Hot Valley (3 page)

“You're ready.”

“Yeah.”

“You sure about this? You ain't gonna run to Daddy?”

“No, sir.”

“You promise?” Maybe Mick had had bad experiences before; maybe that was why he led this drifting life. Maybe that explained the scar down his torso; I had visions of vigilante groups, knife fights, leaving town in the dead of night… I knew what I was doing was dangerous, unspeakable, criminal. Did I care?

“I promise. I want you to fuck me. I want you to fuck me hard.”

“Okay, Jack. Don't say I didn't warn you.”

He pulled his finger out of my ass and then, before I could get used to feeling empty again, hawked some saliva into his hand and smeared his prick with it, pushing the head against the target. I pushed back in response—and, to my astonishment, he slipped inside me. His dick was so much bigger than his finger. It felt as if someone had pushed a hot potato inside me. There was no pleasure, but neither was there particular pain.

“Go ahead. I'm fine.”

“Slow down, horsey. You need to be broken in slowly.” His hand played around my dick, which, unknown to me, had suddenly become limp. “I'm going nowhere till this is hard again. You'll thank me later.”

And so, resting the head of his cock inside me, controlling its position like an engineer, he resumed kissing my neck, murmuring obscene endearments in my ear, and playing with my prick. Within two minutes, I was harder than
ever and felt like I was ready to come again. My ass was working around his cockhead like a wringer.

And then he began to fuck me. I thought I was ready for him, but nothing could prepare me for the sensations that were to follow. He pressed another inch, another inch, another inch into me, and suddenly, where there had been nothing but pleasure and appetite, there was pain.

“Hey!” I shouted.

“Hurts, huh?”

“Hurts like hell.”

“Let's just wait a second. Hold it there. Just breathe in and out for me. Take it easy.” He kissed me again, he played with my cock. At first I couldn't understand why he didn't just take his cock out of me, as it hurt so much—but then, after a few moments, the pain began to slip away and the pleasure returned. And so we proceeded, cautiously, stopping and breathing and waiting when necessary, until he could push no further.

“That's it, Jack. You got all of me.”

I reached around behind me and felt his stomach pressed against my back. I felt my ass ring stretched around the thick base of his cock. I grabbed his balls and pulled them toward me.

“I can't get them in as well, you greedy little bastard.”

And so the fuck began, slowly at first, gaining momentum. My body was focused entirely on the sensation of cock and ass—and yet, to my surprise, my mind was floating free, wandering from subject to subject. I thought of my schoolmates, my family, my prospects, my future. I thought of the things I had studied, I thought of how my life might unfold. In all these thoughts I was impressed by one overwhelming idea—that here, now, at this moment and in this room, my life was really beginning at last, and that whatever happened to me in the future would be defined in some way by the pleasure that Mick's cock was giving me as it drove into my asshole.

And then he pulled out.

“How you doing?” he asked, sitting up beside me.

“Good. Why are we stopping?”

“You'll see. You think that was what fucking was all about? Oh, boy, you have no idea.”

And so, for the next half hour, he fucked me in every conceivable position. He had me up on my hands and knees, ramming into me from the back. He had me sitting down on his cock as he lay back on the bed. He spun me around, he flipped me over, he rode me and supported me and possessed me. Finally, I lay on my back, my legs resting on his shoulders, as he braced himself with his powerful arms and fucked me harder than I believed possible. And yet I took every stroke, I met every thrust, and I wanted more. I could not tell if I had come again or not; my belly was wet with slippery, sticky fluid, and yet I was still as hard as could be. Finally, he doubled the rate and vigor of his thrusting, stuck his tongue down my throat, and spewed his load up my hole.

I thought this would be the end, but he quickly rallied and, leaving his cock firmly lodged inside me, sat back on his heels, pulling me toward him.

“Let's see you come again, Jack. This time with me inside you.” He grabbed my dick, jerked me gently a few times—and it was enough. The feeling of his hard prick invading my guts was enough. My dick was just the trigger. This time, I came with my whole body, and spilled a massive load across my chest and stomach. It ran down my sides and soaked into the thin cotton sheets.

We lay together for an hour or two, drifting in and out of sleep, listening to the heavy footfalls along the corridor, the creak of floorboards, the banging of doors. In the silence of the night, every sound was amplified; God knows how loud our revels had been. Everyone in the White Horse must have known that the young man in the stylish suit who wandered
in off the street was no longer a virgin.

It was getting light when Mick roused me. “You better get home. People will be asking questions.”

I did not want to leave. I wanted to stay with him forever, and I told him so.

“You do as I say. We'll meet again if you want to.”

In answer, I dived down into his groin and started sucking his cock. It started to rouse itself in my mouth.

“Not now, Jack. There's a big wide world out there and we have to be on our guard.”

“Fuck me again.”

“I will. I promise you I will. But now you get home. We don't need that kind of trouble. Go on. Get dressed.”

I walked home in the gray dawn, listening to the chickadees stirring in the pine trees, and climbed in through my bedroom window, as I always did when I'd been out exploring at night. The house was silent, and I slept until nine. There were a few jokes at my expense, good-natured raillery about how seedy I was looking, how they could smell whiskey on my breath, a suggestion that I must have a sweetheart down in town. I laughed and kept my own counsel.

FOR TWO YEARS, BETWEEN MY 19TH BIRTHDAY AND THE outbreak of war, I dedicated myself to the art of fucking with an application that, had I brought it to my working life, might have made me a rich man. I grew stronger in my body, thanks to swimming and riding and running and the regular exercise I took in the bedroom. My body became harder. The hair on my head became, alas, a little thinner; at the age of 21 I already had a pronounced widow's peak, and was receding at the temples. But the hair on my body spread and grew thicker, creeping up from my belly to my chest, around my nipples. It was never as thick and wiry as Mick's, and it was several shades darker than the hair on my head—but there it was, extending down my thighs and over my ass, filling the crack that once, when Mick first tasted it, had been almost bare. I became a man—in my body, at least, if not in my mind.

I returned often to Mick at the White Horse, and he became my tutor, my mentor, and a more admirable moral guide than you might have thought. He taught me to
observe the conventions of New England life, to behave like a gentleman, to take my pleasure discreetly and with consideration for others, to run no unnecessary risks. He had learned by painful example just how badly wrong things could go for the likes of us, and he told me, one night as we lay naked together after he had fucked my face, of how he came about that deep scar on his torso. A young man in another town, a jealous wife, an angry father-in-law, an ugly brawl in a bar, a knife, a desperate flight on horseback, still bleeding, infection, a fever, near death… Mick had learned the hard way just how dangerous the love of men could be.

It had not, however, put him off, and in the White Horse he'd found friends who would support and protect him. The barman shared his tastes, and on more than one occasion joined us for the night. I took them both, at both ends, alternately, together. One evening, when business in the White Horse was slow, the barman locked the doors with just himself, Mick, another rough laborer called Scott, and me inside. We fucked on the bar, on the tables, on the floor, upstairs and down. I took them all—and, that night for the first time, I learned what it was like to fuck another man, sticking my prick up the barman's hairy ass as he leaned over a beer barrel sucking on the two hard cocks in front of him.

And it wasn't just in the White Horse that I took my pleasure. With the confidence of extreme youth, I had my own adventures. I assumed, like a fool, that any man who took my fancy would be happy to accommodate me. I lay, shamelessly naked and erect, on the sunny rocks at my favorite swimming pond, daring other bathers to come and join me. I worked my way through several of the cleaners, engineers, and clerks at the Hydropathic Establishment. Seldom was I turned down, and even if I was, nobody would have dared say a word against the boss's son. I even seduced family friends who came to visit, “accidentally” stumbling into their rooms after everyone had retired for bed, ready with some foolish story about looking for a book, and often stayed till dawn, tasting forbidden fruit.

But it was always to Mick that I returned, and I never tired of his loving. Our appetites matched perfectly. There was nothing I could dream of doing that he was not already expert at. His cock was always hard, always ready for me. And, more than that, we became friends. We talked. He advised me, warned me, encouraged me. When he wasn't fucking me, he was like a father to me. In return, I helped him out with money when work was scarce, and, to keep him in town, I even found a job for him at the spa. He impressed my father with his knowledge of boilers and water-heating systems, and he replaced the old chief engineer, whose idea of modern technology was a coal fire. Mick moved out of the White Horse and took a cabin in the woods, where we could fuck as loudly as we wanted, with only the occasional moose or bear to hear us. I do not know if my family wondered about this unlikely friendship, or if talk reached their ears of my inappropriate associations; if it did, they were far too polite to mention it.

Reluctantly, I took a job myself at the Bishopstown Hydropathic Establishment and Mineral Spa Center, largely to silence the mutterings about “earning my keep” and “preparing for the future” that were becoming far too frequent for my liking around the family table. I was placed in the accounts department, apprenticed to Jasper Windridge, my father's “right hand,” as he liked to call him, an unlikable man of middle age who took great pleasure, I thought, in pointing out my shortcomings. I suppose I cannot blame him, as I was an unwilling student, interested only in the clock, my mind on my next debauch. It was all I could do to add up a column of figures without error; the complexities of double-entry bookkeeping were a mystery to me. The only double-entry I was interested in took place in the White Horse, when I managed, with concentration and a hell of a
lot of butter, to accommodate both Mick and the barman in my painfully stretched asshole.

I worked with an ill will, doing as little as possible, antagonizing Mr. Windridge to the point that he would threaten, once or twice a week, to “speak to your father.” I dared him to do it, and went back to doodling winged cocks on my notepad. Somehow or other I learned the basics of accountancy, but it was more in the way that a tree soaks up rain than by any positive effort on my part. In years to come, I would thank Mr. Windridge for that grounding he gave me in dollars and cents; at the time, however, I regarded him as little better than a troll from a fairy tale, barring the gate to the garden of delights.

And so I might have continued, wasting my youth in pleasure, heedless of the future, burying my head in a book (or a hairy crotch) every time there was talk of politics. When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, the town was alive with talk of trouble to come, with cheers and boos and rallies and counterrallies; the papers carried nothing but stories of secession and abolition and constitutions and conferences. It meant nothing to me—a background hum, the wind in the trees, the gurgling of a stream.

Even Mick was shocked at my lack of interest in current events. “This is history in the making, Jack,” he said to me one Sunday afternoon when we had headed off for a walk in the mountains, looking for secluded places where he could fuck me in the open air. “You should pay attention.”

“There's only one thing I'm interested in,” I said, hauling his half-hard cock into the dappled light of a forest clearing. The subject was quickly dropped as I sucked him to a full stand, and wasn't resumed until his dick plopped out of my ass an hour later.

“There's going to be trouble, Jack,” he said, as we washed ourselves off in a clear, fresh pond. “Not just for you and me, but for the whole country. Father against son. Brother against brother. Friend against friend.”

“Gloomy old man,” I said, splashing him. We wrestled ourselves dry on the forest floor.

 

But he was right. Trouble arrived one day in February 1861, and with it came Aaron Johnson.

At home, over breakfast, we read about the secession of six more states from the Union, the adoption of the Confederate constitution, the threat to military establishments in the South. There were dark looks, pregnant silences, and my father mentioned the word
war
.

“Don't talk like that,” my mother said. “You'll frighten the girls.” My sisters, in fact, looked far from frightened; they were much more interested in the troubles than I was, and found the prospect of war exciting.

“I'd go and fight for Lincoln right now if I was a man,” said Margaret, older than me by two years—and she looked as if she meant it.