There really was a Lac du Miel in Lac du Miel. Once it had been wild and scenic and outside the city limits, but over the last couple of decades, what with the whole state sinking and the town expanding, town and lake had met and your view and access to it were obscured by a development called Honey Lake Estates. Houses started in the $120s and went up to McMansions.
This was not where Terry was heading. He skirted the subdivision and took the road that led southward out of the town limits and ran parallel to the bayou. At this point it stopped being a blacktop road and was paved with pebble and shell. On the right side of the road were the houses, casual-looking buildings made of cinder block below and wood above. Apparently, people lived above and stored things below. The houses were close enough to the water so that you could sit on your deck and cast into the bayou. Bayou Row looked like an idyllic place for a water rat to live, but the unstated cost of living out here was expressed in the form of water marks—some marked, with dates, in paint—on the sides of some of the buildings.
Terry was itching and sweating with nervous excitement and was a little sorry he hadn't stopped at home to take another shower, but he'd wanted to get away as soon as possible. He told Victoria that Brent had invited him to supper and if they got into drinking during the evening he wouldn't try to drive home. Victoria looked at him obliquely and told him to have fun, and try to see his dad sometime during the next day, if he could. Terry said he would.
On the way out of town he stopped at the liquor store and bought a mid-price bottle of Petite Syrah, which just about cleaned them out of that commodity. In his kit he had a tube of lube. He was very glad he'd bought it in New Orleans along with the probe; in Lac du Miel, if he was seen buying lube they'd figure out what he was up to at once and might work out the who-with part before the day was over.
He'd dropped out of Boy Scouts before he got beyond Cub, but had never forgotten the Scout motto.
The sun was backlighting a big bank of cumulonimbus clouds with a glowing, translucent edge, shooting rays out from behind them that were so intense that the sky between them looked like dark rays. Terry hoped that he was getting the right signals from Brent; that he'd be there the night and that Brent wasn't the kind who expected his friends to go home afterwards. He did not look forward to making his way out of Brent's neighborhood in the dark, if it was going to storm.
Brent's house was the last one on the road. Terry could tell it was his because one of his trucks was parked in front of it. To his surprise, the grounds were attractively landscaped—the old saw about the shoemaker's children going barefoot did not apply here. Brent seemed to be into containers when it came to his house. Maybe they were easier to maintain when it was flooding all the time. The upper part of the house was made of cypress, already weathered silvery though the houses didn't look old. Terry didn't remember this area being built on before he left Lac du Miel.
He parked behind Brent's truck and got out. There was a staircase leading to the door. Terry walked up it and knocked.
"Hey, Terry! You made it." Brent was dressed much like he had been the previous afternoon, except he was wearing a snug gray t-shirt with his cutoffs and he was barefoot. Westering light filtered through the windows of his house and attractive odors filled the air. "What you got there?" Terry was holding, rather awkwardly, both his kit and the bottle of wine in his left hand, needing one hand to knock on the door. Brent smiled as he relieved Terry of the Petite Syrah. Terry shook the other man's proffered hand. If Brent had been a girl, he'd have felt it natural to greet him with an embrace and a kiss, in light of what they'd done the previous day, but here he didn't know what the rules were. "Thanks for the wine. You want to drink it with dinner?"
"Sure. We can do that."
Brent put the bottle of wine on the dining table, and the two men stood there looking at each other for what seemed to Terry like forever. Brent stepped up close to him. "Terry, Terry," he said, "It's me, remember? The one you were doing
soixante-neuf
with yesterday afternoon? I won't bite..." He waggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx. "...unless I am carried away by passion—or you want me to."
Once again they were in a full-press embrace, kissing voraciously. Terry grabbed Brent's ass and pulled him close. Their cocks sawed and rubbed against each other through their clothes. Terry's had hardened immediately, and he was so aroused it hurt.
"Do we have to bother with dinner?"
Brent disengaged himself. "We sure as hell do, young'un. You think I bought these shrimp to burn? I need my strength even if you don't." He turned away and stepped back to the stove, where he had been sautéing the shrimp in some butter and garlic. He had just put them in the pan when Terry arrived.
Terry laughed and came up behind Brent as he stood in front of the stove. As if given the go-ahead by the kiss, he started doing his best to distract him, nuzzling the back of his neck, pulling at the neck of his shirt so he could nip and suck on the skin over his beautiful hard deltoid muscles, bringing his hands around to flick Brent's nipples into little hard points through the cloth, then down to caress the slight convexity of his belly, rubbing the bulge in his pants against Brent's denim-covered ass.
Brent turned off the burner under the shrimp. When he bent to get a pot out of a lower cabinet, Terry slid his fingers up the leg of his cutoffs and tickled everything he could find; Brent was commando under them. "For God's sake, Terry, stop a minute so I can fill this up," Brent said, laughing. He filled the pot up with water and put it on the stove to heat. "What am I gon' do with you anyway? I can see I won't get anything done with you acting like this..." Using Terry's erection to steer him by, he backed Terry a couple of steps to the dinette table. "Lean on that," he said, and brought a chair around to sit on himself. He quickly undid Terry's belt and unzipped his trousers. "Boxers
and
briefs?" he queried, raising an eyebrow. "I didn't know you were that conservative."
The old Terry, who had burned with embarrassment and nerves while the eyes of a Texas artist raked over all his particulars, woke to life briefly. He felt a blush pass over his face like fire. "You know I had to be at work," he said. "I couldn't stop thinking about...yesterday afternoon. When Mom was there, it didn't...it wasn't a problem, but when she wasn't...I couldn't go to the bathroom to jack off, but sometimes I had to come out from behind the counter!"
"
Mon pauvre p'tit,
Brent murmured. "Let me fix that for you. Up—" He hauled down Terry's trousers and underwear and Terry's cock sprang up, hard, its head shining with precum. Terry closed his eyes and gripped the edges of the table as he felt Brent's mouth cover him. When he opened his eyes, Brent, grinning, was holding his cock and flicking his tongue around its head. He closed his mouth firmly around it and stroked down—once, twice, a half dozen times, and then Terry lost it. He heard his breath rasping in and out of his lungs with each spasm that sent his seed boiling and spurting out of him.
"Sweet. That was a fine protein snack," Brent said, swallowing and licking his lips. "I could go on the Atkins diet." As he stood up, Terry noticed that the end of his stiff cock extended below his cutoffs, secreting a short dribble of precum, but he seemed unself-conscious about it. "I'll bet you're feeling a lot better now. Why don't you help me get dinner set up so we can eat and have fun afterward? Or you can go look at the radio and pick us out some music."
Half the wall on one side of Brent's open-plan house was taken up with an étagère containing an entertainment system that looked as if it cost as much as the house. Terry, tucking himself back into his pants and zipping them up, wandered over to it. Once he had switched on the power button, he began twirling the dial without bothering to listen to what was initially coming out of the radio. "None of that Top 40 crap," Brent added. Terry found a station that played the kind of classic rock that he and Sidonie had sometimes listened to in the warehouse, and Brent seemed happy with it. At least he said nothing about it. He appeared to be preparing salads. Terry drifted around the room. On a low square table next to the futon was a photograph of a child: a girl with curly dark hair and green eyes. She did not appear to be old enough to be in kindergarten, but she already projected an air of catlike, potentially fatal loveliness.
"Who's the kid?"
"My daughter," Brent answered from the kitchen area.
