EXCERPT

[The school term is drawing to a close, and Jonathan breaks the news that after school is out, his family will be moving into their new home in the suburbs, twenty miles away. Concerned that these events will force them apart, Red begins cultivating their relationship outside the creative writing program that brought them together. He invites Jonathan for a day of fun at the local water park.]

On a sunny spring afternoon, Buccaneer Bay stripped them bare, the muscular, shaggy-chested man and the pale, skinny boy, tits pink and flat as ever. Jonathan’s usual buddy Ernie couldn’t make it, so he brought his sister Angie instead. Two years his senior, at fourteen already a full-grown woman, she was none too eager to hang around with her little brother and his teacher. After a few slides, she lay down to sunbathe and left the man and boy to their own devices.

Jonathan raced to the top of a ten-story tower challenging Red to keep up, who to the boy’s surprise matched him step for step until they stopped on a landing to catch their breath.

Before him, the boy stood still and quiet but for his rapid breathing, his young body turned toward the panorama of the park where he gazed, providing Red the opportunity to study him up close and nearly naked as never before. Red admired the sunlight glistening on the boy’s smooth, damp, transparent skin speckled with sparkling jewels of water and sweat.

What an evanescent little creature he was, and human as well, with mind and personality! He seemed like one whom magic had transformed from a bright, divine spirit into glistening flesh. His legs were smooth and slender. His ivory thighs were bare almost to his narrow hips where bright red nylon fabric clung to his brazenly protruding butt. His bony frame was soft and slight like a bird, yes, a fledgling eagle looking out from his aerie preparing for first flight. Entranced, Red stood too close behind and scrutinized the blond down feathering the back of the slender neck. As Jonathan turned his head slightly to catch some sight below, Red caught the heart-stopping profile. On the threshold of adolescence, his face was androgynously girlish and at that rare stage of boy beauty celebrated in art and poetry throughout history.

Red’s love had chosen this beauty. Theo was right. You can’t see and be beauty at the same time. Beauty required the remove of the lover who desired, adored, envied, and wanted to be it, but was not it, the poignant impossible longing of love.

Still gazing out over his domain, Jonathan sensed the presence and adoration of Red’s eyes and turned back to him in quiet curiosity. A faint blush glowed on his cheek.

Though the silent meeting of eyes lasted only seconds, it was too long to be the kind of glance friends might exchange a thousand times a day. It was a glimpse into their respective souls.

Jonathan smiled sweetly and broke the silence, “You like to hang around me, because it makes you feel like a kid again.”

Shocked at the precision of the boy’s insight, Red was struck dumb and then laughed. “Yeah, that’s part of it,” he allowed, “I also happen to think you are a remarkably beautiful person. What made you say that all of a sudden?”

The boy squirmed. Even if he knew, he wouldn’t say. He shrugged his shoulders and bounded up the metal stairs again like a springbok. Red’s eyes followed for a moment. Something in the boy’s movement, the purposeful way he sailed through space, gripped Red with surprising force. There was a moment in late boyhood when shambling awkwardness and long-limbed grace came together in tune. Jonathan’s movements sang with that clear pure pitch, and Red felt, gazing at the boy disappearing up the stairs, something very much like awe. He followed in hot pursuit.

They arrived at the top of the Blue Chute, a fiberglass pipe in transparent Tidibowl blue like a giant flushing toilet. Riding tandem with the boy on a foam mat, Red spread his thighs around the slender young hips and his arms around the soft, lean boy torso. “Comfy?” Red inquired hoping for the green light that would send them over the edge before his hard-on became apparent. Green, they pushed off squealing with glee down the wet blue tube that spat them out like an easy birth, and they skimmed across a landing pool thrilled and breathless, laughing and talkative, Red feeling like a kid again.

At the end of the day, changing in the locker room, Red caught another glimpse of slender, naked, glabrous Jonathan but daring not dwell on the vision a second time, he quickly looked away. The boy was still a kid, no “again” about it.

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