Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2021 19:23:38 +0000
From: olhap8464972175@elude.in
Subject: THE MONKEY'S GRIN (young-friends, sf-fantasy)

THE MONKEY'S GRIN

by Oliver Hapland

Thirteen-year-old Martin inherits a certain piece of intimate sports
equipment from his grandfather in colonial India, with a cryptic note.
When he puts it on, unusual things start to happen and he begins to see
his friend Peter in a new light.

Warning: this story contains descriptions of sexual acts by boys. If this
is likely to offend you, please do not read on. This story is fiction. It
is an artistic exploration of its themes and does not condone them.

Readers who enjoy this story may like to read my other stories, such as
'The Lustful Little Mouse', 'Little Lord Barry' or 'Gulliver's Pageboy'
(see links below).

I am always delighted to receive readers' email at olhap8464972175@elude.in

Please consider making a donation to Nifty to continue providing all these
wonderful stories http://donate.nifty.org/




THE MONKEY'S GRIN

PRELUDE

We are moving house and I came across an old photograph when I was
clearing a drawer. It shows eleven boys in cricket whites posing for a
team photo: six boys standing in a row with their arms around one
another's shoulders, and five boys kneeling in front. Every boy has a
bright, beaming face, but the boy kneeling in the middle, with a mass of
unruly hair, looks particularly cheeky, and kneeling next to him, looking
a little less sure of himself, is his best friend - me!

This picture brought with it such a flood of memories that I paused in my
packing and chuckled as I looked from face to face, recalling the names
and characters of all my boyhood teammates.

Written on the back of the photo, in my father's hand, it said 'Grantwich
Junior XI, County Cup winners, 1976'. My best friend, Peter (the one with
the cheeky grin and the hair) has every reason to look pleased with
himself because he was the top run-scorer of the championship, and the
trophy, sitting on the grass in front of us, is there largely due to him.

He and I were thirteen when we won the Cup, big boys in the team, where
some of the others were only eleven or twelve.

In our white tops and trousers and shiny boys' faces, you would be
forgiven for thinking us as innocent as lambs - which, if you know
anything about boys, it won't surprise you to hear we were not! I am going
to tell the strange story of what happened to me that summer, and how I
learnt some of the guilty secrets of the other boys in the team.


CHAPTER 1

'My dad's giving us a lift home,' I told Peter, one Friday night after
cricket practice.

'Ace!' he said. 'That means I get to ride in your dad's new Cortina!'

We both liked cars, especially Peter, and I think he had been more excited
about my dad getting a new Ford than I was.

'How fast has he done in it?' Peter wanted to know.

'Oh, well over a ton,' I said impressively, inflating considerably the
speed I had really seen my father do.

We came out of the shower together and padded back, dripping, to the
benches, where the other boys were in various stages of dressing, and
rubbed ourselves dry with our towels.

Mervin, who coached the team, was there with his striped tracksuit open to
reveal a gold medallion on his somewhat hairy chest.

'Hurry, boys,' he said. 'I have to close up sharpish tonight.'

'You got a new bird, then, Merv?' piped up young Colin, mischievously,
standing there blond and naked, trying to find his way into a T-shirt.

Mervin stalked over to him.

'You are a cheeky boy,' he said, taking hold of Colin's cheek and tugging it.

Colin grinned back at him with his arms through the T-shirt and pulled
himself away. He was a nervous boy and a bit twitchy, but his irreverent
way of talking to people, especially adults, made him popular with the
rest of us.

'You are a very cheeky boy,' repeated Mervin, taking an upward slap at
Colin's departing bottom.

'As a matter of fact, I haven't got a "bird"...tonight,' Mervin said,
pacing up and down and spinning his bunch of keys round his finger.
'Tonight I have to go and arrange a fixture for you layabouts with the
Milords at the public school, St Botolph's.'

'A bit la-di-dah are they, Merv?' said another boy, Brian, who was our
tubby, but very dependable, wicket keeper.

'A bit "hello darling" more like!' someone else said, to general laughter.

'Well, whatever else they are, they're damn good at cricket,' said Mervin.
'You've got your work cut out.'

'What I don't get,' said Daniel (who had made the joke) as he pulled on
his socks, 'Is why there aren't ever any girls at our matches.'

Daniel was always going on about girls. He and Peter had got girl-mad
recently, which I found tiresome. I had preferred it last year when they
were happy talking about cricket and cars.

'You just want to go in the girls' changing room!' said Christopher, who
was dressed and waiting next to him on the bench, swinging his feet
against the shoe cages underneath. Chris was Daniel's younger brother -
and, like him, shocking ginger.

'No,' said Daniel. 'It would just be nice to have some girls watching the
match...that we could chat to and that.'

Mervin guffawed. 'This isn't a matchmaking service I'm running here for
you boys.'

Daniel stood up and pulled his duffle bag off the peg.

'We just want to start learning how to perpetuate the race!' he grinned.

Mervin smirked. 'Is your right hand getting worn out then?'

I wasn't sure that some of the younger ones got the joke, but Daniel
certainly did because his freckly face went red and he started shoving
things in his bag hurriedly.

The others were nearly dressed.

'You're so lucky,' Peter said to me, as he wriggled into his Y-fronts. 'I
wish my dad would get a new car.'

With our tracksuits pulled on and our Adidas bags round our necks, we
headed outside to meet Dad.

Sitting in the back of the orange Cortina five minutes later, Peter seemed
suitably impressed. Dad changed down a gear and the engine gave a throaty
roar. Peter and I both ran our hands over the luxurious seats with
thousands of little punched holes in the leather.

We were excited because it was the weekend. Peter was sleeping over at
mine this time and we had the whole day tomorrow to practise our strokes
in the garden - OK, we were cricket mad!

'How's Martin's batting coming on?' Dad asked over his shoulder, to tease me.

'Pretty good, Mr Dempster,' said Peter, playing along, 'But he let himself
get caught out by Kevin Simmons and now Kevin thinks he's the best thing
since sliced bread.'

'Very unlucky,' said Dad. 'Oh, Martin, I went over to granddad's today.
We've cleared most of the stuff now, but I found something in the loft
that I know he wanted you to have.'

'What is it?' I asked apprehensively.

'It's a box with some things in it - cricket things.'

The summer evening sun slanted in, spotlighting the wood and chrome on the
dashboard.

'I know you're still feeling sad,' Dad went on. 'We all are. But these
little things might help you to remember granddad as he was. He knew how
much you love cricket.'

'Sounds neat!' said Peter. 'Can I see them?'

When we got home, Mum had set the table for dinner. Dad was looking for
granddad's things.

'I put that old box on the floor,' she told him. 'You boys take it up to
Martin's room. You haven't got long before I dish up.'

The box was all torn and scuffed but when we sat down cross-legged with it
on my bedroom rug, Peter could just make out a crest on the side: '"Best
Indian Tea Exporters, Bombay",' he read.

'Granddad  lived in India when he was a boy,' I told him. 'It must be from
then. My great-granddad, was an official in the British Empire.'

Dad was standing in the doorway.

'Your granddad wanted to give this stuff to me when I was your age,' he
said, 'But I never did like cricket much. The cricket sense skipped a
generation and you got it!'

Over the rim of the big box was sticking out the handle of a cricket bat
and a couple of shin pads, yellow with age.

Peter pulled the bat out.

'Look, it must be a hundred years old!' he said, with obvious awe.

'I shouldn't think they'll be much good to actually use,' said Dad, 'But
they might be lucky. I'll leave you to it.'

When he had gone, we rummaged through the other treasures in the box.

As well as the shin pads, there was a pair of wicket keeper's gloves,
which were falling to pieces where the stitching had disintegrated. Their
shiny leather appealed to me. It was brown and well-used and smelled of
sun and sweat. I slid my hands in and could see my fingers poking out
where the seams had gone.

I could feel that the gloves had had hands in them before. They were
moulded to the shape of someone's fingers: granddad's I guessed, some
sixty years before, at his school in India.

There was a faded and well-thumbed paperback copy of 'County Cricket
Rules' and a scrapbook with newspaper cuttings pasted in it. When I peered
into the shadowy bottom of the box, I could just make out something else
and put my hand in to fish it out.

It was another little box, flat and about five inches square. When I
opened it, I had a surprise. I recognised what I saw immediately - what
cricket-playing boy wouldn't!

It was a triangle of hard creamy-white material about four inches long,
concave and rounded, with soft leather stitched round its rim. It was what
we called a cricketer's 'box', or what might be called now, a jockstrap.

'Always useful,' said Peter when he saw it.

I felt a bit embarrassed with Peter seeing the 'box', knowing that it had
belonged to my grandfather, and we both laughed and laughed.

'I suppose they needed their nuts protecting back then as well,' said Peter.

Naturally, being boys who had recently started to grow, we were curious
about such a sports pad and the intimate protection it was intended to
give.

When we regained our composure, I examined the pad more closely and
decided that the rigid material, that I had taken to be plastic, was in
fact something else, perhaps horn or bone. It had been carefully carved
out by someone who knew exactly the shape required.

I turned this familiar, yet somehow very strange, object over in my hand,
running my fingers over its contours and feeling its smooth bulbous
inside. There was a curious maker's mark on the front where the pad
bulged: a line drawing of a monkey, holding its paw up and looking out,
with what looked like a broad smile on its face.

'Go on, put it on,' Peter said, his eyes bright.

'All right.'

I closed my bedroom door quietly and then pushed the pad down inside my
tight jeans and into my underpants, so that it sat where it had been
designed to go. It nestled surprisingly comfortably.

'How does it fit?' Peter wanted to know.

I told him it was snug, but not unpleasant. I eased it around so that it
sat better.

How strange it was to think that the last person to have used the pad
would have been my grandfather when he was a boy; his balls would once
have been cupped where mine now were. I started to get hard at the thought
and the box quickly became tight. I pulled it out.

'Hey, there's a piece of paper,' said Peter, prising something out of the
little cardboard box that the pad had come in.

'"Personal Guard, Size Small",' he read, 'And there's some funny writing -
it must be Indian - then there's a poem in English.'

'Let me see,' I said, moving to look over his shoulder.

He was right. It did look like a poem, printed in a curious italic script
in the middle of the folded piece of paper, pock-marked and yellowed with
age. We read it aloud together:

	"He who keeps this guardsman close,
	Will insight have and knowledge host.
	So use it wisely and with care
	And every secret shall lay bare.
	In friendly play wear it and each
	Opponent's wishes it will teach,
	But use it to a guileful end
	And mischief on you shall descend."

'That's just weird,' Peter said, making a face. 'It makes it sound like
it's magic, or something.'

'Perhaps it's got some Indian curse on it, like the Egyptian mummies!' I
said.

'Woooo!' he made a noise like a ghost and grabbed the pad out of my hand.
Then he held it against his groin and danced round my bedroom, thrusting
his hips obscenely and making noises like some sort of spectral gorilla.

'Boys! Dinner's on the table,' Mum called up the stairs, and Peter
stopped, mid thrust, looking mortified that Mum might have heard him.

'Dare you to wear it while we have dinner!' Peter said.

I wasn't about to decline a challenge.

As I moved to put the pad back down my trousers, I thought I saw the
picture of the monkey wink its eye at me. I blinked. I must be seeing
things!

How naughty it felt to wear my granddad's cricket pad surreptitiously
under the table as we sat down to eat with my mother and father and big
sister, the three of them completely unaware of why Peter and I kept
grinning at each other.

'Martin...?' Kathy turned to me. My sister still looked a bit strange to
me, since she had only just had her hair done in a new style, a pageboy,
like Joanna Lumley in The New Avengers.

'Have you been in my room?' she demanded.

'Why?'

'A pair of my new tights have got a ladder in, and I haven't even worn
them yet. And my makeup's been moved around!'

'What's that got to do with me?' I said.

I couldn't believe she had brought this up when Peter was round.

'Martin used to like to dress up when he was little,' Mum explained to Peter.

'Oh, I used to do that,' Peter said. 'I had a cowboy outfit.'

I just knew that Kathy was going to keep on about her tights - which, yes,
I had borrowed - and I was casting around in my mind for something that
would annoy her so much that it would take the conversation in a different
direction.

Suddenly, just the thing popped into my head. I didn't know how, but I was
absolutely sure that she had been shagging a boy that afternoon and wanted
to do it again. I couldn't possibly have seen her with anyone, since I had
gone straight from school to cricket practice.

'Kathy was in Derek's car again today,' I blurted.

Dad put down his knife.

'I thought we agreed that you wouldn't see that boy again,' he said.

'You agreed,' Kathy said, sullenly.

There was a bit of a fuss and when Mum and Dad went out to clear the
plates for pudding, Kathy grabbed my arm hard and hissed, 'How did you
know I was with Derek?'

'I don't know,' I said, honestly. 'I just did.'

The pad had grown warm and sticky between my legs.

'Why are you fidgeting?' asked Mum, when she came back with the bowls.

'I'm not,' I replied, as I stood up.

'And where are you going?'

'To get the apple crumble,' I said.

'Thank you. But I haven't asked you to get it, yet?' Mum replied, sounding
surprised. 'And how did you know I had made apple crumble, anyway?'

'Didn't you?' I said, confused.

'Yes, but you haven't been in the kitchen since you came home.'

'Oh,' I said. ' I just knew you had made some.'

The cricket pad seemed to be burning now in my groin and I felt scared.

'May I be excused?' I ran out to the downstairs loo by the back door.

By the time I got there, the pad felt cool again. I yanked it out and
examined it. Perhaps it was giving me a rash or something. I sniffed at
it. What on Earth was it made of? It had a strange sort of animal smell,
like at the zoo.

I went upstairs and left the pad in my bedroom. There was something
strange about it that I wasn't sure I liked.

After dinner we watched Kojak on TV. Then Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid came on and Mum let us stay up and watch that too, because it was the
weekend.

When we finally went up to bed it was after 11 o'clock.

'What did you think of that girl in the film?' Peter said as we got
undressed.

'Which one?'

'You know, the brunette!' he said, as he pulled off his trousers and
climbed into his sleeping bag in his pants and vest, leaving his socks on,
like he always did.

'She was all right,' I said.

'She was more than all right. I thought she was super hot!'

'Yeah,' I agreed, without conviction. The girl in the film was nice, but I
had found Robert Redford more interesting.

'I wish I could stick my dick right up her!' said Peter, pulling the
sleeping bag up round his chin.

'Yeah, me too,' I replied, probably to reassure myself, as much as him,
that that was what I wanted.

Before I turned out my bedside light, Peter asked, a little uncertainly,
'Martin, why do you have so many posters of David Bowie?'

'I don't know,' I replied.

'Is he a poof, wearing all that makeup?' Peter asked bluntly.

'Of course he's not a poof! Why would I like him if he was a poof?' I
snapped back, without meaning to.

I didn't think Peter was convinced by my denial so, as if to prove the
point, I waved at my Abba poster instead.

'What about Agnetha? I'd really like to bone her!'

That was true, at least.

'Yeah,' he said enthusiastically, his eyes wide. 'She's a minx!'

I turned off the lamp and Peter started clowning in his sleeping bag.

'Ah, brunette girl, I want to eat your minge...' he moaned, ardently.

In a few minutes, I could hear him wanking himself in the darkness. Our
sleepovers often ended like this, with one or both of us masturbating in
our beds. We didn't mind the other one knowing what we were doing and
sometimes we talked as we did it, but we never did it with the lights on -
although I might have liked to have done.

I had never seen Peter erect, but I had seen him soft or half-hard in the
showers often enough. His penis was different from mine since, unlike me,
his had a short foreskin that only half covered the head, even when
flaccid. I often wondered what happened when he got hard.

I don't know why we never watched each other wanking - perhaps it just
felt a bit 'queer' to do that - anyway, we never had.

The noises from Peter's sleeping bag grew more frenzied until I heard a
breathless 'Oh, fuck!' and the beating he was giving himself halted.

'You bastard!' I whispered. 'That's my uncle's sleeping bag.'

'Don't worry,' he whispered back. 'I caught it in my hanky.'

After that I heard him yawn and he said he felt really tired. It wasn't
long till he was asleep and breathing calmly.

I lay awake on my side. My head was too busy for sleep. I could see the
cricket pad on my desk, seeming to glow in the moonlight that came under
the curtains.

My mind kept coming back to the dinner table and the funny feeling I had
had that I knew what Mum and Kathy were thinking about. Could it have
something to do with wearing the cricket pad? Didn't that silly poem in
the box say something about 'laying bare' people's secrets? And the pad
had definitely become weirdly hot down my trousers.

Each of these things individually, I would have dismissed. But the fact of
them coming together made me feel quite strange. For some reason that I
couldn't explain, the cricket pad scared me: the monkey reared up,
grinning hideously, in the dark of my imagination. I would probably have
slung the stupid pad away, but for the fact that Granddad had left it to
me.

I determined to put it to the test some more tomorrow. I would prove that
there was nothing unusual about it after all!

With that settled in my mind, I found that I was quite horny and I decided
it was my turn to make the noises. Hearing Peter do it had made my cock
stiff as a bar and now I pulled my underpants down to stroke it.

When we had a sleepover, I slept in my underwear like Peter did. It was
more macho somehow than admitting that you usually wore pyjamas in bed: I
know Peter did just the same because I had seen his pyjamas tucked under
his pillow when I slept at his house.

This was one little secret that I knew about Peter but, although I didn't
realise it then, I was soon to find out several more, and not just about
him!

As my hand settled into the familiar rhythm, I remembered Peter doing the
horny gorilla thing with the cricket pad - only I imagined him doing it
naked with a hard on. Then, as the feeling heightened, I fantasised Peter
driving his hard penis into the actress, Katharine Ross, who played the
brunette girl in Butch Cassidy, and that brought me to climax. It was the
most intense come I had had for a long time.

When it had finished, Peter's voice came from his sleeping bag.

'Good one?' he whispered.

'I thought you were asleep,' I said.

'Do you expect me to sleep with all the noise you make?' he laughed. 'I'd
be surprised if your parents don't hear you! Here, use this...'

And I felt a soggy handkerchief land across my face.

Not long after, we were both enjoying the sound sleep that follows a good
orgasm.

			***

I would be delighted to hear from readers of my story. Email me at

olhap8464972175@elude.in

and tell me what you enjoyed (or what you didn't!) and what you think
might happen in the next chapter. What has the strange cricket pad in
store for Martin, and what is the meaning of the cryptic verse? What might
happen with Peter and the team?

I try to reply to everyone, and comments encourage me to write more!

Readers who enjoyed this story may like to read my other stories:


The Lustful Little Mouse

-about the budding young son of a Russian diplomat in Victorian London.

https://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/adult-youth/the-lustful-little-mouse/


Little Lord Barry

- about a wicked boy in the time of King George.

https://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/historical/little-lord-barry


Gulliver's Pageboy

- a comedy about the sexual adventures of a larger-than-life adolescent.

https://www.nifty.org/nifty/bisexual/celebrity/gullivers-pageboy