Gay Erotic Stories

I think the year was twenty-five, I know the month was June with summer quickly burning off the downy spring. Dates grow encrusted and obscure but I hold clear a vision of saturated days, long and fever hot. I was at an interim of life, a milestone mark I wouldn’t soon erase. I’d never been away from home, the fall and college cast a looming shade. I clenched to this, my last toy summer, with the stubborn grasp of a weaning babe. My pale eyes ached from forced and conscious focus squinted under blazing sunlight as I had craving need to review every vista, every quaking aspen tree and every praying leaf of Wilson Grass that whispered from the pastures, prone before the lordly peaks of distant Tetons; soaking up the bitter scent of sulfur yellow fennel, dissect the fragile white bone lace of Queen Ann’s flowerets and memorize by rote the greens that shifted into purple on the wing shells of flying beetles skimming over vagrant Texas blue bells, snatching azure as their right. At night, I swore off sleep to graze on milk washed stars that promised every dormant fancy, our prairie dome a shepherd’s stellar scroll. I meant to learn their names and ranked positions but gave up reading as distraction from the real that kaleidoscopes around me, glossed anew. To say good-bye is to see every thing in natal primacy, as dire knowledge lusters golden worth on dullest loss. What could I learn so far away when I had yet to decipher this homegrown, grievous beauty of a sagging cow who lags late to barn at dusk with swinging teats raw, tender from the prancing calf who follows and bleats; a beauty that keens the wind as an echoing harp yet doesn’t fit to pattern pose book of art nor proper line and shape. There were lessons in this skimmed through primer I had yet to read, to fathom, comprehend. What eastern, book bound wisdom could I gain when I was so poor a student of glass bodied mayflies and cabbage moth paths of silvered motes, of sloe brown eyed girls and melancholy fiddle reels or Chet Ryan’s gothic hands? There would never be time enough to understand and even now, years past, those lost and shallow buried secrets haunt me, murmuring always underneath the roaring tide of dawns.

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Chester Ryan was our hand, caretaker of the ranch for as long as I could remember. I grew up following in his long shadow, learned more from him than all my schoolroom lessons. He filled all the blank places in my life. He was my father, my hero, best friend and confidant. In the whirlwind of change that swept at me during my eighteenth summer, only Chet provided steadfast comfort and unswerving trust. By tossing challenge before me and daring me across, he made a better man of me. I worked like a devil to please him and he gave me all the care of a guardian angel. The tenderness inside his leathern strength was one of the great mysteries of my youth.

That summer we would mend the fences of the high pasture and I would stay with Chet in his line cabin. Since boyhood I'd dreamed of living there with him, a fully partnered share of his life. Only, now, it was a time for leaving. Whenever I thought of going away to college I wanted to cling closer to him. ............

Ryan’s boots fell to the floor with a double clunk and his shirt chattered with popping snaps as he stripped it off. Still in his heavy corded trousers, he sank down next to me on the bed and his weight created a slope down which I would slide but for careful balance. A match flared bright with its harsh whispered scratch and the dark gathered round its flame. He lit a cigarette and exhaled a billow of smoke with a long, slow sigh. Match glare extinguished, dim shadows grew tall and wavering from the last crimson coals in the fireplace, but I could see his bare chest rise and fall in rhythmic swells. I watched him smoke through a veil of drooping lashes and listened to him, content. Just lying next to him was more pleasure than my youthful fancy had dared hope to know. He flipped the butt to the hearth in a low arc. When he reached down and thumbed open the button at his waistband, then slid the brass zipper down, it purred loud enough to send a fever chill along my neck to tingling elbows. It surprised me, I guess. I gave a small start and raised my head with a quick jerk. His amusement chuckled low and deep, “Don’t bolt, lad. I ain’t never yet raped nobody; just easing to get nest comfort. I’d pull off these damn breeches but I’m wearing no drawers, didn’t know how you’d take it. I ain’t accustomed to company in my bed.” I tried to spin a joke of it, ashamed I’d been easily shocked by what was natural to a man, “I thought you was about to start pleasuring yourself.” “That why you reared up? You was gonna watch?” His gravel voice rattled a chuckle. “Well, gosh dammit, if you pulled it out, I’d sure as hell look!” I was stung by his laugh. “Not much to see,” he yawned, “not enough you’d be impressed or anythin’.” He spreads open his fly to reveal the soft mound of privacy curled in its halo of dense hair. Against the dying embers of the grate, the hairs glittered with orange highlights; the flesh glowed like new bronze. “Well done! Looks pretty damn impressive to me,” I was entranced and let him know it, “but not surprising, you’re so big all over! You ain’t shy, are you?” “Shy? Me? Hell, I never learned the knack of it. Matter of fact, I kind of like somebody to look at my rooster. It ain’t much but I’m proud of every inch!” I didn’t need much encouragement; I raised up to get a better look. “That’s a big buck! Makes mine look like a toddler’s nib!” That wasn’t exactly true, I’d been growing like a spring colt, but he seemed to enjoy the flattery and I wanted him to get as much enjoyment from this as I did. “Now I got nothing more to hide from your virgin eyes, I’m shedding these trousers. They’re too damp and tight to sleep in.” He lifted his hips off the mattress and pushed the thick breeches down to his thighs and began tugging at the narrow cuffs. “Here lad, gimme a hand.” He turned on his side and offered me his feet. I didn’t quibble, just grabbed and pulled. The dark casings slid off his pale legs and I tossed the shed clothing to the floor. He lifted our shared blanket, pulled it across his legs and up to his waist, putting a quick end to my delight in his show of nude flesh. He yawned and stretched, fitted his arms behind his head, mumbled sleepily, “You ought to see it when it gets willing and fierce, that’s when it really shows off to good account.” I bit back an enthusiastic reply, thought about my pride too long, and decided against saying anything. I rolled against him and he put an arm around my shoulders, pulled me tighter. I slid my hand across his bare stomach. Loosed from ordinary restraint by his expansive mood, I reveled in the texture of thick, slack skin over taunt muscles, of wiry hairs teasing at my sensitive palm, at heat rising from his body into my hand. My sly fingers slipped under the edge of the blanket right at the curious, ridged depression of his navel. I was alert for any protest, but he only sighed, “I’m not up to it tonight, lad, too damn tired; got to get some sleep. You can play with it tomorrow, but go to sleep now, I’m weary.” I was stunned to silence when he bent his head to brush his lips and scratchy whiskers on my cheek. “Good night, lad. Sweet dreams,” and he began to snore. Sweet dreams, indeed! In those few minutes of casual intimacy, he spun me new dreams, rearranged the foundations of my sky castle. My most stringent kept secrets were suddenly common, my deepest spring well of fear evaporated by his inconsequential kiss. Sleep? I wanted to spin madly about the room; I wanted to go leaping from the barn roof into the soft armed reception of starlight and piled hay. I wanted to flap my new spread wings and fly, soar on the rising drafts of warm relief.

He knew. He knew and didn’t care. He knew and he would grant my fervent heart’s wish like a tossed favor; so easy, so gentle, so like him. Why did I ever fear him? How could I have imagined his disdain? The thing I admired most about him was his way of embracing the entire world in its vast tapestried divergence, never condemning a wolf for eating a calf, or a weed for invading the garden row, not a storm for flooding away his labor nor a horse for tossing him to ground. I gave him the horrors of my own fears and he would not own them.

“You can play with it tomorrow,” I chanted his promise to my inner ear. “You can play with it tomorrow.” The words beat timpani on my anvil and stirrup, all the obscure parts of my sound gathering ears still vibrated; his words, his voice, the most joyous music of my short sojourn into destiny. It didn’t seem at all unreasonable that he admitted no passionate desire for my touch, just an unsuspected depth of generosity that he might indulge my silliness. That’s all it appeared to be, to me at that time, just a silly impulse to reach out and touch something that was socially prohibited. I knew nothing of the import of gender and sexual politics nor all the soul shredding doubt by implication that went along with it. I just knew I had a secret and shameful desire purely centered on Ryan and thought all the rest of my life was stitched up from mundane cloth.

I didn’t have a ghostly sliver of an idea that this silly impulse would eventually color everything else, would ink and dye the fabric of my existence. I was an innocent, then, blithe in the false safety of dividing my experience into little neat packages, never seeing the connecting strings and chains that tied it all together into a tottering and unbalanced, dangerously complex construction of traps and disparate pieces. His snore rumbled through my skin, vibrating my bones in harmonic chords. My palm gathered excitement as it seeped upward from that fount of wrinkled navel, as it billowed on the sea of his belly in tidal rise and ebb of basso rumble. My bold fingertips that probed, restive, below the blanket edge, knew the few degrees of difference as the exquisite heat trapped down there escaped in trickling tendrils about knuckle and cuticle. He snored and with the swell of his belly, my fingers slid further into musk damp dark. I shivered in excitement and pressed my aching cauldron of expectation against his hip.

He needs this sleep, he is exhausted from our long day’s work and the back ridge climb to the cabin. Can I be less generous to him when he would gift me so much? Though I am impatient for the promised pleasures, I still my questing fingers in the tangle of bushy thicket, imagining I can feel the copper fire of their color. Can I sense the creamy white of tender belly shy of sunlight? Does that mere arrhythmic catch in his breathing mean I have disturbed him? I lay poised tense, a Llewellyn setter at quail nest epicene, my every nerve projected from delft finger print ridges and extending outward in anguished wish. Ah! I quivered in spine length jolt as his lambskin textured, rearing cock head leapt upward to my silent call. It slid along the knobby outer rim of my little finger and settled in a mounted position atop the back of my hand. I breathed in synchrony with him, let my whole arm and hand rise and fall with the movement of his body, never letting the weight give way to gravity. I began to ache with pent desire and tight leashed urge. His swelling distension grew in another spasm of twisting crawl and fully spanned my hand’s width. By lifting my thumb ever so slowly from its resting position, I brushed the wet tip and for the first time, knew the delicate vulnerability of his silky foreskin. Air would not force past my constricted wind pipe. In perfect stillness, I craved, I yearned, and I ached. With a mild cough, he broke the silence on which I floated, shifted his hips, mumbled an unintelligible short phrase couched in the language of dreams and rolled away from me, burying his face in pillowed arms and his snore shifted into a cadenced and sonorous nasal whisper. I took the break as cue and I, too, rolled away, rolled into a cocooned and nascent luxury of new knowledge and peaked experience. I thought no sleep could ever overcome such pounding heart, but woke to daylight chill and solitary stillness.

He was gone from the cabin and I thought for a moment I had dreamed the encounter with his flesh and lips out of the desires of my imaginative heart but a sure flood of well known shame put the reality of the memory into familiar focus. He knew. He knew and I was pilloried to public view. He indulged a childish and silly boy but had no part of that desire in his manly structure. I could not mistake his indulgence for glad participation. He would never share that twisted pleasure and in his distance from it, he would feel some tight checked disgust even when he was too kindly to show it.

The reasonableness of daylight clarity settled on my thin chilled figure in burdensome heaviness. He might allow me access to his privacy, but he would hold the cool gaze of observer to my foolish excess. I knew this, not as a tenuous fear, but as an icy hard axe blow to my dreams. The fancies of firelight and weariness recessed with the night, now was morning and bright reason. While I dressed, I alternated morning chills with hot flushed embarrassment. How could I face him, see the knowledge in his eyes and not flinch? One glance of ironic amusement, one lifted eyebrow, one flared nostril and I could never walk upright, again. He would today regret the night as a contrite drunkard. He would look on me with pitying glance. I had wagered my entire value on his acceptance like a crazed gambler piles his fortune on one number. Now I saw the possibility of loss as a falling away from the earth.

I filled a blue enameled cup with hot coffee and it chattered against my teeth as I gulped it down with a hunger for its bitter heat and weight in my floating belly. The door hinge screeched and I jumped, spilling coffee down my shirt. Ryan laughed his rocky brook chortle, “Gimme’ a hand, now! Two o’ these is about more than I wanna’ lift to the counter top!” He bore twin water buckets with a pained grin, “Hurry up, lad! My arms are coming off at the sockets!” A five gallon bucket holds about fifty pounds of water and he must have brought them all the way up from the spring house down by the willows.

“Give me this one,” I took it from his tight curled hand, “set that one down, I’ll lift it up!” My voice came out with more strength than I expected, I thought I might only croak a whisper. “You’re a life-saver! I’m getting too old for that climb; I better see a catalog about a pump. ‘Bout time I had modern convenience out here. Do you think your momma might give me electricity for the place if I go at her sweet?” We filled the churn kept for kitchen water and he began preparing breakfast as we discussed the improvements that power could bring to his isolated line cabin. “And a telephone too! You really need a way to stay in touch with the ranch house, what happens if you get ill out here or if the truck breaks down?” I mouthed the thought even as I knew the wonder of the cabin depended in part on its distance from the rest of the world. He laughed at my concern, “I just don’t fall sick, simple as that! And I don’t know if I wants your ma able to poke at me by telephone every time she gets the notion! I already dread the list she gives me every Saturday when I go down. God knows how many “improvements” she could think up if I was only a crank-up away!” We both laughed. Momma was in all ways a worrying woman and I knew I couldn’t live within ear shot of her! I set out plates on the red oilcloth covered table as Ryan piled up the heady stacks of bacon and sausage on top of a bowl of scrambled eggs fried up with chopped onion and finely minced purple basil and enough coarsely ground black pepper to sting the eyes. I had thick slices of wheat bread toasted by the morning fire and he drew a mound of ivory butter wrapped in thick folds of brown waxed paper from the stone larder tucked under the kitchen floor. The smell of old apples and dried peaches came up with the butter. “There’s a bit of pear preserves in the cupboard if you want, I’m pretty sick of ‘em!” Only when the silence settled over our random rattle of fork against plate did I remember the previous night and I hid my flushed face by hunching over my breakfast. By no word or glance had Ryan acknowledged that something might have shifted in our camaraderie. None of the sly leer I had feared, not even a patronage he was entitled to deliver due to my fall from manly to boyish level. He would not have forgot, I couldn’t convince myself on that hope. He was not so lightly impressed by events. I knew him as a man who was thorough in every experience, sifted out the wisdom and connected all the whys and byways. If, now, he chose not to refer to our strange fumblings of the night, then he had reasons. No doubt he simply spared my feelings; he would certainly have known my heart as he had always done so. I admired him fresh in that moment, for his mute kindness.

A sip of coffee lifted my eyes and I stared at his face, so well memorized, so fascinating in its mysteries. His moss green eyes never flickered to challenge my stare, his thoughts distracted, miles away, perhaps with the rambling fences we must put right before cattle could be pastured in the high valley, perhaps with the fancy of an electrified cabin and a humming refrigerator. I was ever endeared of the long ridge of his nose and it’s friendly round tip. The fine crinkled skin at his temple quivered with a hidden pulse, a thriving intelligence animated his face even at rest. The copper brows drew down in sudden wince and his green eyes found me, “Damn! I guess I over done the pepper, again, huh?” I could only grin, no words ready for pepper when I was lost in admiration of the hero of my youth, this ideal by which to measure humanity, this rare treasure of a good man. His calloused hand came out to cup my cheek with rough affection, “Don’t look on me so, Ted, you’ll likely jack up my consequence.” His dimples danced in ballet dips and bows. “You’ve a way of making me too much for my poor stature. I’d thank you eternally but it’s far too rich for the likes of me.” He ruffled my unkempt mat of sun bleached hair. “One day, Teddy, one day there’ll be a worthy for that offering, but it waters my knees to see it wasted on the scraps of me. Weakens me and swells my chest to bursting with a passion you ain’t ready to know, not with your tender body. Times I could eat you whole, I swear it, Christ! You look at me and I don’t know if I’m man or beast to want to devour you.” His already rough voice thickened, “Make me go slow. When I want to overwhelm you, push me back. I’ll die when it’s over, you know. When the day breaks you don’t have that look in your eye that sustains me, I’ll fade away. I cannot stand without it.” “But, I’ll always love you, Ryan; forever and ever.” There is a searing beauty in truth, flatly stated. It burns away all ugliness and whining fears, leaves a man on a high plateau of blue intensity. “Aye, Teddy, and I’ll always love you, forever and ever, amen. Trouble comes with being mortal, stampeding through a churning whirl of time. People change, men change, boys grow up and old men fade away. In a week or a month or a year you won’t be you anymore, and I won’t be me. What there is of us will change and alter but what we remember stays the same inside, we’ll always remember this moment and this pleasure of mood and we’ll always and forever wish it back but it will never come this way, again.” Tears welled up with flash-flood suddenness and darkened his pale lashes, spilled to his freckled and ribbed cheeks and ran in long streamers down the creases that zigged from dimple to dimple around his sad smile. I was far too innocent to know the pain for its piercing depth, nor to know his vision of the future for its terrible accuracy. “Even great Zeus fell before Ganymede, I’m only a man.” He stood, kissed my forehead, “I need some fresh air!” and left me alone with my awesome, tingling power and my confusion.

The day was thick with humid heat and little breeze. An endless line of fence posts made our meager progress seem a creeping pace. Bring up the truck, unwind more stubborn, twisted wire, reset the canted posts, replace the ones too soft to hold a nail, pull the wire until our arms were aching sore, then bring up the doggone truck again. Rough tiered meadows spread for miles around us, green and brown leaf grasses, pinion pines no higher than my chest, some yellow speckled Anglesey hung like limpid bells on scratchy grey stems, fuzzed with silver down. Eyes pulled up to find a framework; the sky was bigger than the ground. Upland, west, the mountains peaked a mighty bastion, but barely scratched that high domed, blue glass sky where soaring hawks sailed gliding spirals, caught my soul in dares of swooping dreams. By ten we were soaked with sweat and our shirts hung on the tailgate without a flutter. My shoulders burned pink, and my back. Ryan was so cured with years of sun his back was splotched with great splatters of rose freckles against a brown skin. Only his armpits showed a paler natural color, like the inside of a peach. I kept glancing at the nests of tangled hair. His nipples, too, drew more of my attention than before. They bloomed a yellow rose tint and the central buds seemed fat as tiny tangerines. His canvas dungarees, now dark with sweat, sagged lower on his hips and the blue white inch of skin below his waist teased at me, as somehow more naked than skin could be.

I was sharply grown aware of the thinness of the fabric and the way wet canvas clung to buttocks and to thighs and outlined soft shapes that nestled inside and shifted with his every lift and pull. His attention was all for fence and post, still the man I knew who lived to work. He was fed by labor, never tracked the time. His eyes kept glancing at the broken rusted line that ran before us to the hills and defied any hope of progress. I kept looking back at the shining thing we’d made, the mark of new silver wire in three close bands marching up behind us. “Bring up the truck, Ted, while I pull this old soldier back up at attention.” He yanked on a slack post. I trotted off down the dirt lane and noticed, for the first time, the clouds moving in from the west, big gray mountains hid in deep shadow. They were coming slow.

Continued…