Neal knelt down beside Rex next to the kitchen door. He had stood there momentarily at first, holding his breath, while he checked to see that Rex was still breathing. The vet had said that it was just a matter of a few days now—that she'd give the Townsends something to administer to him to make sure he didn't feel any pain, if they wanted to let him be at home.
Rex snuffled and opened his eyes wide and looked up trustingly at Neal, as the young man buried his face in the dog's neck and whispered how everything would be all right. At the same time Rex tried to zone out on the argument that was raging between his dad and mom in the dining room. It was more or less the same argument they had every weekday when his dad came home from the plant and found that his mom had been drinking most of the day away.
He was grateful Rex couldn't hear it—the dog had been deaf for nearly two years now. Rex had been part of Neal's life—perhaps the happiest part—for a dozen years, ever since Neal had started into first grade and the cocker Westie, a mix of cocker spaniel and West Highland terrier, had shown up on his sixth birthday. Rex had slept in Neal's bed every day since then up until recent weeks, when his dad told him that it was too painful for Rex to be moved anymore.
Rex hadn't necessarily agreed with that, and the first night they were to be parted, he'd struggled to get up from his warm basket next to the kitchen door. Neal had spent the first three nights from then on a sleeping bag next the basket in the kitchen himself. By the fourth day, though, Rex had been too zoned out to notice, and Neal, trying to hold back his tears, had gone to his room and slept there alone—or had tried to, mostly unsuccessfully for a couple of nights.
It had been while Neal was sleeping alone—or trying to—that he first let the thoughts creep in about how he would prefer to be sleeping. He did want a warm body against his, but he scared himself as he lay there, almost unconsciously playing with his developed, young man's athletic body, that the partners he conjured up weren't young women. They were other young men, and then mostly teammates of his at the Rock Hill Academy. Much of the time his thoughts went to Slick Johnson, the team's point guard, who was two years older than Neal was and would, this spring, be moving up from the post-high school prep school to an athletic scholarship at Duke—if he could keep his grades up.
It had been Slick who had gotten Neal's thoughts of other men going in the first place—by showing interest in Neal and because of what Neal had seen Slick doing with Dwayne Lee a few months earlier.
Basketball was everything to Neal. He'd been good enough in high school to attract the attention of several well-ranked university teams, although not teams quite as good as Duke, where the supertalented Slick was headed. But like most of the other guys at Rock Hill, his grades hadn't been good enough to go directly into the university. Some, like Slick, also had some discipline problems they had to get past.
"Please, please be here when I get home this afternoon," Neal whispered into Rex's thick coat before he stood and, with another look back at the dog that was looking up at him with those big, brown eyes and panting in shallow, ragged breaths, went out of the kitchen door and climbed into the old Chevrolet Camaro coup he was maintaining just shy of the junk yard. His parents, who left him more or less on his own, had said he could go to prep school as long as someone else paid for it and as long as he could get himself there. With luck, Neal had managed to get into Rock Hill, which was less than a forty-five-minute drive away from home and that had accepted the scholarship Wake Forest had offered him, to include two years at a prep school, as necessary.
Neal fretted through his classes that day, a feeling of dread at the back of his mind. Rex had been so weak that morning. Neal was afraid that today was the day. He'd been mentally prepared for it, but there was no emotional relief for him. Rex had been more family to him than his own parents had been.
Somehow he made it through the school day and the mandatory hour-long basketball practice afterward. But he wasn't sharp in practice, never connecting with the three-point basket he was famous for, and Coach Wilson noticed.
"Over here, Neal," he called out as the guys were heading for the shower. "Your head somewhere else today, guy?"
"No. Sorry, Coach. Something's on my mind, yes. But it will be OK in a few days, promise."
"It'd better be. We need your three-pointers. We have a game coming up with Flint Hill, and your team needs you to be focused. You going to go to MacDonald's with us and come back for the drill practice?"
"Uh, no, I don't think so. I'm needed at home tonight. Sorry."
"Well, get your head back on straight by tomorrow's practice," Coach said, and he gave Neal at slap to the rear to send him off to the showers.
The slap to his butt jolted Neal, making him think thoughts he'd tried to reserve for the privacy of his dark bedroom at night. This wasn't helped when he entered the showers and saw Slick and Dwayne, both chocolate giants—both tall and muscular—almost huddled together at one end of the shower and half turned to each other and turned away from the shower entrance. Neal imagined what they might be doing from the groaning sounds they were making. It had been like this when he'd seen them before. But then they hadn't been turned from him. They'd been standing close together, each with his hands on the other's cock—and Slick's had been huge—and they were rocking back and forth and pulling on each other's cocks.
Tearing his eyes away from them in the shower today, Neal went to the other end of the shower stall and turned toward the tiled wall, standing under a cascade of water, and trying not to let anyone see the effect his thoughts were having on his body. His own cock was hardening up. There wasn't anything he could do about it. This was one of the dreams he'd been having. He and Slick standing in the shower and doing what Slick and Dwayne undoubtedly were doing.
He shuddered and jerked at the feel of a touch on his thigh and turned, involuntarily and embarrassed because he had been pulling his own cock, to see that Slick was next to him and that it was obvious what he and Dwayne had been up to from what Neal could see below the black giant's flat belly. Slick's dong was pointing out a good eight inches, and it was this that had touched Neal's thigh. He sensed the presence on his other side and turned his head to see that Dwayne was there, leaning against the slick tiled wall, extending his hand and ready to touch him, reaching down for Neal's cock.
"Here, let us help you with that, Neal," Slick said in a low, thick voice.
Neal turned from both of them with a moan and padded toward the door to the shower to the sound of Slick's deep-throated laugh. He brushed by Coach Wilson as he went and retreated, dripping water and barely able to keep himself from sliding along the floor, to the locker area beyond. He couldn't tell if the coach had been looking into the shower area or not, but this was one too many pressures and complications in his life right at this moment. All Neal wanted to do was dress and get home.
When he had dressed, he came around the corner of a set of lockers and saw Slick straddling a bench between the locker banks. Dwayne was sitting in front of him on the bench and bending over Slick's lap with the top of his fuzzy-black-haired head brushing against Slick's belly. Dwayne's head was bobbing up and down, and Neal could hear the slurping sounds he made while he sucked on Slick's cock.
Neal stood there, mesmerized, and once more his hand ran down his belly and to his package, and he was rubbing his knuckles on the hard cylinder he could feel straining at the denim of his jeans. Slick looked up at Neal, no doubt hearing Neal's low groan, and smiled. Neal moaned and struggled to and out of the locker room door.
Neal's dad's car wasn't in the drive when Neal arrived home, and Neal noted that his dad uncharacteristically was late—and he regretted this because he knew the regular scream session that ensued when his dad arrived home from work hadn't happened yet. Neal was in no mood for that. There was too much drama going on without that. As soon as he opened the kitchen door, however, he knew what had happened and that he was too late. The house was deathly quiet and the dog bed beside the door was empty.
He knelt down, looking at the empty bed, willing it not to be empty, willing for Rex still to be in the house somewhere. But as he stood again, his mother appeared at the dining-room door. She looked uncharacteristically sober and was pale.
"We noticed not more than an hour ago. I'm sure it was peaceful," she said in a quiet, halting voice. "Your father has taken him—"
Neal heard no more. He was back out of the house in a flash and in the Camaro and roaring out of the driveway. He drove for an hour or more, haphazardly, not knowing where he was going. At first he had intended to drive to the vet's. But he knew it was too late for that.
