by Blake Dawson* <blake@menetor.com>
From the Preface to Chapter 1:
If you like to read this kind of story but are concerned about possible legal implications, work to change the law! If you don’t, why are you here?
*Blake Dawson is the person the otherwise anonymous author would be if “trading places” became magically possible.
Being eight had been great, plenty of cause to celebrate. But before I could have my celebration there had to be much negotiation. Mum was the easy bit. All I had to settle with her was format and numbers—at our place rather than going out and five guests with Hayden invited to stay over, although that certainly was not the way that that part of my master plan was to be put to him. And I would give her a lot of help preparing the food and earlier with the invitations—another key to my master plan. The hard part was the invitation list because I insisted that that be negotiated with Hayden—he and I being seen by all as “best mates”—all that is except me who still harboured other expectations as to how our relationship should develop. Our mateship was the highlight of my last months of being eight, but it also served to keep my emotions on the boil. The part of me that knew we were going to stay best mates for ever struggled with the part which sought to push our relationship to another level. Preparations for my ninth birthday party became a trade off between my rational and emotional parts with one offering to serve the other so that the other would stay patient.
The reality was that these two best mates who went to and from school and everywhere else together had still not been inside the front doors of each other’s homes, so a simple invitation to help me work out the guest list became my excuse to get Hayden in the door. I had also decided that the safe way to introduce sex was to talk about other people doing it, which led me initially to the otherwise boring topic of girls. I brought up the prospect of inviting Felicity French as a decoy, but for a while the case in favour was overwhelming. Back in the days before Cherie Vander unleashed my emotional side, I had learnt more about the female anatomy from Felicity that anybody else. She was now in grade five and her place had always been one of the hangouts for our old gang, now largely dispersed, although it tended to be favoured most by her younger brother Corey’s mates which sometimes left Felicity and me with little choice but to snob off to her room. Hayden knew who she was but would not entertain any discussion of how well he might know her—not that is until mum announced from the kitchen that she had to go out for half an hour.
As soon as she was clearly out of hearing and seeing range, Hayden changed tone completely. He had never in the months we had been talking ever said anything that even suggest I was a junior partner, but suddenly he put a conspiratorial arm around my shoulder and began to explain that big boys did not need to explain the messy details of their encounters with girls in the crude terms that I used as they had a system of scoring which enabled them to convey exactly how far they had got with a single number. He added that Felicity was an eight with him which left me in the darkest dark. And while my logical self well knew that an arm around the shoulder from Hayden was purest mateship, my emotional self still hoped momentarily that in this changed setting it might be more. But that was nothing to the conflicting messages I was to encounter when Hayden decided how to answer my all too obvious question. “I can show you up to four, but after that you will either need Felicity herself or some imagination.” He took my hand in his, squeezed my fingers as I had done to him more than once, then quickly changed to fondling my hand and then to interlocking our fingers. “One.” He turned to face me and put both his arms around me pulling me into his chest and working his hands around my back, and I amazed myself by at least appearing tentative in responding in kind. “Two.” He kissed me lightly on the forehead, on the bridge of the nose and on the cheek, then pressed his cheek against my lips which I puckered momentarily. “Three.” He then kissed me squarely on the lips, moistly, held a moment, slid the tip of his tongue between my lips, and touched the tip of mine at which point he opened his mouth and this time I responded with less hesitation and we kissed deeply until he broke for breath. “Four.” He said I didn’t have the body parts needed to go any higher, but at least conceded that it was a ten point scale, and my logical side dragged me back to discussing the invitation list.
The next three did not prove to be all that difficult. Being in my grade at school, even though he did not yet play cricket, Robbie Vander was the only one of the old gang who I still related to, that is other than Cherie who I could not possibly bring up for such an occasion, and Felicity who was already in the to be considered column. Jarod Kendall was the only member of the tackers that we both felt comfortable with as he had played quite a few games with Hayden the previous season when our club only had one Under 12 team and was only left out of the A team because his parents had offered to look after the new team. Jarod, like Felicity, was in fifth grade, so we only saw them casually at school. Even though I had Hayden paired up with me in my version of the guest list, it looked more and more sensible to invite Barry Smith who sat with Hayden in class and was a more than handy member of the A team. I was not overly concerned that one of the reasons that Hayden had been going to skip to Under 14s was to ensure that Barry, who was a couple of months older than him, kept playing next season, and was aware that the Kendalls and the Smiths were long standing friends.
Having five definite boys, could have provided a lot of conventional arguments against Felicity, but instead we demolished her by a ridiculous game of numbers, which was made even stranger by me not yet having any accurate idea as to what five through nine represented. Then finding a sixth boy proved tougher. Symmetry considerations suggested a second fifth grader, but that argument didn’t eliminate Felicity, nor did the fact that I wanted them to be a natural pair for Robbie. In the end the only boy who fitted that spot was Joey Mantari who was also the one player to be promoted from the tackers to the A team mid-season, even if mainly because the number of tackers had kept increasing. We each had a few reservations about him, but agreed that he probably thought of both of us as his mates, so an invitation would not appear out of place.
The only remaining stumbling block was that I had not had much to do with Barry, but at least we had a few days until the invitations had to go out, so I could do something about that, and anyway I had the double incentive of needing to do some numerological research with one of the “big boys”. As it turned out we got on so well that he would probably have been more surprised if he hadn’t got an invitation, but Barry was as uncomfortable as Hayden when in came to using words in place of their secret numbers. I finally prised out of him that five was “outside upstairs”, six was “inside upstairs”, seven was “outside downstairs” and eight was “inside downstairs”, but he just poked his tongue out when I asked about nine.
Mum had recently acquired a desktop publishing setup at home so she could do a few freelance jobs on the side, so helping her with the invitations made it easy for me to change “Birthday” to “Slumber” on one of them without mucking up her layout. When Hayden arrived on the allotted night, I took his sleeping bag at the front door, quickly chucked it in my bedroom and shut the door. Robbie had warned me that Joey might not fit in all that well, so I had suggested the Vanders should offer to bring Joey and take him home, and I let Robbie know that the older kids were unlikely to appreciate our old gang games. He was cool about it but also aware that I was desperate to get a bit further with Hayden. The two sixth graders tried their best to appear to be way ahead of the rest of us, but Jarod could play Barry on a break, while Joey oscillated from over-enthusiastic following to becoming seriously censorious, and none of us got around to trying anything that could not have been shown on Play School. I even kept away from numbers until after Cherie had come to the door, ostensibly for her brother and Joey, but really to give me a birthday kiss, and I had to explain to Hayden that he was the only one who was actually staying over.
We helped mum clear up and volunteered to retreat to my room and give her some peace, and so I could at last get on with my grand plan for the night. “Did you know they use a slightly different version of your numbers at the Mardi Gras?” He did not offer a reply so I sat beside him and continued. “The gays can’t be worried about tits, so they go straight downstairs for five ... like ...” and I groped his crotch until I felt the first signs of hardening. “Then six ...” I swung us around more lengthwise on the bed, opened his pants waist and fly, slid my fingers inside his jocks and started tugging his now quite hard dick. Soon I had slipped his pants and jocks down around his thighs and swung us both fully lengthwise on the bed. “Then seven ...” I put my mouth to his dick, kissed it, licked it and started to gently suck on it. My hand fondled his balls and slipped lower easing his legs apart until my finger was deep between the cheeks of his arse. “Then eight ...” muffled out of the corner of my half open mouth as I slipped my finger right inside his tight hole. He soon climaxed and I eased my head up onto his chest as I slipped my own pants down and then rolled fully on top of him. “And nine ...” as I rubbed my dick into the grove between his thighs until I too climaxed. After a few moments to recover, I swung my legs onto the floor and finished undressing, then helped Hayden to do likewise. “That only leaves one number, so it must be your turn to do it to me.” I rubbed some hair cream on my arse hole and his dick, placed a pillow lengthwise in the middle of the bed, then lay my torso on top of it so and spread my knees far apart so my arse pointed into the air. Still not showing any sign of emotion, Hayden knelt between my feet and guided his again hard dick right inside me and was soon thrusting more and more rapidly until he climaxed for a second time.
I told him that he had given me my best birthday present, and he didn’t refuse to share my bed for the rest of the night. Sometime in the darkness a few previously blocked signals must have asserted themselves within his brain, and I awoke with the warm feeling of him starting over back at twos and threes. With just a little encouragement from me, he happily progressed to the kind of scoreline that he only dreamt about on the cricket field—a long run of fours and sixes. While the magical transformation of that night has never left us, he has almost always followed the rule that real batsmen don’t score sevens or above, and don’t score fives except by somebody else’s mistake. In the morning we used mum’s publishing system to design a form that had space for a list of names down the side, each followed by ten numbered check boxes. We printed two on pink paper and two on blue and each took one of each on which to record our future scores.