The Good Old Boy

I was behind the bar at the Wild Goose that very same night. The owners, Carla and Johnny Lake, wanted to attract a younger crowd and generally make the place more hip. That made me grin to myself, but I nodded seriously. They were very clear that they wanted to hear any ideas I had to change the image of the place and draw people in. Ideas? This hick town wasn’t ready for my ideas. It never had been.

From Marc, who roped me into fixing drinks at his stuck-up faculty wine and cheese parties, I had learned quite a repertoire of cocktails. But it was highly unlikely that anyone would be ordering a vodka gimlet or a green apple martini at the Wild Goose, not when the closest thing they had to an import was Michelob.

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, I worked with Carla Lake so she could train me on the register, tapping the kegs, and cashing out. It was pretty easy stuff. The day person, Mandy, would do most of the stocking before she left since I couldn’t do a whole lot of lifting with my broken arm; and if the keg ran out during my shift one of the regulars would be willing to carry it in from the stock room in back and change it for me. During the week things were pretty quiet. I’d come in at 6 and leave at 1 am; and then on Friday and Saturday night they had a license to stay open until 2 am. The pay was better than I expected, but Carla cautioned me not to expect much tipping, unless it was Friday night. Patrons of the Goose were notoriously bad tippers.

“Think you can handle it by yourself?” she asked as we cashed out Tuesday night.

“Sure.”

“Well, Johnny and I know you’ll do a good job. Take tomorrow off and come back Wednesday ready to rock and roll.”

I was used to lying around watching TV and drinking beer, not working; when I came home at night I fell into bed exhausted. At least now I had an excuse to sleep till noon. Andy and I saw each other when he came up to the house from the garage to eat his lunch and that was it. I hadn’t seen Louis or talked to him since he left Sunday morning. He was usually over here several times a week at Andrew’s nightly parties, but now that I had a job I wasn’t here myself; I thought about calling him, but he never gave me his cell number, and if I asked Andy for it he would want to know why I needed to call Louis. As far as that went, I didn’t care if the whole world knew about Louis and me; but for his sake I kept silent. It wasn’t my place to out him. I knew he was busy, but that didn’t stop me from thinking about him constantly, especially when I woke up alone with a hard on, stroking it while I relived the feeling of his hands holding my ass as I thrust into his mouth, or my tongue pushing gently inside his tight virgin hole while he moaned in his throat.

I spent my day off with Rachel and her 3-year-old Will. I went over there about every other afternoon to watch SpongeBob SquarePants with Will so Rachel could shop or have some “Mommy time”; in return she cooked for me and washed my hair in her laundry room sink. I don’t think she told Tom I came over so often. It wasn’t that he was jealous; but Rachel admitted he was somewhat homophobic. I wondered what he’d say if he knew that the James in William James wasn’t some great-uncle of Rachel’s like she’d told him, but my real first name that no one called me. I didn’t really make an issue of it. If Tom didn’t like fags, that was his problem. I didn’t particularly care for bigots myself.

When I got home, the party was in full swing, with my brother grilling steaks and sausages outside and everyone drinking and smoking pot. I had a headache from too many episodes of Blue’s Clues so I went downstairs for a nap. It was getting close to 9 o’clock when I came up to get something to eat and have a few hits of the community bong. The party had moved to the TV by then for the college basketball game, but I was just zoning out and indulging my munchies. The sports gene had skipped me. That’s when headlights pulled up in the driveway and Louis came in.

Across the room our eyes met, and Louis gave me a secret little wink before he looked away. My heart jumped, along with my dick, but I tried not to show it; there were too many people here even if they were all watching basketball. Everyone was happy to see Louis. He was the man with the good weed, after all. As we got high, I was sitting next to Louis at the kitchen table along with a few other people, but we didn’t look at each other. They seemed oblivious to the electricity between us. How could anyone not notice the air practically crackled?

“I guess I need to go on a beer run.” Louis got up and pulled his keys out.

“I’ll ride along,” I said casually. No one even looked up as I followed him out the door to his old green Jeep Cherokee.

In the car, in the dark, he glanced over at me and smiled his cute, sexy, familiar smile. I could remember when he had a mouth full of metal. “So how’s the job?”

I didn’t bother to ask how he knew I’d taken the Lakes up on their offer. In a town this small you can’t take a shit without everyone knowing it. “It’s okay.”

On the country road that led into town, there were no lights at all other than the Jeep’s headlights illuminating the road. It was very, very dark, and when I looked up at the sky through the car window I clearly saw the silvery thumbnail of the moon and the shining stars of Orion’s belt. The radio was playing “Stairway to Heaven.” Along the road was an old storage building that used to be part of someone‘s farm. Louis pulled off into the gravel and stopped the car. Turning off the headlights, he faced me and smiled in the dim green light from the radio.

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

Reaching out, we fell on each other. We were like two starving people at a feast, devouring with our mouths, making urgent and greedy little sounds as we strained to touch as much of one another as we could reach. Hands tugged impatiently at jackets and shirt buttons. So quickly I never could remember later how it happened, we were in the back of the Jeep; Louis obviously used it for work because the back seat was taken out and the cargo area was lined with boxes and stacks of veterinary supplies. There was just enough room to recline if we didn’t stretch out, a lot more comfortable than the tiny back seat of a Shelby Mustang. Louis’ belt made a whizzing, snapping noise as I pulled it through the loops and tossed it aside.

There were dangers to getting it on in the car like this. The county patrol usually didn’t come all the way out here, but there was always that chance; and Louis informed me that the night deputy was a guy we’d gone to high school with. I didn’t give a shit who caught me fucking a man in the back of a Jeep, but he might not be ready for that kind of exposure yet. There wasn’t much need to stick around long anyway, because we both finished up very quickly, our passion at the breaking point after 2 days. In the dark I held on to him while our hearts slowed in unison.

“Do you want to fuck me?” he whispered suddenly.

“Fuck yes,” I blurted out in a blaze of excitement, but then I realized how aggressive I sounded and added on more cautiously. “But only if that’s something you want. You don’t have to.”

“I know,” he said softly. I could just make out his eyes in the pale light of the moon. “But it’s only fair, right?”

“I don’t mind. I love having you inside me.” This, to my profound surprise, was the complete truth. When he pulled out I felt empty and hollow. I needed him there, filling me. This was a feeling I hadn’t had in a very long time, wanting to open myself to someone, not since the very first time I ever fell for a guy, my junior year of high school. Louis had brought to life a part of me I thought died long ago. “If you want it, we can, but I don’t want to hurt you. We’ll have to work up to it. Starting next time.”

This felt like a terrible risk, assuming there would be a next time for us; it was the first time either of us had mentioned a word about the future. But Louis just nodded. Then we slowly sat up and pulled ourselves back together and continued on the road to town; we couldn’t exactly come back from a beer run with no beer. Louis was quiet, lost in thought.

“I used to think there was something wrong with me,” he said suddenly. “All my friends, the other guys at school, the only thing they cared about was getting pussy, but I was never all that interested. I did it with Danielle more as a duty; and when I was with her, it was sometimes hard for me to get off. I really had to concentrate, and if my mind wandered, I sometimes couldn’t come at all. She bragged to all her friends that I could last all night, but it got tiring. Sometimes with chicks I ended up just faking it. I always used a condom so they couldn’t tell I hadn’t come.”

“I think we’ve found the solution to your problem,” I remarked with a grin. The generous amounts of jism he spurted out were proof that his climaxes were real enough.

“Yeah. But it’s funny… I honestly didn’t know why. I thought it was Dani, that maybe I wasn’t turned on by her. So I tried it with lots of other girls to make sure. And it was the same. But otherwise Dani was okay; so I stayed with her more or less from habit. It was comfortable. That is, until she started talking about marriage.”

“Oh God.” I shuddered in genuine horror.

“All her friends were getting married, and she wanted to have a big fancy wedding too. That’s when I panicked. All the sudden I knew I couldn’t spend my life chained to somebody I wasn’t attracted to. Dani was smart enough to see I was never going to marry her and she dumped me. That was about 5 years ago, and after that… I just figured I wasn’t sexual at all. I just decided to live my life without sex.”

Sad. I didn’t say it, but I was thinking it. Deciding at 27 you don’t need sex. Sex is life. With us, it isn’t about procreation, but it’s a primal, ingrained human need to connect and share the pleasures of someone else’s being, to feel joined, at least for a moment, and not completely alone in the world. And Louis… He was by far the best lover I’d ever had. Sex was an all-over experience for him, not just something that happened below the belt. Now I knew why. Not only was every experience of being with a man new to him, but even the feeling, that intense physical and emotional sexual need, was something he’d never known before. To share it with him was incredible.

I could have pushed him right now with a remark like, Is that when you realized you were gay? But a comment he’d made yesterday stopped me. “Having sex with a guy doesn’t make you gay.” The story he’d just shared pretty much told me what I needed to know, but he wasn’t ready for the G-word yet. Because of my growing feelings for him, I wanted to keep things safe for him, and for myself, so I didn’t push. But I did have to ask one question.

“If you’ve never been with a guy before, then how did you learn all those things you do?” All those things that drove me wild with excitement, that made me wake up sweating in the middle of the night…

“Just because I thought I didn’t need sex, doesn’t mean I didn’t look at porn on the internet.” He grinned at me and we cracked up laughing.

Later, after everyone had either passed out or gone home, I lay in my lonely bed and thought about it. There was a logical progression there. One of two things had happened. Either Louis came across gay porn accidentally, and in doing so realized it turned him on; or he was curious and he sought it out to discover his reaction to it. I knew from my own internet adventures that one seldom “accidentally” came across gay porn. Sure, porn was everywhere, but it was mostly straight porn-- fake tits, horny coeds. To find guy-on-guy stuff took a little participation; and anything special interest, like my own thing for water sports, was out-and-out search engine stuff. So no. It was no accident. At some point Louis had realized he was turned on by gay porn and he used the internet to develop his interest, just like I did with my little fetish.

How many closeted men were out there right now, looking at guy-on-guy pictures or reading stories about gay sex? All the while telling themselves they aren’t gay. They’re just casually surfing the internet, and hey! Look at that! Gay porn pops up on the screen! But Louis had taken it to the next level, and that took courage. He could have kept jerking off, but instead, he met me halfway. I hadn’t really come on to him; it was an unplanned moment of sudden mutual attraction. I wanted to think he’d done it because he liked me, but the truth of the matter was, I might have just been the first gay guy available to try things out with. First? Around here, probably only. So I couldn’t start pressuring him about being gay and blurting out my feelings for him, at least not until I had a better feel for things. I knew exactly how intoxicating it was at first to discover your sexuality after trying to repress it for so long. It went against every fiber of my gay, uptight, control-freak being, but I had no choice but to let things unfold naturally.

Wednesday night was my first official night bartending at the Wild Goose. Things were pretty quiet when I got there; just a bunch of guys hunched on their barstools in camouflage hats. Nick Innis was there. He’d been there every night I worked, but I hadn’t really talked to him, not with Carla Lake looking over my shoulder. His mullet brushed his shoulders and as usual, he wore tight jeans and cowboy boots with a three-day growth of beard.

“Hey,” he said neutrally when I brought him a cold beer. His green eyes sparkled wickedly. “Get that part for my truck in yet?”

“I’ll put it on Andy’s parts order this week,” I answered, giving him a little grin. Flirting was fine, but I didn’t really have a boner for him anymore. I saw him more clearly now. Despite a nice ass, he had the dissolute, slightly bloated, red-eyed look of a budding alcoholic.

As Carla said, weeknights were pretty dull. I spent the time making Jello shots for the weekend. This was one of my ideas, along with margaritas. They already had 50 cent draft night, but what this place needed was to draw in more females. Once the girls came in for my jello shots and margaritas, the guys would come too. I was also lobbying for a karaoke night. I couldn’t wait to sing “I Touch Myself” in front of a bar full of drunk rednecks.

The evening went by excruciatingly slowly. About eleven thirty the door opened; everyone looked up curiously to see who was coming in so late. To my complete shock, it was Louis. He looked so hot with his ponytail and a red Columbia zip-up jacket over his jeans. He grinned at me and sat down at the end of the bar while I brought him a bottle of Bud Light.

“Hey, don’t you have school and work tomorrow?” I asked him, leaning in a little. I noticed Nick looking at me from the other end of the bar and I moved back. But I couldn’t help beaming like an idiot.

“Yeah, but I thought I’d come by and buy you a drink.”

“Let me buy you one instead.”

One turned into several, and before I knew it, it was last call and time to close up. Louis lingered behind as everyone else dragged themselves off their barstools and stumbled out the door. Nick had been staring at us all night and even though he was fairly drunk, he still turned and sized Louis up from head to toe before he left, slamming the door.

“I gotta cash out,” I said under my breath.

“’Kay. Want to meet me?”

I nodded, swallowing. “Yeah. Be about fifteen minutes. Same place as last night?”

We couldn’t go to my house because of Andrew, peacefully sleeping in the bedroom above mine. We couldn’t go to his house because of his sweet old granny. So we were reduced to car sex like two teenagers. Well, I didn’t have a problem with that. I didn’t expect him to leave with me, advertising the truth to anyone with half a brain, either. Part of a loaf was better than no bread at all, especially to someone as hungry as I was. In fact, I was ravenous. I finished the close-out as fast as I could without screwing it up completely.

The green Jeep sat in my headlights when my tires crunched on the gravel around the old storage building. He smiled at me when I got in the passenger door, turning to kiss me without a word. Sometimes Louis and I didn’t have to talk. The waxing moon was brighter tonight, casting more light on us, letting me see the contours of his face washed in silver. I used to dream about a perfect guy, one with the face and body of a Greek god, carved out of marble. I lifted my hand and brushed my fingertips over his cheek. Louis didn’t have a flawless face with perfect, pouty lips and sculpted cheekbones. What he had was kind of a cute round face hidden by his scuffy beard and eyes that danced even in the darkness, still that same kid I knew from grade school. I didn’t care about perfection anymore. I was no underwear model myself; my nose wasn’t perfect and I could stand to lose ten pounds. I was too old for dreams of Prince Charming. I wanted a real man. His flaws were what made him sexy.

“What’re you staring at?” he whispered, but I just smiled at him and drew him in closer to fill his mouth with my tongue.

“Is it too cold to get naked?”

In the back of the Jeep, I tugged at his jeans, frustrated. Pulled down around the knees, pants were restrictive, even more so in a tight space.

“I want these off.”

Louis brightened with an idea; twisting around he opened one of his boxes of supplies and pulled out a soft, folded plaid blanket. It had animal hair on it, probably off a horse, but I didn’t care. Underneath it, I pulled off his Merrell shoes and his jeans. He never wore underwear so that made it easier. He was squirming around, half laughing, as I fell on him mercilessly, pulling his shirt up to his chest, tasting every inch of him with my tongue. His nipples were a hot spot, I’d discovered. When I licked them, he drew a breath; when I bit them, he let out a little yelp, which was followed by a low moan of pleasure and his arms wrapping around my back.

“Uh-uh.” I pushed his arms up over his head and held his wrists with my good hand, my full weight pressing down on him. His naked erection throbbed right against mine, straining against the crotch of my jeans, wetting them; I watched his eyes roll backward while I slowly undulated my hips against his, and despite the cool air outside the blanket, we were both suddenly covered in sweat. With a swift motion I threw the blanket off and the cool night air rushed around our overheated flesh. He played along with my little game, laughingly submitting to me; but he wasn’t laughing when I swirled my tongue around the head of his cock, breathing hot and wet. I held his arms down at his sides as he tried to break away. I wanted to be in control of this.

“Oh God, Sean, you’re making me so hot,” he choked, throwing his head back.

Usually any kind of talking somewhat annoyed me; it distracted me and made me feel foolish, like I was in a bad porn movie, especially the “Ohhh, so good,” type of crap. I was definitely the “shut up and fuck me, then get off me” type. But not with Louis, because when he started talking, it wasn’t fake to stroke his ego. It was completely real, genuine and meant. Just like everything about him.

“Jesus,” I breathed. On my knees over him, I paused in amazement and for a second I just gazed down at him in the pale light of the stars and moon in the black night surrounding us, his lean smooth chest, his pale hips, his thick, erect cock with its perfectly shaped head. His familiar face with his long hair damp with sweat, clinging to his neck, eyes looking up at me, serious for once. “Where the hell have you been all this time?” I whispered.

“I’ve been right here, Sean; the question is where have you been.”

Something in me shattered. Maybe it was my inhibitions, or my male ego, because suddenly I didn’t care about playing games, all I cared about was pleasuring him. I plunged his big dick all the way into the back of my throat, sucking it hard and deep while I used my good hand to massage his soft balls. They tightened. When his hands clenched in my hair and his head whipped from side to side, I withdrew and pushed his legs up in sudden motion that probably would have freaked him out if he hadn’t been so far gone. It was so dark, I could barely see the shadow of his hole between his sweet, boyish cheeks.