Shawn's Law (9 page)

To the west of the yard was a fully enclosed, Balinese-inspired gazebo. It had a thatched roof and bamboo walls about five feet high, leaving a gap between the top of the wall and the roof for sunlight and airflow. There was an opening facing the pool and waterfall, and I could see that a circular bench ran the entire way around the inside of the structure. A plastic sun lounger had been dragged inside, and I could imagine Harley spending time in there, next to the cooling waters of the pool but away from prying eyes.

I looked around the perimeter of the yard and realized it was virtually private. Next to the gazebo was a tall pergola covered in grapevines that hung over the paving and part of the pool, completely hiding the neighbor’s house. The fence on the other side of the yard was hidden behind masses of bushes planted along its length.

I switched my gaze to Harley and just knew that he’d been out here naked.

He was messing with the barbeque, cleaning off the hotplate with some paper towel and getting the gas going. He splashed some oil onto the hotplate as it warmed up and spread it around with a spatula.

“How do you like your meat?” he called to me.

“Medium would be great,” I replied. “Where are we going to eat? Inside or outside?”

Harley smiled at me, and I was glad that the pool was fully enclosed, because if the man went around flashing smiles like that, I was going to walk headlong into the water by accident. “I was thinking about outside, if that’s okay with you?” He pointed to a small wooden table that was tucked under the vine-shaded pergola, next to the pool.

I agreed. With the meat sizzling away, we grabbed plates, cutlery, salads, condiments, drinks, and napkins and set them out. The dogs, sensing that the food was about to appear, materialized at our side, wagging hopeful tails and very obviously asking to partake. Harley frowned fiercely at them and they seemed to sigh with resignation, as if they knew they wouldn’t get anything but thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask anyway. They finally flopped in a heap under a bush, out of the hot sun.

The steaks didn’t take all that long, and soon we were sitting down with our plates piled with food. I’d made a Caesar salad, a rice salad, and a potato salad—enough to feed a small army—but we made a decent dent in the portions while we talked.

Harley asked about my mother and her prognosis.

“She won’t get better,” I told Harley. “At the moment, I’m coping with her at home with some help from Lisa and agency care. Lisa has Isabelle, who’s five now, and twins, who are two. She’s not really in the position to help out much. An afternoon every now and then, but that’s about it. There’s not really any time limit for Mum getting worse, we just know that she will.”

“Is she bad now?” Harley asked.

“She’s getting there,” I admitted. “At first it was just the loss of words she knew, the disorientation and forgetting people’s names, but now she can’t think for herself. She can’t think that it’s summer and it’s too hot to wear a jumper. She can’t think that the water in the shower is too cold and that the soap is for washing. She’s confused more often—not remembering what year it is and who
she
is. Frequently she refers to her father, thinking that he’s still alive, but she never really mentions her mother. At different times of the day she recognizes me as her son, but most of the time, she just accepts that I’m there to take care of her.”

“How long has she been like that?”

I sighed and shrugged. “Four years since the official diagnosis. It’s been three years since Dad was killed. Mum was always a bit funny for years before the official diagnosis—scatterbrained, if you know what I mean. Absentminded and easily confused. She was only fifty-nine, so none of us thought about dementia. When the doctor first suggested it, we were shocked.”

“I know,” Harley sympathized. “Sometimes it just comes out of left field.”

“It’s depressing,” I confided. “I’m now the parent and she’s the child. It’s not meant to be like that.”

Harley clucked his tongue to commiserate and stood to give me a brief hug. “Do you know what you need?” he asked.

“An all-expense-paid trip around the world?” I asked hopefully.

He laughed. “No. Sorry. But you need to have some fun. So, let’s go swimming.”

I looked with longing at the pure, clean water nearby. “A swim would be great,” I enthused. “But I didn’t bring my trunks. Do you have a pair I could borrow?” I was walking a knife-edge of uncertainty. Swimming with Harley would mean that more of my not-so-muscly body was on display. I knew what was attractive in men. Not only was I gay and attracted to the masculinity of the male body, I also painted nude and seminude men as a hobby. The pale, flabby, hairy bodies of shorter-than-average, not-quite-middle-aged men weren’t sexy.

The upside of swimming with Harley would be that he’d take his shirt off again. Now that I was more relaxed around him, I didn’t know how to suggest that he remove the shirt he’d put on. Purely for his sake, of course. My eyes having a perv would be secondary.

“Trunks?” Harley questioned. “Trunks belong on elephants.”

And without warning he yanked the knot of his sarong and dropped the material on the ground. As I had predicted, there was no underwear gracing his body, so when he pulled his shirt over his head, he was standing in front of me completely nude.

The blood in my body headed south.

He didn’t have the body of someone who religiously worked out in the gym on a daily basis. He was simply lean from a good diet and active lifestyle. His belly was flat and he had only a sprinkling of light brown hair across his pecs. His legs were long and attractively toned, and—my favorite—not a single tan line crisscrossed his body. Yes. This man had done plenty of nude sunbathing.

“C’mon,” he called as he walked unselfconsciously to the water’s edge. “Don’t be shy.” He arched a perfect dive into the pool, barely making a splash as he entered. He disappeared from sight but that was one image engraved in my memory banks forever.

If Kris wanted me to draw an anatomically correct picture of Harley, I now could.

I now would. Just as soon as you can stand up and walk out that front door without embarrassing yourself
.

Harley surfaced with a flick of his head and turned back toward me. “C’mon, Shawn. It’s absolutely gorgeous in.”

“Ahh….”

Maybe the Alzheimer’s gene had been passed on to me, because I had certainly lost the ability to speak.

“Don’t be shy. You don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.”

Harley’s smile wasn’t helping my erection issue. I leaned forward and placed my elbows on my knees, hoping to hide my reaction from him. “I don’t think—”

“Please?” he pleaded. “I’ll keep to my end of the pool if you want me to, but can you please give a guy a little teaser?”

My sluggish brain struggled to make sense of that. I looked at him with shocked eyes and blurted, “You mean you
want
to see me naked?”

That beautiful smile widened even further. “Shit, yeah. Of course I do.”

“But—why?” I was aghast.

Laughter greeted my reaction. “Because I’m gay,” Harley chuckled. “Because I’m attracted to you. Because you make me horny. Because you’ve been driving me nuts for months.”

“But—why?” I could’ve slapped myself for sounding like a broken record. That is, if I had the power to move my own hand. My body seemed to be frozen.

More laughter floated across the water. “If you get in the pool I’ll tell you,” he promised me with a throaty growl.

Get in. Pool. Without clothes. Erection.

That could be a problem.

“Ahh… maybe in a bit,” I hedged. “I think I need to digest my meal a bit more.”

One of the problems with being gay is you can’t hide things. Literally.

Harley was still smiling and laughing at me. “Do you think I don’t know what your problem is? Why do you think I got in the pool first? I’m just
thinking
about you getting naked and I’m half-hard.”

That wasn’t helping. “Telling me you’re hard is not going to help my problem go away, now is it?” I said through gritted teeth.

But he was earthy and honest. “I don’t want your ‘problem’ to go away,” he admitted. “Thanks to a not-so-attractive flasher the other night, I didn’t get to meet your ‘problem’ so I got shortchanged. Now hurry up, before I have to get out and
make
you.”

Shortchanged
.

Using words like that didn’t exactly make me want to take off my clothes. I don’t mean to imply I’m tiny or anything. It’s just I’d never had a guy see me for the first time and exclaim, “Oh. My. God.” with delight. At the age of twenty-nine, I had seen enough to realize that the guys on porn were skewing the bell curve at the bigger end, but it still didn’t mean I was comfortable letting it all hang out.

Like Harley was.

And my single glimpse of him was enough to inform me that he had absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.

Not that I was ashamed. Or embarrassed. I just didn’t want there to be a big build up, and then a disappointed sigh.

“Shawn,” Harley’s voice warned me. “If you don’t start stripping off in the next five seconds, I’m going to climb out of this pool and push you in.
Then
I am going to take off all your clothes and leave you with nothing to wear for the rest of the day while they dry.”

Still I hesitated. What did Harley see in me? It’s not like I was a sex god or anything.

“Five….”

Would he expect me to initiate something sexual? Did he want to make love with me?

“Four….”

Maybe I was just the “fat chick” of the gay world. The one he thought would be an easy lay. Which I was. He probably thought I was desperate. Which I was.

“Three….”

I was definitely willing to give him a blow job right then. And I was only a little bit hopeful he would give me one too.

“Two….”

Too? Too? Oh, sugar in a teacup. Two! How did the countdown get to two in such a hurry?

“One….”

I stood up, forgetting about my erection for the moment, and shuffled off my shoes. I pulled my polo shirt over my head before I could overthink my situation. My pale white skin was blinding. I hesitated and glanced at Harley, who was lounging in the water but watching me very closely.

“Are you sure you want me to do this?” I asked.

“Absolutely” came the confident reply. “You can’t leave me hanging now.”

With the word
hanging,
I remembered something of mine that should’ve been hanging and was not. I quickly covered my boner and blushed bright red. “I—”

“I know. I have eyes. And they’re waiting. I showed you first, so you can’t be embarrassed now.”

Flubber-hubba-bubba
. Could I do this?

I looked at the pool. There were about five steps to the edge. Four if I ran. I could shuck my shorts and throw myself into the relative security of the water. I would be covered in under two seconds.

“Shawn—”

Taking a deep breath, I pushed my shorts and underwear down over my erection, over my thighs, and allowed the material to drop to the ground. I left them there, threw my glasses on the table, and hurried toward the pool edge. I dove in.

Okay, I admit it. Since Shawn’s Law is never too far away from me, I ran for the edge of the pool, kicked my toe on the lip of the pool edge, and fell inelegantly into the water. But at least I was in. Naked. With a naked guy I desperately wanted.

I surfaced and looked around for Harley, blinking myopically since I was now half-blind. He was grinning broadly at me from the other end of the pool.

“Now, that didn’t hurt one little bit, did it?” he chuckled.

I thought of my toe, which was throbbing from kicking it on the pool edge, my skin, which was stinging from my belly flop, and my dick, which was both stinging and throbbing from the thought of being naked with Harley. “Not much,” I admitted.

“Good.”

He lazily turned on his front and, with a couple of strokes of freestyle, touched the side of the pool at the far end. There was a flash of tanned bum as he somersaulted at the wall and then pushed off, churning up the water toward me. I floated to the edge of the pool, happy to watch him and happy to just chill in the freshening water. Another somersault, another flash, and he was pushing off from the wall again.

After six laps he stopped and treaded water in the deep end. “Better?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m a lot cooler now. Thanks.”

“Not quite what I meant, but close enough.”

Oh.

I’d taken refuge on the steps in the shallow end, and it was lucky that I didn’t have to remember how to float when Harley moved toward me and suddenly mounted the steps to my immediate right. I copped an eyeful—
oh thank goodness
—as he exited the pool and was left to concentrate on my breathing as he went into the house. I took the opportunity to glance down at my lap. To my horror, the pool was clear as glass. So much for concealing waters.

Harley returned with two towels and a plastic bucket full of ice. I could see my four remaining cans of premix cooling in the bucket, along with Harley’s bottle of wine. The dogs tried to follow him into the enclosed pool area, but he sternly pushed the gate shut and told them they were not welcome in the pool today. He then slung the towels over the fence and placed the bucket on the pool edge. I gratefully reached for another drink. I had a feeling that alcohol would get me through the next hour.

Settling on the step next to me he asked, “So, when do you need to get home? Is your mum at Lisa’s house?”

I gulped down half of the can and said, “Kind of. Lisa took her to visit her sister, and then will bring her back to my house while her husband watches the kids. She reckons that only having to deal with one person for a couple of hours is a holiday compared to three kids and a husband. She usually sits down and watches a movie with Mum, so it’s a bit of chill-out time for her. As long as she’s home by five o’clock tonight to make dinner for the kids, she doesn’t really care what time I get back. In fact, she ordered me not to be back before three so she can watch some three-hour movie.”