Dear Reader, I apologize if you had the terrible misfortune of reading the sheer and utter crap I originally posted as "Chapter 2". And while I thank Zbbal, for your kind words, I know what it was. Poor writing. I did a terrible disservice to the characters of this story and the readers who were so kind as to compliment the original posting with such zeal. Please accept my sincerest apologies and this - hopefully - better rewrite. I spent an entire day hating myself for posting what I knew was subpar and there is no excuse. Disregard it, if you can, and please do not shirk away from reading this as a result. I wanted to upload this so as not to leave those who recieved e-mails of update waiting, so I haven't proofed yet. If there are any glaring errors, please tell me so that I may quickly fix them. Thank you.
Warning: Descriptions of sexual activity between two young boys and a scene of masturbation. Flames should be well-thought out and carefully worded. I don't want a flickering candlelight, I want a roaring brush fire.
Dork
The walls are lined with books. The books form walls of their own. Shelves stacked high. They tower over and press in impressively, intimidatingly. Despite the mass of people, its quiet. The only noise in the large room is the low hum of a short row of computers at the front. At times people will talk but in soft murmurs that die out before they have the chance to become audible. Between the shelves are round tables with four chairs each. One for each row of shelves. I'm sitting at one such table, between the fourth and fifth rows, beside a large window obscured by cream colored blinds. Between those blinds, the sunlight drifts inward illuminating in its glow tiny specks of dust. It cascades over the faux wood-grained table top and the ignored textbook that lies open in front of me with its glossy white pagers covered in colorful numbers and words.
I'm staring distantly at the books neatly lined up on the shelves, pretending to be interested in the titles I don't recognize on their spines while twirling my pen. The Complete Works of Plato. Nietzsche. Kant.
Study hall is a waste of an hour.
My study partner sits uncomfortably closer than necessary attempting to demonstrate the steps in solving one of the numerous problems in our text. He writes furiously with his blue mechanical pencil in his spiral notebook numbers and symbols I stopped paying attention to several minutes ago. His blond hair is over-jelled and he smells of musky cologne.
"So when we cross-multiply the denominator and numerator, we are left with...?" he exclaims eagerly. He turns to me for the answer and I offer him a blank look.
"A...number?"
He sighs, a weary whoosh, and slumps disgruntled.
Okay. Clearly not the right answer.
"You could at least try, Otto," he tells me, irritation obvious.
I fold my arms on the table and cradle my chin between them. I've known Sam Dullard since age ten. He's younger than me and a year above me. I probably wouldn't feel as insecure about it if he hadn't grown taller than me, also. Doesn't help that he also forgets not everyone is as smart as him.
He seems to sense my defeat and decides, "Look. I'll go over it again."
His voice is soft as he talks. His words plain and simple, as layman as he can get. He leans in close to me, our shoulders flush, and pokes me with the pencil when he wants to emphasize a point. I try to pay attention but his explanation blurs together. Its long and overwhelming, there's too many numbers, too many odd lines and strange squiggly doodles. I stare at the watch on his right hand instead. Its water proof, black rubber with a digital face. The skin beneath is pink. He's too pale. My arm next to his is like night and day.
He uses the pencil to push his eyeglasses up, they've been persistently slipping down his nose all class. Not long ago he traded his usual thick black-rimmed square frames for thin silver oval things. I had told him at the time they looked nice but I didn't really like them. He had always been the butterball of my friends. The nerd with ambitions of coolness. It's the role I cast him in. Making changes to his appearance threatened that role.
"How much longer are you grounded?" he asks. It startles me. I guess he gave up. Threw mathematics in the pile of causes lost on me. I'd be pleased if I weren't so hung up on the idea of graduating with my class and needed to pass Algebra II to do it. He's still leaning against my shoulder, tapping his pencil on the notepad and watching me curiously.
I shrug. It's not really an answer but its the best I've got.
"Raymundo said until I'm old enough to retire."
Sam drops his voice and brings his face near mine. The proximity is a bit unsettling but I ignore the urge to pull away.
"Why don't you just tell the principle who really did it?" he demands. His words are damp on my cheek. I roll my eyes.
"I like my social status." He makes an argumentative noise so I amend haggardly, "Okay. I like the way my face looks. Why do you care so much anyway?"
He flusters, cheeks tinging pink, and pulls himself up. He does a wonderful fish impression, mouth blubbering open and shut, as he searches for an excuse.
He settles on, "Because you're my friend."
Then shakes his head and adds, "And while you're on parental lock-down, I have to entertain Twister."
I smirk.
My best bro and the Squid. There is a comedy act I miss watching. It wasn't as though he meant to, but Twister had an impeccable way of getting under Sam's skin. It was something about the way he asked questions with obvious answers and made comments or bodily noises not generally considered polite. It would be a good reason to care about my whereabouts if it wasn't also a dead give away that Sam wasn't being entirely honest. The two didn't spend much time together when I wasn't around. I was the most they had in common.
I let it slide though and my lack of calling him out on the lie is his cue to continue chiding me.
"It's not fair, Rocket boy. You're taking the fall for something you didn't do. I'm just not understanding why you can't turn in the real culprits. You know who they are. Despite what you say, I know you aren't afraid of them."
I glare at the librarian. I can see her easily from where I sit, standing at her circular counter checking in books. Her thin graying ebony hair is twisted atop her head and held in place by a few blue ballpoint pens. Her dress is black with red polka-dots. She wears black cat-eye glasses and her eyes themselves are framed in long, black, fake lashes. She always pauses in what she's doing to smile when students walk by. Her eyes linger too long when those students are boys.
"I don't like cheese," I mutter.
"What?"
"I don't like cheese. I'm not a rat."
Sam sighs again. I feel like he's been doing that all study hall. I wonder if he ever gets tired of being so annoyed. He start to doodle without care on the notepad. Of course, his version of doodling is writing out long equations and slowly solving them. Nerd.
"How horrible is Saturday detention?"
Images flood my mind as blood rushes to my face.
Me pinned against a bookshelf of history texts. Dark brewing eyes and a solidly built chest. A singularly perfect mole on a singularly perfect collarbone. Angular hands, roughly calloused, coursing down my bare thighs. Pens and papers sprawled on the floor. Toppled desks. Flushed cheeks and a pouted mouth trailing kisses. A hot erection. A looming lover casting the shadow of an old enemy.
A milk white hand wags in my face. I blink.
"What?" I growl.
"I asked about Saturday. Twister had mentioned that Lars should have been there, that's he's been serving Saturday detentions pretty much since school started. Big surprise there. I know you two don't really fight much anymore but how torturous was it? I saw him the other day. He's gotten scary. I mean, he was scary before but I always just chalked that up to me being so much smaller than him. You know, how your perspective as a kid is so skewed. We're the same height now but he still seems so big."
I turn my face away. Let Sam drone on. It's what he's best at. I play with the pen in my hand, dexterously slide it between fingers. I try not to think about it. Saturday. The last day in the week. I used to look forward to it. Sit daydreaming through long lectures thinking about how I'd spend that one perfectly free day.
Would I sleep in? Would I wake early to surf? Would I languish on the beach? Would I shred Madtown?
Now I don't know what to daydream. Detention doesn't usually play into anyone's fantasies.
I close my eyes.
Forty desks lined up in neat little rows. The ticking of the clock an insanity inducing drum beat. A slender teacher with a penchant for leaving her delinquent wards unattended. The classroom is quiet, deafeningly so. Nothing is emptier than a classroom without students. He is the personification of crash. His movements are explicit. His body curves smooth and fluid as the ripples in the tide. His taste is cinnamon, his smell anise and cilantro.
I feel the awnings of arousal and catch myself mid-lust. Burst back into the cacophony of dying whispers and screaming dusty tomes. Sam has stopped talking. I glance him askance. He's watching me, feigning disinterest. I press my lips together. Take a settling breath. Let the blood flow into my veins again. Cool the heat simmering in my belly.
"It was a Saturday lost," I say, more terse than I intended.
Sam nods. The movement is stiff, calculated. He's putting too much thought into such a simple gesture. It makes me nervous. I sniffle casually. Straighten and take up the notepad he's been writing on. I glare at the swirl of numbers.
"Mathematics sucks," I announce, "I'm never going to understand it."
"You don't try," Sam silently admits.
I flinch involuntarily. He's fingering the binding of his English text book, neatly stacked under his math. Studying the table top as though there's a lengthy equation scrawled across it that he's trying desperately to solve. He's chewing the corner of his mouth. His left sneaker is pressed against the back leg of my chair. It's moments like these when I wonder what it is he really wants from me.
He's not very athletic. Always been on the husky side. He stumbles, trips over himself, to keep up with me and Twister. Girls don't really like him. The charm of a shy geek is overwhelmingly lost in the patronizing of words and mannerisms. He doesn't mean to talk down, he really does just forget not everyone is as smart as him.
I think about the way he sits. Precariously balanced on the tip of his chair. Torn between leaning back and falling forward. I think about the feel of his shoulder pressed against mine and the heat of his words on my face. His eagerness to please, his earnest concern, his bulging stammered mouth and wide eyed expressions. I feel like there's something on the edge of my mind. A dawning of realization eclipsed by the uncertainty of the situation's reality.
I wonder if sometimes he wishes he were me. I wonder if its more than sometimes.
"Are you alright?" he asks, it seems out of the blue and I perk a brow of question. "You're just...really quiet."
I shrug. Wrap my hands over my head, stretch forward on the table and yawn. He smiles at me, a strange look of endearment. I scramble my mind for a reply. The eruption of dismissal bell saves me the trouble. I give him another shrug and stand. I slam my book closed, scoop it up, and toss my bag over my shoulder.
"See ya," I tell him and hurry into the flurry of exiting students. Whatever his farewell is I don't hear it.
I'm lingering in a moment. Navigating an ocean of people rushing to their next destinations. Wading through the semblances of my mind. The ocean, beautiful expanse of glittering crystal. All at once serene and perilous. The ocean is like sex. Tumultuous and encompassing. Seeping into your skin and lungs. It rips from you air and leaves you breathless. It pulls from you heat and leaves you cold and desiring. It bruises your body and leaves you battered and wounded.
Or maybe is just him. Maybe he is the ocean. A delicate combination of violent and calm.
I slip into the bathroom wafting of excrement and un-deodorized armpit. Nod my head to acknowledge the boys inside though I only recognize but not really know any of them. Some stand over urinals, white enclaves fixed along the blue tiled walls, and I can hear their steady or not-so-steady streams. Others linger at the sinks, there are only four, washing their hands and combing their hair. They pretend not to want to chat with one another. Only girls do that.
Nonchalant, I take one of two stalls, lock the door secure behind me and hang up my bag on the provided hook. I stare at the toilet, small porcelain bowl with a red stained ring inside, and ponder the last time it was cleaned. The warning bell sounds, a loud siren echoing through the halls and traffic out the door is suddenly heavy, urinals flushing in rapid succession. I lean my back against the stall door, its an ugly brown cream color etched with various graffiti marks advertising phone numbers, indecent sexual acts, and spewing randomly or targeted insults. I listen to the boys leaving, glare at the ceiling with its ugly white partitions and energy efficient incandescent light bulbs.
The final bell screams out that I should be in class and I finally feel alone. I sigh. It's a relief. The day is way too long. It should be a crime keeping me locked inside for more than two hours at a time. I rub at my face and roll thoughts around between my ears. Numbers float in my peripheral but I'm thinking of something more substantial. I link my fingers behind my neck and smirk at the floor. A half torn square of toilet paper lays beside my brown sneaker.
Saturday. I've tried not to dwell on it. Too many questions. Not enough answers. I'm lucky groundation for me doesn't mean the same as to other impressionable boys my age. There are no long hours sitting in my room meditating on my offenses. For me, groundation is hard labor. Dinner rush at the Shack. Serving up the beach's best burgers while my dad takes the orders and his large Hawaiian best friend grills the food. Though the time goes by fast, I almost think I'd prefer my room. It's like Chinese water torture, to be close enough to the ocean that I can taste the salt settling on my lips and not be able to slip into its icy embrace with a board under my belly.
I want to say it just happened. Its over and done with. That it means nothing. But it lilts in my mind. Vivid memories springing clear to the forefront at inopportune moments in time. I wake in the middle of the night in cold sweats with a rock hard erection and a biding afterimage of a face I know so well and have tried so hard to forget. This must be what addiction is like.
There is that sticky uncertainty, after an abnormal interaction occurs between two otherwise perfect stranger, when no one knows quite where to go. Feelings left over are ambiguous. They have no place in the past and, while they fit in that moment, they don't quite fit in the future. Despite our twined childhoods, he and I were strangers and though in that near instantaneous act we were connected, we are now...uncertain.
I sigh. The door rattles as I flop against it and bury my face in the palm of a hand. High school is complicated enough.
I haven't seen him in days. It's a harsher punishment than anything my dad or the school board can think up. It fascinates and frustrates me all at one. I marvel at the way he so easily fades into gone. And while I really don't look, his absent face in the crowd is more pronounced now than it ever was before. At times I unintentionally imprint him on boys with similar features, dark hair and eyes, and when I scrutinize them closer I realize there's nothing of him in them. They don't roll like a wave or stare intense as a horizon.
I wonder, not for the first time since that paradigm shifting day, what I'm really longing for. Is it the warmth of a body? Or the warmth in his arms?
Its already been so long. And I'm so tired of fighting it. Five days have passed. Five long, unending days, since five inexplicable hours. I'm alone now, I realize. At least, I'm alone for some forty-odd minutes until the next bell rings. I haven't thought about it. Not once. Pushed it to the background, white noise superimposed over my day. Let it lie there and fester untouched.
But I'm alone now. I let it in now. Let it flow outward, over my senses.
We were alone. He and I. I and he. I. He. We. Alone.
Rewind the moments in my mind. Separate, rearrange, dissect, and disseminate. I'm sitting in the classroom. I'm staring at the chalkboard. I'm talking. He's talking. We're exchanging words. Accidentally falling into an argument. It's our pattern.
I slow the replay down. The bookshelf exploded behind my spine, the bruise is still there. My whole body is still riddled with aches and sores, well-earned battle scars. I take a few steadying breaths. Hard swallow. Grip my bicep tight. His lips seemed coarse, they broke the blood vessels, but there was an underlying softness. A tremor, subtle, that I nearly missed. I think on it now. A small detail that sets heavy now against my chest. A gripping gnaw I can't explain.
My breath is getting shallow. I run a hand across my neck and trail it along my collar bone to the other side. I close my eyes to better see the images flickering through my mind.
I can almost feel him against me again. That even pressure firm on my chest and abdomen, holding me up more than I realized then. Now it rushes furious at me. The weakness shivering in my lower extremities. Braced against something so solid and unyielding, I wonder now how I could have crumbled and fell.
The kiss. His kiss. Ghosted on my mouth. Hot and wet. My bottom lip quivers and I bite it to hold it in place. My skin is pulsing, shuddering with need. I slide a hand beneath my shirt to give me some relief. The touch ripples up my stomach, which I instinctively tense, and it jolts down my spine. It's hard not to think of his hands. Hot and sweaty palms. They grabbed at me so roughly, and I'm enraptured again in that pull and push of our fervor. I almost hear his apology, I tried, on my earlobe. It races under my skin and coupled with the hand tracing circles over my belly and up my chest, I start to feel lightheaded.
I think of peeling his shirt off, the lightness of the fabric between my fingers. The freeing feel of watching it fall haplessly to the floor like a burden lifted that I don't remember ever weighing me down. His bare chest is like my own, stocky and well-toned. But his shoulders are broad and his skin is a deeper shade of bronze. I want to trace the cords of his arms, I settle for my own. I lick my lips and recall his mouth on mine. The taste so bittersweet. It lay in my mouth for the rest of the day. I suck on my own lip, bite into it for good measure.
We crossed the rooms in strides. A pace unmatched by the pounding thrall of our intoxicated gasps for air. Again I'm standing, again I'm kneeling, again I'm tormented, overwhelmed, restless. I think of him here in front of me now. Suckling my neck, invigorating my senses. I whimper without meaning to, it echoes against tile. I startle momentarily. Eyes flash open like a child caught in the act of stealing candy. Remind myself I'm alone and slip again into the haunted memory of his touch.
I brush my fingertips up and down my sternum line. Think of him curling his hand in my hip. His nails breaking into flesh. He's moving his tongue along my jaw, sinking his teeth into my chin, up to my mouth. Its churning inside me, the whirl of adrenaline. It's his hand on my mouth, its his hand on my chest, its his fingers massaging my nipple hard as he braces me up against the bathroom stall. It's his tongue in my mouth. It's his teeth nibbling my lip.
He's taking his time. He's drawing it out. I murmur erotic. I quiver under his imagined fingertips. At his imagined mercy he draws from me the whimpers and moans that I wish he couldn't.
"God...please..." I freeze at the raspy words that reverberate through the tiny room.
Alone. I remind myself. I'm alone.
Again, I focus on him. Bare chest glistening. Thick bulge in his jeans. I feel a fire licking up my insides. I work at the buttons of my own jean shorts. But it's his expert fingers that flick them undone. It's his hands that work them open as his mouth massages my own. It's him that smirks devilish at the sight of my boner.
He's dragging his hands along my thighs. He's pressing kisses, some hard, some soft, some sweet, some bitter; to my mouth, to my jaw, to my neck, to my collar. My exposed shaft is pressing against his crotch, its rubbing against his own hard arousal. I'm finding the urges coursing my veins. When I take hold of my member, it's his hand steady and strong, that coils around it. He's dragging me out, he's drawing me in. He's kissing me senseless.
"Oh...ah...unh..."
Our bodies are lined with layers of sweat. Our skin sticks to one another, salty and sweet. He's pulling against me. He's pulling away. His rhythm is perfect. It increases quick enough to keep up the arousal, slow enough to draw me out. As only he could. As only he would. Sadistic bastard. He's whispering in my ear, in heavy gasps, Rocket dork.
"Ah...please...shit..."
My hand is on the wall of the stall, fingers clawing at the scratched in words. My heart is pounding in my ears. I'm gasping for air but it won't fill my lungs. His face is all I see. His eyes boring into me. His words are all I hear. You have to tell me what you want.
"Oh shit..."
I want...
"...shit...shit...shit..."
I want...
"Oh fuck..."
I want...
"...Lars..."
It flows through me in spasms as I shudder in orgasmic release. Manage to aim most of the cum into the toilet. I'm biting my bottom lip to keep from screaming out so hard the skin splinters and trickles metallic into my mouth. There's some on my hand but so long as I don't stain my clothes I'm fine for the day. I gulp the air, sickeningly putrid, in short gasps. Try to catch my breath. My heart slows to a steadier beat. I'm leaning heavy against the cream colored stall. Exhausted and spent.
I reach for a handful of the shitty little square papers that someone, somewhere expects people to effectively use in wiping their ass. I start to clean up, remember how tenderly he did the same on Saturday. My hands are shaky. I think of his hand on my cheek, almost afraid to be there, almost afraid to pull away. I wonder where he's gone. I think of Saturday.
There's a shuffling outside the stall. I tense. Toss the papers in the toilet, hesitantly redo my pants, strain to hear. My heart is racing again. There's something bristling, unmoving in my throat. My brow is furrowed. I'm more alert than I've ever felt in my life. I tell myself, I'm alone. I'm hearing things. I'm alone.
The door squeals opens. My heart is sinking. Clatters closed. I slump against the door.
"Fuck," I growl, bury my face in open palms, mutter, "Dork."
