The Good Old Boy Ch. 04

Still, I drew the line at “Achy Breaky Heart.” Everyone has their limits.

“The guy who decided to live without sex.”

I teased Louis as we fooled around in my bed on Sunday afternoon. As I’ve mentioned, the house was hardly ever empty, but Andrew had taken Kayley and Hunter to the birthday party of one of his friends’ sons, then on to their mother’s boyfriend’s; in fact Louis and I were supposed to be at the big barbecue ourselves right now, but instead we decided to take advantage of a rare break from car sex. What a relief to stretch out completely, and on soft, relatively clean sheets instead of rough, scratchy cargo bed carpet that left my elbows and knees permanently red and raw.

“Yeah, they kicked me out of the monastery, thanks to you.”

He kissed me, squirming around under me to get even closer. God, he was amazing. I still hadn’t fucked him yet, but he loved my fingers in his ass; and he was beginning to crave more and deeper penetration. No matter how much I prepared him, there would be pain the first time, so I wasn’t in a big hurry. There’s a big difference between fingers and a real cock-- namely the initial penetration of the head. That was going to shock him. It still did me, even now, for a second until I relaxed. The idea of being his first made me weak in the knees, but what terrified me, was not being his last. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing him to some other guy. But I knew exactly how it was when you first came out of the closet-- if indeed he was doing that. You want to fuck everything that’s out there. Granted, there wasn’t much out there; I was pretty much the only act in town for the moment. And for that I was glad.

He roughly pushed me down to the bed. With any other man I couldn’t have stood for that-- I had too many control issues-- but I liked it when Louis got forceful. There was no submission involved because he wasn’t trying to dominate me, it was more playful than anything else. We used to wrestle when I was in fifth grade. He and Andrew used to hold me down and torture me until I cried, then they‘d laugh at me and call me a sissy. Probably the root of a lot of my issues, thanks a lot.

Now, though, it was hot. We were backwards with my head hanging off the foot of the bed slightly; the blood rushed to my head and made me a little lightheaded, so the room spun while he fucked me. Not kinky, but a darker shade of vanilla. I’m sure my eyes were all the way back in my head as he pounded into me, sweat drenching us both, my hand on the back on his neck, wrapped in his long hair that dragged my face and my other arm spread off to the side to keep the cast from nailing him. We were both intent and silent except for our hard breath, caught up in the waves of pleasure that washed over us.

I don’t have any idea why my eyes flew open and went to the door. Later I could never remember hearing a sound. But they did, and because I was upside down with my head hanging back, brain scrambled in a sexual haze, for a second I didn’t register what I saw.

My brother Andrew, standing in the door we’d carelessly left open, his mouth hanging open in disbelief.

All this only took less than three seconds. My body froze and Louis noticed the change; he impatiently paused in his thrusting and looked up and for a long, horrifying moment we all stared: Louis and me at Andrew, he at us. His best friend since seventh grade and his little brother, naked, sweaty, fucking. And then he turned around and was gone.

“Oh, shit,” I whispered, but I held my hand up to my mouth to cover the beginings of shocked, involuntary giggles. The expression on Louis’ face was absolutely indescribable. He lost his erection, pulled away from me and rolled over on his back. Apparently when he said he’d like to be watched doing the deed, my brother wasn’t the audience he had in mind.

I rose up on my elbow and put my hand on his smooth chest. The sweat was drying on him, leaving him cold, and his expression was dazed. “I’ll go talk to him, Louis.”

“No.” He shook his head to clear it. “I should do it. You stay here.”

He went into the bathroom and cleaned up, put his clothes back on. I watched him leave the room without moving. Well shit. It took more than a little coitus interruptus for me to go limp without getting off. It damn near took a fatal accident. So while Louis was upstairs, trying to explain to my brother what was going on, I lazily jerked off. Hell, I didn’t know what was going on myself, so what else was I supposed to do?

Eventually I wiped off all the sweat and lube and come with a wet washcloth and got dressed. I had no idea what kind of conversation Louis and Andrew were having upstairs. My brother didn’t exactly embrace alternative lifestyles; he wasn’t riding the PFLAG float in any gay pride parades. But really, despite being somewhat of an asshole in general, he had never had a major problem with my being gay. Maybe smoking a lot of weed really did open your mind, as well as make you drive to the store at one in the morning for a bag of Doritos.

I never did learn exactly what was said. When I finally reluctantly went upstairs, the two of them were sitting at the kitchen table smoking weed and laughing about something inane, just like they’d been doing for as long as I could remember. I walked up behind Louis’ chair and stood there without saying a word, my eyes going between them. Andrew was looking up pointedly at the ceiling, loudly humming a tune; and Louis glanced over his shoulder at me, grinned, and reached behind him and gave the back of my knee a quick squeeze. After that, everything was normal. My brother never mentioned the subject again, but the next time Louis came down to the Goose on a booty run, instead of meeting at the storage shed, we met at my house and slipped quietly down to the basement while my brother slept. He couldn’t stay the whole night, he still had to fuck and run, but at least it was in a bed; and yet thanks to fond, nostalgic memories of our passionate moments in the back of his dirty Jeep under a hairy blanket, the smell of horse liniment will forever be a turn-on.

“What are you going to do when you get out of vet school?”

Sitting on the hood of Louis’ Jeep, behind a stand of trees at the bottom of a hill, I watched as he watered his huge, lush pot plants with a special concoction he brewed in his kitchen. He told his grandma it was herbal tea, but she was wise to him. His two mutts, Kato and Mr. Peabody, followed him devotedly. He had the mangiest, most pathetic group of pets I’d ever seen, all abandoned or abused by former owners, who would’ve been put to sleep by the clinic if not for him. In addition to the dogs there was also a geriatric pony, Charlie, who shambled around the barn lot with his ears and tail and bottom lip hanging. The only time he perked up is when he saw Louis, who’d saved his sorry hide from the dog food factory.

“Jeff-- Dr. Kounce-- wants me to work for him and eventually make me a partner, and then when he retires, I’ll try to buy the clinic. Not too many new vets get the opportunity to step into a ready-made practice like that.”

“Oh.” I brooded, staring at him from behind my sunglasses. I was every bit as slavish as the two dogs; I just didn’t have a tail to wag every time his eyes turned my way. “You’d be pretty stupid to walk away from that.”

“What are you saying?” he asked abruptly. He turned around and looked straight at me, and I froze, regretting not thinking before I opened my mouth, as usual.

“Oh…” I tried to give a bored, self-mocking laugh, but in the end, I was more muttering. “I just have this fantasy of you and I running off to the city together.”

“Sean, for once in your life, instead of running away from things, why don’t you let yourself be happy where you are?”

I sighed and fidgeted impatiently with his all-too-keen observations. “Don’t you ever get bored around here, Louis? I mean, hanging out with my brother, going to places like the Wild Goose? Wouldn’t you like to be able to go out to restaurants and clubs where nobody’s wearing camouflage?”

“There’s not much to do around here,” he admitted.

“I’d love to take you out to a real club. Get you dressed up, show you off to my friends, you know, like a real gay scene. I miss that. I miss having coffee, something other than Maxwell House, you know? I miss hanging out with my friends.” I could just imagine it. My friends in the city would trip on themselves drooling over Louis, the hot small town boy, who was as far from an ignorant redneck as anyone could be.

“Let me ask you a question.”

“What?”

“How many of these friends of yours have called you since you came home?”

I made a face.

“Not many?”

“Actually, none.”

“My point exactly.” Louis let out a laugh. “And here, does a day go by when your phone’s not ringing off the hook? These friends of yours, the ones that haven’t called? They don’t give a damn about you. Here, there are a lot of people that care about you. Andy, your mom, your friend Rachel--”

“You?”

I didn’t meant to say it out loud, but I did. I froze, but Louis just gave a casual shrug that made my heart sink.

“Yeah, sure. Listen, I’m not trying to argue with you, I get bored sometimes too. I’m just trying to tell you, there are more important things than clubs and coffee shops. Like family, for one, and real friends. What exactly is it you want to do, anyway? I know you wrote for a magazine, but what do you want to accomplish in life?”

“Oh… I don’t know. Write a few novels, get a college degree, find the right man and settle down…”

“You can do all that here.” He realized all the sudden what he’d said and he flushed in a split-second panic, but he tried not to let it show, racing to cover it up. “You’ve got plenty of time to write and you showed me your ideas, they’re good. And there’s nothing wrong with the state college here, is there? You’ve got a job and a place to live here, which you don’t have in the city.”

“Yeah.” I nodded and we stopped talking about it, but I didn’t forget that momentary look in his eyes when he said I could find the right guy and settle down right here. I knew that look of panic because it was the same way I always felt when I was with him. Terrified because I was so in love with him, and I didn’t want him to know it. What was he so scared of himself? And that single question was a just another last nail in the coffin of my wanting to ever go back to the city.

Yes, it was boring here. It was a small town. Everyone was always in everyone else’s business; there wasn’t any decent place to buy clothes other than the local Farm and Home Supply; there were no clubs, no vanilla mochaccinos, no pizza delivery. But there was also no traffic, no parking problem, no pollution. There was no need to “get away from it all”; all I had to do was walk outside and look up at the clean blue arc of the sky, with no buildings to block it out, and it was easy to get grounded. Sometimes I’d lie in bed at night and it was so quiet, with no dull roar of cars and distant sirens, only the chirping of crickets, and so completely dark, that at first I couldn’t sleep; but now the darkness and silence surrounded me like a warm blanket. Louis was right. I was learning he usually was. I was almost 30, and I was starting to realize something. It wasn’t perfect, but it was home.

Final chapter coming up…