive on the stock exchange, but it was clear that the time for that kind of behaviour was coming to an end. The era of the mega-money, high stakes trader was over, to be replaced soon enough by the computerised, bulk trade exchange. Still, all that was behind me now and I needed to take this chance to reinvent myself.
Before I left, I tied up a few loose ends. I owned a flat, the title of which I transferred to a trust, making my new identity a trustee; that way, I could rent it out, pay the mortgage and have somewhere to come back to, even if it didn't make me profit. I also set up a couple of bank accounts in my new name, and got myself sorted with a few things here and there - this was before large scale digitisation of tax records, for instance, so it was a lot easier to get some faked Inland Revenue documents to appear to have paid tax for a number of years. Enough, at least, that it looked like Zack McNaught had done something with his life before emigrating to America.
Then, of course, I needed to consider what to do when I got there. The American stock market was comfortably more insane than the British one, and with one of the few ounces of common sense I had left, I decided that the combination of me plus the added lure of Wolf of Wall Street-type antics was not going to end healthily. But finance I did understand, and there has always been a large market for private wealth management, so I decided that I'd look up a few former colleagues and see where I could dip my toe in the water.
Not, though, before I completed the one thing that more than any other made the move to the States exciting: my big road trip.
Midsummer, 1985
The air was hotter and drier than I'd thought possible. I stood waiting to board a bus to the terminal, more than a little peeved to find that there was no air bridge. The flight had taken long enough, and had felt even longer, but at least now I was here, ready to begin: LA, the first pin on the map. If I could just get through passport control...
I was too tired to be nervous, but as I shuffled forward in line, I started to doubt myself. I only had the passport in my new name - for fear of having been found with both - so if this didn't go well there was very little way of proving who I was, other than getting on to the British Embassy and hoping that they were sympathetic. A lady ahead of me in the line became increasingly agitated, and was eventually approached by border forces. She complained loudly about the wait (which was long, even in those days of more relaxed security), and about the treatment she was receiving, and was eventually led away, still making noise. The incident did little to settle my nerves.
When it finally came time to step forward, I presented my documents to the immigration officer, a be-permed lady by the name of Jeanette; the name stuck in my mind because I remembered thinking how very American it was. She looked at the passport and at me several times, and leafed through its pages, apparently surprised to find it almost blank.
"It's new," I offered, by way of explanation.
"I can see that," she responded, not at all interested in having a pleasant conversation.
Only when she was done minutely examining the passport did she pick up the green card. This, too, was subjected to scrutiny - in a time before instant computer checks, the passport officers were left to make their own opinions about the validity of documents.
"You're here to work?"
"Er, eventually. Here to live, really. I'm having a holiday first."
I was unable to tell whether or not that was a satisfactory response.
"And you have listed your address as a motel downtown."
"Er, yes? Have I? Where's downtown?"
She gave me a look which suggested that I was a total idiot, and then went back to examining the paperwork.
Eventually, having gone back through the passport another time, she bundled the papers together, handed them back to me, and waved me through without a word. Her glare told me she wasn't at all happy having been unable to find a reason to detain me any longer.
I sat in the back of an iconic yellow taxi cab, watching the desiccated city pass by. It was all so very different to where I had come from. So much drier, and unbelievably hot, and in some ways glamorous. I'd already seen the Hollywood sign from a distance, and for now the trip still seemed imbued with some sort of magic.
The motel was OK, no better than that. I'd been warned to keep my head down, not to get too flash with my cash, given that the American authorities had started clamping down on foreign money being laundered through the States. That meant that I needed not to turn up and funnel in cash from my account in the Bahamas, and buy myself a Ferrari and jump from luxury resort to luxury resort.
In fact that was fine with me. I wanted there to be a bit of authenticity to the trip, and if that meant staying in some bang average motels and buying a fairly normal car, so be it. It was the place I was here to see, not the inside of an identikit Hilton.
I tipped the driver what I thought was a reasonable amount, and was greeted with a complaint about miserly Limeys who don't know how to tip, an accusation I was unable to respond to as he sped off, leaving me standing in front of the reception in the heat of the midday sun. By now, jet lag was well and truly setting in, and all I wanted to do was get into bed and sleep for days.
I don't remember a lot about the next few minutes, or the hours after that, but I awoke at about four in the morning to a screech of brakes, a loud car horn and what very much sounded like gunfire. I lay staring at my ceiling, and then smiled at my own suspicious nature as a sharp crack of thunder shook the flimsy motel walls. I waited for rain, but it never came.
I woke again an hour later, this time by a combination of a pressing need to use the facilities, and a gnawing sensation in my stomach. I solved one problem easily enough, but was unable to solve the other for at least an hour, when the pancake house adjoining the motel would open for business; at least, according to the advert on the little card pyramid on the table. So, instead I wandered out onto the balcony and looked down at the pool.
Light was beginning to creep over the horizon already. The sky above was clear, which back in the UK usually meant that it was a cold night. Here in LA, however, it was already stiflingly hot, and was only likely to get hotter. The radio in the cab the day before had warned of higher than normal temperatures for the time of year, but I didn't really know what that meant beyond `hotter than an Englishman could probably cope with'.
I returned to my bed now wide awake, and tried not to get overexcited by the prospect of what the day had in store: day 1 of finding the perfect American road trip car.
I'd only fixed certain parts of the trip in my mind, and other than the motel hadn't made any advance bookings. I had a beginning - LA - and end - NYC - and I knew I had to go along at least part of route 66, and through Tornado Alley, just because it sounded cool.
Only one other thing was a necessity, and that was the right car. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, whether it was a late 60s muscle car from the classic era, or something more modern like an early 80s Firebird. Either way, I knew next to nothing about where to start, and what to look for.So, I planned to hit the dealerships in LA, and spend a few days thinking about what the right car might be. Money wasn't in limitless supply, but I'd read a few magazine articles in the UK, and had the impression that I could afford something pretty decent without stretching myself too far.
The only fly in the ointment was getting the funds transferred without raising suspicion. Because of my status in the US - as a newly permanent resident - I had to register with a few key bodies, notably the IRS. They'd been very interested in my finances, as you might expect, and in order that questions didn't get asked back in Britain, I'd had to declare a certain portion of my wealth. The thing was, there wasn't quite enough of that wealth to splash on a fun car, and so I was left with the option of bringing in cash from my offshore account. That would have been taxed to death, though, so instead I planned to use the services of an associate of a friend, who had certain skills with getting cash into the country for a fee that was a fraction of what I would pay in taxes.
I'd lined up a meeting with him before I came to the country, and it was on my second day in LA that we were to meet by the pool in a country club outside the city. I'd been warned that we would have to get together several times before he agreed on the transfer. He was known to me only as `Jim', and Jim was particular about those with whom he did business. If he liked me, he could help. If not, there would be some uncomfortable discussions to be had.
The country club was like nothing I'd ever seen, except perhaps in movies. In England, things had tended to be a little more downscale, a little more understated. But there was certainly something to be said for the marble colonnade of the club, with its grey slate roof, surrounded by the only patches of greenery for miles around. It gave an excellent first impression.
I was expected, and greeted at the door by an efficient lady with a massive perm, a very well fitted skirt and quite the body. Not exactly my type, but it beats a crusty old English doorman hands down. She bade me follow her through the cool, dark interior of the club and back out into the sunshine. I squinted in the brightness, still not used to the fact that sunglasses were a mandatory item of clothing in LA.
Jim was sitting at a table beneath a sprawling canopy. The hostess pulled out a seat for me, took an order for a Coke with plenty of ice, and left us to it. My contact was a large man, wearing a bright Hawaiian patterned shirt, light grey shorts and a Panama hat, beneath which he sported the obligatory shades. It wasn't that Jim was overweight, so much as scaled up in every dimension. He stood to greet me, and must have been a good few inches taller than me, and I was known for knocking my head on low doorframes.
"Nice to meet you, Zachary," he said, and I responded in kind.
The glitter of gold on his fingers as he extended his hand drew my eye.
"Oh, those," he said, noting my interest. "Championship rings. Three of them."
"American football?" I asked, oblivious to his obvious fame.
He grinned at me. "We prefer to just call it football here, but yeah. I guess you don't follow the game in England?"
"Sorry. No offence intended, we just don't get the coverage there."
Jim laughed, a short bark. "You know, it's nice to meet someone who doesn't know who I am for once. I'm surprised Daniel didn't warn you, though."
Dan was our mutual friend, although he and I could hardly be said to be best mates. He was someone it was convenient for me to know, and I was someone it was convenient for him to know, and that meant we were cordial and polite to each other, and he had tipped me off about the SFO probe. Some of the things we had done together bordered so closely on illegality that we had become bonded in a certain way, so maybe there is honour among thieves, after all.
"Is that where your business comes from, then?" I asked, aware that I was asking an indelicate question, but keen to get down to it.
"It's all kinds of things. I know a lot of people with a lot of money, and not all of them are sensible with it. Lots of dumb kids who got paid more than they ever imagined, nor know what to do with. So I help them out, make sure their money gets invested properly, that sort of thing. That's how I met Daniel."
"And it means there's lots of cash going in and out of your business, right? Lots of places you can hide a few thousand here and there and put it down to rounding?"
Jim nodded, with a sly smile. "Did Daniel tell you that, or did you work it out for yourself?"
"It's a fairly common racket for us, too. Harder these days with computers taking over, but it's still possible."
Back then, in the mid-eighties, we could get away with all sorts of little tricks, of course, and this was just one of them. Put through a several million dollar transfer and appear to be very upfront with paying your taxes, and you could hide tens of thousands in the numbers that no-one looked at. You had to be discreet, of course, and you could only move a certain amount at a time, but when you were moving hundreds of millions a year, it was very easy to hide quite a lot of money down beneath those zeroes.
"So, as I understand it, you need to bring in about twenty kay, is that right?"
I nodded. "Need to spend some cash under the radar. Need a few things before I settle down, get a job and pay some taxes."
"That much won't get you an apartment or anything. Mind if I ask what it's for?"
I paused, not sure how much to reveal. But then, I was asking him to trust me with his identity.
"It's for a car. And a road trip."
Jim didn't speak. He tilted his head to the side, took off his glasses and stared at me.
"A car? You're doing this for a car?"
I nodded, unsure of where this was going. Was he suggesting that the risk wasn't worth it for something so materialistic?
"What kind of car?"
"Er... I was thinking a Pontiac Firebird."
"The Trans Am?"
"Er. Yeah."
Jim suddenly grinned so widely that I thought the top of his head was going to fall off.
"I like it," he said. "I like it a lot. But it's not the best car right now."
"No?"
"No way. You want the Chevvy Camaro IROC. Hottest property if you like a muscle car."
"How much?" I asked.
"Fourteen. And I can get you one tomorrow, save you hanging around. What colour you want? Red, white?"
I looked at him. I had no idea whether that was a good offer or not, although I'd been warned to spend at least ten thousand on the kind of car I was after. It was only some time later that I found out I'd been overcharged a couple of thousand, but honestly it was worth it to save the hassle, and get me on my way quicker.
"Tell you what," he continued, "since I like you so much I'll waive your fee for the transfer if you buy the car. You'll be doing a friend of mine a favour. All above board, the five-o won't bother you."
It was my turn to smile. "I like a man who looks after his friends," I said, and reached out my hand. It was to turn out to be one of the most impactful handshakes of my entire life.
We chatted for a while longer, finding we had more in common than a stockbroker and a former NFL player might expect.
Just as we were finishing up, a hispanic pool boy came past, all smokey eyes and brooding features. He was undeniably handsome, somewhere in his late teens I would guess. His shorts were very tight.
Without his glasses in place, I saw Jim's eyes wandering. He snapped back to our conversation, but not without realising that I'd seen where his gaze went. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged slightly, and put a finger to his lips. I smiled, gave him a wink of understanding, and the bond between us was signed with his confession.
I was told to expect a call that evening. I stayed in the room at my motel, and ordered in some food. At the time this seemed a luxury, and one of the areas the US was well ahead of the UK. Routine food deliveries to your door still weren't commonplace back home.
The call came punctually at 7pm.
"It's agreed," said a voice I didn't recognise. "There's a party tomorrow night at 763 Portola Blvd. Be there at 10pm. Ask for Angela."
The line went dead in dramatic fashion, and I put down the receiver. It had all gone more smoothly than I had expected. I'd been warned that Jim was guarded, that it might take some time for him to agree to help me out, but we'd spoken for maybe twenty minutes, and now everything was sorted. I didn't even have to go to a dealership to get the car bought.
No longer tied to the phone, I went into town but was disappointed to find that little actually happened in LA unless you knew someone, and the only person I knew was an ex-football player whose number I didn't have. So I made my way back to the motel, and went to bed. So much for the start of my trip.
I woke the next morning in a far better mood, and went shopping. Primarily I wanted sunglasses, and some clothes that suited the weather. I had a little cash which I'd changed on my way over, and blew most of it at the shops, content in the knowledge that plenty more would be in my pocket by the end of the evening, along with my new car keys.
I did a few touristy things, because I knew myself, and as soon as I had the car I wouldn't want to hang around. I'd expected to be in the city for longer than this, but there was little left holding me here once I had transport, and the road was calling me. I spent a few confused hours watchings the Dodgers losing to the Chicago Cubs, and then it was suddenly time to make my way to the party.
The cab driver gave a low whistle when I gave him the address.
"You sure you're dressed for that neighbourhood, my man?" he asked.
I thought I looked pretty good in my new sunglasses and the last fashions, but clearly I hadn't come close to pulling it off. When we drew up outside the house, I understood what he meant.
Large gates blocked my entry, and a security guard stood impassively in front of them. Clearly he wasn't used to guests arriving in cabs, because he looked down his nose at me with undisguised disgust.
"I'm here to see Angela," I explained. He didn't move at first, but when I persisted in standing there staring at him, he finally relented. He stood back and fiddled with something by the gate. I expected it to be the controls to open them, but instead a phone receiver appeared in his hand.
"There's a man here says he's here to see Angela. You want me to get rid of him?" he growled into the phone.
A few moments passed as I became ever more uneasy, though I tried my best to appear at ease.
"Yeah, he's a limey," he went on. "No, he didn't give me his name. Yeah, I know. Right."
He returned to his position standing by the gate and said nothing to me.
"Er, should I wait then?" I asked, feeling very British and not at all like I fitted in. He didn't respond.
A moment later, a tall, blonde woman in her forties arrived at the gate. Like everyone else, she was immaculately tanned, immaculately dressed, immaculately coiffured. I realised immediately why the doorman had been so sneery. Compared to me, even he was better put together.
"Mister McNaught, thank you for coming. If you'll follow me," said the lady, who at this point I assumed must be `Angela'.
I followed her down the drive towards the house, from behind which came the hum of people having a nice time, drinking food and being generally better off than I was. It was the first time in a while I'd felt genuinely poor, and that was saying something given my recent dabbling in high finance.
As we rounded the side of the house, the pool came into view. I was struck by something strange - despite the relatively late hour, the occupants of the pool were exclusively young kids, all within a few years of their teens. Most were boys, but there were also a few girls in there. Adults were dotted around the outside, chatting and mingling as adults do, but what I appeared to have stumbled upon - confirmed by the table set up to one side loaded with presents - was in fact a kid's birthday party.
Angela caught the curious look in my eye.
"Oh, don't mind the kids. It's Jim's nephew's tenth birthday. We have them over later, when the heat dies down a bit. Means they can actually play outside."
"Oh, right, I see."
"What did you think was going on here, Mister McNaught? I think you've listened to too many weird tales about what happens in LA," she said, with a twinkle in her eye.
I have to admit, that's where my mind had gone. I'd read just such a story in Rolling Stone, or some such publication, about certain bands and underage girls in LA, and to be honest my mind had immediately gone there. Still, this did seem innocent enough.
Angela showed me into a room by the pool - was this the `pool house' I wondered - and there was Jim, chatting to a balding, middle aged man. When Angela notified him of my presence, he broke off and came straight over to me, beckoning me to follow.
"Sorry about the location, Zack. I just needed to be among plenty of people when I handed over the goods. Makes for good cover, you see."
At that moment, a young lad of about the right age to be Jim's nephew came running across to us, wearing very tight swim shorts, as was the style in those days. I admired his lithe little form as he came, especially the shapely bulge at the front where the wet material clung to his jewels. It was the first time I'd been so close to a nearly naked boy for longer than I care to mention. A sensation which had lain dormant for several years reared its head, and I fought down my feelings.
"Uncle Jim, this is the best party ever!" he piped, hugging his uncle. "Thank you so much!"
"Hey, it's alright Ricky. That's cool. You just go enjoy yourself now, I need to just get something I promised for this nice gentleman."
Ricky disappeared off, and we went on our way, entering the house by the side door. When he was sure we were alone, Jim spoke in hushed tones.
"That boy in five or ten years is going to break some hearts. But looking at you just now, I think he already did, huh?"
I gulped, not sure how to respond. I thought I'd been discreet, but apparently far from it.
"I was just surprised, that's all. I don't spend much time around kids. I don't really understand them."
"Lucky for the boys, eh?" Jim said with a laugh. "With your blue eyes and that accent, they'd be in trouble."
I blushed at being complimented by this bear of a man, and the feeling strengthened that here was a kindred spirit, perhaps one who was giving me decent treatment because he recognised a common interest, and a rare one at that.
"Of course, you ever touch Ricky and they won't find your body," he muttered, and I believed every word of it.
The keys to the car were in a safe in Jim's office, and he handed them over with some reverence.
"Got you the red one," he said. "Little boys will love it."
He sniggered, but not unkindly.
"The rest of your balance is in a holdall in the passenger side, under the seat. Six thousand in tens and twenties, none of it sequential. Paperwork for the car's in there, too. Registered to your name, under a business address of mine downtown. I'd appreciate if you could change that as soon as you have somewhere to call home, yes?"
I nodded, feeling slightly lightheaded at what was going on. Jetlag was well and truly a problem by now - my body hadn't quite adjusted, so I still thought it was the early hours of the morning. Add to that the enormity of the everyday laundering that had just gone down and I was left reeling. I allowed Jim to lead me down the path past the screaming kids in the pool, to the bottom of the property, where a gate let out onto a private road.
I could see the car immediately, gleaming under a streetlight. It was jaw dropping. The scale of it was bigger than anything in Europe, and the muscles it had bunched under its haunches promised some serious performance.
"She's all yours. Be safe now, y'hear? And if you come this way, look me up, yeah?"
I nodded mutely, and watched as Jim disappeared back through the gate with his hand raised, then turned back to the car.
Fuck. It was really happening.
The great thing about driving a brand new, powerful car in a country where they drive on the wrong side of the road, when you've only driven in that country once or twice, is that it immediately cures your jet lag. Adrenaline is the hands down the best cure for tiredness, though I knew I would crash extra hard later on.
The guy on the desk at the motel was thoroughly confused that I was leaving at about 11pm, and warned me several times that I wasn't going to get a refund for the extra nights I'd already paid for. Frankly, I couldn't give a fuck - I had my bright red muscle car, and it was time to hit the road.
I grabbed my bags from the room (I'd packed light into duffels not suitcases), and tried to put them in the boot - sorry, trunk - of the car. But for some reason in my sleep deprived state I couldn't work out how to open the damn thing, so instead I chucked them on the passenger seat. Perhaps not being able to operate part of the car should have been a warning sign that I was in no fit state to drive, but the buzz I was feeling was akin to a decent speed trip, and I wasn't about to start making sensible decisions.
I roared out of town, found a freeway heading east, and set off into the night.
I was woken by a loud rap on my window. I went from deep sleep to wide awake in an instant, and came face to face with a burly looking dude with a thick moustache and a stained mechanic's shirt with Mike on the pocket.
"No sleeping here!" he bellowed through the window, pointing at a sign a little way off that would have been impossible to see in the dark. Mike shook his head and pointed off to one side, where trucks were parked up in ranks. "Over there would be OK."
I nodded, and put my hand up to thank him for the helpful information. Mike wandered off, still shaking his head at my idiocy.
It was just before 8am according to my watch, but I had no idea where I was. I wound the seat back upright, and looked around properly. This was, I would guess, a service station - sorry, rest area - somewhere along whatever highway I'd taken. There were no signs that I could see indicating where on Earth I might have ended up. My mouth was dry, and I desperately needed a piss. Luckily, the diner across the tarmac - asphalt - was already open.
I must not have looked like too much more of an alien species than the average early morning visitor to the diner, because for once no-one commented on my appearance, or even my accent. I was seated in a booth, poured coffee even though I didn't know I wanted it (which, it turned out, I was wrong about), and left there to ponder how spectacularly I'd screwed up.
I ate pancakes with far too much maple syrup, tipped far too heavily this time, and wandered back out to the car feeling considerably more human. I was almost all the way back to the brooding red menace when I realised that I still didn't have a clue where I was.
I backtracked and found the gas station, and bought myself a map. The rather pretty girl behind the counter who was almost visibly aroused by my accent helped me find the little dot that was Cactus City.
Fuck. Cactus City, on the I10 towards Arizona. It didn't feel right. Not having a plan for which way I would wander meant that there was no such thing as a wrong turn, but heading so far south straight away just felt like a mistake. I don't really have anything logical against Arizona, but I knew I had to either turn back or find somewhere to head north. What's more I was, I estimated, about 150 miles from where I started. I wondered what time I'd finally arrived at this rest area, and how exhausted I must have been to have no recollection of the journey from LA.
I went back to the car, laid out the map on the boot - fuck, sorry, the trunk - and started to think through my options.
That's when I heard the knocking, and the desperate cries for help.
I knew immediately that there was someone in the trunk - sorry, the boot. There was no other option, the fucking map had moved when they hammered against the lid. I threw the map to the floor, and bent down to examine the lock. Fuck, it needed the key. Why had I imagined in the night that the car had central locking? Even the fanciest cars back in Europe were still only beginning to have that. Why would this wonderful but basically engineered lump of American metal be so sophisticated? I rammed my hand into my pocket for the keys, dropped them on the floor, fumbled with the lock, and finally popped open the lid.
He was tiny. A fucking kid! No more than ten or eleven. Skinny as hell with a mass of blonde locks.
He was scared shitless, and from what I could smell in the boot had pissed himself during the night. He was too weak to get himself out, so I ended up helping him. His dry, cracked lips hung permanently open. There were bruises on his forearms where he'd been banging on the inside of the car.
I lowered him to the ground, leaning against the car, and grabbed one of the Cokes I'd bought when I went back for the map. He gulped greedily at the can, then retched slightly, then took more.
After a few minutes the sugar and the caffeine in the drink did its work, and his eyes started to focus again.
"Thank you." His voice was a hoarse whisper, high pitched by gravelly.
"Are you OK? How long were you in there?"
"I'm `k. Think so, anyhow. You're the Brit, right?"
Well, the accent gave away my Britishness, but the Brit? I had to get to the bottom of this. But first, he needed to get out of the heat of the sun. I helped him to his feet, and around to the passenger side. He leant on the already scalding hot metal and winced. I opened the passenger door and hauled out my bags, throwing them to the floor. Then I helped him into the passenger seat, only remembering once he was seated that his clothes were damp with urine. Oh well, that's one of the benefits of a leather interior, I suppose.
I stowed my luggage where it ought to have been in the first place, then ran around and joined him in the car, so that I could get it fired up and start the air con.
Thank God for decent American air conditioning in cars. Even back then it was amazing how quickly the cabin cooled down, bringing more life back into the tiny little sliver of boy sat next to me. As the degrees dropped, he sipped his coke and I looked him over.
I lowered my age estimate a bit, to nine or ten, although I was as terrible a judge of boys' ages then as I am now; I discovered later on that purely by chance I was about right. He was so thin he almost looked emaciated, and his ears were too big for him. Other than that, though, he was just about one of the most attractive boys I'd ever seen. He was dressed in a pair of cut-off Levis and a very faded black t-shirt with the Queen logo on the front. The state of the clothing suggested that he wasn't one of the rich kids from the party, at least.
He drained the Coke, burped, giggled and then looked at me. The mirth drained from his face.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. Tears were pooling in the corners of his eyes. "I didn't meant to mess things up for you."
"Why were you in the trunk? Did someone put you there?"
He shook his head. "I got in myself. I had to get away."
"From what? Am I going to have the police hunting me down assuming I've kidnapped you?"
He shook his head frantically, eyes wide open. "I don't think anyone's going to come looking for me."
"How come? No, wait. Let's get a few things straightened out. What's your name?"
"Cody."
"Right, Cody. I'm going to look after you until we can get the police out here to take you back to LA."
He turned to me with genuine terror in his eyes. "No, don't make me go back. Please don't. I'll run away if you make me!"
"What's so bad about the police? And what are you running away from?"
He was crying now; not sobbing, but sitting there with tears running down his face.
"It's my step-dad," he said, trying - and failing - to keep his voice from cracking. "He's.. he's not nice. He's the one you bought this car from. Not Jim, he's just Joe's friend. Joe sells these cars. Everyone thinks he's nice but he's not."
"OK, but surely your mum will be missing you?"
He shook his head, sadly. "Mom does stuff. You know, drugs and stuff. Takes it up her nose."
"Cocaine."
"Yeah, that one. She doesn't care about me anymore, she only cares about the drugs. And Joe helps her get 'em and he does 'em with her. And then they beat on me, or kick me outta the house while they party. And my mom won't let me go to my dad, all because we... he..."
That was too much for Cody. He broke into uncontrollable sobs, burying his face in his hands.
I exhaled loudly, and stared out of the windscreen at the parched brown hills which counted for scenery around Cactus City. I knew without a doubt that the right thing to do was to involve the authorities and get Cody taken back to LA. It wasn't my problem to get involved in the rights and wrongs of the kid's upbringing. I'd tell them about the lines of coke the mother was apparently doing, and leave it up to them to sort it out. They could find Cody's real dad, and reunite them, for all I cared.
Except... well, there was definitely something dodgy going on with how I'd acquired the car, and I didn't really want that looked at in too much detail. Nor did I want any questions asked about where I came by the money to pay for it. As soon as they asked how Cody had come to be in the car with me, it would lead back to Joe, and to Jim. No, I couldn't bring that house of cards tumbling down and expect to get away with it.
Besides, the kid was damned cute, and didn't deserve what would probably happen to him in state care. After my mum died, and my dad went to prison, I spent two years as a ward of the state before I aged out of the system, and it was for many reasons the worst two years of my life. At least part of that was down to the way I was treated by the care system. I didn't know whether the American situation was that bad, but I really didn't feel like making Cody find out.
Shit, I was going to have to do something very stupid instead.
"Cody?"
He looked over at me, still snuffling, blinking the tears out of his eyes. I'd grabbed a couple of extra napkins from breakfast in case I needed them, and handed him one to noisily empty the contents of his nose into.
When he was done, he said, "Yes?"
Fucking hell. There was hope in his eyes. I think he knew I had folded.
"Do you know where you father lives?"
He nodded. "He sent me a letter on the holidays. Mom didn't see it so she could't keep it from me. He's in Connecticut. I have his address."
"Sorry, that's in the east, isn't it? I don't really know."
"Do you have that map?"
I grabbed the now crumpled map from behind my seat, where I'd shoved it in a hurry.
"You shouldn't do that to maps," he admonished me when he saw it, smoothing out the creases.
"Sorry! I didn't really have much choice. I had to shift it quickly to get you out of the trunk!"
He grinned sheepishly at me. "Oh, yeah. Sorry."
Having smoothed out the map, Cody carefully re-folded it for me, with the state marked CT front and centre.
"Jesus, that's a long way, isn't it?" I said.
He nodded, looking glum.
"It's way too far, isn't it?"
Suddenly, it occurred to me what had happened. Perhaps I should have realised sooner, but I'm not always the sharpest.
"You were trying to get to him, weren't you?"
He nodded, looking down at his lap, where his fingers were intertwined.
"I was going to hitch-hike my way across. Or hide. I don't know. I thought I could do it."
"Why the trunk of my car, though?"
"I heard Jim talking to Joe about it. He said he had this mad British guy who wanted a car quick, and he would pay more than it was worth just so he didn't have to wait, because he wanted to get going on some road trip all the way across country. So I thought if I could get in there and hide maybe you wouldn't find me until we got to the other side."
"How long did you think it would take?"
He shrugged. "I dunno. Like, a day or two?"
"And you didn't take any food, or water, or anything?"
He shook his head, downcast.
"It's OK," I said, trying to be as gentle as I could. "it's just that I was planning to take about a month over the journey. Not a couple of days. I'm not even sure it's possible to drive that far in two days. It must take close to a week even in a hurry. And I'd've found you sooner if I'd managed to work out how to open the trunk before I left."
He managed a slight smile at that. "Good thing you didn't, then."
I smiled ruefully, and shook my head.
I looked at the map a little longer before making up my mind.
"We're going west, back to Palm Springs. It's only a short way back along the road. There's bound to be somewhere we can stay there, and get you cleaned up. And I need to get some proper sleep tonight and think about things. I was going to head back west a way anyway, and then take a road north a bit before I went east."
"I'm not in any hurry, y'know. It's summer vacation right now. I don't want you to miss your road trip because of me. Unless you don't wanna have me around."
I looked across at him, wondering if he had any clue how good he was at making me feel guilty.
"Let's just get to a motel, get you showered and get some sleep, OK? After that, we'll work out what to do next."
It was easy enough to find a motel on the edge of town with the two most basic requirements we had: external chalets to avoid scrutiny, and a pool for Cody to play in, which was his one and only request.
It was only mid morning, but we were both exhausted, me from being in the car so late the previous night, and Cody from lack of sleep while he was trapped inside the trunk. I was only glad that he didn't appear to be showing any other ill effects from his confinement.
I booked us in, then went back to the car to drive it around to the chalet. I handed the key to Cody and went to get our bags. Watching him as he walked up to the door peaked my interest; he had a wonderful, tight little bum, clearly outlined in his closely fitting jeans. I paused for a moment with the lid of the trunk open, one hand resting on the bare metal, as I observed him. When he managed to get the door open, he turned back to se where I was, and caught me looking. A tiny from creased his forehead, and I guiltily looked away.
His bag was tiny compared to mine, and couldn't have held much. When he turned it out on one of the beds, there was hardly anything in there - a couple of pairs of very worn underpants, another black t-shirt, this time with Black Sabbath on the front, and another pair of jeans, though these ones had escaped the scissors and went all the way to the ankle. It was a pitiful collection, especially given that none of it looked new. Also in the back was a little flip book album with the familiar Kodak K on the front, and the remains of a teddy bear. Both were clearly precious to him, as he scooped them up and put them straight into he bag, shooting me a warning with his eyes as he did so.
"You shower first," I said, keen to get his unpleasant smelling clothes off him. "There's a laundry service here, we can get your stuff cleaned tonight. We'd better go out, too, and get you some more to wear. There's no way there's enough here."
He gave me a sullen look, as if I'd suggested something truly appalling, but complied. I'd expected him to go into the bathroom before getting undressed, but instead the t-shirt and the shorts came off right there in front of me, leaving a skinny little thing clad only in a pair of bright red briefs, which clung so closely to his body that I could easily imagine how big `little Cody' was. He scowled at my attention, but then poked his backside out at me as he went past, giving it a shake and giggling when he saw the surprise on my face.
I listened to him showering as I lay on the other bed, mulling over the insanity of what had happened. The correct course of action was obvious, but then there were so many arguments in favour of doing the stupid thing. One thing my lawyer back in the UK had said was don't compound one slightly illegal thing with another, much more illegal one, just because you think you're already in too deep. And yet here I was about to do that. I'd heard of rules about transporting minors over state lines for illegal purposes, and though at that moment I had no intention of doing anything wrong with Cody, there was still that lurch in the pit of my stomach when I saw him. I was already past mild interest, and well on the way to having a serious crush on him. And that was before we'd even spent any time together! I really hoped he would turn out to be obnoxious, so it was easier not to fall for him. It wasn't a lot to hang my hat on.
It was so clear that I should have taken him back to LA, handed him into the cops and let it play out that way. But questions would be asked. How had he come to be in my trunk? How had I come by the car? Did I have a bill of sale? No, it was far too dangerous to me personally to take him home, and far too dangerous to keep him with me. What I had to decide was which risk I'd rather take.
He came out of the shower before I'd really come to any solid conclusions about what we were going to do next. He was wrapped in a towel, and went to raid his pile of clothes for some new ones. I thought he might go back into the bathroom to change, and perhaps he would have done if he'd not turned around and given me a questioning look. I didn't have a clue what the query was, but I knew one thing - it was far too soon for me to see him naked and have any hope of not molesting him, and so I did the only thing I could think of.
"I'm going for a shower!" I almost shouted, grabbing some clean boxers and shorts from my duffel, and disappearing into the bathroom before the towel had a chance to drop.
I really did have to insist that Cody got some new clothes, so once we were both dressed I drove us through town to the nearest big store, a Target. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen in the UK; all our shops were smaller, lower, more specific in what they sold. I'd never seen such a - what I considered - weird selection of items for sale. At one point, there were barbecues for sale next to golf clubs, and the overwhelming scale of the place made it feel like we were shopping in an aircraft hangar.
Eventually we found boys' clothes, but it was a case of the blind leading the blind. I had no practical parenting experience, and Cody was just a kid, so between us we didn't have an inherent understanding of what constituted a proper wardrobe. There we were in the middle of the shop debating in all seriousness how many pairs of pants he might need.
As we were discussing which type of swimsuit might suit him - I preferred a Speedo, but Cody was set on a pair of less revealing trunks - his brow creased.
"Why are you buying all the stuff?" he asked. "I mean, thanks, but why?"
"Because you need clothes."
"But if I'm going back to LA, I can go home and there are more clothes there. I mean, they're not nice like these, but I'm not your problem, right?"
He was right, of course. I hadn't told him - or possibly even admitted it to myself - but I was going to take him to Connecticut.
"Well, maybe going back there isn't the right thing for you right now."
"That means you're going to take me to my dad, doesn't it?" he gasped. The hope was clear in his voice.
"I suppose so," I shrugged, and before I knew it I had a small, happy-crying boy wrapped around me, his arms clamping mine to my sides.
A woman passing by commented, "I wish my son was that grateful for getting new clothes!"
All I could do was nod and smile.
"I think it might be a good idea if you tried some of this on," I said, in a desperate attempt to distract him. He peeled himself off me and nodded, wiping a tear from the corner his eye with the back of one hand.
We found the changing rooms, and though I would love to report that he insisted that I follow him in to `help' him, nothing of the sort happened. Instead I hovered outside, not really sure what to do with myself.
I was half way through an in-depth study of the benefits of a propane grill (they definitely knew how to target the `husbands and fathers' demographic with that product placement...) when I heard a rather timid, "Um, Zack?"
I peered around the corner, and standing outside one of the changing rooms was a little piece of boy heaven. Cody was wearing very short and tight fitting white tennis shorts, with a red and blue stripe down the side, and an equally snug-fitting green t-shirt with a collar. He was the epitome of 1980s cute boy fashion, and damn it suited him. He ought to have been modelling, looking like that. He blushed and looked down at himself.
"Is it OK?"
"Wow, Cody, it's more than OK. You look amazing!"
He looked up at me, though his head stayed bowed; it gave the effect of being more than a little coquettish.
"I like it, too. Mom would never have bought me things like these. She liked dark clothes, y'know. Can we really get them?"
"Yep, and anything else you like, as long as it fits."
He smiled, and turned back into the cubicle.
As I turned back to the grill - four individual burners! - I smiled too. It felt good to spoil him. Frankly, it felt good to have anyone to spoil at all. I'd been so wrapped up in the pursuit of money for so long that I hadn't realised what I was missing. I'd also been alone long enough to forget what `family' felt like, but all of a sudden it came flooding back. I found myself thinking of my mother and father before it all went wrong; dad hadn't exactly been father of the year before he killed mum, but for a good long time they were happy together. Or at least seemed happy. Who knows what was going on under the surface?
I was almost sold on the grill when Cody emerged. He was in his old clothes again, but had a handful of new stuff. It looked very small compared to the pile he'd gone in with.
"Oh, don't worry, these are just the ones I don't want," he said, when he saw the concern on my face.
It seemed that at least part of his upbringing had gone well, as he went and personally put everything back despite there being racks to leave things on. Only then did he go back and get everything he'd tried on, and dumped it into the cart alongside a few others things I'd spotted along the way. He gave me a big smile and another hug, and we wandered towards the tills. Sorry, checkouts.
Back at the motel, I was treated to a little fashion show, as Cody showed me outfit after outfit, looking hotter and hotter in each one. For his grande finale he disappeared into the bathroom with a slim sliver of fabric, and a few moments later reappeared in the tight little Speedo I'd suggested for him, but which he'd rejected.
They were light blue, and had a tri-colour stripe across them, front and back, on the diagonal. The stripe was primary red, blue and yellow, and the overall effect was mesmerising. They enhanced what Cody had in front, and showed off the perfection of his tight, skinny bum at the back. In every way they set off his natural beauty, and I was left quite stunned.
"Are they OK?" he asked, twisting his hips back and forth.
"They're..." I tried, with a croak. "They're amazing. They really suit you."
"Thanks," he whispered, looking down once more, the blush back in his cheeks.
"I thought you didn't like those," I suggested.
"Well, not as much as the others. But I saw how much you liked them and I wanted to do something nice for you, so I got these as well as the others. You said I could have what I wanted."
"Yeah, that's right, I did," I smiled. I must have missed them among the big pile of clothes we'd put through the till. "I'm glad you took me at my word."
"Well, I thought maybe because you wanted to see me in them..."
He trailed off, and the blush renewed in his cheeks. Then he looked up at me and the smile was replaced slowly by a frown.
"Zack, how come you can afford to do this?" he asked, timidly. "You're not..."
"Not what?"
"You're not a criminal like my step-dad are you?"
Well, that wasn't a straightforward question. I didn't think of myself as criminal, even though some of the things I'd done with money were extremely shady. I hadn't hurt anyone, though, and I suppose that's what really mattered.
"I'm fairly well off, I suppose," I told him. It was true - by average standards I was quite wealthy. Not enough to keep on living the life I had before the crash, but if I was frugal and invested sensibly I could conceivably retire in my twenties.
"But are you like my step-dad?"
There was a pleasing look in his eyes. I had to do something to reassure him.
"I'm a stock-broker, Cody. It means I make quite a lot of money when I'm working. I'm on holiday now, and I don't have anything else to spend my money on."
"Don't you have a wife or girlfriend or something?" he asked, for once looking me right in the eye. He wanted the truth.
"No. Don't want one, either."
"Me neither," he said, with some vehemence. "So... why are you being so nice to me?" he asked.
I think he realised even then that my interest in him wasn't pure. Yes, of course I cared that he was alright, it's merely human to think that way. But it was more than that, and I think he was coming to realise that my affection for him also had a dark side.
"Come on, get changed or put something over the top of that, we need to get something to eat."
By the look on Cody's face, he knew full well that I was avoiding the question in case he didn't like the answer. And that meant he probably had an idea of his own.
I lay on a lounger in the shade of a parasol, ostensibly reading a book while Cody played in the motel's pool. In reality, I was splitting my time between watching him and wondering what the fucking hell I was doing.
It was libido, pure and simple. Nothing about what I'd done to this point could be explained away unless you took into account the fact that I'd had my head turned by the boy. Small for his age, pretty features, very slender, blonde hair and blue eyes. There could be no doubt that I had fallen for him, and that the decisions I was making had been badly affected by it. It was madness to take him across the country to find his father. Wasn't it?
Blue lights flashed on the inside of my eyelids. I rolled to the side and came suddenly awake as adrenaline was released into my bloodstream. I leaped out of bed and strode over to the window, expecting to see a squad of cars outside, and the door of our room in imminent danger of being smashed down.
We were in fact surrounded, but it wasn't our room that held their attention. A SWAT officer approached the window and put his hand up, shouting, "Stay inside!"
I nodded, and decided that I would definitely comply. All the fun had definitely already happened. Someone was being led away in cuffs, wearing not a lot.
Cody joined me at the window, yawning loudly. I looked down at him, dressed in nothing but the briefs he wore to bed. It was too hot for anything else, and the aircon in the room wasn't up to the job of keeping us cool.
The show was over pretty quickly, and Cody and I made our way back to our beds. I watched him climbing into his, wishing that I could be joining him. For a moment I thought I might have a wank after I was sure he was asleep, but as I lay there I was overcome with concern about the police. They hadn't been after me, but it still didn't feel comfortable having them outside the room.
Before I fell asleep, I made my decision. The next day, we were moving on.
I'd spent some time the day before studying the map, so I at least had a plan. It wasn't a direct flight across the country to Connecticut, even though that made the most sense if I wanted to keep Cody out of the system and get him into his father's hands as soon as possible. Something was stopping me, though. Why didn't I just race across the continent as quickly as possible? After all, I had the car for the job, right?
But that wasn't the plan. Instead, I was meandering a little, taking the less direct route, following some of the quieter, more traditional roads. I was having my road trip, even though so much had changed. And in the first instance, we were driving west, away from our destination. I wanted to head north a little way, so that when I cut across country I was headed for Kansas. I had no solid reason to go that way, but for some reason - perhaps it was the Wizard of Oz? - I'd always wanted to travel through Kansas.
We roared out of Palm Springs on the highway, with the roof off and the wind whipping at our hair. Cody giggled manically each time I floored the throttle; the engine growled as we surged forward, and the whole car buzzed with barely constrained mechanical fury. It was the first time I saw him genuinely enjoying life. I repeated the acceleration over and over until he could barely breathe from giggling. I caught myself smiling at the purity of his joy.
Should I say purity? Alongside his infectious grin I also noticed his hand squeezing at the bulge in his shorts. Our eyes met and there was a lost, hungry look in his, as if he was caught suddenly in a feeling that he couldn't explain and couldn't control.
More than ever, the car felt like an excellent investment.
Cody looked the other way, out of his side window, and didn't turn back for quite some time.
We stopped at a roadside diner somewhere in the scorched land that lay around the San Bernadino forest. The heat of the day was unbearable, even travelling with the wind buffeting us, so we decided to have an early lunch and stay inside for a while.
It was every bit the traditional diner - I expected to find a gaggle of young boys at the bar drinking soda, but of course it was just two middle aged men in John Deere caps.
A waitress who'd clearly been at the diner since it heydey - possibly never missing a shift in the intervening thirty years - showed us to a table in one corner of the empty room with a warm smile, and handed us menus. Her name tag read `Mabel'.
"So, what brings you to us today?" she asked.
I wanted to make some kind of snarky response given the obvious answer to the question, but then realised that mean-spirited sarcasm wasn't the order of the day. Instead, I went for a tiny bit of honesty mixed with a healthy dollop of utter crap.
"My nephew and I are just passing through," I replied.
And Cody chimed in with, "We're on a road trip, to my dad's place."
I smiled indulgently, like I hoped an uncle might. "I don't get over here from England much, so we're making a trip of it."
"Oh, that's so lovely," Mabel gushed. "And such a fancy car, too."
"Actually, I hired it," I lied, easily. "Isn't it amazing what you can get from Hertz these days?"
Mabel nodded, and left us to make our choices.
"She totally believed you," Cody said as he turned back to me, having been staring out at the parking lot and our fire engine red Camaro. "Why did you lie to her?"
I stared at him a moment, astonished that he was so naive.
"What do you think people will think if they know you're no relation, that I just found you hiding in the boot of my car and decided to drive you thousands of miles across the country to find your dad, who might or might not even be where you think he is?"
Cody's brow creased. "The boot? What's that?"
"It's what we call the trunk in Britain, OK? But that's not important right now."
Cody shrugged, apparently of the opinion that it might very well be important, but he wasn't going to argue the point.
"I think they'll think you kidnapped me," he said, with some relish, "and that you're going to do the nasty with me, then kill me and bury the body in the desert."
From the mouths of ten year old boys! I wondered what films he'd been watching to get that line.
"You don't even know what that means," I accused, and was instantly rebuffed.
"Yes I do! It means to have sex."
The last word was said in a whisper, very self-consciously. Cody gave me no hint whether or not he thought that's what I wanted, but it made me wonder why he thought I was doing all this for him. Maybe he was expecting that would be the payment for our trip. If he was thinking that way, what must he have gone through in his short life? For me, the very idea had been firmly shoved into the box labelled "Unattainable Fantasies".
"I'm not sure you even know what that means, especially for two guys," I teased him.
His mouth dropped open, his response dying on his lips. "Do so," he murmured.
"Don't worry, I'm not going to make you do anything like that," I smiled.
Cody shook his head, as if disbelieving.
We ordered big, greasy burgers with fries, an enormous chocolate milkshake for Cody, and a Coke so large for me that I hoped there were plenty of rest stops along the way so I could piss it all out again. All of it was delivered by Mabel, who would give us a soppy little look as if she'd entirely bought our cover story - and why shouldn't she? - and was simply thrilled at how wonderful an uncle I was.
Cody tucked in enthusiastically, occasionally burping prodigiously, which made us both laugh. Very little was said until we were sated, but then Cody asked something which set into motion a huge shift in the dynamic of our relationship.
"You do want to do it with me, don't you," he accused. He seemed surprised at his own voice, as if he didn't think he would have the courage to speak up.
I tried to brush it off. "Don't know what you're talking about."
"Yeah, you do. In bed stuff. Grown up stuff."
"I... look, Cody, I'm not going to do anything you don't want, and I don't want to worry you. I'm not going to molest you or anything."
"But you wanna, right? I saw the way you looked at my in my Speedo. You're one of those weird old men they talk about. Except you're not old, or weird."
There was no point denying it any further.
"Yes. I like the way you look. You're beautiful Cody. I'm a horrible, weird old man. But I promise you I won't do those things to you."
"Why?"
"What do you mean, `why'?" I demanded. "I'm not some kind of monster, you know."
"No, I know," he said lightly, with the hint of a smile on his lips. "If you were gonna, you would have done it when I came outta the bathroom in that Speedo!"
There was a glint in his eye. He knew he had me figured out, and he was gleefully playing with me.
"But I didn't," I protested.
If I hoped that proved anything to him, I was quickly disappointed.
"What would you do, if I let you?" he asked, barely suppressing a giggle. I knew now that he was fining this exciting, a bit scary perhaps. The laughter was covering his nerves.
Deciding I'd had enough of him having the upper hand, I thought I might freak him out. While he seductively (I chose to believe accidentally) sucked on his straw, I lowered my voice and went into graphic detail about how I would make love to him.
"Well, first we would lie down together on the bed, naked. Maybe we've just had a shower, and your hair's wet, and so is mine. So, we lie down facing each other. I reach across and push a stray lock of hair away from your face, tucking it behind your ear. You'd shiver at the contact, and goosebumps would pop up along your arm.
"Then, I'd smile and lean in to kiss you, and for a few moments that's all we'd do, kissing gently, just with our lips. Lots of little kisses. Then I'd put my hand on your waist, gently touching the soft, smooth skin there, and then slowly moving it, lifting off until only my fingertips touch your skin, trailing them around, touching your butt, and your hip, and your tummy.
"Then I'd push your hip to turn you onto your back. Still kissing you, I would run my hand up to your nipples, playing with them until they were hard, gently caressing them with my fingers. I would lift my lips from yours, kissing your neck, your ear, your chest, until I was kissing your nipple, making it even harder. While I alternated between your nipples, my hand would be drifting slowly down your firm tummy until I grasped your dick in my hand. I would slowly rub your dick while I returned to kiss your lips. When you started getting too sensitive to rub with my hand, I would kiss my way down your body, moving to lie between your legs. Facing you, making sure we made eye contact, I would lower my mouth onto your dick, letting my soft, hot lips pleasure you, sucking and sliding it in and out.
"I'd make you get there before we did anything else. It wouldn't be the last orgasm you had, but I would make sure it was the best. I would suck you until you couldn't cope with the pleasure anymore, and then take you over the edge.
"That's when I would really start to make love to you. I would roll you away from me, and spoon up to you, until my hard dick settled between the cheeks of your ass. You would feel it there - big, hard, long, hot, soft-skinned, dripping with precum. I would reach down between us and push the tip in to the crack of your ass, spreading around my natural lubricant, which would start to do its magic, easing open your hole. The whole time, I would be kissing your ear and your neck, and holding you close to me with my other arm.
"You would be so worked up that you let me in willingly, pushing back on my manhood as you feel it stretching you deliciously, intense but intensely pleasurable. It would fill you slowly, until there was no room for more. Then, I would clasp you to me as I slowly made love to your backside. My hand would rub your boyhood back into life, and I would jerk you off as I gently fucked you, until you reached your second peak. The feeling of your asshole squeeing as you came would finally send me over the edge, and I would gently bite your ear lobe as I filled you up.
How does that sound?"
A forgotten drip of chocolate shake slid down the straw oh so slowly. Cody stared at me open-mouthed, his cheeks aflame.
"I need to go visit the bathroom," he whispered, and was gone. I checked ever so carefully for signs of an erection as he left, but he moved too quickly for me to be sure.
And I just sat there, hoping he wasn't trying to escape through the bathroom window...
He was quiet in the car. At least he'd come back, I suppose, but he wouldn't meet my eye.
I couldn't blame him. It was a stupid thing to do, but I was being driven to distraction by his sexiness. I know for most people that's hard to understand about a ten year old boy, but my God he oozed sexuality. Dripped it, exuded it. I kept getting knocked for six by little vignettes. His smooth, nut brown calves. The neat bulge in his crotch, tending towards prominence. The narrowness of his hips in contrast with the breadth of his shoulders. The curve of his neck as it blended into his shoulder.
I looked over at him as we cruised down the highway. He stared out at the passing scenery, his arm on the sill of the window even though it was a little high for him. He was trying to act cool; he didn't really need to try.
He didn't say anything until we pulled into the next motel, and I had driven us around to our room. He looked around at our accommodation, and wandered inside with his bag, throwing it on the floor and sitting down heavily on the bed.
When I'd followed him in with my bags and closed the door, he finally spoke.
"Zack?"
It was barely above a whisper. A little murmur, with a creased brow.
"Yes?"
My heart pounded. Was he about to tell me that he didn't want to continue with the journey? I would gladly take him back to LA if he asked, I'd already decided that.
"Those things you talked about, do you really wanna do those?"
"Well, no, because I would only want to do them with you if you wanted to do them with me, and I think that's pretty unlikely."
"If it wasn't, though. If it wasn't unlikely, if I did actually wanna do them, would you wanna do them with me?"
I sighed. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said what I said, it wasn't fair to you."
He looked up at me, and there was a new-found strength in his gaze. "You didn't answer the question."
"Yes. Yes, if you wanted to do all those things, or even some of them, it would be the most amazing thing in the world for me, Cody. I like boys like you. I think you're hot, OK? In fact, beyond hot. Maybe the hottest boy I've ever seen. I'm sorry, it's weird, I'm weird, but it's the truth."
He blushed, and looked down.
"Maybe it's not that weird," he muttered. "If other people do it."
Cody swam, and I watched. He was wearing the Speedo this time.
"Because you like it," he said over his shoulder as I watched his backside leaving via the door, wrapped in satiny soft material. He smiled back at me, too, though I nearly missed it, given the clear and obvious distraction.
I followed him to the pool several minutes later, having sorted out my own particular issues in the bathroom. He wasn't the only one in the pool; there was another boy around his age, and Cody had already struck up a conversation. He dripped his way across the concrete towards me a little later, and sat sideways on the lounger to my right, under the shade of a parasol.
"Do you think he's hot," he whispered to me, nodding to his friend.
I didn't really know what to make of the question. Something had very much changed in Cody as a result of our conversation about `doing the nasty', as he liked to say. He had become brazen in his sexuality, making suggestive comments, and sticking out his pert backside to distract me at every possible occasion. I wasn't sure I liked how overt he was being about it, but then he was still young, and was probably processing a tonne of emotions that he really wasn't ready to deal with yet. On top of that, I couldn't forget the fact that he was going across the country in the company of a complete stranger, in hopes of finding his father. Things were bound to be getting a bit freaky in his head.
"I think you're way hotter," I whispered back, in all honesty. His friend was a plain looking boy with a terrible bowl haircut, and if I was being very critical, not a very pretty face. I wouldn't have risked everything for him in the way that I was already prepared to do for Cody.
"He grabbed my dick, you know," Cody confided. "I don't know why. He just smiled at me, and he did it again a little bit later. You think wants to do the nasty with me?"
I shrugged. "He probably just wants to compare, you know, see who has the biggest."
"Oh, that's me," Cody said, confidently.
I raised an eyebrow. "Oh yes? Got a big one, do you?"
"Massive!" he laughed, holding his hands about a foot apart, and promptly dived back into the pool.
Perhaps I should have asked how he knew his dick was bigger than his new friend's...
After the pool, he showered to take off the chlorine, and I followed suit afterwards, to rid myself of the layer of dried sweat all over my body.
When I emerged from the bathroom, he was still lying on his bed on his towel, but it was open at the back, and for the first time I was treated to a full length view of his naked back side. His shoulder blades were pronounced peaks, as he lay watching TV with his chin cupped in his hands. The little knobbles of his spine cleaved his back, and at their base the most wondrous treasure, the gentle slope up to his pert rear end. His bum was everything I knew it would be - small, tight, not too bulbous but rounded enough to fit the palm nicely, if I ever had the chance. Its hillocks blended seamlessly into his upper legs, making an uninterrupted wave from the nape of his neck to the backs of his knees.
I realised I had stopped, and was staring. I saw his eyes flicker my way momentarily, and then return to the TV screen. He wanted to know that I'd seen, without making it apparent that he was checking. At some point when I was messing around with the clothes in my bag I turned back to find that he was sitting up with briefs on, which had appeared as if by magic.
I was left wondering if he really meant to show me anything at all.
Despite the growing trust between Cody and I there was still a little niggle in the back of my mind. It was nothing so much to do with him, as it was the absence of him. From LA, and his mother.
Had he been missed, or was his mother as detached from reality as Cody insisted? It just didn't seem plausible to me that she wouldn't have noticed his absence. But would she have reported it?
My only contact in LA was Jim, and it was because of my dealings with him that Cody had come to be in my trunk in the first place, in a roundabout way. It made sense to at least ring him, and I had an excuse worked out.
The payphone in the lobby was busy, so I changed a few notes for quarters at the desk, and wandered across the street to find another. The sun beat down strongly from above, and I was sweating before I even reached the phone. But at least it was working. Hoping that I'd remembered Jim's number properly, I dropped in a quarter and dialled.
"Zack, how's it going?" Jim bellowed down the phone, when he realised it was me.
"I'm good, Jim. Made it all the way to Phoenix already," I lied.
"Oh, that's not very far," Jim laughed. "What's taking you so long?"
"I'm not in that much of a hurry, really. Just taking it slowly, enjoying myself."
"So, what can I do for you?"
"I just wanted to check everything had gone correctly with the conclusion of our business."
"Oh, that. Yes, it's fine and dandy. You owe me nothing."
"Great, thanks."
"Oh, man, I almost forgot," Jim said. It sounded a little staged, and I started to worry.
"What?"
"Well, the car I helped you buy. The guy who sold it has been hauled in on drug charges. Nothing that should affect you, I don't know why the cops would be interested in a legitimate customer of his, but maybe keep your head down, yeah?"
"Oh, right. Is everything OK with you? It doesn't affect you does it?"
"No, not really. The cops quizzed me as a known associate, but I explained that his son, Cody, and my nephew were school friends until last year, that's how I know him. Funny thing, after they called me his wife rang, asking if I could help."
"What, help get the guy out of jail?"
"No, she wanted something else. She said her boy had gone missing. She said he'd done it before, and he always came back, but this time he'd left a letter saying he was going to hitch all the way to Connecticut to find his dad or something. She doesn't think his dad is actually there, but the boy's convinced that he is."
"So she wanted you to help find him? Didn't she call the police?"
"She's convinced he'll come back, and she doesn't want the authorities involved in case they take him away. She had some mad idea that he might be hiding in our house after coming to my nephew's party. I told her that wasn't right - he was here that night, but he went home with his step dad, he certainly wasn't in my closet. Then she just put the phone down and I haven't heard from her since. I don't suppose he hid in the trunk of your car or anything stupid like that, did he?"
"Well, if he had I would surely have bought him back, right?" I asked, hoping the laugh I tacked onto the end sounded more authentic than it felt.
"Yeah, sure," Jim drawled. "Of course. Look, Zack, just take care and keep your head down, y'hear? And when you decide where you're going to settle down, let me know. I like you, and we have more in common than I have with most people I come across, if you know what I mean. I'll set you up with some work if you need it. And I can sort out all sorts of other unusual paperwork."
"Thanks, Jim. Take care."
"Yeah, you too, Zack. And say `hi' to Cody for me," Jim chuckled. "I have a feeling you two will have fun together."
The line went dead.
My blood froze.
Jim wouldn't shop me, would he? No, I was sure he wouldn't. But he certainly had me by the balls, if that's what he wanted. He'd accurately guessed that Cody was with me, and if he wanted to blackmail me it would be easy.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that Jim was more than likely on my side. He might not be quite so perverted in his desires as I was, but an admirer of boys is an admirer of boys, whether their interest is in peewee baseball players or country club pool boys. We were kindred spirits.
And then there was that last line. `... you two will have fun together.' What did he mean by that?
Not to mention the matter of Cody's increasingly obvious flirting. After the incident on the bed after his shower, he'd started showing other signs of acting out. While we waited in line at McDonald's later that day, for instance, he pushed himself back into me, and gave a little moan with his eyes closed as he leant his head back on my chest. It could easily have passed as the actions of an affectionate father and son, but of course we were nothing of the sort.
But despite all that, the honest truth is that he had shown no concrete sign of wanting to take things any further with me. And we were only on our fifth day together - what was I doing overthinking things like this? Once again I had gone too far and read too much into the situation.
The facts were simple - Cody was a young boy who had been starved of attention, and who was suffering through a pretty traumatic period in his life. He had found someone willing to care for and pay attention to him, and he was latching onto that person. Me.
He needed me not to indulge my fantasies. I committed right there and then to do the right thing by him. If only I'd realised how little I really understood.
The road stretched away from us to the horizon in a straight line, undulating over hills and disappearing into the distance in a shimmering haze. We drove with the roof panels out, and from time to time Cody would stretch his hands high into the sky to feel the air rushing through his fingers. He rarely sat still, wriggling and squirming, fiddling with the radio to find the local rock station, stretching and yawning as if he hadn't slept well, which was the opposite of the truth. He was cat-like at times. He wore a tight shirt and the shortest shorts, which only served to enhance what they were intended to hide, and his mop of white blonde hair was barely held in check by the blue and white trucker-style baseball cap he wore, with a palm tree silhouette design on the front. He'd asked for (and received, of course) a pair of sunglasses similar to my own, and wore them continually. Every time I looked at him, it struck me that I had probably never been in the presence of a more stunningly attractive boy.
Cody was one of those boys who cannot leave their package alone, either. He was constantly touching it, tugging, scratching, rearranging. I didn't mind, of course, other than the fact it was quite distracting.
We ploughed on through the afternoon. Cody was bored of the long drive well before we stopped for the day, but I had a destination in mind. A guidebook at our last overnight stop had recommended a motel next to a waterpark, and I intended to give him a day or two to have some fun, while I did some sightseeing. On a previous trip to the States I had spent some time in a waterpark with the family of a friend from university. Their two young girls held no interest for me, but the trip to the park had opened my eyes to a world of boys, and I longed to re-acquaint myself with the sights on offer. I was almost salivating thinking about all the young boys in their Speedos and tight-fitting trunks, a sight which regretfully in the modern world has vanished in favour of more modest board shorts.
We were destined not to make the journey in one go, however. What had seemed an open road and an easy drive quickly soured when we reached a road block and a diversion. I pulled up when stopped by a Highway patrolman, and had a sudden jangle of nerves as he approached the car, desperately praying that Cody's mother had indeed avoided going to the police over his disappearance.
"Road's closed, sir," the patrolman slurred as he came to the window. I noticed his eyes slide across from me to Cody, who was disinterestedly looking out of the passenger window in the other direction. Something fleeting passed across the young man's face - whether it was concern about what the boy was doing in the car with a man clearly not old enough to be his father, or whether instead it was the same sort of feeling I had when I saw Cody in those particular shorts I don't know - but then he proceeded to tell me to take the turning to the right, and head off the interstate along a more local highway.
I thanked him briefly, and followed his lead, just wanting to be away from the law as quickly as possible. When we were on our way, Cody turned to me and illustrated that he was more perceptive than I had given him credit for.
"You think he was gonna stop us `cause I'm in the car with you?" he asked, a slight smile curling one corner of his mouth.
I shrugged. "It crossed my mind that he might be interested in why you're in my car. I mean, we don't look a lot alike, and I'd've been about sixteen when you were born, so it's not that likely I'm your dad."
"Dunno," he replied with an ironic leer, "where I'm from that's kinda old to be starting a family."
"Well, older than you are, at any rate," I quipped back, and he frowned.
"How do you know I couldn't get someone pregnant?"
"Because you're ten. You don't even have any hair around your dick, your balls almost certainly haven't dropped and there's no way you can shoot."
"I can too shoot! My step-dad showed me how!"
Well, that pulled me up short. "Sorry?"
"He took me out back with his gun, and he showed me how to load it and aim it and everything. See, told you I can shoot."
It took a little while for me to stop laughing. Cody looked furious.
"What's so funny?" he demanded.
"Um, Cody, that's not what I meant by shooting."
"Oh. Then, what did you mean?"
And so I spent the next few miles as we wandered along a weaving country road explaining a little of the mechanics of things to him. When we were done, his face showed such a mixture of emotions that I wondered which was going to come out on top.
"So, when you talked about filling me up at the diner, you meant with your sperms?"
I was surprised he had remembered that part and put two and two together, but he was right.
"Yep."
"That. Is. Gross."
"It's not that bad. It's not enough to actually fill you up or anything. It's not like it would start coming out the top, through your nose."
He guffawed at that, laughing until he could barely breathe. Apparently my crass humour is considered funny by little boys.
"Seriously, though," I continued, once he'd calmed a bit, "there's not very much of it. You could swallow it in one gulp."
"Swallow it‽"
"Yeah, swallow it. Some people like to do that after they've sucked someone off."
"That's a blowjob, right?" he asked.
"Yeah, that's right."
"So if you suck my dick and I shoot my sperm in your mouth you'll swallow it."
"Well, like I said, you can't shoot yet, can you?"
"Ugh, fine!" he said, exasperated. "But if I could, you would?"
"Yeah, I suppose so."
"That's so weird."
"It shows you love someone, though. Or that you just like the taste!"
Cody stuck out his tongue and shook his head. "No way!"
It didn't surprise me one bit that he wasn't keen on the idea. The first time I ever gave another boy a blowjob I was reluctant to put his dick in my mouth, but wanted to follow through with it because I thought (in my own naive, twelve year old way) that I was in love. By the second or third time I was growing increasingly keen on the sucking element, and even wanted to see what semen tasted like. Luckily my introduction to the world of cum was the watery, salty-sweet emission of a fourteen year old I was madly in love with.
All this talk was making me horny as hell, and my full bladder wasn't helping, so as soon as we saw a truck stop I pulled in and announced my need. I wasn't going to go and wank off, but I thought going for a piss and changing the scenery might just keep me sane until I had some real privacy later.
To my surprise, Cody followed me straight into the men's room. Until now, he'd always gone in separately to me, presumably because he felt shy. My heart was pounding so hard in my head that I could barely hear, and I had a swimming feeling. There was no doubt about it, Cody would have to take his dick out to pee, and there was every chance that unless he went to great pains to hide it, I would finally see that most sacred morsel of flesh.
If he had been shy before, Cody had certainly overcome his timidity. He unbuttoned and unzipped his shorts and pulled the fly wide open. His briefs he shoved down below his balls and his dick, leaving nothing hidden. He knew exactly what he was doing - as he pissed, he made a point of twisting his hips a little my way. Then, he looked up and caught my eye with a grin. He was showing off to me, pure and simple.
I stared. I could do nothing else. I took in every contour. Uncut; unusual for the States, but just like mine. It looked big on him - there was a certain heft to it. Thin blue veins on the side. Balls which hung down in the heat but hadn't dropped. Scar down his ball sack was bright pink, a contrast to the general lack of colour across his whole midriff. Light blonde fuzz around his pubis, like the fur on his arms and the back of his neck; not pubes, but where hair would follow later. Pink tinge to the entrance to his foreskin, and a slight ridge at the back of his glans, but not so that it stood out unduly.
I wanted to worship it. I wanted to kneel there in the piss beneath the urinals and devote myself to the everlasting love of his penis. It was a glorious conclusion to the creation of the perfect boy. He could not have had a finer specimen - longer, shorter, thicker or thinner, cut, haired, with bulging veins, all these would have ruined this most perfect object. A little larger than expected, maybe, but all the more thrilling for that. The penis of a young boy still several years shy of puberty, so that its larger-than-normal size was a gift, not the early onset of something more prosaic. What would it look like hard? Would that long pucker of foreskin retract behind the head, or remain as a hood covering the most sensitive part? How much would it grow - already three inches I guess, so would it become four, five, even six? That would be truly prodigious! But it hardly mattered, because in that moment what I cared for more than anything else in the world was that I had seen it.
And, as the shock of the sight of it wore off, it occurred to me that there are two sides to every coin. My dick had been out, too, and Cody had taken a good long look to satisfy his curiosity. Long after we'd both finished we remained standing there, staring, until the door banged open and with a hurried laugh we both put away and zipped up.
He kept stealing glances across at me. Every few minutes I would feel his eyes, and look at him, and he would turn away and look out of the window without saying a word. I started to get paranoid.
"What‽" I demanded on about the fifth occasion.
"Nothing," he responded.
"No, come on. You keep looking across. What is it?"
"It's just... you know on the end of your thing, there's extra skin?"
"It's normal, all boys are born that way," I responded.
"But none of the guys I know look like that."
He looked close to tears.
"Well, where I'm from most men and boys still have their skin. You'd be totally normal there."
"My step-dad said it was disgusting. I heard him talking to my mom. He said he wanted to have it cut off. My dad's is like mine, though. He's from Europe."
"Well, that's pretty wrong of your step-dad to say. There's nothing disgusting about it. Yeah, maybe you have to make sure you're cleaning it every day, but even if you're cut you should kind of be keeping it clean, right? No-one want to play with a stinky dick."
That made Cody giggle, which was a relief.
"So, you thought mine looked OK then?"
"You saw me looking?" I asked. I had already worked out that he'd seen me - after all, I was certain that he'd deliberately showed me, and then made sure I looked - but we hadn't actually spoken of it, as such.
"Yeah, I mean you were totally staring at it! I don't mind. You can look at if you like."
And with that, he started fiddling with his zip. I knew I should have stopped him. I knew it was wrong to let him carry on, but I'm only human, for fuck's sake!
I had to look at the road, to negotiate a couple of sweeping bends. When I looked back, Cody had one hand tugging the waistband of his briefs down below his balls, and the finger and thumb of the other tugging upwards at the much smaller overhang of foreskin which capped his now raging stiff penis.
We nearly crashed.
I took my eyes off the road for far too long and it was only because of Cody's sudden intake of breath that I realised that my attention was entirely in the wrong place. I stamped on the brakes and hauled us to a halt in a cloud of tyre smoke. The nose of the Camaro was perilously close to the crash barrier on the outside of a corner, with nothing but thin air on the other side.
I looked across at Cody, whose face was flushed and whose erection had entirely wilted.
"Maybe I should put it away," he breathed.
I nodded, not quite able to speak, and reversed us away from death.
"We're not used to seeing people from all over the world," Shareen said, as she turned away from me to pull a key off the hook behind the desk. "From England, y'say?"
"Yes, I'm over visiting my brother and his family."
"On your own?"
"No, I have my nephew with me. I'm treating him to a road trip. I don't get to see him as often as I'd like."
"And that's your car out there?"
"Well, no, I hired it. They hire out some amazing cars these days, eh?"
Shareen's eyes narrowed. I just knew she wasn't going to buy it, and trouble was coming. My heart started to thump in my chest, and I went a little lightheaded.
"You ask me, there's nothing amazing about a Chevy. Had nothin' but trouble with mine. But if you're enjoying it, that's what matters. Well," she continued, brightening up significantly, "you and your nephew have a lovely stay with us, and give me a bell if you need anything, I'm here all evening."
I thanked her, and walked back out into the heat of the evening as my heart rate slowly subsided.
The sun was heading rapidly towards the horizon, and flies hung in whirling clouds in the golden light. The Camaro sat low to the ground, its pillar-box paintwork lightly covered in dust. Its passenger seat was occupied with four feet of the most gorgeous boy for miles around, who sat in his sunglasses staring around at the scenery, looking effortlessly cool.
"At least the air con's been on," I said as we entered our room for the night. I hadn't been able to get us a twin, so there we were with a king size double bed. Cody looked at it with a slight frown.
"It's OK, I really don't mind being in the same bed as you."
He didn't sound like he really believed it, but it was kind of him to be understanding.
"Well, tomorrow we'll get on the road early and get to that waterpark I promised. Sorry, Cody, if it wasn't for the diversion we would have got further tonight, and these out of the way places don't have a lot of choice. At least this one had a room; I was sure we would have found somewhere at the last town, but at least we ate."
He shrugged. "Prolly didn't help that I nearly made you crash, huh?"
I laughed, though it really wasn't funny at all.
"Yeah, maybe don't show me your dick while we're driving along."
"And at other times?" he asked, with a laugh. His hand had wandered to the fly on his shorts. I just shook my head in disbelief.
All of a sudden, I felt a closeness between us that I had only seen in glimpses before. It prompted me to ask,
"Cody, why is it that you trust me?"
He frowned, and cocked his head to the side, seemingly confused that I would even ask.
"I don't know. Maybe it's `cause you were really nice to me when you found me in your trunk. You could've shouted at me and all, but instead you were nice. You just seem like a nice guy."
"Even after I told you what I would do to you if I had the chance?"
"Even then," he shrugged. "I guess `cause you said you'd never do it if I didn't want. Like, you want to badly, but you won't. If that was my step-dad and he wanted to do something, he wouldn't care, he would just do it."
"Have you been round guys like me before? You know, who like boys."
Cody grinned, and nodded. "Everyone knows about Pervy Pete down on 113th. Some of the boys even go there to get their dicks sucked. He pays you five dollars just to sit there while he sucks you off."
"And have you ever gone there?"
He wrinkled his nose. "No way! I mean, yeah, I wouldn't mind getting my dick sucked, but he's gross, all fat and hairy and he smells bad. And there's Mr Halliday at the school, he lost his job because he got caught lookin' at the boys after gym class, you know, in the showers. But then I heard from my friend's cousin that he's working at their school now in the next district, and he still looks at the boys in the shower, but that school doesn't mind."
Idly, I wondered where this school was in LA that didn't mind its staff watching the boys in the shower, but then I realised that even if I knew I wasn't really in a position to be applying for a job there...
"Oh, I forgot!" Cody exclaimed, cutting across my train of thought. "There was the guy in the bathroom at the truck stop earlier today. He was a total perv!"
It took me a moment to realise he was talking about me, and when he saw it, he grinned at me, then squealed as I leapt for him, ready to pin him down and tickle him for his crimes.
For a frantic five minutes I chased him around and about the room, over the bed and back again, until finally, breathless, I pinned him to the bed by his wrists, and sat on his hips. I smiled down at him triumphantly, resisting his wriggling, unmoved by his demands to be set free.
When he finally settled, I realised that I was sitting in his lap, and even through my clothes I could feel the lump in his shorts. He pushed it up into me again, but this time forcefully, insistently.
I leaned down and brought my face close to his. He looked intently into my eyes, his expression unreadable.
"Do you trust me?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Can I kiss you?"
Another nod.
I leaned in, twisting my head to the side. Cody's eyes closed moments before my lips met his.
It was electric. His hot, soft lips responded to my caress, and for a few, heavenly moments we were locked together. I ground my backside into the lump in his shorts, then shifted so that my own confined excitement could rub against his. When I pulled away his lips hung open, and Cody was left breathless. It was much more than I could ever have hoped for.
"Want to find out what you're missing at Pervy Pete's?" I whispered.
With a lazy nod, Cody consented. He licked his lips and blinked slowly.
I knelt on the floor, while he lay cross-wise on the bed with his legs dangling. I still remember the sensation of the cheap carpet on my bare knees as I slowly lowered his shorts and briefs, and the smell of the detergent used on the bed sheets. Cody had an arm over his face, nose buried in the crook of his elbow as he breathed hard. I could see his pulse in his neck as his excitement rose.
For a moment I simply regarded it: his rock-hard boyhood was a healthy four inches long, if not more. It looked out of proportion on his slender body. The head was hidden behind a pink-tinged pucker of foreskin, with its rim clearly outlined beneath the thin, blue-veined skin. It stood at forty-five degrees, pointing up toward his face, but so painfully tense that it held itself clear of his body.
I reached out a hand and touched it first, amazed at the smoothness of the skin, and the softness of it, a thin covering over a steel-hard shaft beneath. Cody shuddered at the touch, and made a little whimpering sound, but there was a smile on his lips. I peeled back his foreskin, which came away easily, and drank in the sight of his glossy purple helmet, a stark contrast to the pale hues of his shaft, and the pink ring of skin bunched behind the head.
It started there, with the delicate touch of the very tip of my tongue to his exposed frenulum. Cody jumped at the sensation, then relaxed. Another touch, another little jerk of his hips, but then he settled. My lips on his exposed helmet were too much, so I covered it over, and let my tongue play at the entrance to his puckered foreskin. This he much preferred, and soon his hips were pushing up at me insistently.
Young boys should always be teased a little when you're sucking them off. It heightens the sensations, bring their horniness to the fore, makes their eventual release so much more desperate, and so much more powerful. I pushed his hips down, preventing him from humping my face, and went to work slowly. At first, on only the first inch of his shaft, then a little more. Then, with my lips locked on his skin I lowered my mouth all the way to the root, until my nose was pressed into his rock hard abdomen.
He cried out in surprise at the intensity of the sensation, then made an unintelligible half growl, half moan in the back of his throat, an animalistic sound that spoke of hunger, of desire, of need.
Teasing should only be taken so far, of course. I applied suction, and lifted my head slowly until only the tip of his dick was in my mouth, with my lips wrapped around just behind the flare. Cody gasped and arched his back.
I took him to the root again, feeling the very tip touching the back of my tongue and the roof of my mouth, before backing off. My tongue-tip wriggled its way inside his foreskin; there was a slaty tang there I hadn't expected. Then back to the root again, drawing forth another unintelligible groan.
Some boys cum quick, others take their time. Cody was on a hair trigger. Maybe he'd been horny all day. I hadn't sucked for nearly long enough to enjoy myself before he suddenly pushed himself up on his elbows with a frantic look in his eyes, and hunched his hips into my face. His head fell back, and his upper body collapsed back onto the bed with a massive expulsion of breath as his orgasm hit. His dick kicked one, twice, thrice in my mouth, and then quivered with aftershocks for some time after.
I didn't want to let it go, to relinquish the exquisite morsel of flesh, but Cody's dick was rapidly wilting and oversensitive. I pulled off, leaving it fat but flaccid across his hip, glistening with my saliva. It twitched a couple more times, then lay still. I moved up to lie next to Cody on the bed, and he grabbed me into a hug, rolling his body into mine, nuzzling his face into the crook of my neck. I held him gently, rubbing his back, as he came down.
A few minutes later he snored gently. I rolled him away from me, pulled back the covers, and put him to bed naked.
I woke with a sweaty, naked boy snuggled into my side. I'd decided that although he was unclothed, perhaps it would be better if I had something on, so I was wearing boxers at least. But acres of our skin was touching, and it was a deeply erotic sensation. For so long I'd dreamed of a physical relationship with a boy, and waking up next to one having sucked him off the night before was every bit as wonderful as I had hoped.
He stirred, and stretched, and pushed the sheets of us both with his feet, feeling the heat already. His dick was limp, but still looked large against his narrow hips. I couldn't believe how beautiful it was - everything about it was perfect, and I wanted nothing more than to have it in my mouth again. But I needed to be fair to Cody, and couldn't just go at it while he slept. He lay with his arms up, hands over his head on the pillow. Everything about him was perfect, head to toe.
White blonde hair. A little pug nose with a smattering of faint freckles. Long, blonde lashes, behind which I knew were deep blue eyes. A soft pink bow of a mouth, a gentle curve to his jaw. The tendons of his neck making a beautiful little cup at the juncture of his collarbones. An undeveloped chest, two faint pink nipples stretched by his languid posture. Utterly bare underarms, ribs which stood out beneath a light brown tan. An innie bellybutton, also stretched to an oval, just like his nipples. The clear line where his tan stopped and - were he wearing them - his swimming trunks started. Such pale skin beyond, focused towards the perfection of his boyhood. Below that, the smooth curve of his thighs, his scabbed knees - a pre-requisite for all young boys, surely - and the lightly blonde-furred sticks of his shins. Then, finally, his feet, with his perfect little toes.
Jesus wept, he was perfection.
And he was naked in bed with me.
He ate well. More than well. Sex had given him an appetite. I wondered what he would be if we actually went all the way, or if perhaps we went at it all evening. Maybe both! He would have eaten the diner dry.
As it was, he polished off an adult-sized plate of pancakes and maple syrup, with bacon, then looked slightly guilty at me and burped loudly. That set off a fit of the giggles, and I was reminded that as sexy as he was, he was all boy.
Which is exactly how I liked it.
We passed over the state border into Colorado, and the Rockies stretched out ahead of us. In midsummer they were clad in green, rolling slopes giving way to steeper hills and crags, and eventually the peaks, which even now were occasionally clad with white.
Cody lolled in the passenger seat as we drove, often with a hand out of the side of the car, or hanging on to the edge of the roof where the panel had been removed.
It hadn't rained on us more than a couple of times as we drove through Nevada and Utah, but now as we neared the hills and the geography got properly wrinkly for the first time the heat of the summer days led to thunderstorms in the afternoon and evening. Several times we had to pull over by the side of the road and rush out to get the panels on as the heavens opened, laughing as we were inevitably soaked to the skin. On one occasion, Cody was so wet that he stripped off everything, underpants and all, and rode along with me naked as the day he was born. Thank goodness the roof was on and the windows up, because at least then it was harder for people to see in.
Cody had shed his inhibitions after that first night I'd taken him into my mouth, as if he'd simply been waiting for the opportunity to do so. He slept in my bed by preference, so I'd started asking for a double rather than a twin, and keeping him well out of sight of the motel staff. He also slept naked by preference, and so I'd started to do the same, and although nothing more had happened between us it was only a matter of time.
That next chance came when we were high in the Rockies, following a twisting and winding set of roads and resolutely failing to make progress. We'd stopped at a pretty small place, with a steak house attached. The place was fairly heaving, but there was one room left at the motel and one table left in the restaurant. It seemed to be destiny.
That night, I decided to have a beer or two with our meal, something I didn't often do. I ordered root beer for Cody, but when it came I could see him eyeing my drink.
"I'm pretty sure that first of all it's illegal for me to give you this, and secondly it's just a bad idea."
"Wouldn't be the worst thing you've done since LA," he said airily, watching for my reaction. Thank God the place was buzzing and we couldn't have been overheard.
I scowled at him. "No, but that was behind closed doors! This is very much public."
"Go on, please! I'll hide it. No-one will know."
I looked around. The truth was, I rather liked the idea of giving him a sip or two. I had the feeling it might loosen him up, and that might lead to more fun. The morality of that was questionable but let's be fair, I'd already gone well past the point that I could be expected to make sound ethical judgements.
"Go on, then," I said, scanning the room again to keep an eye out. We were in a really secluded corner and the only other table nearby was occupied by a picture perfect family. Perhaps because I enjoyed rebelling against that benign, standard family unit - mum, dad, little girl with pigtails, young boy with his plaid shirt tucked into his docker trousers - I felt even more encouraged to do wrong.
Cody took my permission and ran with it, and half the bottle disappeared into him before I could stop him. For a kid not used to drinking - and waif-like as he was - that was a lot of alcohol.
He made a face at the taste and burped loudly, then grinned at me.
"See?" he said. "I'm not drunk!"
No, I thought, not yet.
Cody was inebriated. Not massively, not so that he swerved all over the place as we walked around the corner to the motel, but enough that it was obvious to me that he'd been affected. His eyelids drooped and his words were slurred.
He collapsed sideways across the bed, with his arms outstretched and a silly smile on his face. If I didn't know better, I would say he was pretending, but he really had drunk the beer. He looked at me looking down at him, then with a grin he pushed his shorts and underpants down to his knees.
"Suck it!" he giggled, and then when he saw my arched eyebrow, added, "pleeeease!"
I shook my head. "That's not how it goes."
"How does it go, then?" he frowned.
"Well, I'm not just here to be your sex slave."
He giggled at that.
"If you want me to suck you off," I continued, "we both have to enjoy it. It can't just be what you want, when you want it."
Comprehension dawned on his face, and he sat up.
"OK," he murmured, and without hesitation reached out, placing his hand on my fly.
"Cody, that's not quite what I meant. You don't have to do that."
His hand didn't leave the growing lump in my pants, but his eyes flicked up to mine.
"I wanna."
I shivered as a surge of excitement radiated from my groin. His wide blue eyes stared into mine, and the truth couldn't be hidden. He held my gaze for several, long seconds more, then it fell to my crotch. His hands worked on my zip, then the button of my fly, and then my shorts were puddled around my ankles. Gently, he pulled the waistband of my boxers away from my body, then extracted my hard dick. Holding it in one hand, he divested me of my underpants with the other, and then sat there looking at what he had found.
"It's not as big as in the porno I watched," he said meditatively. "I sucked my friend's brother's one once," he added, softly.
He leaned forward and without hesitation took the head of my dick in his mouth. His lips were the hottest, softest thing I had ever felt in my life, and my dick jumped, oozing precum into his mouth. He pulled back slowly, squeezing my foreskin with his lips, extracting my salty fluids. His tongue passed over his lips, cleaning up what hadn't gone into his mouth.
He leaned back and looked up at me.
"Can we take off our clothes and get on the bed?" he asked.
Without answering, I ripped off everything I had left on. Cody followed suit, and as I lay down on the bed with my head on the pillows he crawled on all fours to my side, leaning in to kiss me gently on the lips.
"Mmm, I didn't think I would like doing that, but it's cool," he reflected. Then he shuffled down the bed until he was level with my waist and took my rigid member in one hand. He was quick to return his mouth to the tip, sucking gently as he pushed himself as far as he could onto my dick. He could take nearly half of it, and though I'm hardly well-endowed, that was still some skill for a boy his age.
His hot, wet, suckling mouth took me to heaven. I looked down the length of my body to the mop of blonde hair tickling the skin at my waist. Somewhere beneath there Cody had sole ownership of my dick, and he was giving me the most wonderful head I'd ever had. His slender back was arched over as he knelt, and even the knobbles of his spine looked beautiful.
He sucked a little harder, then pulled free, looking up at me. His throat moved as he swallowed, then his mouth fell open and he breathed hard. His eyes were so full of lust that instantly I came, groaning with the intensity of the orgasm, the strongest I could remember. Cody's hand was clamped around my shaft as I came - he seemed frozen in place, watching in fascination as volley after volley of semen arced up into the air and splattered onto my chest and stomach.
"Holy crap, you shot a lot!" Cody said after a moment of stunned silence. We both burst out laughing and he fell back onto the bed, his stiff little dick pointing to the sky.
"Imma get you some towels or something," he said, rolling off the best. Still in my post orgasmic haze, I felt a lurch from my groin as I watched his tight little bum wiggle off in the direction of the bathroom, and a little extra spurt joined those already painted across my abdomen.
He came back with a massive wad of toilet tissue, and between us we managed to get me wiped down enough that I could at least stand up without dripping on the floor.
"I think I need a shower before we do anything else," I said. "Are you coming in with me?"
Cody grinned, and pointed down to the stiff little stick at his waist.
"Now will you suck it?"
"What would you call this bit of America?" I asked Cody, as we descended through the hills a couple of days later. The sun was out, the roof was off, and Cody had his bare feet up on the door as we drove along, with one arm supporting his head, and the other casually buried in his pants.
"We're in Colorado, dummy," he said with a grin.
"Yeah, I know that. I mean, it's not the east coast, or the west coast. It's not the southern states, so what is it?"
"I dunno. The middle bit?"
"Middleland. I'm going to call it Middleland."
"You're weird," Cody said idly. He didn't seem to consider it a judgement.
"I'm definitely weird," I admitted. "Totally. I mean, only a real weirdo would have woken you up by sucking you off this morning."
Cody looked backwards over his head at me. "That wasn't weird," he breathed. "That was amaaazing."
And the fumbling in his pants intensified.
I loved watching Cody cum.
It was the same every time - face flushed crimson, eyes squeezed shut, the hint of pain on his face, breath in short pants from his open mouth, and at the very last a moan stifled by lips clamped shut. It was more intense in every way than my own, perhaps because as you might expect it was totally dry. Cody could make a decent quantity of precum, but when it came to the big event he was firing blanks.
I came to enjoy the different ways I could get him off. He loved being held from behind while I reached around and wanked him off, better still if we were naked so that he could feel my hard manhood pressing into him. He would writhe and wriggle, delighting in teasing my dick in the soft, shallow valley of his bum.
He also liked to lie propped up on pillows so that he could watch as I sucked him off, lying between his legs. He enjoyed holding the hair on the back of my head in his fists and humping my face as he reached his peak. When I did him like that I would tease his hole with my fingertip; it was always hot, damp and soft. I wondered how easy it would be to penetrate him with something a little bigger; he never complained about the fingertip, but he didn't ask for it, either.
Showers were more fun together. Slippery skin felt wonderful, and I loved the basic intimacy of doing something as simple as washing Cody's slim body, running my hands along his limbs, across his torso, through his hair. It didn't always lead to one of us kneeling in the spray sucking off the other.
By the time we had reached the halfway point on our journey, Cody and I were having some form of sex every other day, and each time it happened he became more confident, and his nervousness subsided that little bit further.
Cody regarded the woven bracelet on his wrist, and then looked across at mine. Matching light blue cord, matching jet black stone with a hole through the middle, threaded on. He smiled warmly at me, and gently touched the stone with a probing finger.
"It's really cool," he breathed. "What does it mean that they're the same?"
I shrugged. "Doesn't have to mean anything much. Just that I like being with you, on this trip. It's a memento."
"I like it too. Being here with you, I mean. I was so scared when you opened the trunk and found me, but I'm so happy now. I haven't been happy like this since my dad was still around."
"How old were you when he went?"
"About six, I think. He and my mom hadn't been living together before that, though. I don't really remember my dad living with us, but mom said he used to. But she kicked him out, and then a few years back his job made him move, and she wouldn't let me go with him. I hated her for that."
"I'm sure she thought it would be best for you to stay with her."
Cody shrugged. "She just hated dad. I don't know why. When you meet him, you'll like him, I'm sure of it."
Cody looked up at me from the passenger seat as we reversed out of the parking bay in front of the diner. We'd gone in for pancakes, and then had a risky trip to the gents to get mutual relief for unexpected sexual tension. Cody had squeaked his way through an orgasm in my mouth, then helped me splatter my load into the toilet bowl with his elfin fingers.
"How much longer do you think it will be before we get to Connecticut?" he asked.
I shrugged, having genuinely no idea.
"Do you think I can send a letter to my dad to let him know I'm coming?"
I looked across at him. He was looking particularly androgynous that morning: tight shorts and a t-shirt which clung to him. Long, blonde hair tied up, and his feet up on the dashboard so that any sign of the boyhood at the junction of his legs was hidden in the folds of his clothing. Somehow the idea that he might have been boy or girl made him more desirable. Of course, I knew which he was - the taste of his dick still lingered on my tongue.
"I'm not sure, Cody. Thinking about it, I guess I don't see the harm in it. As long as you don't tell him about certain things."
"What, like the fact you stuck your finger right up my butt while you sucked my dick this morning?" he giggled.
I laughed, but it wasn't exactly amusing. "How about you leave out all mention of me entirely? I don't want him sending out the cops after us because his son's out there in a car with a pervert."
"He wouldn't mind what we do," Cody said. "That was one of the things mom used to get mad about, even after he was gone. She said he was too... uh, I don't remember the word. Beings with `per'."
"Perverted?" I asked, only half serious.
"No, silly! Another word. Perm..."
"Permissive?"
"Yeah, I think so... She said he had all these weird ideas about walking around without your clothes on and getting into bed with people, and I wasn't to listen to him about any of them."
"Your dad sounds pretty cool."
"I told you! You'll like him, I promise."
Before I let Cody write a letter to his dad, I decided to call Jim again.
"Damn, Zack, it's all gone south here," he growled down the line. "You and I are in the the clear - I think - but Cody's mother is in jail on prostitution and pimping charges, and his step-dad's with the narcs. Turns out is was more than just a little intent to supply, he'd been running coke for half the producers in Hollywood. Best keep your head down. How's the boy, by the way? Bedded him yet?"
I ignored the crude question, mostly because I didn't want to admit that the answer was `yes, very much so'.
"I'm going to get Cody to his father in the next couple of weeks. I've got no idea how things work here legally, though."
"Well, as long as you're out of the picture and Cody never tells the family court how he managed to get from east to west, I reckon you're in the clear. If not, some real questions are going to be asked about what the hell you were doing with him, and what took so long, and as much as he promises you with those big blue eyes of his that he'll never tell, the police are definitely going to make him, no matter what they have to put him through to get the confession. As for his father, any half decent lawyer will get him custody given the mother's record. If she's still in jail, the father has automatic rights, I think, but it's interstate so it might be tricky."
I thanked him and hung up, and went to try to work out how to break it to Cody.
"Yes!" he shouted, punching the air. "Really?"
"I take it you're not upset, then."
"I'm not," Cody said, vehemently. "She was nasty to me. At least my dad loves me."
"Yeah, on that... this letter you want to send to him. If you're sure you want to, you can. The thing is, if you mention anything about your mother's arrest in the letter, but mail it from here, and then someone finds out about it that's not you or your dad, then they'll know you were here but had contact with someone in LA, which could get the people in LA in trouble. Just keep it simple, tell him that things got real bad with your mum, that you had to run away because she was beating you, and that you'll be with him soon, and you're safe. OK?"
Cody shrugged. "Well, it's the truth, ain't it?"
I nodded. It pretty much was.
Cody sat in McDonald's with his Happy Meal getting cold while he leaned over a postcard, with the pen that had mysteriously appeared in the glovebox of the Camaro. He looked cute as hell with his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. His hair was tied back with a bandana, but a few strands had escaped and occasionally he would tuck one behind his ear as it fell in front of his face. He was very carefully writing his message to his father; writing was something which seemed to take a lot of effort for him.
He seemed a lot lighter after the card had been dropped in the mail box, as if a dark mood had been lifted. He sat humming in the passenger seat as we crossed endless miles of flat Kansas. He took the same delight I did in the enormous skies, and the huge, dangerous clouds that built up over the plains. All three days we were in the state we were treated to spectacular thunderstorms in the late afternoon, though none of the twisters Kansas is infamous for. As we drove we would watch the clouds mounting up in the sky and then place bets on when we'd see the first flash of lightning, and hear the first drops of rain smashing into the Camaro's bodywork.
We stopped a day in Wichita just because it reminded me of the Glen Campbell song, and found a water park where Cody convinced me to don my shorts and join him on the slides. Reticent at first, I quickly overcame my resistance when I saw just how many boys' bums I could look at. They were everywhere, especially when queueing on the stairs up to the slides, and I found myself getting ever more aroused.
"Were going to have to get out of here so I can do something really bad to you," I whispered in Cody's ear at one point.
He gave me a shocked look, and then giggled.
"Why don't we just do it in the shower stalls?" he asked, blushing.
The truth was, I had considered it, but dismissed it because of the inherent danger of getting caught. But now Cody had suggested it, I became more convinced of the idea. Who would stop a father and son showering together? I practically dragged him from the pool and into the changing rooms.
"In here," I said, finding the most out-of-the-way cubicle at the end of a row, right up against the wall. I shoved a giggling, wide-eyed Cody in ahead of me, squeezed past the door and locked it behind me.
"Come here."
I could hear the lust in my own voice. Low, breathy, commanding.
I lifted Cody, supporting his with hands beneath his bum as he leaned in to kiss me. We went at it passionately for several minutes; with my hands on his backside I ground him into my stomach, feeling his boyhood grow until it was a stiff spike between us, pushing up the material of his trunks. I dropped him to the floor and he stood on tiptoes to push them down and off, craning his neck so that our lips still touched. When he was done, I knelt in front of him and without pause took him into my mouth. With the tiles of the shower floor imprinting themselves on my knees, I sucked him off rapidly and with ever-growing lust. His hands curled into fists in my hair as he fucked my face, as desperate as I was for the release, as turned on as I was by the situation.
When he came it was short, and fierce, and he cried out so loudly that if I was in any rational frame of mind I would have been fearful of discovery. But I had long ago abandoned rational thought. Still on my knees, I spun him by his hips.
"Hands against the wall, push your bum out," I whispered, urgently.
Looking fearfully over his shoulder, Cody nonetheless complied. But fear turned to astonishment, and then desire as for the first time I dug my tongue into his pucker.
"Shiiiit!" he breathed, as the strange sensation took him by surprise. Cody didn't swear around me, so I knew I was onto something.
I was proven right when he started to push back against me, arching his back so that I had all the access I needed.
His hole was always tight at first, but I knew from fingering him that he would soon loosen up. It was hot and smooth on the inside of his ring, and as his hole stretched around my tongue it only grew warmer. Only once in my life had I tried this before, and it hadn't been anywhere near as enjoyable as having my lips against Cody's backside and my tongue wriggling ever deeper into his hole.
I stayed there for several minutes, loosening him each time he tightened up around my muscle, until that magic moment when I pulled back and then pushed forward again, and there was no resistance, just acceptance.
I stood behind him, and leaned forward, my dick resting on his lower back. I swiped a load of precum from my manhood and slicked my fingers with it, entering him gently as I leaned forward to whisper in his ear,
"Cody, do you want me to fuck you?"
He hung his head, perhaps feeling shame at his desire, maybe thinking that it wasn't a very manly thing to admit, but then breathed, "Please..."
I kissed his ear, nibbling gently on his earlobe as behind him I manoeuvred myself into position.
"Push out a bit," I whispered urgently, as I pressed forward.
Gently, slowly, with infinite care I eased inside him. His ring snapped around the head with a sudden rush, and Cody groaned at being impaled so. The thick band of muscle around my shaft was like nothing I'd ever felt, and the hot slickness inside him was without question the ultimate pleasure. Quivering as adrenaline surged around my body, I barely had a chance to thrust into him before my orgasm overwhelmed me with shocking suddenness.
Cum surged into his bowels. One, long stream of my pent up desire, spasms too close together and too intense to tell apart. Reflexively I pulled back a little and thrust once more, and my seed was squeezed out around my dick, falling to the tiles with a soft splatter. I softened, and was ejected from his tight embrace, and Cody whimpered as the spasms in his backside forced my fluid from him, running down his legs in thick globs.
I turned him around, grabbing him into an embrace that was driven in equal measure by love and by regret. I had taken his virginity in a chlorine-soaked swimming pool shower cubicle, without discussing it with him first. His consent was freely given, but under the influence of lust. But my love for him was real and pure. His youth and beauty had attracted me, but there was something far more complete beneath the surface, something far more real. I realised as I held him to me that I would have immense difficulty leaving Cody with his father.
For his part, Cody clung to me, arms around my neck, bottom supported in my hands, legs around my waist. His face was buried in the crook of my neck, and I could feel his eyelashes tickling the sensitive skin there. When he pulled away, his face was flushed crimson - from desire I hoped, not from embarrassment - and his nostrils flared as he sucked in oxygen.
"I wondered how that would feel," he said, dreamily.
"And?"
"Not like that! But good. You felt so big back there, but there was this feeling in my tummy like I was going to burst. I think I almost got there again. Is it meant to feel like that?"
"Good, you mean?"
Cody nodded enthusiastically.
"Yeah, it is meant to feel good. Although," I added, "normally you're a bit more used to it before you really enjoy it. I'm glad it felt good though."
Cody just smiled, kissed me gently on the lips and snuggled his face back into my neck.
We played a little longer at the park, then retired to our motel room. Exhausted, we both fell asleep, and didn't wake until mid evening. I ordered pizza to be delivered and then leisurely sucked Cody off while we waited, taking my time and finishing him just as the delivery boy happened to knock at the door.
What the fuzzy-chinned teenager thought of my obvious erection and the barely covered form of Cody lying face down on the bed I don't know. Perhaps I could guess, though, as he swallowed involuntarily, and his voice caught in his throat. His eyes flicked back to the bed several times, and I wondered if he was more interested in my role or Cody's. For a fraction of a second I entertained the idea of asking him to come in, but decided it was too much like a bad porno plot-line.
He said nothing and was tipped generously.
"What are you going to do after?" Cody asked, not long after we'd slipped over the state line into Missouri. "Once you've finished your trip, I mean."
I didn't know how to answer that. I didn't really have a plan, after all. I was just going to go where the road took me for a little longer, and then try to work out where to settle down and find a career. I could probably survive for a while on what I'd taken from the stock market, but I didn't want to rely on that.
"I don't know. I need something to do, but I'm not sure what, yet. I don't think I want to go back to my old job."
"You could ask my dad. He works for some company called Xerox, but I don't know what they do. They might have a job for you."
I wondered briefly what a stockbroker would have to offer a tech company, but didn't want to burst Cody's bubble.
"What do you want to do when you grow up?"
I expected all sorts of things, but not the answer I got.
"I wish I could write books," he said, with real passion. "I could even write a story about all this, about you and me and our amazing roadtrip, and about the way you really like to do me up the butt. I think I'll use your name as my pen name. I could get real rich selling a story like that."
The idea of a warts-and-all recounting of the true nature of our trip scared the hell out of me, but I knew Cody was joking. I mean, surely he was joking. Right?
"I've never seen you reading, though," I pointed out. It was quite true - all we'd done apart from sometimes going to the cinema was watch TV in the evenings, and then make love. Cody hadn't shown the first sign of interest in books.
"That's because I don't have any books with me."
"But if you did, you'd read?"
He looked me in the eye and nodded enthusiastically.
"It's the biggest bookstore I've ever seen!" Cody breathed, as we walked through the door from the heat of the day to the dim, air-conditioned interior. I wish I could remember the name of the store, or anything more than it was probably in St Louis, but my attention was more on getting Cody something to read. I wasn't always the most attentive to reading, but if it was a passion of his I wanted to support it.
I told Cody to go off on his own and not come back without an armful of books, and then went to wander around on my own for a bit. It was the first time we'd been very far apart for a couple of weeks now, and I got a strange sense of missing him immediately. I found myself turning around and being surprised not to find him behind me.
Then, I turned around and there he was! It had been no longer than 10 minutes, but he had about seven books already, which he handed me, and then went back for more.
"I just need to get two more in one of the series but I couldn't carry them," he called over his shoulder.
The lady at the checkout went slightly wide-eyed when she saw Cody's haul, but she also smiled warmly.
"I just love it when children want to read. You must be a very proud dad."
I smiled noncommittally and paid in cash.
Outside at the car, Cody snaffled two of the books from the bag before I could get them in the trunk, and then spent the rest of the day's drive reading. Even when we reached the motel in the afternoon, he eschewed the pool in favour of lying on the bed with a book, and even my gentle teasing couldn't encourage him to engage in a little sex.
I was right to be concerned that books had nullified Cody's sex life. In fact, they completely replaced me - he read morning, noon and night, and didn't once respond to my gentle advances. Before we bought him his own little library, he would readily harden as soon as my hand touched his knee. Now, though, he remained resolutely flaccid, entirely taken with the story he inhabited.
I knew I couldn't complain - after all, how many boylovers are lucky enough to have had any kind of mutual satisfaction with a boy? - but there was a sense of injustice about how easily and completely I had been replaced. What had seemed fun and exciting was now passé and irrelevant.
He lasted three days without succumbing to desire, but then on the fourth morning his libido came roaring back.
I woke because he was wanking next to me. It was early morning, we were naked with the sheets off and a shaft of sunlight had escaped the curtains and was lying across Cody's hip, neatly highlighting the hand that was pumping up and down. A book lay discarded to his side, open but face down, as if he hadn't even had time to find his bookmark before he started to play with himself. It was next to the book...
"Mmm, need some help there?" I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
"Mmmph, yes!" he squeaked.
Lust is a powerful driving force, and I went from barely conscious to barely able to contain myself, diving onto his dick and sucking hard. He was obviously close already, because immediately he went over the top, lifting his hips up, mashing my nose with his stiff abdomen as his dick jumped in my mouth. He collapsed back on the bed, and then stretched languidly, his penis still bobbing about as it deflated.
"Thanks," he said, strained. Then, with a lascivious grin, "Hey, wanna fuck?"
It was a question clearly calculated to stun, and it did so. Since our first time in the showers at the water park he'd resisted the act, always preferring something a little tamer, but I was desperate to do it again. Not to mention hearing those filthy words in his high-pitched little voice sent all kinds of signals straight to my dick, which stood even harder to attention, and immediately started to leak.
I grabbed his ankles and pushed them back over his head, much to Cody's amusement.
"Hold them there, I'm going to open you up."
This time, Cody could look down at me while I went to work on his hole with my tongue. But before I knew it his eyes had rolled back into his head, and his mouth hung open. This was a boy who really loved a good rimming.
Because we had nowhere else to be and I wanted to draw it out, I took my time loosening his hole. I played games, alternating between stabbing as much of my tongue into his guts as I could manage, and gently running it around the wrinkled pucker. I held his cheeks apart, shuddering with lust at the sight of his hole hanging open, unwilling to even try to close. Spit-and-precum slicked fingers found their way into his hot, silky tunnel, prying, twisting, stretching, widening. I added more of both slippery substances, until his rear end was coated in a slick, greasy layer, and his hole lay open and ready.
I climbed forward between his legs, lowering them until they sat comfortably on my hips. Cody seemed to stare straight through me, his eyes heavily lidded, as I reached down between us. His dick was hard as steel, and I gently rubbed it, before going lower and finding my own, bringing the tip of it up to his backside.
Penetration was gentle, but easy. My narrow shaft and Cody's well loosened hole meant that I was quickly within him beyond the bulge of my glans, behind which his stretched sphincter tightened. Cody gasped at the intrusion and lost his hardness for a moment, but as I pushed deeper and hit a certain little spot his erection returned with a vengeance, and he reached between our bodies to squeeze it hard. His eyes clamped shut and he writhed as I impaled him, pushing deeper with each thrust until I could go no further. I was almost all the way inside.
This time I lasted longer; the excitement was still present but it was under my control, not the other way around. This time I made love to him for real - gentle, undulating, slow, then fast, then slow. Deep, shallow, deep. Building, backing off, building again, higher and higher, a wave, a tsunami of lust washing everything clear in its path. Insistent, incessant, rhythmic pressure on that point deep inside that made him feel for the first time the agonising, consuming, liberating, paralysing force of an orgasm forged within his rectum, sweeping through every fibre of his being, alternately tensing, relaxing, tensing until he lost control and cried out, and took me with him over the edge, plummeting, falling, dropping from the cliff with the feeling that I might fall forever, a bottomless pit in my stomach as my whole soul emptied into him, my physical gift a pallid reflection of my love for him, my lust for him, the world I gave to him as with one, last, desperate thrust we came.
He lay there looking up at me, gasping. Shocked. Unable to speak, his hair dark and damp with sweat, beads of perspiration covering us both, as still I twitched inside him, still I delivered the last drops of everything I possibly had to give, until he was full of nothing but my seed, until I could give no more. And still I remained, and looked at him, astonished by the sheer force of our lovemaking, at what we had made and done together. He was so small and slender beneath me, so out of scale. A thin, slimy trail of precum was smeared haphazardly across his lower abdomen, a dark snail trail left by the tip of his dick, milked out of him from within, as his curled-up hips pressed it into his stomach.
I held him for some time after we separated. Just hugged him tight to me, ignoring the reality that his guts were full of my cum and that sooner or later he was going to have to get it out. He grabbed my arms around him as I hugged him from behind. He may have slept, but I couldn't be sure. At least, he lay very quietly.
"My grandpaw told me once what they do to homosexuals where he's from," Cody said, conversationally, as the scenery flickered by on both sides. Each syllable of the word was chewed over, imitating the accent he'd heard it in. Ho-mo-secks-yew-als.
"Where was he from?"
"Alabama."
"I guess it wasn't throw them a big party then?"
Cody shook his head emphatically. "He said they burned one, once. Just straight up locked him in his house and burned it down."
"That's awful."
"Even when he told me I kinda already knew what I was," he said. "An' I prayed and prayed to God to take it away, but I guess God didn't hear me."
"I guess not."
At no point had we even discussed the concept of Cody's sexuality; we were just having fun. I didn't think much of what we did would define who he was for the rest of his life, but clearly he had thought it over.
"You don't have to be ashamed about it, Cody. It's OK to enjoy what we're doing, and it doesn't mean anything about you."
He shrugged. "I know. I just kinda don't care no more. If being a homo means doing things with you in bed, I'm OK with that."
It was quite an astonishing statement for a boy so young. It was a complex admission to me, and to himself.
"So you like what we're doing then?"
He looked at me as if I'd said, "Do you enjoy breathing?"
"Course I do," he said. "I even like your dick up my ass. If that don't make me gay I don't know what does."
"I reckon the defining factor is liking men," I told him, receiving an eye-roll for my efforts.
"Well, duh. I like guys, too. Like, you make this go hard," he said, grabbing at his crotch. There was evidence that I was already having the effect he suggested.
"What kind of guys do you like?"
He shrugged. "Don't know. You, I guess. Sometimes I see someone and I get hard thinking about what's inside their pants."
"And you said you did some of this stuff with your friend's brother."
"Uh, yeah. Kinda. A bit. Not all of it, though. Not all the things we do, but like some of it. Jerking off. I sucked him off but he wouldn't do me."
"That's not nice, it should go both ways."
"Want me to put it in your ass, then?" he giggled.
"If you want to."
He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged.
"Nah. I kinda don't wanna."
I didn't think it was the right time to start introducing terms like 'bottom' to him, but it was getting clearer that Cody was happier on the receiving end of my physical affection.
He wasn't exactly a camp kid, but there was something about Cody which certainly pinged my gaydar. And I think others saw it, too. An older man - neatly-ironed button-down plaid shirt, neatly-trimmed greying beard, very smart shoes - passed us at a strip mall one day. He had a certain manner that might have made some of my friends at home in England sit up and take notice. I felt his eyes lingering on us after we passed, and I glanced back his way. He had stopped, and was staring at Cody. He caught my eye and raised an eyebrow; he knew what was up.
How long would it be before Cody started to realise the attention he was going to get? He was genuinely beautiful and clearly gay, to those tuned into such things. Me and the neat older guy couldn't be the only ones wanting to get into the sexy little thing's underpants.
We crossed the border into West Virginia, and I could feel that we were reaching the beginning of the end. We could probably make it after a long day's drive if I really pushed it, but I wasn't in any hurry. The very thought that I could reach Connecticut, hand Cody over and then never see him again was terrifying.
We stopped for a little longer just upriver from Charleston, and took a boat up the river a way towards the green shrouded hills. The company we booked it with took us to a remote cabin and left us there. I hadn't explained to Cody how long it would be, but in fact we'd been given supplies for three days, and wouldn't be picked up until it was over. We had a radio and distress flares for emergencies, but beyond that we were on our own. It was only as the boat drove off downriver that Cody began to ask questions.
"Aren't we...?" he started.
"Aren't we what?" I asked, enjoying knowing what he didn't.
"Aren't we going back downriver?"
I shook my head, pointing at our bags sat on the end of the jetty. "Nope. That's our clothes. Let's get them inside."
Cody didn't bother trying to disguise his shock.
"You mean it's just the two of us? Out here?"
"Us and the mosquitoes, and maybe a bear here or there."
"For how long?"
"Three days."
"What's there to do, though?"
"Oh, I don't know. Read. Fish. Skinny dip in the river. Have masses of sex."
Cody blushed and giggled behind his hand.
We'd arrived late in the afternoon, and would be picked up around the same time two days hence, so we were in no hurry to do anything much. We looked around the cabin, working out where everything was. There was one bedroom with four bunks, but one of the lower two was wide enough to hold Cody and I; there was no way we weren't sleeping together out here in our cabin in the woods. There were no washing facilities save for a large bowl on a countertop in the kitchen, but there was a wood burning stove and a decent stockpile of logs; the notes that came with the cabin suggested that we might want to split more from the pile around the back.
Cody wanted to do just that. It was exactly the kind of thing he'd done when he was really young in Alabama, he told me, but hadn't been able to do since he moved to LA. I liked the idea, too. It sounded fun, so we ended up out there, inexpertly swinging a hatchet, probably breaking all the rules about how you should go about splitting logs. But it didn't matter - Cody was having a ball, and I was enjoying it just as much.
It was hot, sweaty work though, and before long we were both stripped to the waist. I stood back and watched Cody at work. God, he was beautiful. So lithe and so strong. The muscles on his back were stronger and more defined than I'd given him credit for. And his arms, spindly and boyish as they were, had more strength than one might think.
"Do you think we could be done now?" he asked, when the pile next to him was almost as big as that inside the house.
"We'd done enough ages ago, actually," I said with a grin. "I was just enjoying watching you work."
Cody stuck the hatchet into the top of the next log, growled at me and went on the attack. Luckily the ground was soft because the element of surprise meant that he soon had me pinned, and started digging his fingertips into my ribs, copying what I did to him. The only response was to wrap my arms around him and try to control him, which left us lying there face to face on the ground. Cody's laughter died away, and he lay there staring into my eyes, a rather dreamy look on his face.
We kissed then, rolling in the dirt, overcome with the passion of the moment. We were able to be free out here in the woods, far from anyone. I grabbed his arse through his shorts, pushing the material into his cleft as I rubbed my fingertips hard at his entrance. Cody moaned into my mouth, and ground his stiff little dick into my abdomen.
I lifted up my hands to his lower back, rubbing him gently, trailing just my fingertips over his sot, smooth skin. Then I pushed beneath the waistband, probing the hot, sweaty valley of his backside until I found his pucker. It was loose and ready, and for a moment I contemplated fucking him right there behind the cabin, out in the open air. Cody has other ideas, though.
"Please suck me," he whispered urgently into my ear.
I nodded, rolling him to the side and off me. He lay back on the dirt, stretching his arms above his head, accentuating the bulge in his shorts. It wasn't there for long, though - I yanked them down, releasing it to the air. Cody's dick still surprised me a little, so long and think compared to his compact, slender body. Not obscenely big, nothing like an adult dick, just so out of place. Its tip was already damp; it never ceased to amaze me how much precum he made without ever having a wet cum. But leak, he did, and I bent down to taste the salty treasure.
This was not languid lovemaking. This was not exquisite, drawn out pleasure. This was animalistic, hungry, primal. I skinned back his foreskin for ultimate effect, and brought him off as quickly as I could, with maximum suction. Cody squeaked and huffed his way through his orgasm, punching his hips at my face with each spasm.
Then, spurred on by the sight of him lying back, red faced, panting, still hard as a rock, I ripped down my shorts and knelt over him as I wanked myself off, firing thick ropes of cum across his naked crotch, onto his t-shirt, and even splattering against his face. Cody grabbed his cum-slicked little spike and dragged himself to a second, smaller orgasm with my seed as his lube.
We looked at each other, covered in dirt and sweat - and in Cody's case semen - and panting with exertion, and couldn't stop ourselves laughing at the sheer joy of how filthy we both were, physically and morally.
"What are we going to do about all this?" Cody asked, as I hauled him to his feet. He was right - we couldn't carry on looking like we did. Even if we didn't see anyone else, we were sill going to traipse dirt and cum into the cabin, and I didn't particularly want to leave that kind of message in the visitor's book.
"The river?" I asked.
Cody looked quizzically at me.
"I mean," I continued, "let's go and jump in the river. Leave your shoes on the jetty, though."
Clearly deciding this was the best idea ever, Cody disappeared at a run around the cabin, and was still out of sight when I heard a 'whoop' and a splash. I rounded the corner in time to see wavelets lapping against the shore, and Cody's head bobbing in the water.
"It's warm!" he shouted back, sounding genuinely surprised. "I can't believe it's warm!"
I'd been told it would be. The cabin was built on a section of the river where a pool had formed, and the water was especially slow moving. It was heated by the sun. Deciding I had to see for myself, though, I shed my shoes and dived in.
Cody came straight to me as I surfaced, and splashed water at me, then set off giggling. Well, if it was chasing he wanted, he could have it! I took off after him but held back a little, knowing from our previous pool visits that I was a far faster swimmer than he was. I let him get away from me for a few minutes, but then hauled him in, and dragged him close to me. He wrapped his legs around my waist, and I stood shoulder deep in the water gazing into his eyes.
"I love you," he whispered. He was shaking, but not from cold.
"I love you, too, Cody," I whispered back, before my lips touched his.
We swam a little longer, occasionally discarding items of clothing rinsed clean by the river. Cody swam to the jetty with each item, throwing them with a wet slap onto the deck. Eventually, he threw his underpants and mine, bundled together.
Naked, he swam back through the water to me, a glistening, mythical creature, perfect in form. A water satyr, sexual, natural and free, child-like and yet deeply erotic. For a moment I saw with absolute clarity that this was what youth was meant to be. Not a period devoid of physical love, but a chance to explore it without consequence. No risk of pregnancy, no need for a lifelong commitment, just a boy ready and able to enjoy physical intimacy without the need to over-analyse, the need to worry whether or not it was right. When not abusive and one-sided, how could one call it wrong?
He came to me in the water, skin on skin, an overwhelming wholeness of contact. He was two people in that moment - the innocent boy who with wide eyes had explained to me that I must read this book he'd found call The Hobbit, and a sensual creature of touch, desire, romance. To find a boy who is both is to find life's perfect companion.
He spat water in my face and, giggling, dived away.
That night we cooked over a fire, then lay on the riverbank watching the light fading in the west. Cody fell asleep snuggled into me, and I carried him to ur room, laying him on the bed. He was only in shorts and t-shirt, nothing beneath, so I left him like that and climbed into bed with him. I remember nothing else.
We had sex again the next morning. Cody was horny as hell, having slept more soundly than I'd ever known. We luxuriated in the freedom we had to take it slowly, not needing to get packed up and check out of a motel room. And out here in the woods Cody could be as noisy as he wanted, which, it turned out, was particularly loud when he was on top, bouncing himself on my dick. With each thrust his whole body would quiver, and Cody - his eyes clamped shut - would make an unusual grunt with a high pitched whimper at the end. As I got closer to finishing and fucked him harder and faster, the grunts and whimpers merged together into one continual, guttural noise that was entirely unintelligible. Cody, it turned out, really loved to be fucked.
We slept a while longer, then started the day with pancakes made fresh from the supplies, though I'm not sure the long life milk from the carton was really up to the job. Cody ate heartily, of course, having had his cute little brains fucked out. After breakfast we ventured out into the woods, finding trees to climb, streams to splash around in, and near the end of our walk, not too far along from the cabin, a platform in a broad tree with a dense canopy. Directly above it, though, the branches had been removed.
"I bet you can see so many stars from here at night," I pondered.
"We should come back tonight," Cody suggested.
"I think we should do better than that. I think we should sleep here."
"On the platform?"
"Why not? It's safe enough. And the guide said not to expect any rain at this time of year. Even if we do get wet we can just go back to the cabin. And there's a rail all around the outside, so we won't fall off."
Cody grinned. "Yeah!"
We did exactly that, hauling our sleeping bags up from the cabin, and a couple of pillows. We ate at the cabin, then took water bottles and a torch with us, and a candle to keep the bugs away. I also took two beers from the stash which sat in the river, provided by the trip organisers; they were cool rather than cold, but that hardly mattered.
It was still light when we climbed up to the platform. Cody was overexcited for a while, chattering away and bouncing around the platform, but soon enough tiredness overcame him, and he settled down next to me. We sat with our backs to the rail, watching the light fading from the sky, and sipping at the beers.
Cody's hand on my leg was like fire. His touch was possessive, strong, and yet soft. His fingers edged upwards, beneath the hem of my shorts. I didn't dare risk breaking the spell by speaking, so I just kept staring at the sky, just like Cody. Minute by minute the gently questing fingers edged deeper into the confines of my shorts, while my penis made every effort to avoid capture, it seemed, by standing to full attention in the loose fabric. Cody had already done way more than just touching me, of course, but there was something truly electric about his gentle, slightly hesitant touch that night. It felt like the first time we'd ever done it.
His arm was deep within the leg of my shorts by the time his fingers closed around their prize. I shuddered at the sensation, and my manhood gave one enormous lurch, ejecting a stream of precum into my foreskin, which bubbled out and down over Cody's hand. He caught it up, and used it to slick my skin. He wanked me gently, slowly, lovingly, squeezing the head to eject more lubricant, and smearing it about.
My eyes closed as the feelings started to build in the pit of my stomach. A relentless oncoming wave of pleasure that felt like fear. Or was it the most intense anticipation? I could no longer tell the two apart. My breath was ragged, my senses overwhelmed. There was no forest out there, no sky full of stars, no river burbling gently between its banks. There was barely any sense that Cody or I existed. We were mere reflections of his hand and my penis, the only two objects in the entire universe.
He paused, and I groaned at the lack of closure. But then lo and behold my zip was lowered, and my damp manhood met the cool even air, sending a shiver right through me. I lay fully prostate now, across the deck, with Cody kneeling at my waist. How had we come to be arranged thus? Then, the coolness of exposure was replaced with the hot, damp furnace of his mouth, and truly I reached nirvana.
I cannot tell you how long I lasted, only that no matter how long it was, it could never be enough. The feel of the suction applied by his mouth, the sharp little tongue which teased the opening of my foreskin, the gentle up and down motion, unhurried, deliberate. A devotion. It was all beyond anything my mortal mind could comprehend.
I exploded into his mouth, volley after volley of my seed. Still the suction remained, making my pleasure agonising. It became rhythmic, and I understood slowly through the haze of my completion. Swallowing. All of it, not a drop spilled, or left behind.
He sucked on the beer bottle, too, to mask the taste, and belched, and fell down in a fit of drunken giggles until I made him serious again with my mouth.
We slept.
In the morning, we carved our names into the wood of the platform, as other lovers had down the years. Z♥C.
"It's down a ways. Go south on Forbes until you reach Forest, it's on the left, then you go up Forest a ways and then take the first right, that's Brewer. Then Jay is off there, on the right. It's not hard to find. Only, take it careful, there's kids out on the streets."
Somehow, despite the pounding of my heart and the tang of adrenaline in my mouth, I was able to take in the instructions. We were in Hartford, and might only be minutes away from finding Cody's father. A kindly older gentleman had stopped to help two very lost-looking tourists, and now we had all the info needed to reach Jay St. The end of the line. The terminus. The place where I would get off the train of Cody's life and walk away, never to look back.
I'd already decided that was the way it had to be. I couldn't cope with a long, drawn out goodbye. And then I was going to drive all the way back across the country, as fast as I could, and find something to distract myself in San Francisco. That, I had decided, was the answer for me. There was a well-established gay scene there, I would probably be able to find some slightly twinky looking boys who would satisfy urges well enough, and I could forget all about wonderful Cody and his infectious smile, his quick wit, his beautiful face, his sculptor's dream of a body.
Once he was with his father, I reasoned, there would be little reason for me to stay in his life. Better that I made the decision to leave quickly - he might be hurt at first, but with his beloved dad around Cody would have no use for me. I had served my purpose, I had delivered him across the country to his father, and had only slightly spoiled the goods on the way.
It didn't seem quite real. I felt as though I was looking down at myself as we drove, observing from outside as the characters on a screen acted out the final scenes of a movie. The sun beat down on the car. Cody and I drove in silence, sunglasses on. He looked out of the passenger window, wary, alert. I was feeling crushed already. Hollow. Barely able to operate the controls of the car.
Jay Street. Number 32.
There...
I pulled up to the kerb outside. There was a Pontiac Firebird in the car port. The car Steve convinced me not to buy. I wondered what Cody's dad thought of it.
Jens. His name was Jens, and he was from Denmark.
Excited, yet wary, Cody opened his door and stepped out. I remained resolutely where I was.
He looked at me, puzzled. "Aren't you coming in?"
I hesitated. The moment of truth. Or lies, as it happened. "I'm going to let you go ahead, Cody. You should have a few moments with your dad before I come in, it will be more special that way. Grab your stuff from the trunk and take it with you, then you won't have to come out to the car later."
That last little lie hurt the most. If had an inkling of what I was coming, he showed no sign. Instead, he happily got his things and slammed down the boot lid, practically skipping up to his father's house. I watched him go, struggling to handle the pain of what I was about to do. I had slipped a letter into his bag that he would find later, when he unpacked. Just something to let him know that I thought I'd done what was best for him.
I watched as he approached he front door. Part of me secretly hoped that the address was wrong, that this wouldn't be where Jens lived. Cody would have to come back to the car, and come with me. God knows what we would do then, but at least we could be together. But with Cody moving in with his father, that was out of the question. No parent would ever allow that kind of relationship for their child.
When the door opened, I could hear the gasp from all the way out at the kerb. Jens was a tall, thin, blonde man, an archetype for a future Cody. He sunk to his knees and folded Cody in his arms. I could see his shoulders shaking as he cried.
That was when I gunned the engine. The Camaro leapt forward, rocketing me away. I didn't dare look back, I just kept my eyes focussed on the road ahead. Jay St was short, and I took the turning at the end with a lurid tail slide. Kids in the road be damned, I needed to get out of there.
The motel was clean enough. I made sure it had a pool, just from habit. It wasn't necessary anymore.
I slept, dreaming of him. I woke, and missed the feel of his body next to mine. I ate breakfast alone in the diner, and went back to my room. He left one of his books in the car. I held it to me, a prized possession. It even smelled faintly of him.
I didn't intend to linger. I just couldn't motivate myself to move on.
The knock at the door came mid morning. I had fallen back to sleep; it hadn't seemed worth getting up. I don't know who I expected it to be, but it certainly wasn't him.
"Why?" he growled, holding back tears. His fists were clenched. "Why did you leave me?"
"Cody, how did you find me?"
"It doesn't matter," he hissed. "Why?"
"Is your dad here?"
"Answer. The. QUESTION!"
"Cody, please stop shouting. Do you want to come inside, and we'll talk."
"I want you to answer the Goddam question before I find the nearest state trooper and tell them what you did to me."
He was almost hysterical, but I sensed that trying to take charge of the situation would not improve matters.
"Because... because what we did was wrong. Society could never accept us. Your dad would have started asking all sorts of questions, and he would have got to the truth, and he would have thrown me to the wolves. And you would have had to go through court and tell your side in front of the police, and then maybe a judge and a whole courtroom. I thought maybe if I left none of that would have to happen."
"That's stupid. You're stupid."
"Cody, I'm sorry, I love you, but I couldn't put you through what would have happened."
"If you really loved me, you would have listened. You would have understood."
"Understood what?"
"I kept trying to tell you, my dad's different."
"Cody, as different as he might me, I don't think he could possibly condone what we were up to!"
"You don't know that!"
"And you do?"
"Yes!"
"Why are you so sure?"
"Because he... because he knows what I'm like."
"What do you mean, 'knows what you're like'?"
He looked down for a moment, then fiercely back up. Tears chased each other down his face as he blinked rapidly.
"You have to promise you won't hate me."
"Hate you for what? I could never hate you, Cody."
He gave a little laugh, disbelieving. "I was in the bathroom at the mall one time, about a year ago, and dad was visiting me in California. There was a guy there, younger than you, I guess, but lots older than me. He was peeing, and so was I. I started to, y'know, look at his. And he saw me, and he wanted to see mine, and so I showed him, and he got hard, and he moved to the urinal next to mine, and like, his thing was just there. I grabbed it just as my dad came in looking for me."
"I don't hate you for that, Cody. God knows, I've cruised for guys in the toilets in London often enough."
"I thought dad was going to kill the guy, but he just shook his head and the guy ran out. I never saw him again. But dad was, like, really quiet all the way home. I thought he was going to kill me. But we just sat in the car outside my step-dad's house and we started talking about it. He was asking me all kinds of stuff, y'know? But mostly about men and things. He said it was OK for me to be the way I was, but if I wanted a man to be with like that, it had to be someone I knew, and someone he was OK with."
I stood there utterly speechless. Cody was suggesting that his dad approved of him being with a paedophile, as long as he vetted them first. It didn't seem possible that this was real.
"I'm not... I don't..."
"If you're going to tell me you don't believe it," Cody said, his voice edged with steel, "then why the heck do you think he called in a favour from a friend of his in the FBI and got them to ring round all the motels in Connecticut until they found you?"
That did silence me, fully and finally. I stepped back into the room, leaving Cody in the doorway. I fell heavily onto the bed, and hung my head in my hands. All of a sudden I felt dizzy enough to throw up.
A hand fell on my shoulder. "I missed you so bad. I couldn't stop crying. Dad figured it out, I didn't even have to tell him. He just guessed. Then he said if I was that upset then you must mean something to me, so he said we would find you and get you back. And I read your letter, and I knew you didn't really want to leave me."
I looked up at him standing there, and suddenly the last vestiges of my resolve crumbled to dust. I pulled him to me, and he leant down to kiss me, full on the lips, uncaring who might wander by. When we came up for air, there was a polite cough from the doorway.
Jens smiled, and raised a hand in greeting. "I think," he said, heavily accented, "that you perhaps need a little time to work things out. There is a little diner just down the road, I'll see you when you are ready."
I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. Jens had caught me with my fingers in the cookie jar, and yet he'd acted as if nothing at all was wrong with me passionately kissing his ten year old son. I mean, my hands were on Cody's firm little backside, for fuck's sake. Jens pulled the door shut, and we were alone.
"So, what do we do now?" I asked Cody.
He simply grinned and forced his knee between my thighs. "Think you've got the strength to do me, old man?" he grinned.
"Over there, in the cupboard next to the refrigerator," Jens said, in response to my unspoken query about the glass I had just finished drying. We were washing up in his kitchen, looking out over the pool where Cody and his cousins splashed around riotously. Jens' brother and his wife had come up from Newhaven for the day, having heard that Cody was finally with his father. It seemed strange to me that both Danish brothers had emigrated to America and lived so close to each other, but Jens seemed to think nothing of it.
"What do you think we should tell people, Zack?" he asked, swilling the suds around inside another glass, not really paying attention to what he was doing. "How do we explain you living with us?"
"I didn't think we had decided that yet," I said, cautiously.
"Cody has decided it must happen, and I think that neither of us could deny him, yes?"
I laughed, but there was no humour in it. "What I don't understand is why you're OK with this."
Jens shrugged. "I'm not, really. Not deep down. It troubles me to think of what you two must do at night. But that is my problem, not yours. Cody is happy, and I am certain that he is not forced. He could have let you drive away, but he didn't. He begged me to find you."
"Maybe I should find a job and buy a place. I don't have to stay here. I could be nearby, near enough for Cody to come to visit."
Jens shook his head. "If he sleeps with you, he does it here, in this house, under my roof, where I know he's safe."
I couldn't really get my head around what Jens trusted me to do, and what he didn't, but it hardly mattered. He made the rules for my relationship with his son, not me.
"You know," he continued, in an artful tone, "I do work very long hours. I was worried about Cody having someone to look after him when I was at the office. He's nearly old enough not to need it, I suppose, but for a few years... Of course, I suppose after a few years you'll be done with him."
The thought hadn't even occurred to me, but even as we spoke I knew the answer. "I'm not... I don't just do it with boys, you know?"
Jens raised an eyebrow. "So you'd stay with him?"
"If he wanted me. He's about to go through a lot of changes. He might find someone more interesting than me."
"And if he doesn't?"
"Then I will always be here. And when he's older, we will get a place together. A place of our own."
"And what will you do for money?" Jens asked.
"I know accountancy. I have enough money to get by until I have my US certifications, then I'll just do the books for small business, file people's tax returns, that kind of thing. I can do whatever hours I like doing that, at least for now."
"You seemed to have it figured out," Jens said, with a twinkle in his eye.
"Well, I'm motivated..."
Cody looked up at me desperately, pleading for me to give him the final few thrusts that would take him over the edge. I had been battering his prostate with my manhood for ten minutes, and he was about ready to pop. His stiff little finger dripped precum onto his tummy, the pink-tinged tip of his foreskin connected to the soft skin of his abdomen by a thin, glittering strand of the stuff. He wrapped his legs around my waist, dragging me into him, and finally he was tipped over the edge into bliss.
"Happy eleventh birthday, Codes," I whispered into his ear as I leaned down and sent him into blissful oblivion with a couple of well-timed thrusts of my hips.
"Hnnnngh!" he cried out, a sound at once nonsense, and the perfect description for the sensations ripping through his body. He clenched his teeth and dug his fingernails into my shoulder as the intense, almost painful sensation of being fucked right over the edge hit him, and hit hard. I buried myself to the hilt in his still-tight little bum and held myself there until not a drop of cum remained my my balls.
After a few minutes, he opened his eyes. I was still erect enough to be held my his tight little tunnel. He looked down, and his eyes widened. I looked down, too, and marvelled at the scattered droplets on his tummy. Thin, watery, little more than ejected precum, but undeniably, unmistakably his first ejaculation.
"Now, that is a happy birthday", I said.
Cody giggled, then looked up at me seriously.
"Did I tell you I love you?" he asked.
"Only a million times."
He nodded, content, and with a blissful sigh closed his eyes.
"Hey, Cody," I whispered, feeling a little mischievious.
"Yeah?"
"You know, the school bus will be here in 15 minutes."
Cody's eyes flew open.
"Shit!"