Beautiful Boys: Gay Erotic Stories (2 page)
Read Beautiful Boys: Gay Erotic Stories Online
Authors: Richard Labonte (Editor)
“You’re such a skinny little punk,” he said, his voice not even a little bit warm.
“Fuck you, Frankenstein.” I said, and Joey winced, but Richie laughed and tossed me a beer.
We sat side by side on the tailgate of Richie’s pickup looking at our raft. The sun stretched toward the mountains, across fields tall with alfalfa. The smell of summer was heavy, and suddenly I wanted to cry. My throat felt like a chunk of granite was lodged there, and as I fought it down, I looked sideways at Joey who was kicking at the dust with one booted toe. This was what it could be, but it could never be what it should have been.
We launched our raft into the brown swirling water of the river just a little after ten A.M and exited the race about twenty-five minutes later. The bungee cords we used to hold the PVC framework together started sagging fast, and the whole thing began to fall apart after about a mile. At about a mile and a half, the inner tubes broke free and floated off on their own, and we were left in the middle of the river, clinging to our craft like rats on a pile of pick-up sticks. The laughter from the last of the rafts struggling past us had barely faded as we struggled ashore, dragging our crumbling cage, and collapsed on the muddy bank.
Richie sat in the mud for barely a second, before getting to his feet and screaming, “Fuck!” at the top of his lungs. As Joey and I watched, he kicked the remains of the raft into pieces, occasionally stopping to pick up a shard or two of PVC and hurl it into the scrub grass along the banks of the river. His rage was silent after his first explosion. Joey dropped his head between his knees, and his shoulders sagged.
I wanted to scream at Richie. “It’s just a stupid fucking raft, you idiot. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Joey got up and said in a flat voice, “Richie, give me the keys.”
Richie whirled on him, a piece of pallet wood in his hand. “What?”
“The keys. To the truck. I’m gonna drive it down here.”
“Why?”
Because he wants to get away from you
, I thought, but Joey only said “Because.”
, I thought, but Joey only said “Because.”
They stared at each other for a moment, and then Richie fished into his soaked jeans and pulled out his keys. “Watch second. It sticks.”
After Joey left, Richie sat on a log a few yards away. I leaned back on the clay bank, and listened to the water swirling toward town without us.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” Richie said softly.
I leaned on my elbows and looked over at him. His eyes were closed, and he had pulled his soaked T-shirt off. Snake grass rose up around his legs and sweating torso. He was logger pale, brown arms and face ending with a slash into marble white. He became still and he was quiet, but tension coiled off him in the stark tendons and hardened ropes of muscle that wrapped his body.
He opened his eyes and found me watching him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He got off the log and walked toward me. “Don’t say
nothing
. What?”
nothing
. What?”
“Why do you have to…?” I trailed off. “Never mind.”
He was standing over me and reached down and grabbed me by the front of my shirt and pulled me off the ground.
“Why do I have to what?”
I scrabbled with my toes for ground and grabbed at his arm.
“What are you gonna do, Richie, kick me to pieces, too?”
“Fuck you.” He dropped me and turned away, then whirled back toward me and advanced to within a few inches.
“I should kick the shit out of you. I should. I should fucking kill you.”
I stepped back, shaking my head. “Go ahead, I don’t give a shit what you do. Go ahead.”
He stared at me, and then his eyes were full of tears. I watched, horrified, as he stood in front of me and started to cry.
“Yeah,” he spat out, his voice choked. “Yeah, I know that.”
He towered over me, the top of my head barely reaching the hollow of his throat. This mountain of a man with whom I had once run through the world stood in front of me, his chest hiccupping and trembling. I was frozen. Then he whirled away and walked to the river. He kicked off his muddy shoes and shucked out of his soaking jeans and, naked, hurled himself into the brown eddying water.
When he surfaced he stood, water streaming in rivers down the landscape of his nakedness, splitting apart over bulging muscles and coming back together over the flatness of his hard stomach, and he walked out of the water, and I felt something tear apart inside me and I started shaking.
“I had a friend once,” he said, his voice high and clear, “and then I didn’t. All those years, back when we were freaks, we were always side by side. I guess I thought that meant something.”
“What do you mean? We weren’t freaks.”
“Yeah we were. Little hippy kids that didn’t go to school, running around in hand-me-down clothes, while our moms walked around town in patched jeans and long skirts. What do you think people thought?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. We were just kids. Besides, that changed.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it really changed. You got too good for us.”
“That’s not what happened.”
He snorted and ran his hand across his head, brushing his dripping hair out of his eyes.
“You didn’t want to know me. That’s what happened.”
After all this time, we’re finally having the conversation, and he’s standing there naked, water shining on his skin, so close to me I can feel the heat coming off him. My mouth was dry as I tried to form sticky words.
“You changed. I didn’t change. You changed. You…”
“What? I what?”
“You went fucking crazy, Richie. Insane. Drunk and starting shit all the time. I don’t know what happened to you and neither did Joey.” I was shouting before I realized it. “You were scary to be around.”
“You sound like a fucking girl.”
“Why did you do that shit?” I ignored him, “Why were you pissed off all the time?”
“Because I didn’t want to fucking be there,” he roared at me. “I didn’t want to give up everything that was cool about us and figure out how to be them.”
Goddamn it. And I knew that, too. I wasn’t so stupid I couldn’t figure that out. I was on the edge of knowing what I did when I pulled back.
“You should put some clothes on.”
He looked down at himself and then burst out laughing.
“Oh, the hell with it,” he said and turned his back to me and walked toward where his clothes were piled on the bank.
“I’m sorry,” I said under my breath, but he heard me all the same.
“Yeah, so what,” he muttered, his back still toward me. “You got what you wanted.”
“I didn’t know what to do.” I said more loudly. “I didn’t know how to be when I was around you.”
He swung around, his jeans dangling from his hands and then stalked toward me.
“Be around me? What the hell does that mean? We’d been around each other all our lives.” Then he hit me with his pants. It was so stupid, him swinging his wet jeans into my face, but they hit me like a log. For a second I was stunned, his voice shouting in my ear.
“You didn’t want to be around me because I didn’t fit in. You got as far away from me as fast as you could before I even had a chance to figure out what was going on.”
That wasn’t true, I knew it, and he knew it. But it was true. Inside me where he couldn’t get, I knew it was true.
I had staggered back when he hit me, and now I came at him from a crouch, caught him around the middle and took both of us flying into the river. It was the only answer I had for what he had said.
Richie went down on his back in the river with a loud smack, me on top of him, clutching at his naked writhing form. He locked his arms around my waist and pulled me tight into him. I was soaked through, and I could feel every inch of him pressing into me. He rolled me over, pushing my head under the water. Through the cloudy swirling river, he flickered and wavered above me, like a phantom.
Then he was pulling me out and tossing me like a sack toward the shore. I landed, sprawling into the mud, scrambling with my hands up the slope, my feet slipping out behind me. He yanked me up again and whirled me around to face him, his fist already swinging toward my head. When it connected it felt like he ripped half my nose off, and the blood start flowing.
I fell backward, the neck of my shirt ripping in his hands, and as I fell I kicked out as hard as I could, catching him somewhere by his ankle and sending him off balance. As I landed on my back, I saw him stumble and land on one knee. I rolled as fast as I could in the other direction, but he was up and on me before I got anywhere.
“Stop it,” he was saying, his knee in my back. “Stop it, don’t. Don’t.”
“You fucking hit me,” I screamed, my face inches from the mud. “
You
stop it.”
You
stop it.”
I lay in the mud and he took his knee off my back and knelt beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder and we sat there, breathing hard, and then he was pulling me up, cradling me in his massive arms, my head pressed against his muddy chest.
“I never wanted to do that,” he whispered. “Ever.”
I looked up at him. His face was worried.
When we were twelve, I fell off a runaway horse and broke my arm. I had screamed and rolled over cradling my arm and seen legs racing toward me across the field. Richie had landed on his knees next to me, rolled me over and lifted me into his lap, staring down at me. Now his face was a terrifying shadow of that, and all that had been thrown away crashed down and flattened me, and I started sobbing.
“Goddamn it, Richie,” I choked out. “Goddamn it.”
He wiped tears off my face and pulled me into a hug. I put my arms around him and started crying harder. He put his hand on the back of my head, pressing my face into his neck.
Looking back on this, all these years later, I know we didn’t mean it to happen. It wasn’t something that had always been there. Truly. We were just raw. We were only kids, really, even though Richie was wrapped inside the massive body of something more. When he kissed my cheek, it was meant as comfort, but I turned my head in surprise and his mouth was still just there. His lips came down again, and I met him straight on, and all the air in the world went away, and my heart was in a pinching vise as I breathed him into me.
So, we didn’t stop. We kept going. There was too much space between us, every fraction of an inch of air became more than we could bear. Every bit of clothing I was wearing was too much. His skin was slippery and then mine was, too. The sun played over us, and the river danced, and our lips never left each other’s.
I was naked and on my knees in front of him, his hands on either side of my face. Rigid and throbbing flesh spanned the distance, and when I felt the spongy head of his dick brush my lips, I didn’t hesitate. Too much space, this air between us. I opened my mouth and he slid inside me, over my tongue and on back.
He murmured something inarticulate and gently pulled my face forward until my bleeding nose was buried in the river-smelling forest of hair between his legs.
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