by Rhett Heath
“Shit.” I flipped a U-turn. “I don’t know. I’m just tired, I guess.”
Danny grabbed my arm, steadying himself. “Still too scared to ask Celeste to Homecoming?”
“Yeah, and school sucks.” Then, quick to change the subject, I asked, “Who have you decided to ask, Clay?”
As he started discussing his plan, I turned and barreled down the road to our town. Jeremy, the local cop, turned on his siren and flashed his red and blue cop car lights. That was his way of telling me to slow down without bothering to pull me over. Jeremy had gone to high school with my dad; he would never pull me over. I slowed down. I rarely sped, and he knew it.
I hadn’t heard anything else my cousins had said until I pulled up outside my house, parked, and got out.
“Thanks, man,” Clay said, getting out on his side.
“See you in the morning.” Danny slid out after Clay.
“Yeah, see you guys.”
Fuck! My mom’s truck was parked in its usual spot. Why is she home?
My mom was always helping my dad in the evenings, down at our barns. What the hell? Okay, I told myself, walking across the lawn—such as it was. Don’t act unnatural. Mom will catch on to something if you’re being weird, then hound you until you tell her. And you’ve been trying not to lie so much, so just do what you do any other night they get home before you.
Opening the front door, I immediately sensed what was up. Some ladies sat in the front room, chatting with my mom. Our family hadn’t gone for years, but some of the ladies from a church we used to go to had apparently been assigned to schedule monthly visits with her, to “check on her” and “help out” where they could.
“They could help us out at the barns” was my dad’s monthly complaint.
I had to put on an act, so I did.
“Good evening, ladies. How are you?”
“Good evening, Bobby!”
“Doing well, Bobby, thanks. Great touchdown in Friday’s game.”
“Thanks.” I took off my letterman’s jacket and hung it up. “I couldn’t do as well as I do without Todd getting people out of the way for me. He’s one tough guy.”
“He loves hitting people,” Todd’s mom replied in a forced-happy tone as my mom and the other lady laughed along.
“It’s nice seeing you.” I headed to the kitchen.
“Your plate is in the oven.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
I knew there was no plate in the oven. She was always at the barns, and I always fixed my own dinners. I was cool with her saying that, though. I knew she would fix dinners for me if she found time, or if I cared. I didn’t.
I did have to fake the sounds of “busy” in the kitchen, as I grabbed the plastic container of tuna salad I generally ate after practice, grabbed a handful of slices of bread and a glass of milk, and maneuvered my way up the back staircase to my room.
Once there, I dropped the food on my cluttered desk and did a twisting flop onto my bed, landing on my back.
Please! Please! Please! Don’t call the cops, Jacob. Shit! Shit! Shit!
I had to calm down. What was done was done. I couldn’t undo it, and I wouldn’t lie about it. I’ve just got to hope he’s gay and was cool with what I did to him.
I shoved in my dinner while staring at a picture of Jacob and was extremely glad I worked so hard at practice, because once my head hit my pillow again, I was dead to the world.
I AWOKE drenched in sweat, my heart pounding.
I dreamed that I was driving home with Clay and Danny, but Jeremy actually kept his siren on and began following me, wanting to pull me over. I instantly knew that he had just gotten a call on his police radio and Jacob had told his parents and they had called the cops.
Everybody in these little towns was Christian. There were no openly gay people anywhere around. Christians gave homophobes free rein to be evil. What had I done? Then Clay and Danny weren’t in the cab with me. Some guys from school who always teased people started egging me on to go faster.
Jeremy was right on my tail. I gunned the engine as the boys started pushing me, calling me fag and smacking me around. Trying to defend myself, I lost control of the truck. As the truck was crashing, I woke up.
It was three o’clock. I lay there panting.
If anybody found out I was gay it’d be a nightmare. If Jacob told anybody, I would have to deny it. Everybody would believe him over me. He went to church every week, I didn’t go at all. He was smart, I was dumb. He was good at talking and was an actor. I rarely spoke.
I hated living here. Even if I were to get accepted to Nebraska, would there be any gays in Lincoln?
I eventually fell back to sleep. When I woke again, I had morning wood, feeling only slightly guilty, I quickly rubbed one out with thoughts of Jacob running through my mind. I couldn’t help myself.
I quickly showered, dressed, ate, and went out to my truck, my parents already out to the barns.
My cousins came out shortly after I honked, starting my truck and getting the heater going. Morning rides were pretty quiet. Danny and Clay generally slept. My heart was racing, not knowing what to expect of Jacob. Had he told anybody?
Once inside I scanned the halls as I headed to my locker. Would he be avoiding me or wanting to see me, too. I was crushed to not see him anywhere. I arrived at my locker and opened it, seeing that somebody had slipped a note in through the slats in the locker door.
My heart leaped to my throat and my hand trembled (which was weird) as I slipped it into the pocket of my letterman’s jacket. I pretty much kept to myself, but people gawked at me a lot, so I looked around to see if anybody had noticed anything. Nobody had.
How did he know which locker was mine? Had he been stalking me? I wished! He knew it was my locker because the cheer squad always put signs on each of our lockers each week with motivational sayings, and “Kill the Tigers, Bobby!” happened to be this week’s saying.
I thought about ditching class altogether to read the note, but my first period teacher loved me, so a few minutes after she took roll, I quietly stood, walked over and grabbed the hall pass from the bookshelf next to the door, and left. Mrs. Wilson liked that method.
“Don’t bother me if you need to leave,” she said, weeks earlier on the first day of school. “I don’t want to know your ‘business,’ just leave and return, so somebody else can take a turn. It’s a hall pass, so you’re legally able to be in the hall, but don’t take advantage! Be mature about it. You’re all seniors here.”
I hustled to the restroom and, locking the stall door behind me, grabbed the note from my pocket. My hands trembled again as I unfolded it.
Hey,
If you’re wanting to hang out sometime, I ride my bike to and from school. If you were to pick me up in your truck, we could put the bike in the back and go somewhere.
Let me know (or just pick me up).
Shit yeah! He is gay, and he does like me.
I was freaking out. Breathe, I thought to myself, my entire body trembling now. Just breathe and enjoy this.
I read it again. Using discretion, Jacob hadn’t written my name; he hadn’t signed his. He had very neat handwriting, so one might think the note was written by a girl if anyone else were to see it. There were plenty of kids who rode bikes around town, all alone. This was a small community. There was only about two thousand people; we all felt safe.
Tonight wasn’t going to work, though. It was a late-night practice. Shit. Wait, be happy, he likes you. Or at least he wants to meet you. This rules! Yes! He wants to meet.
I pulled myself together, folded the letter, placed it in my inner pocket, and flushed the toilet even though I was alone in the restroom. Then I decided I really did have to actually pee, so I did; I washed my hands, and then stopped short, seeing my reflection in the mirror.
I’m not that ugly. My ears were lopsided, my eyes were way too squinty, but there was obviously something he liked about me. Still excited about the note, I smiled. I had great
teeth—the only thing straight about me. I turned and headed back to class. The rest of the morning was great, and I figured I’d be seeing him at lunch.
Toward the end of lunch, I sat with a bunch of other team members on the “senior staircase.” I wasn’t really friends with any of them, I just sat with them because I was on the team with them, and that’s where we sat.
Jacob had just turned a corner and walked my way with this kid, Craig, that he was always with. He pretended to show interest in what the kid was saying, but when he glanced my way, our eyes locked. His smile was so instantly bright, my heart burst. I couldn’t look away, and apparently neither could he. I didn’t want to. I swear his eyes twinkled. The hall was full of other kids, nobody was paying attention to us. He crossed his eyes at me as he passed by, and I let out a laugh in spite of myself, but nobody noticed. At least nobody asked what I was laughing about. Being a good football player had its advantages. Other kids never questioned me because I looked pretty intimidating.
Jacob had just flirted with me! At least, that’s how I was going to take it, and I would be seeing him at practice too. Things were great, except we had to come up with a way to be able to just be with each other whenever we wanted.
Chapter Three
Jacob
I SAW him in the hall at lunch. When we made eye contact, my heart went up into my throat and it felt like my balls were retracting. Craig was blathering on about girls and I pretended I knew what he was talking about. If he knew I was gay, I knew he would stop being my friend; that’s why I referred to him in my own mind as my “supposed” best friend.
I was so mesmerized by Bobby staring at me as I walked, I got flustered and crossed my eyes at him. What a complete “dork” thing to do, I thought even as I was doing it, but he laughed, which gave me some relief. I loved his laugh and carried the memory of it with me the rest of the afternoon. It was Thursday.
On Thursdays, rather than after school, football practices were held in the evenings, under the lights. It was to get the team mentally ready for the game the following night. The managers, however, had double duty because the Junior Varsity team would play actual opponents in a game each Thursday afternoon. We would work the game, and then work the normal Thursday night Varsity practice, which generally started as soon as the JV game was over, usually around 6:00 p.m.
Aside from the fact that we didn’t get done until 9:00 p.m., everything was normal. I did my job; the other managers did their jobs. Practice ended. I turned off the field lights, and out of habit made my wish that Allie would love me, then made another that Bobby Versailles would love me too. Then I went in and handed out towels to the players.
Bobby Versailles came and got his towel just like always—buck naked. Adrenaline rushed through me, big-time. Maybe this time he walked a little slower. Was he doing that for me? He was loving showing me his body, but this time, as he reached for his towel, he slowly shook his head. He wasn’t going to pick me up that night, and my heart fell. To make it up to me, he really strutted away slowly, letting me stare at his perfect butt as he did.
Just as Bobby Versailles was approaching the door, at the other end of the weight room, Coach Lafferty came through the door.
“Nice hustle, today, Bobby.” He patted his shoulder.
“Thanks, Coach,” I heard him say.
Then, as Bobby turned to walk through the doorway, he glanced back at me and winked.
I love you.
I love you? What was I thinking? Oh, I was going to hell for sure. Lord, what is happening to me?
When Coach said we could go, I slowly rode my bike home, somewhat let down. Well, sorely let down, actually. Anywhere along my route he could have picked me up. I thought about it, though, as I rode, and figured out two reasons why he wasn’t able to pick me up. It was either because it was so late or because he wasn’t going to take me up on my invitation.
I settled on the former, because he had gotten me to touch him, and when he had slowly shaken his head at me, it wasn’t with a grave face. It was more of a sad face. Or was it? He wasn’t scared, and he wasn’t too shy. He also lived in a town that was twenty miles away, so I settled on the idea that he had needed to get home. I didn’t see him at school on Friday, and that night was a home game.
We won; he played a great game. I watched his every move and even got in trouble a few times for not doing my job. I did run out on the field during a time-out, and he took the water I handed him. But we didn’t make eye contact, and he didn’t find me after the game. I wasn’t expecting him to, but I was still disappointed that he hadn’t.
The weekend felt like the longest of my lifetime, and when Monday came, I was at my wits’ end. Saturday I’d watched Nebraska fall to Penn State. Craig had come over to watch and I kept thinking how awesome it would have been to be able to watch it with Bobby. The Huskers lost, so it made the weekend worse. Being in church on Sunday made me feel like a leper, but the roof didn’t cave in. How could God have made me this way if it was a sin?
I had had wet dreams about him on both nights—how was that happening—and had awakened from my dreams both times, prematurely coming before I could even enjoy his perfect cock in my mouth. Monday couldn’t come soon enough.
HIS TRUCK was already parked where he always parked it, and my pulse pounded. I didn’t see him until lunch, and I purposely walked past the senior staircase twice just to, I guess, be near him? See him? Assure myself that he was real? I was driving myself crazy was what I was doing!
No, I had arrived at crazy. I now knew what horny felt like. My mind was spinning madness and my dick was never less than at half-mast for most of the day.
There was another kid in my class, Kyle, whom I suspected was also gay. We had been friends in elementary school, but he liked hanging around girls more than boys, so we stopped hanging around as often once we had started seventh grade. The high school was comprised of kids from seventh to twelfth grades.
Remarkably, as I changed after PE, my boner had subsided, and in the shower, I was totally limp. Having been in PE classes for several years, I had trained myself to not let my eyes wander around; most everybody had already showered and dressed, anyway. As I was about to leave, however, Kyle slowly went past a window in the locker room that separated the coaches’ office from the locker room. I noticed that Kyle was wearing a T-shirt with a Husker’s logo and laughed. He didn’t know anything about football. Everybody had already labeled Kyle as a gay kid and he’d been getting bullied a lot recently. Maybe he thought by having a Huskers shirt on, he was keeping the abuse down. But I had just caught him peeping through the small space between the drawn curtains of the window.
He was checking out our PE teacher, who was in his late thirties and was the head wrestling coach and an assistant football coach. I couldn’t resist, I wanted to see, too. I passed by just as Coach Lafferty was just pulling on some underwear, and was rewarded with a flash of his dick, determining quickly that it was equal in beauty to that of Bobby Versailles’s.
I headed out of the locker room looking around to see if anybody had noticed. Only Kyle had and as we both left the gym he strode up beside me and softly spoke.
“Can you believe it? That thing is five inches limp. Can you imagine how big it gets hard?”
“I know!” I said, picking up my pace.
And I did know. My dick was maybe four inches limp and it was seven or eight inches hard.
What was going on? I was becoming obsessed with dicks. I couldn’t pay attention in class the rest of the afternoon. I checked out my history teacher’s crotch for an hour, then checked out my English teacher’s crotch after that.
And then it was time for football practice. I had a job to do, and Danny had gone home sick that day. Doing his tasks and my own, I ran around like a crazy person: laundering towels, fixing helmets, at one point grabbing sniffing salts for a guy who had been knocked unconscious. Monday also meant practice would only be two hours out on the field instead of three because t
hey’d watch game film for that final hour. The film would be of the team we were playing that upcoming Friday. Getting the projector out and setting it up was also one of my duties, so I had to leave the field early to go do that and to remind Trevor that he’d have to turn off the field lights.
I would have never imagined that it would happen, and I was so rushed throughout the whole practice, that I was totally shocked as I overheard people talking about Bobby Versailles getting injured during the last play of the scrimmage, at the end of practice.
Coach Lafferty called me over to where Bobby had just been set down.
They’d set him on the floor in the back of the weight room, one leg up on a weight bench so that it was above his heart.
The entire floor of the weight room was a huge wrestling mat, and everybody was, for the most part, already there, scattered around, sitting on it or on weight-lifting benches or on old, arbitrary school chairs in the room in anticipation of watching the game film. Coach Lafferty asked me if I could get some ice packs to put on Bobby’s leg. I was more than glad to.
Coach had set him down against the back wall, behind all the other players and coaches. I let myself believe he’d planned it that way.
We had medical ice wraps that were filled with some ice gel for injuries like this; I went and got what supplies I thought we’d need, plus aspirin and water. To bring it all to where he was sitting, I had to maneuver through a couple of players and some gym equipment. They had turned off the lights to watch the game film and the only light we had to work with was streaming through the doorway of the locker room about fifteen feet away.
He took the aspirin from me first, smiling his thanks, then I kneeled beside him and gently wrapped the ice pack around just above his kneecap. The swelling was obvious.
Coach Hillyard, another assistant coach, a smarmy guy, came and whispered to us that we should keep it cold for twenty minutes, then take off the wrap for a minute or two, then put it back on for twenty, then off again for a few more.