Lover Boys Forever (11 page)

“
I don’t know, Steve. I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”

“
Please I have to talk to you. It’s not what you think.”

I thought for a while, and then said,
“Okay, but it better not be here. I don’t want Ryan to know. He can be real mean sometimes.”

“
Sure, I understand. Do you want to come over here?”

“
No, I don’t think so. Could we meet somewhere neutral?”

“
How about Riverside Park?” Steve suggested.

“
That sounds good. About six-thirty?”

“
Yeah, that’ll be fine.” We arranged where in the park to meet, then Steve said, “See you there,” and hung up.

I was sitting on a bench, watching a pair of Mallards, when Steve showed up. My heart gave an extra beat when I saw him. He looked even better than he had the night before. He took a seat next to me and kissed me on the cheek. My heart did a little flip.
“I don’t know where to start, Tyler, so I guess I better barrel right in. Do you remember last night?”

“
I sure do,” I interrupted. “It was great.”

He smiled then continued.
“It was, wasn’t it? But that’s not what I was going to say. Do you remember what Ryan said when we were talking about Jason? He said that he was home by eleven-thirty.”

“
Sure I remember. I told you he woke me up.”

“
Well that’s not true, Tyler, I saw him in the parking lot at about eleven-forty when I was going home. He was with Jason, and they seemed to be having some kind of argument. If he hadn’t made that statement, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. I’ve got a feeling he was somehow involved in Jason’s death.”

“
You must be wrong. It couldn’t have been him. He was at home.”

“
How do you know he was at home?” Steve asked.

“
Well he was, because ... .” I couldn’t finish because I knew I didn’t really know. I hadn’t looked at the clock. Ryan had woken me up and told me it was eleven-thirty. Had he been trying to establish an alibi?

“
You’re not sure are you?”

I shook my head,
“No I’m not. But it’s not possible. Ryan would never do anything like that. I’ve known him for two years. I would know if it was him.”

“
I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Tyler. What are we going to do?”

I thought for a while. Something was gnawing in the back of my mind. Something else had happened that didn
’t sit right. What was it? It had something to do with Ryan. Something he had said. Suddenly it came to me. “When the police interviewed you what did they tell you?”

“
Not much. Only that Jason had been murdered. Why?”

“
Did they say anything about drugs?”

“
Drugs? Why would they say anything about drugs?” Steve asked.

I told him what the Detective had told me, and then I told him that Ryan knew about the drugs. Ryan could only have known about the drugs if he
’d been at the scene of the murder.

“
That’s weird. I’ve had a funny feeling for a while about the sedation that I’ve prescribed. Some patients continued to have pain after their sedation. It always seemed to happen when Ryan was working with me.”

“
Oh, God. I can’t believe this. Surely there must be some logical explanation. What about Brian?”

“
I think that’s a lot of hogwash. Jason was well liked by all the staff and patients. The only person I’ve ever seen him arguing with was Ryan.”

“
Oh shit, this is awful. What are we going to do?”

“
I think we should talk to the police. We can’t just ignore it,” Steve said.

“
But what if we’re wrong? It would ruin him. I’m really scared, Steve. What if he does something to me?”

Steve put his arm around my shoulder, rubbed my neck, and kissed the top of my head.
“I think you should go home and act as though everything is normal. Don’t say anything. I’ll speak to ... who did you say?”

“
Detective Jerry Mack.”

“
You go home now and try to act normal. If you feel threatened in any way, just walk out of there and go to the police. Give me a call when you can.”

“
Before I go,” I said, “I want to ask you something. It seemed as though you and Ryan were pretty familiar with each other last night. Had you slept with him before?”

“
Yeah, I’m sorry. He’s been over to my place quite a few times. That’s how I knew he liked to get fucked.”

I was nervous when I left Steve, but I was determined to find out if the two
-timing asshole was guilty of murder. I knew that whatever happened, there was no way that I would be able to continue living with him. It would never be the same.

I made sure that I was in bed when Ryan got home. I didn
’t want to talk to him, scared that I would give myself away. I played dead when he climbed into bed, but when he started playing with my rear-end, I suddenly realized what I had to do. I pretended to respond to his advances, making sure he had a safe on, and then opened myself to him. I felt abused and hurt when he pounded into me, not seeming to care if I was enjoying myself. I was ready to scream when he finally climaxed in my chute.

When he pulled out, I rolled over and removed the safe.
“I’ll look after it,” I volunteered.

“
Thanks, sweetie,” he said as he turned his back to me.

Asshole
, I thought.
That’s the last time you’re getting into me
. I carefully carried the safe into the bathroom. I tied a knot in the safe, and then dropped it into an old pill bottle and put it in the refrigerator. I pulled a blanket out of the closet and then settled down on the sofa. It took a long time before I finally drifted off to sleep.

The next morning
, I was out of the apartment by eight. I went straight to Central Police Headquarters and asked for Detective Mack. They said he would be in at nine, so I sat waiting and worrying.

When he came through the door
, he looked at me in surprise. “Aren’t you Chris’s friend?”

I nodded.
“I need to speak to you. It’s urgent.”

“
Come on up to my office,” he said.

I could hardly contain myself when we were eventually seated at his desk.
“Did Steve talk with you yesterday?”

“
You’re the one,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was you when he told me about Ryan. You’re actually his lover?”

“
Yes ... you have a problem with that?”

“
No not at all. I couldn’t care less, I’m just surprised ... that’s all.”

“
Good, because I’ve brought you a gift.”

“
A gift?” he said.

“
Yeah,” I said handing him the bottle, “I thought you might like to run a DNA test on this.”

He looked in the bottle, and then opened his mouth in surprise.
“What the ... it’s a condom. Has it got Ryan’s semen in it?”

“
Yeah, a big load. Is it okay?”

“
Sure. Thanks a lot. I’ll get it tested right away. Where can I get in touch with you?”

“
I’m not going back home. I think I’ll move in with Chris for a while until things are settled.”

“
That sounds like a good idea. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can, and don’t say anything to Ryan. It could be dangerous.”

I went home, and was packing a bag when Ryan awoke.
“What’re doing?” he asked.

“
I’ve decided to spend a few days with Chris. He needs me.”

“
I don’t want you to go. What about me? I need you, too.”

“
I don’t care. He needs me, and I’m going.”

I was scared that he would try and stop me, but he must have seen something in my eyes because he just let me go.

The next few days seemed to drag on endlessly. Ryan phoned a few times, but Chris always managed to convince him I wasn’t home. Steve phoned every day, and we chatted for long periods. It was three days after I had seen Detective Mack when he showed up at the door.

“
There’s no easy way to say this,” he began. “You and Steve were right, Tyler. The semen that you brought in proves without a doubt that Ryan was the killer.”

“
Oh, God, no,” Chris wailed. “Why would he do such a thing?”

“
We think that Jason must have seen Ryan stealing the drugs, and that he threatened Ryan with exposure. Ryan couldn’t let that happen, so he killed him and then planted the Demerol in your apartment. As we speak, he is being arrested and charged with murder.”

My mind was in a whirl. How could I have been so blind? He
’d used and abused me all the time we were together, and yet I had still stayed with him and believed in him.

After Detective Mack left, Chris and I talked for a long time. I was scared that he would blame me, but he didn
’t. I phoned Steve and gave him the news. We had both been on edge since we had spoken to the police, but could now relax. Steve asked me if he could see me sometime, and I said yes, not realizing that love would flourish out of my despair.

The chiming of the mantel clock brought me back to the present. I placed the anniversary card on the table and carried the phone back to the bedroom. I was looking forward to the night, wondering what new and wonderful things Steve would have in store for me.

Ron Radle has been published in a number of erotic anthologies in the past couple of years and is the author of two novels,
Two Sides of the Coin
and
Degrees of Passion
.

I cried.

Not at the ceremony itself. That would have made for a pretty picture, wouldn’t it: a groomsman bursting into tears right along with the bride’s maids and the bride’s mother and the little old maid somewhere out in the church pews lamenting her own failed nuptials. No, but I cried a good bit before the actual wedding and afterwards because in actuality, I was more than one of John’s groomsmen. I was, for several years, his lover.

We grew up together in the same small town in the upper middle portion of South Carolina, not all that far from Charlotte.
Oh, it was years later before we ever bedded down with each other. In fact, the both of us were in college when that event first took place. But until then, we were as close a couple of boys could be and shared all the good and the bad associated with pre-adolescence and adolescence itself. All the scrapes and bumps of little league sports and tree house adventures, all the overblown heartache of teenybopper romance, all the irritation of school teachers whose incessant homework made it hard for us to practice those habits and pastimes we liked best: hunting, fishing, swimming, sports, going to the movies, listening to music, talking about girls. John grew up in the same town I did, but he was a little more country. That’s because he spent a lot of time helping out his granddad on his farm in the rural part of the county. Me, I couldn’t be bothered with the vicissitudes of farm life. I was too good for all that dirt and heat and stink of manure. As I became older, I turned into more of a, well, not a sissy exactly, but something close, I guess. Books interested me more along with good music and fine paintings and all the other preoccupations one would associate with an “intellectual.”

John noticed this change in me and wasn
’t exactly comfortable with it. He was afraid I’d get all slack and flabby and sickly, that I’d become some kind of shut-in, a hermit, and such a lifestyle would limit my lifespan. He invited me out a lot to his granddad’s place in York County to see how the “other half” lived. But I never did get the hang of country living and working, although it was fun watching John himself enjoy it. And, it was easy to see why he was so popular with girls. He had a head of wild, unkempt dark hair, which he usually kept hidden with a John Deere cap. Clichés can only do justice to those blue eyes: piercing, penetrating, and darkly crystalline. His smile was sexy-goofy, owing to the unevenness of a couple of his front teeth, a “problem” (not really, at least not to me) he would eventually remedy with the aid of braces. And his body. That cinched it. His arms and chest especially well-defined not only from weight-lifting but also from the outdoors work he did for his granddaddy. The weightlifting built the muscles; the farm work molded them and gave them a kind of natural definition you wouldn’t find in a professional bodybuilder. Nice butt, too. Curved and firm. Women like nice butts. And they’re not alone in that admiration. It was a special pleasure for me to watch John doing farm work shirtless, although I was careful never to let him see me watching him.

I dated
, too, at least for the first couple of years of high school. But by the time I was a senior, it no longer interested me. I gave it up. I didn’t even go to the senior prom. This worried John some, too. His last words to me after graduation were “I’m going to find somebody for you, buddy, if I have to raise hell and high water to do it.”

Well, he didn
’t have to find anyone for me. I’d already found someone. John Irvin.

John left York County and went to school in the further eastern part of the state, not too far from Clemson University.
He liked Clemson and wanted to go to school there, but he didn’t have the grades. So he settled for a private religious school nearby. I went to a well-known university there in the county in the county’s largest town and majored in English. John and I maintained a fairly close contact with each other those first few months of college, but then things between us grew distant. He became a connoisseur of the party life and let his grades drop. I wasn’t a complete bookworm in college. I did have some fun. But I was no John Irvin, that’s for sure.

We had a real reunion that summer after our first year in school.
Again John went to work for his granddaddy in the fields. And I tagged along occasionally. John’s body, on shirtless display for me, had grown even more beautiful, it seemed. He hadn’t gotten the beer belly I thought might come from so much drinking. When I discreetly commented on his muscle tone, he said he had been making a lot of use of the school gym.

The summer wasn
’t all work though. We managed to take up our favorite pastimes together, one of them being fishing. John’s granddaddy’s property was bounded on the north side by a beautiful, clear lake that stretched more than a quarter of a mile and was, in the sunshine, as green as a muscadine grape skin. We took off early in the morning one day for the lake weighed down with our poles and bait and tackle boxes. We packed a little lunch, too, and John brought along something extra, a cooler of ice-cold beers. We sat all day long with poles in the water, going over old times – old for a pair of nineteen year olds, that is. After a while his talk consisted mainly of the girls he had met at school, the ones he wanted to bang and the couple he had. I tuned that out fairly quickly. It made me too jealous to hear of his sexual conquests, modest as they were. I was jealous, of course, of the girls. And before we knew it, the sun had slipped west in the sky and left the lake bank in semi-darkness. The lake itself had begun to turn black. Beside each of us lay about half a dozen empty beer bottles, and that buzz, along with the good, cool breeze off the water, gave John Irvin an inspiration.

“
Let’s go skinny dipping,” he said to me, that uneven grin brighter than anything else around at the moment.

“
What?” I asked. My heart raced fast. My stomach drew into a knot.

“
We’ve never done it before. At least I haven’t. Have you?”

I shook my head.
Cautious me, all I could do was think of the danger of going into the water after having consumed so much beer. When I mentioned this to John, he sort of laughed and stood.

“
That’s your problem, bro. You play it too safe. You don’t really live.”

He walked off from me, shedding first his shirt, stepping out of his canvas sneakers, then shucking down his jeans and white jockey briefs at the same time.
There stood revealed, in more than just my fantasies now, his perfectly shaped ass. It hovered in front of me just a moment like a pair of muscular moons. I swallowed hard at seeing it, my mouth going moist.

“
John!” I hollered out, as much from desire as from concern for his safety.

The water splashed.
“Get in here!” he called. “The water feels so good.”

I stood and began to undress, wanting to but not wanting, confused almost to the point of tears and a little bit drunk
, too, I suppose. But soon I was naked and heading for the water, heading for that dark circle John was making with the motions of his arms and legs. We would die, I was sure of it, but we would die together. I would die with the man I loved more than just about anything else in the world.

Except we didn
’t. We lived. We left the water together and dropped down into the grass, the full moon now riding our skin and making it bone-pale. We laughed at the insanity of what we’d just done and lay back in the grass to recount it. John did anyway. I spent my time eying his nudity, taking in as much as I could while I could before we got dressed. His thick hair was matted to his head. His ridged muscles were bejeweled by water droplets. His dick lay curled in the curve of his right thigh. It was hard then to gauge how big it was. And of course it was soft right then. But it didn’t matter. It belonged to John Irvin. That was enough. I hurt with how much I wanted him right then, and I had to be careful that my desire didn’t show too much in the most obvious place, so I lay kind of at an angle so my crotch was shielded.

We didn
’t say anything for a long time, and I don’t know what happened, but I must have drifted off to sleep. Too much beer, too much thrashing in the water, too much general exhaustion. I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or not, but when I opened my eyes, I heard this regular noise beside me, this quiet and steady beat of something being rubbed, maybe sanded down. There was labored breathing, too. I looked to my right. John Irvin was there, eyes open, staring down at himself, his mouth slightly parted. I looked further. He had hold of his dick and was jacking it with a lot of concentration and determination. I made some kind of noise, involuntarily. John looked over at me.

“
Hey, buddy,” he said then looked back down at his prick. “You caught me.” I tried to laugh but couldn’t. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m just about the horniest son of a bitch there is. You know? Just thinking about pussy so much. Licking it. Having my fingers in it. Putting my dick in it. I guess it’s just part of being young. Are you like that, too?”

He looked back at me for an answer, but I was watching how his hand manipulated his meat.
Just from a crude estimation, it looked like he packed a good seven inches, at least hard. I licked my lips and heard myself answer at last, “No, not really.”

“
No? Oh yeah. You’re too busy studying and reading books and all to think about sex. Man, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. I’ve tried to be a good example to you!” He laughed and let his dick go. “Guess I best stop that for right now. I’m embarrassing you. I can take care of it later.”

“
No!” I yelled, almost desperately. “Please don’t stop!”

He eyed me in the dark with concern.
“You all right? Hey, what’s the matter?”

No doubt the desperation sounded in my voice, the hurt, the want, the attempt to suppress all of it.
And he saw the tears in my eyes, too.

“
What’s the matter?” he repeated.

And I came out with it, figuring all consequences be damned.
I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “I want you!”

“
Hey!”

And that
’s when everything spilled out of me in one gush – the fact I was gay, of course, but also the torch I’d been carrying around for him for so long, not just sexually but emotionally, too. He was the finest, sweetest, most handsome man I’d ever known and ever expected to know. The fact couldn’t be changed. Nothing could be helped. It was what it was.

Of course
, I expected him to spit on me and curse me and dress and leave me for good, but he didn’t. He sat on his elbow and stared down at me. Even in the growing dusk, I could see the confusion in his face, and all I could do was shrug.

He lay back down and stared up at the sky.
“And it would make you feel better if you could suck my dick?” he asked finally.

My throat went dry, but I tried to answer anyway.
“I don’t know, John. Some, I guess.”

“‘
Cause that’s all I could give you. I couldn’t love you. Not that way. Like a brother, yeah. Like a friend. But not like that.”

“
I know. That’s why it hurts so.”

After a few minutes his hand went back to his crotch and he picked up his limp dick and began to stroke it again.
His eyes were closed. No doubt he was thinking about some girl he’d fucked or would like to. I watched his hand move up and down the length of his cock and felt my own prick stirring to life once more. He was shaking, his whole body; with his other hand he cupped his nuts then slid it slowly up his torso to one of his small, pointed nipples, which he rubbed. When a few minutes had lapsed, John looked at me and said, in a voice shaking from the pleasure he gave himself, “You better come get this before the lid pops off it.”

I hesitated just a moment then slowly pushed down the grass on my elbow till I was parallel with his crotch.
He let his dick go. It stood straight up in the air but threatened to drop to his belly until I grabbed hold of it and stroked it as he had done. But there had to be more contact than this. More than just a handjob. It had to be more intimate. It would be my only chance. So I pressed the prick to my face and ran it round my lips, letting my tongue out to taste the top, which was already salty with precum. I ran my tongue around the head slowly, flicking it at the front where the head was divided, and pressing my tongue into the piss slit. Then in one gulp, I had it in my whole mouth and was sucking away. I wasn’t the most experienced cocksucker. Indeed John’s made about the third dick I had ever had in my mouth, but what one lacks in experience he can make up for in sheer love, and I bounced my face up and down John’s dick tirelessly, let him hit the back of my throat, somehow withstanding the gags such a motion gave me. My hand rotated at the base of his dick, and with my other hand, I played with and tickled his balls.

I could look up and see that John wasn
’t watching me. He had his head back and his eyes closed, and all of a sudden, he called out, “Oh that’s so damn good, Elizabeth! Oh yes, Becky, keep sucking me just like that! Don’t stop, Mallory. Oh that’s right. Tickle my balls, Alicia.” He was trying to remain straight while having a gay experience. The roll call of names almost made me laugh, but I was too intent on loving his dick to be distracted. At one point, I attempted to disturb this illusion. I let go of his prick and asked, “Is it good, John? Is it good?” He nodded quickly without looking at me, as though he didn’t want to acknowledge the fact he was being blown by another man.