Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2003 18:51:22 EDT From: Tommyhawk1@aol.com Subject: "Castaways" CASTAWAYS By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM My world was water, mostly water, water in the ocean beneath us and water falling in torrential slashes like knives, whipped by the winds into bullets that pelted every part of my body; there was not even the relative benevolence of rain to this, that it only falls upon you from above and your under parts are spared, this rain hit all sides of me as the wind listeth it, and not my face nor my back nor my arms nor my legs were spared from the misery. The rain had a single virtue to it that the ocean water did not, it held no salt, but the ocean too rose up again and again and lashed its vile stinging spray over us as our boat cut the waves as we rowed. There were twelve of us in the longboat in that dark night, the darkness compounded by the darkness of the typhoon, struggling against the waves that rose up like the fists of God to slap at us. Only by the frantic, fierce rowing of all hands were we able to ride up the wave and so prevent it from turning us all over by the resistance of our forward momentum and the cutting of the wave. This is a feat akin to pushing a heavy object uphill, only we had been doing this for over two hours and the typhoon showed yet no sign of easing; it raged about us in all the fury that it had shown since its first strike. We were getting tired, all of us, and me more than the others because I was but a lad of nine summers. I know that the other surviving members of our wrecked schooner felt that I wasn't pulling my weight, the one being loudest was my oar-mate, a seaman named Fowler for we were two to each of the six oars that we had, with three on each side of the longboat. "Curse ye, lad, pull hard on the heave-to!" Fowler frothed at me. "We slap our bunky's oar another time and they'll throw us both overboard!" "Aye, we will at that!" the man ahead of us said; it was his oar we'd hit yet again. "No room on a longboat in a storm for one who can't take his share o' the rowing!" I was too out of breath to argue, so I just tried harder. But my arms were tired, so tired! "Here comes another one!" the captain called to us and I knew that we had to row hard yet again. I tried, may I spit on my mother's grave if I lie to you! I tried but the wave lifted up the boat and I committed the unthinkable. I didn't help to dip the oar down far enough, the oar thus feathered and we only slapped the water as the wave rose up on us. Such a tilting can put anyone off balance and Fowler took that opportunity to shove me, hard! Hard enough to send me out of the longboat! I fell onto the oars and from there into the brine, and not a man among them seemed to take notice as I went head over heels in the froth-maddened waters, lost amid the chaos of the storm and it took me some time to find myself. When I came up at last, gasping and frightened, into the air again if such a churning wasteland of water and pouring, wind-driven rain can be called air, I was a good twenty feet from the boat. "Help!" I called out to them with what little breath I had. "Leave him be!" Fowler cried out. "It's every man for himself in a storm." "Cap'n!" I called out. He was my sole hope, if he gave the order, the men would turn around. But the captain never said a word, another wave was coming at them, and I knew then that I was being abandoned to the waves. Perhaps the captain was justified; for he had indeed warned us all that any who fell overboard in a typhoon would be left to his own so be careful. Then Tolliver, a quiet man who had never said a word to me before, ill or good, never noticing the skinny cabin boy aboard the ship, it was Tolliver who stood up on the longboat and who dived in and swam toward me! "Leave him, Tolliver!" the captain called out to him. Then, "All hands, heave to! Here comes another one!" And the wave struck them and then it struck me and I was tumbling and when I righted myself again, I couldn't see the longboat and nay, I never saw it again. But Tolliver was there with me in the water, he somehow rode out the wave and then when I broke he came to me and caught me in his arms. "Grab hold of my back, boy!" he said. And when I did, he swam in what I presume was the direction of the longboat. As I say, I never saw it after that, an easy thing to lose in the waves and the wind and the rain. And so it was but Tolliver and me against the storm. We would have both been lost entirely, I think, had not a flotsam in the form of a piece of the mast of our wrecked schooner (or from some other hapless ship were it not ours) not happened along then and was there for us to grab hold of, and we did, Tolliver and me and we both held on for dear life. And the typhoon raged on and on. After some unknown time in the night, when I began to weaken with exhaustion, he helped me to climb up onto the mastpiece, and I could lay upon it mostly, clinging to it, and he held on and held it with me uppermost at the same time. And the typhoon raged on. It broke around morning, leaving us with an ocean filled with large waves but no more rain and in that comparative calm, I fell sound asleep. I dimly remember him taking me in his arms and me clinging to him half-unconscious as he swam, and then I remember him carrying me.... And land, I felt the sand, wet and filthy on my cheek, as he laid me down and I was too exhausted to ponder where this land in a world of ocean had come from. When they tell of stranded travelers awakening after a shipwreck, they tell of him opening his eyes to blue skies and clean beaches, but they know nothing of being stranded in a typhoon. When I awoke, it was because it was raining still and the rainwater was running down from the land onto us, and we were partially buried and the water was covering my nose and mouth. I sat up, coughing and strangling, and saw Tolliver lying beside me, the water at his mouth and nostrils as well, but he was not moving. I found the strength somehow to push him over onto his back, though that was all my strength could take, and he choked in his sleep and I knew he was breathing still and that was all I could do, I sank my head upon his chest and the blackness claimed me once more. I awoke next when Tolliver woke up and I sat up as he did. It was cloudy still, heavy clouds and ran was falling but of a gentle sort, and the waters about us had turned again into wet sand rivuleted by run-off. And I looked about and saw that it was nearing dusk once more. Night was about to claim us once again. "Must get up to dry land." Tolliver said, his chest heaving, and he choked, vomited up some of the water in his lungs. "Can you walk, boy?" I rose, and every muscle in my body screamed in protest, but they held. "I can if we go but a short ways, sir." I said. "Stout fellow." he said, standing himself as though he were old and decripit rather than a man in his early thirties, his muscled frame showing even as his head hung down and his shoulders were humped over. "Let's get into the edge of the forest and that'll be enough until dawn." We staggered there, a slow, painful procession of two, me following him as he lurched like some undead soul raised back to brief life, and no doubt I cast a similar shadow on the dunes. In the rain, this rain gentle yet still painful to our rain-buffeted bodies as it touched us who had been touched by rain beyond all desire for more, and we made it into the palm trees and in their inadequate shelter we sat down and braced our backs against them and rested. After a time I surrendered to my fatigue and again lay down and slept. I think Tolliver kept watch for us the entire night. All I know is that when I awoke again to the light of day, he was there, watching me. And now we had light, the sun was out, though clouds still abounded and often their shadows blotted out its face. Still the clouds were white and the sky was blue beyond them, the storm was past us. I sat up and moved. The pain was still there and still great, but the uppermost edge had been smoothed from its bite. It stung still, but it was the bite of an old mumble-toothed bear rather than a young bear with sharp fangs. "The storm is over." I said to Tolliver, and that was when I realized how thirsty I was, for my lips were cracked and my throat was parched and my voice was a groan, so my next words to my savior were, "I'm thirsty." "As am I, though I have quenched my thirst a little from the cups of these leaves that caught some of the rain. There will be no lack of fresh water here to be had at least, thanks to the storm. Let us find more, both of us." I got to my feet and we set off in our search. Water was everywhere to be had, though water fit to drink posed more of a problem. I did as Tolliver had, taking drips of water from palm fronds and there and a leaf had formed a small spoon-shaped depression that had caught a half-cup of water here, a few tablespoons there. After a time, our search became less frantic, and that was when we found the spring. Tolliver sighed when we found it, for not only was there water there to be had, a trickle of it gushing out of a fissure in the rocks into a pool the size of a wine-barrel before trickling off down a small brook (most of this water we learned later was from the storm, but there was water here to be had year round just the same, though the brook turned into an inconsequential trickle once the stormwater was gone.) "Ah, lad, we have some hope to live here yet. Now if we can find food other than the fish we will have to catch from the ocean or birds out of the air." And it was there, trees that bore fruit, enough that Tolliver frowned as he saw them and declared them evidence of aboriginal inhabitants. But we never found any trace of them. The island itself was some mile and a half long by a half mile wide. Here and there were steaming vents which spoke of its volcanic creation, but nothing more than that, no streams of lava or mountain here however small. Tolliver summed it up best. "I think this island was too small for the aborigines, so they planted a few fruit in case they needed to make a landfall here, and then left it alone. I think we are alone here until we can catch the eye of a passing boat." "We're stranded." I said. "True, but it's our good fortune we are, I think." Tolliver said. "The longboat had provisions for but a few days and only a couple of gallons of drinking water; yet here we may eat and drink at our leisure until we are saved. It will not matter whether it takes them a month or a year to find us, we will be here and well so long as we keep our heads." And he smiled at me, the first time I had seen him smile, and I smiled back. "We'll be friends here, I think, James." he said to me. I think here is a good place for me to tell you of Tolliver, now that you know him as more than a name. He was of medium height for a man in his fullness of years, and his face was serious but not unattractive. He put me less in mind of a schoolteacher than of a student, one who looked at and thought much on life. His cheeks were slender but becoming, his nose was straight and large but not bulbous at the end, coming instead to a small bump at the end, so that if he lay upon his back, you would see a wave in the act of cresting and beginning to fall over, that instant when it has not yet begun to foam white and crash upon itself. His mouth was small and lips were thin, and his chin was small and even. His body told of many years of labor though not at sea, he had not the stringy body of a man who had strained at ropes, but rather a man who had worked long upon the land and carried weights upon his back and in his arms, until his body would bear much more than his own weight without ardor or stress. His body had filled and was broad in his chest, his arms were thick and the muscles in them ran along their course as he moved his hands, adjusting and swelling to carry their burden. When he moved, there was a symphony of movement under his skin as his body cooperated in every action and turned it into a play of muscles like children racing after each other. With his solemn face and strong body, any captain would be quick to sign him up, knowing that whatever he lacked now in knowledge, he had the strength to carry him through to experience and usefulness in the long weeks and months at sea. "Okay." I said to Tolliver. "What's your first name, sir, if we are to be friends?" "You can call me Tolliver." he said. "It's not my name, but it's all I have now." He looked at me steadily. "If we are to be friends, I must tell you that I dare not return to England, for there waits for me only the hangman's gallows that I fled to sea to escape. But be not afraid, lad, for you are safe with me, I killed only because I had to not because of some perverse desire, and for the man I killed, I would do it all again and my conscience is clear." If it seems to you that I forgave this murderer too quickly, remember that he dove into the water after me to save my life when he was safe in the boat, and saved my life again by keeping me safe upon the piece of the mast when my strength gave out; so I believed him entire when he said that his honor was clean. "All right." was all I said. "Tolliver, you can call me James." "And what is your last name?" he asked me. "I know not." I admitted. "For I was a foundling and if you fled the gallows, I fled the foundling home. They gave me the first name they found pinned to my nightshirt and a last name they made up for me, but it is not my name. All I have is James." "James it is, then." Tolliver smiled. "And between us we have one name." He chuckled, and I laughed with him too, more than the joke deserved. We ate coconuts and mango that first day, and then set to work to fashion workable knives to make the other tools we would need, a spear to catch fish, and I took my meager skill to weaving a net from palm frond fibers, this net would let us also catch fish, and a larger one later to catch birds as they ate the fish guts we left for them as bait. But I am getting ahead in my tale. I had thought Tolliver sullen and silent upon the ship, and so he was not just with me but with the men he served with, but that must have been fear he would give himself away if he talked. With me, though, he showed himself as a man of some education and a good bit of common sense. He still pushed away private questions when I asked them, but I learned quickly that I could not ask for a better man to be left alone with on a deserted island. By the middle of that first day, we had a fire and enough firewood to keep it burning through the night. Our plan (Tolliver's plan) was that if we saw a ship, we would fire our supply of wood and let that catch their attention. We felt sure that there was no dangerous beast on the island, no snakes, no large animals, insects aplenty and birds to feed on them (and to feed us), and the trees and bushes that may have traveled there on wind and wave (or inside bird droppings as Tolliver said); they and we two were the only life to be found here. Tolliver had pounded a rock into a fair imitation of a knife and was using it now to try to whittle a spear for fish. I was weaving, as I had said, but as the day wore on and my clothes dried, I began to itch from the salt on my clothes. I endured it for a time, then said, "I am going to find a large puddle and wash out these clothes. The salt is really bothering me." He looked at me, scratched under his arm, and said, "I think you have a good idea, James. The day is warm, if we wash them now and find a good breeze to hang them in, they should be ready to wear again before dark." He stood up and undid the lacing at his neck and pulled the shirt over his body, and I stood looking up at his body. Know that I was a child of the puritanical English, and we did not uncover our bodies; even bathing was conducted in hurried secrecy and the body covered again as quickly as it could be. And the captain, himself a product of this society, had not permitted the men to uncover their bodies at sea, either. So this was truly the first time, the very first, that I had ever seen a man's body bare in any way, and had only glimpses of my own body until then. Hair on his chest, that was what I noticed first. I had not seen hair other than on a person's head, and on the faces of men who wore beards and that was a thing for most to be disgusted at. But looking at his broad frame, his solid body, all golden curves and balls, I found nothing disgusting about it. He saw me watching him, smiled. "You never saw a man's body before, James?" "No, sir...Tolliver." I said. He and I had both lost our shoes in the ocean and our stockings had been first soiled and then discarded by us that morning, so he reached next for his pants, pulling out the tie at his waist and undoing it, and I watched him frankly, and he watched me watching him, and he let me see him, and I let him see me see him. Beneath the pants were a cut-off pair of undershorts, that only reached to just above his knees (the captain's orders were to wear full undergarments, but the rule had not been enforced in the heat of the near-equatorial South Pacific), and I wondered for a time if he would stop there as he tossed the shirt and pants, dry but crusted with salt from the sea, over to me. But his hands came up again and untied the undershorts and I gawked at his body as he pulled them off. Again, I had only my own body to compare him too. I knew men were larger than me in many ways, but I had never thought they'd be so much larger than me in this! Where I had a small stub of a penis which had given me frequent if furtive pleasure, this was a fair-sized tube of man meat that hung insolently down his thigh even in lassitude, beginning in a thick nest of dark hair and ending in a coiled, capped crown which bulged suggestively. He had not been circumcised, as I had upon my arrival at the orphanage due to an infection from improper cleaning. He held the shorts in one hand and said, "Ready to catch this, James?" "Yes, sir." I said and he flung the damp shorts to me. They had not yet dried as the pants had, and so they were heavy and wet and I caught them with a grunt and lifted up my arms to keep them from falling off, and that pressed my face into them and I breathed in. Thick, that smell, thick and in some indefinable way, virile. They bore an aroma I had never experienced before, heady and full and undeniably male. I nearly swooned from that aura of masculinity and Tolliver mistook my reaction and chuckled. "The smell of a man's drawers after they've been worn a few weeks can be rather strong." He admitted. "So give them a good cleaning when you do it, that's a good lad." I realized then that he intended me to do the laundry for both of us! He stood there, bare and proud and I shivered from the raw power he exuded, now wearing only a headscarf tied to his head, the essence of man in the wild. And so I meekly said, "Yes, sir." "I saw a good-sized pool in that way." He pointed, content after our exploration to let me wander the island unattended. The pool was only over the first ridge, however. "It should do you." I turned and stumbled off in that direction and he sat back down, nude as some savage warrior, working on his spear, and only the color of his skin told of his civilized heritage. When I got to the pool, I sank down and, hidden, breathed deeply of this musk his shorts bore, drinking in and memorizing the scent. I would have liked to keep this piece of cloth as it was, but he would not permit that, no doubt. I would have to wait until I did the laundry again before I could drink in that essence again. I washed first my own shirt, an oversized thing that doubled as my nightshirt when I got ready for bed, rubbing it over a large rock I found, forcing the water through the cloth. The salt dissolved easily enough, the cleanliness obtained was less thorough, but it would suffice. Then I washed the other clothes, his shirt and then my pants and his, saving those shorts for last. When I got to them, I held them up to my nose once again, to savor them one last time, and as I drank in their smell, I heard Tolliver say, "Will you be there much longer?" I looked up, my nose keep in his shorts, and he was standing there, his spear finished. He had kept the tie from his pants, and now it was around his waist, with a crafted loop which was to serve some purpose he had in mind, he had still the scarf on his head but was otherwise still unclothed. "Just this to do and I'll be done." I said, hastily dropping the shorts into the water, sloshing them around. I did this and then hazarded another look in his direction, and he was still there, looking at me, a naked boy of nine years age, bent over and scrubbing at his shorts. His eyes were fixed on me and I saw that his organ was filling and standing up from his body. I looked at it, he looked at me looking at it, and so we were for a moment, and then he shook himself and turned around. "I'm going to try to get us a fish for supper." he said. "A man can't live on coconuts alone." I watched until he disappeared and then I returned to scrubbing out his shorts. Their essence was washed from their body and when I lifted them to my face again, fresh water running from them and through them, only a ghost of that aroma remained. Some branches of a bush were moving in the breeze, I draped the clothes over them and then turned to the puddle to wash my own body free of salt. My own shirt was mostly dry, I put it back on when I was done and went to find Tolliver. He was walking out of the surf with a laugh of triumph, a large fish wiggling on the end of his spear. "Got one!" he crowed. "We eat tonight!" I applauded him and while Tolliver gutted the fish with his quasi-knife, I set about to building up the fire. The sun was low, more than an hour still to setting, but we were both more than ready to eat meat, which was scarce enough even aboard ship. We got the fish skewered (his spear, he said he wanted to temper it with fire and he could do better on the next one anyhow) and hung above the flames, and settled back to wait for it to cook. I felt comfortable here, watching the waves now calm and serene and the sky scrubbed blue and clouds becoming scarcer as I watched almost, the trees waving peacefully, the only sounds the surf and the birds and the crackle of the fire. I looked over at Tolliver, and he looked at me, and I said, "You know, I think you're right. We are better off here than on the longboat." "You'd better believe it." Tolliver said. "Here we can do what we want and nobody can tell us not to." "Like walk about with no clothes on?" He laughed. "Exactly. Though you aren't doing that, are you?" I smiled. "Thinking about it." I admitted. "Why not?" He said. "Here, we can do whatever we want to." So I did what I wanted to do, I moved so I could see better and I looked at his crotch. This time he didn't shy away from it, even though again his cock began to fill and stretch out. "It's just so much bigger than mine." I said in an air of frank wonder. "Part of being a man." He said. "You'll get your size one day." I could do what I wanted, so I lifted up my shirt and said, "What I don't see is how you play with one that big." And I showed him how I did it, with my hand over the top of my dick, my fingers reaching down over it on all sides and I pulled on it. "Do you do that with it?" I asked him. He watched me pulling my little-boy's dick and he said, "No, when you're a man, you have to do it like this." And he wrapped his hand around his cock, sideways, his fingers holding on below the head and holding his prick like a mop handle, he began to slide it up and down. You may laugh to know how naive I was, I again say that my upbringing had been of the strictest sort, cheerless and friendless. I did not know anything until then. So I stared at him, watched him moving his hand up and down upon his dick, I marveled at how well it worked. I imitated him on myself, my fingers could only fit two and the thumb upon my little stub of a penis, but I began to do as he did, and I found it felt, not just like the way I had done it, but very fine just the same. I knelt down close to his side and I said, "If I can do whatever I want, I want to feel what this is like." and I took his dong into my hand and he granted me this, letting his hand fall away and leaving me in sole possession of his manhood and his life. As my slender fingers encircled him, I gasped at how it felt. I once had touched a lady's velvet skirt, and did not regret then or now that this touch had earned me a beating by the orphanage director, for the touch of that soft cloth was marvelous. This was as soft as that, and bore the same feel of a thickness to the layer, covering that which lay beneath, but where the lady's velvet dress had been an empty shell of cloth draped over a corset of whalebone and linen, I felt here more than that, for he was warm, very warm, and that warmth fed itself into my body through my touch, and when I stroked it for him, he gave forth a little sigh of pleasure and that thrilled my body as well as his so that I knew in full measure what this small touch gave to him, how it surpasses my own and yet was kin to it, as the child is to its father, my delight was untempered and new and stumbling as if in play, his was seasoned and full and capable as a man laboring at a task, his pleasure bore with it a purpose that my own could not yet attain. I had been lectured frequently at the orphanage about the "delights of the flesh" and so could boast some knowledge however negative about this, I knew that this was something the ministers felt belonged to a man and woman and marriage, though I had also figured out that there were those who were not so inclined to intertwine the three so solidly. So I watched his face as it softened in his delight, as his lips parted and his eyes watched me with a moistness to them, as if he was pouring himself into me and I said, "Is this what a woman does with a man?" His lips joined so they could reform into a gentle smile. "It is one of the things they do." "What else would they do with you?" "Some things you could not possibly do." he said to me. "You are not built the same as they." "Some things." I seized upon his qualification. "But there are things I can do for you as a woman would?" He understood the thrust of my questions and answered them the more fully. "There are things indeed that you could do as well or better than a woman." he said. "If you would like to learn them, I can teach you." He caught my hand and stopped it in its motions upon his prick. "But I must tell you that there is a reason that men and women wait until marriage to join in this way. Once it has been taken beyond a certain level, it cannot be ended." He looked me carefully in the eye and continued. "What it will mean is that you and I will be bonded in a manner beyond all breaking, beyond any changing. You will belong to me in a way that you will never be able to sever. This is a grave choice for one of your age. I shall not force this upon you and must ask you to consider the seriousness of this." And I looked back at him and I said, "When I was abandoned by the captain after being forced out of the boat by a crewmate, you were the one who came after me. You did not know that we would make it to this island or even that we would find that mast to cling to. I would have died out there but for you." I reached up and put my hand to his cheek. "I cannot think of anything I would like more than to belong to you. I beg you, sir, to teach me the ways that I may please you." So with his instructions to me, I knelt over and took the head of his cock into my mouth. Mindful of his words, I kept my mouth very moist and used my saliva to lubricate him thoroughly. Then I began to slide my mouth around and around, rubbing the flanges of his cock with my lips, and he rewarded me with grateful sighs. I had begun this with no more than curiosity about his body, but now I had a higher goal in mind. He had said that this would bring us together forever, and now that you know my history, I think you can see why I would crave that bond so urgently. So it was more than mere curious exploration of a boy upon a man's body that I began, it was the seeking of that very bond which he had warned me about, the knowledge that we would be joined beyond all unjoining, this contact between our bodies. Once I had brought him to his fruition, he assured me, there would be no sundering of our lives, they would be eternally intertwined by this sharing. So eagerly I lavished my attentions upon him, I used my every erg of strength to bring him joy, to elicit those sighs of pleasure, those slow writhings of rapture. Like the gentle swelling of the ocean waves he began to move under me as I rolled my mouth about his cockhead. And I judged him properly moistened now and I began to move deeper. He had warned me that I could not possibly take the entirety of his organ into my mouth, but I craved more of it than I had and so now I enveloped his cockhead completely and, keeping my milk teeth well back from his sensitive skin, I began to pull up and down upon his foreskin, bringing it with me and so stroking it back and forth upon his glans. "Ah, ah, James." he moaned softly up to me. "My tender little lover, sweet child, give yourself to me, and take from me in turn. Mmmm!" This was a long, warm sound that welled up from within his breast and exuded into the air like honey flows onto the tongue. "Oh, oh, James, oh!" I plied my mouth upon him and he moaned, his body was gently rocking back and forth. As his rocking motion increased, I found it first awkward, then hit upon the answer of letting his rocking do part of the work for me, matched his motions and found that this freed me to take him even deeper into my body. Now his cock was running the length from my lips' edge to the back of my throat and I heard his moans increase in volume and timbre, now came the time he had warned me of, the fact that he had been long without release and could not last long at this, that I must expect soon that he would conclude our act which he called "the dance of joining" and so I understood that within this strong man, this muscular being who had dived from safety into chaos to come to my aid, within his breast, the heart beat faster, the breaths came quicker, he was now being pleasured in a way that no boy can yet experience, that he was being consumed in the fires of delight and tormented in the crucible of ecstasy, and this to me meant that his cock was becoming hotter by the moment, it was a fiery shaft within my mouth and throat, so warm, red-warm it was, and now his groans became shouts of joy. "Ah, ah, ah, gah, uh, gah, HNNNGHHH!" came the promised climactic release of the pressure that his ecstasy was building within him, and it was indeed accompanied as he had explained, by his body thrashing beneath me so that it was a labor for me to hold him fast within my mouth and yet still keep him stimulated and pleasured, this was no moment for me to stop, not now, not now! So I fought this flailing beast of a man beneath me, he had been indeed reduced to the rutting animal that was man's true inner nature, this was the moment of joining, that he showed this to me and let it take him and in doing so, take me! And then, he burst into my mouth the savored, sought-after gems of his very life, the hot seed of his being poured into me, this was what would join us together and I drank it down, it was hotter and stickier and saltier than I had expected or that he had explained, but I knew it for the nectar of the bond and so I quaffed it as it flowed from the tap of his body, felt it burn itself into me as it went down, felt it seep into my very body, a warm line that ran from my throat to my stomach and the warmth resonated outwards from there into my very fibre. His humping motions ceased, he dropped almost at once into a state of torpor, his chest heaving harder than I had ever seen it do, even in the labors aboard ship, even after that exhausting swim to shore, he had not panted as heavily as he did from merely lying there and letting me service him, letting me bring forth from him the bond that now joined us and I knew now what he meant by that. A part of him was now inside of me, and we shared this experience, this vulnerability of our bodies and I knew that I wanted as soon as I could to join him in this marvelous exhaustion. I stood up on my knees and I pulled up that shirt and I began to wank my little dick, to give at least this small joy to him. He looked at me with his eyes glazed and soft as blue pillows, and he saw me in my urgency and in his kindness he took my little prong in his fingers and he began to manipulate them for me. I thrilled as I never had to my own fingers, for this was another man's hand, this hand was another person coming together with me, and in that state of excitement at this triumph I lasted but a few seconds and then my body answered with the small echo of an orgasm that a child's body can provide and after that was done, I lay down across his body and he held me in his arms like that and when I looked into his eyes, I saw there the bond he had warned me of, it linked us now, we were one and more than one, our very souls had joined and indeed, I could not imagine the act of God or man that could sever it. The bond is so warm, it is like having your soul being held by another, who warms you and loves you and will protect you always. He sighed and I echoed that sigh, one sigh from two mouths and he said, "Now we are bonded, James, my love, my child and my life. I pray only that you find no regret marring this moment for you, for there is none with me, I would not change it if I could." "My one regret is this." I said. "That there is more for us to do than we could do at this one time." He knew what I meant. "If I possess you in that way, there shall be pain." he said. "I cannot prevent that, though I can lessen it with gentleness." "You could not hurt me." I protested. "You could never hurt me." "The pain would be in the body." He agreed. "Not in the spirit, if you truly wish it." "I do." I said. "Later, as you have promised, we shall do this." "Yes, later." He said. Then, with a note of practicality bolstered by strength and some alarm. "We have forgotten our fish!" Indeed, it had been hanging unturned over the fire for too long and he turned it and I saw how the flesh had blackened some. But only a little of it was burned and when the other side was fully cooked, the burned area was negligible. We shared that fish, Tolliver and I, and it was a festival in the way that Christmas was at the orphanage, when we would hope for a taste of Christmas goose and a spoonful of the plum pudding donated by generous benefactors. When night fully wrapped us around, we banked the fire and settled into our planned sleeping area, an indentation in the sand which we hoped would keep the chill night air at bay. In that cup of warmth, I lay myself upon Tolliver's body and I said, "Now, my dearest friend and my love, take me once again." And he did, with all the gentleness which he had promised. He moistened his cock with his own hand until he had covered it heavily and then he guided my buttocks upon his body, pressing me backwards down his body until my head rested upon his chest and his manhood was up between my legs. When he found and pushed it against my nether opening, I gasped and looked into his eyes, found kindness there, and relaxed into it. There was pain, but it was not the pain of being switched by the director, nor the pain of being beaten by the older boys as they take your sweet from you, nor the pain of falling into the ocean and know that none intend to pull you out. This was pain but it came to me by the virile column of the man who had indeed pulled me out of the water, had risked his life and nearly lost it to save my own, this man who had given me the choice of joining with him or not, and in doing so, bestowed this gift upon me, the gift of pleasing him because I chose, and so the pain of merely being penetrated in the act of sexual possession was less. There was a feeling of tearing, the heat of blood, but that was nothing, nothing at all, it was drowned in the ocean of the pleasure that giving myself to Tollliver and its cries extinguished in the roaring typhoon of the blood pounding in my veins as I felt myself possessed by Tolliver, to belong to him still more fully. Once he was past the opening, once it had given way completely to him, the rest of it was a mere nothing. I found my body expanding to take him, and when he had fully entered me, and began those first gentle thrusts into me, the edge of his ardor drained from him before and giving him this civility of control, I found to my surprise that there was a sexual joy in this for me as well, beyond that of the knowledge of this joining. Every motion of his body sent that sensation into me, I was gasping and felt my cock harden without my finger's aid, and I gasped my joy against Tolliver's broad, strong chest, and it was riding on the gentle waves of his body's ocean like a schooner, a soft rocking motion, and the joy was complete. I was able to move my body in tune with his after a time, rising up to sit atop him rather than laying there, and only feel delight at the motions, and this time went on for some time before Tolliver began to vent once again those warm sounds of increasing pleasure, and I found my own pleasure rising as his did. His motions became needful, not to the degree of bestial rut as he had before, but more aggressive and more firmly he rammed his cock into me and then he grunted, gave a choked moan of joy and I felt his seed boiling into me once more, and I closed my eyes, threw my head back and moaned with him as I felt the most intense orgasm yet touch my body. Yes, we were truly one now, our very joys were interconnected and shared. Done, he and I both, I rested my hands upon his rising and falling chest, and I panted down at him, looking at his long, broad, brown form and I felt then the strength of this bond, and it was love, laugh at me if you will, but it was love and the bond proved true despite its beginning. It was in love that I lay down upon him once more, it was in love that we stayed like that even as we moved into slumber, I slept with his softened cock still imbedded in me, and it was only sometime during the night that it fell away. That next day the sun warmed us both and I awakened in its soft rays to snuggle against Tolliver the more. He opened his eyes, looked down at me, smiled and I reached up to kiss him and he gave me the kiss, a kiss of love, and then we laughed, me in my giggle of euphoria and him with the kindness of a lonely man who has found a companion at a time when he had given up on ever sharing his life, and that hug was wonderful. We arose reluctantly from the depression and set out for the jungle to pick our breakfast. I decided that we needed to harvest some of those fruits, keep them in our camp where the birds couldn't get at it. What came next was a succession of days nearly unmarked and unheeded. We were too close to the equator for winter to be a thought, the days were uniformly hot and weather consisted only of planning shelter for the next typhoon. But there came at last a day I knew would come, when we looked out at the horizon and saw the ship out there. It was larger than our little schooner, this was a ship of great size, and it flew a French flag. I looked at Tolliver and he looked at me. "They'll see us soon." he said to me. "We had best light the fire to be sure." "Yes." I said and went toward our campfire where we had banked the coals against the need for a new fire. Stopped and said, "Tolliver?" "Yes, James?" "Do we have to?" He understood my sorrowful answer. "We can't spend the rest of our lives on this island." he said. "There are things that civilization can provide that we will need." He gestured to the rags his clothes and mine had become. He was reduced to wearing only his pants and they were ragged up above the knees, I wore my shirt and it covered me better than my pants did nowadays. "I guess so." I agreed and prepared to fetch the coals out of the bed. He hesitated. "But we don't have to do it right now." He said. "There'll be another ship along before too much longer." I agreed. "I guess we can afford to be choosy about who rescues us." he concluded. "After all, neither of us wants to go back to England, now do we?" "Yeah." I said. And so, side by side, the fire unlit, we simply watched the French vessel sail on past our island until it at last vanished upon the far blue horizon. THE END Comments, complaints or suggestions? E-mail me at Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM