Foolish Fire

by Willard, Guy

  I’d finally decided that a quiet girl like Wendy was the best thing for me. With her, there was no pressure. I felt comfortable being with her. And everyone else seemed to think we were meant for each other. We were one of the school’s more prominent couples.

  Though in fact we’d only been going steady for a month, most people had the impression that we’d been going together for much longer.

  I’d made it clear to her from the start that there was to be no sex until we were more seriously committed. I warned her of the dangers of teenage pregnancy, backing it up with what Jack had experienced. Not even a condom ensured safety. The best thing was abstinence. And I emerged as a gentleman, a responsible and caring boy, unlike most of the others.

  But she said kissing was enough for her. Some of her girlfriends who were sexually active had confessed to her that they preferred kissing to sex. It was much more romantic and arousing than the brutal thrusting which only gave them pain or a feeling of being used.

  Wendy herself was a virgin and had no intention of using sex as a substitute for tenderness. Not that she wanted to save it till marriage. But her values were traditional. I was happy with that. I suspected she might even be afraid of sex….

  If so, that made two of us. Ever since that afternoon in Mark’s bedroom, I was afraid I might have been “branded,” that I could never enjoy normal sex with a girl. And I was afraid to find out.

  Sometimes I couldn’t believe I’d actually done it. The more time passed, the more like a dream it became. It seemed like some dirty fantasy I’d invented. I knew all the details of that afternoon by heart now…there were times when I couldn’t get the scene out of my mind. It played and re-played like a movie I couldn’t tear my eyes away from.

  Certain memories of that afternoon would return sometimes, often at the most unexpected moments. Even as I was kissing Wendy now, I could feel his body, the ghost of his body, and my kisses became more inflamed.

  I pulled away from the kiss.

  “Look what you’re doing to me.” I indicated the hard bulge at my groin.

  “What a bad boy you are.”

  “But it’s all your fault,” I said. “You’re doing this to me.”

  She giggled. “And everyone thinks you’re such a gentleman.”

  “No boy’s a gentleman when he’s with his girlfriend. Come on, touch me.”

  “Well….”

  Seeing her hesitate, I took her hand and brought it down onto the hardness.

  We played games like this without losing control of ourselves, proud of our maturity. And I was secretly glad it didn’t have to go beyond this. I should never have tried to force myself to lose my virginity.

  I still couldn’t believe that I’d fucked a boy and it had left no mark upon me. I would have expected the whole world to know. This face of mine which everyone looked at—didn’t it give me away every time I thought about what I’d done? Eating dinner with my family, talking with my teachers and friends in school as if nothing were different…wasn’t I a spy carrying a deadly secret? But on the surface, I looked as I’d always looked. It was only inside where I’d been touched with a magic wand—where I’d stepped into the ring of fire and stepped back out again unscathed, unsinged.

  It had been a fluke, a slip. A part of me had always been curious: what would it be like to do it—if not with Mark, then with another boy. A lot of boys wondered.

  But it was all behind me now, safely behind. Mark and I could no longer be friends. I hadn’t gone back to his house since then. In fact, I was avoiding him at school. But he seemed to be used to it. Maybe all the other boys he mentioned did the same thing, out of guilt or fear of discovery—or perhaps to kill the temptation of wanting a repeat performance.

  Maybe it was my imagination, but he seemed hurt by my neglect, and sometimes made biting remarks about me behind my back. But I didn’t worry too much about his telling anyone about what had happened. I knew I could always deny it, and claim it was another one of his lies. After all, there was no proof that it had even happened.

  And my high profile with Wendy made any such rumors about me unlikely. People had such a strong image of me as Wendy’s steady boyfriend that no one would have believed that I’d done anything with Mark. And the more time I spent with her, the more I felt I could rub out the memory of that afternoon.

  If I put that one mistake behind me, it would be as if it had never happened. Unlike Mark, I was just a normal boy with normal desires, no different from any other boy. The straight and narrow path would be much better for me in the long run. After all, I had my whole life ahead of me. It wasn’t determined by fifteen minutes in a friend’s bedroom.

  Yes, no one knew. And no one would ever know.

  Wendy giggled again. Smiling wickedly, she whispered, “Shall I give you a hand?”

  “I think I’d like that,” I said, my voice almost breaking. “I’d like that very much….”

  She smilingly reached for my zipper, but froze at the sound of a car coming up the driveway.

  “Oh God. It’s my brother.”

  “Your brother? I didn’t know he was in town.”

  “He’s home on leave right now. He was out drinking with some friends.”

  We pulled apart and I reached for the television’s remote control and turned up the volume as Wendy straightened herself up.

  The front door opened and we both turned to look.

  There in the doorway, standing with the careless languor of a powerful jungle animal was a young man in his early twenties. He wore faded blue jeans frayed at the cuffs, and his slender, sockless feet seemed to flow into his clean white tennis shoes. His T-shirt fit him so tightly that his muscular chest seemed to swell it out, expanding and stretching it with each breath he took, threatening to burst his upper torso free of its confinement. A sleeve was rolled up on one side, showing the solid bulging of his upper arm, and tucked into the fold of the sleeve was a crumpled pack of cigarettes. His hair was cut very short, showing to advantage his well-shaped head and finely-formed ears.

  Just as he turned his head toward us (a cigarette hanging loosely from the corner of his mouth), I caught a certain look in his eyes, a dreamy, far-off gaze as if he were peering at a distant horizon, his lips pursed pensively, his eyelids half-shut in a seductive droop.

  He paused in the doorway to stare at us.

  Wendy stirred. “Sean, this is my boyfriend, Guy Willard.”

  I got to my feet. Sean strolled over to us, his hand already extended in a handshake. I grasped it, surprised and thrilled at the firmness of his grip. I gazed into eyes whose deep azure formed a stunning contrast with his dark, almost black hair.

  “Hi,” I whispered.

  “Hello, Guy. I’ve heard a lot about you.” His grip was powerful.

  Dimly, I heard Wendy say, “This is my brother Sean. He’s in the Navy.”

  “Oh?”

  I would have guessed as much even without something which caught and riveted my attention: a sinister-looking tattoo on his upper arm of a deadly, rainbow-hued scorpion.

  Noticing my appraisal of it, his brow twitched as though he were repressing a shy grin. With embarrassed pride, he jerked his head down toward it, muttering, “I got that in Hong Kong.”

  “Wow.”

  “Listen, I just stopped in for a pack of cigarettes. I’m on my way out now.”

  “Don’t leave on my account,” I said.

  “I’m not.” He got a new pack of cigarettes from the counter and tapped it against the wall, then came over to me and punched my shoulder lightly. “Why should I wanna stick around here on a Saturday night, right?” He winked at me and turned to go.

  And as quickly as he’d come over to greet me, he gave a curt nod and left the house, leaving a sudden gaping hole in my universe.

  “It was great of your brother to leave us alone.”

  “Yes. He’s really understanding.”

  We listened to the car start up again and pull out of the driveway.


  “In a way I feel bad about it….”

  “Don’t. He likes nothing better than to go out drinking with his old high school buddies. They were always getting into trouble with their parents and the police. A real rebel.”

  Even after he was gone, the whole house for me became filled with the essence of Sean. I pictured him riding through the dark like a moody, romantic hero. Nothing could touch the solitary inner core which lay at the heart of his being.

  “Is he on a ship?”

  “Yeah. But it’s in port now in San Diego, and he’s on a two-week leave. Come on, I’ll show you a picture of his ship.”

  I followed her upstairs and she opened the door of the room at the far end of the hallway.

  “This is his room. What a mess.”

  “Is it okay to go inside?”

  “Of course.”

  It was a small room, furnished with a cot and a dresser. There was a seabag in the corner and some dirty laundry lying about.

  Wendy led me over to the dresser. She opened a drawer and picked out a stack of photographs, then began leafing through them.

  “Look. This is his ship.”

  She handed me one of the photos and I looked at it. It showed a gray ship in a dock somewhere, among a lot of other gray ships. Some sailors were walking around but I couldn’t pick out Sean.

  She was still flipping through the stack as she handed me another one.

  “And this is the kind of thing he does on shore leave.”

  Sean and some other friends were in civilian clothes, in a bar someplace with a lot of Oriental women. They all looked drunk. Sean was sitting at a counter with his arm around a woman’s waist. His eyes looked a little bleary.

  “And look at this one. This is a British girl he met in Greece, a student, I think. She was hiking around Europe when she ran into my brother in Athens. She keeps sending him letters. I think he promised to marry her or something. He’s terrible.”

  But another photo in the stack had caught my eye. I pulled it out. “What’s this?”

  It showed Sean, shirtless, leaning jauntily back against something, a bench or a rope. With his thumbs hooked loosely in his belt-loops, he was squinting in the glare of the sun…or perhaps he was expressing his contempt for the photographer, for his face wore a hint of a sneer, tinged with mockery or even cruelty. It was impossible to tell where the picture had been taken, whether it was on some beach or on the deck of a ship. Behind him was the sea, of a particular shade of blue I had never seen before in my life. It was impossible to pinpoint where sky and sea met. The whole background was blurred into a formless, creamy texture, making Sean’s bare torso seem suspended, like an angel’s, against a backdrop of azure. The light from the setting sun caused his skin to glow and shimmer eerily.

  Physically, Sean was perfect. He had all of Jack’s aggressive masculinity, but without the adolescent bravado; he had Mark’s androgynous sensuality without the vindictive spite. As I studied the photograph, my insides seemed to reverberate with a mellow tone as though a bell had just been rung, a bell whose achingly beautiful resonance proclaimed a message for my ears only.

  I felt as if I were gazing into a place where reality intersected with my dreams and fantasies. An exotic feeling of adventure had keened through me as a little boy whenever I dreamed of life on the high seas with an ideal boyhood friend, soaked in the hiss of sea spray and the smell of brine. Sean reminded me of the long-lost ideal partner of my boyhood daydreams. It felt like a reunion….

  “That was taken by one of his friends in the Navy.” She snatched it lightly from my fingers, and after glancing at it momentarily, replaced it in the stack. “Come on. We’ve got better things to do than talk about my brother.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about if we go to my bedroom? That way, no one can bother us again.”

  “All right.”

  In the privacy of her bedroom, with the door closed, we tried to return to where we’d left off. But it felt too contrived, too mechanical. Something was missing; I was only going through the motions. And she knew it.

  She pulled away from the kiss. “How come you’re so quiet all of a sudden?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I guess I just lost my concentration.”

  “Damn my brother for coming in just then.”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” I murmured.

  “It was. It was.” She looked ready to cry.

  “Come on, let’s try it again.”

  I gazed at the closed door and thought of the short distance down the hallway to his room. I thought of the scorpion tattoo. Its tail had been raised, poised to strike, and the tiny sting, by dint of the tattooer’s art, had actually appeared to twinkle. Maybe it was the light glinting off a drop of poison on its tip.

  *

  It was much later. It was dark. I heard the door open. He came in and turned on the light. When he saw me, he was momentarily startled, but that passed. He didn’t seem too surprised to find me there.

  “You waited for me?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you know I wouldn’t mind?”

  “I just knew.”

  Though I was acting so nonchalant, in fact I was ecstatic. I’d been right! Right! He knew!

  “Where’s Wendy?” he said.

  “She’s sleeping in her room. That’s why we have to be quiet.”

  “I figured as much.” He turned off the room light and went over to the night table and turned on a tiny reading lamp. Its red shade put a strange glow in the room, a glow strangely reminiscent of the light in the photograph I’d seen of him.

  “Do you know Mark Warren?” I asked on an impulse.

  “Mark Warren? No. Who’s he?”

  “No one special.”

  “Listen, I’m gonna change. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No. Go right ahead.”

  He tossed the pack of cigarettes onto the bed then began slipping off his T-shirt. As his upper torso came into view, I saw that it was just like his body in the photo. There was even the same glow. And the expression on his face was exactly the same. Only now I understood the meaning of the contempt in his eyes: he knew what it was that I wanted. But I didn’t care. I thought of all the times I’d dreamed of something like this. I thought of how easy it all was if you just didn’t think about it too much.

  I found myself moving toward him, sinking to my knees.

  He just stood there as I reached up and undid the snap on his jeans, then pulled the zipper down.

  He wasn’t wearing any underwear. As I slid the jeans down his thighs, his half-erect penis popped out and bobbed for a moment before my face, then reared up with a series of twitches until it was nuzzled flat against his stomach.

  Fully erect, it was exactly the size of my own. The sight made me dizzy. I reached up and felt his hardness, shyly at first, and then grasped it more boldly and stroked it. I looked up to see his reaction.

  His eyes went wide as he gazed down at me with just the hint of a smile.

  My hand trembled as I held him. I shifted my weight so I could bring my face closer.

  Like all boys, I’d often fantasized about being able to suck my own penis. I’d once seen a photo of an Indian yogi who’d bent his body so that his face was down at his groin. If he hadn’t been wearing swim trunks, he could easily have sucked himself off. That photo had always haunted me. Try as I might, I could never duplicate the posture.

  Now my face was so close to Sean’s dick that I could feel the damp heat from it as it quivered and twitched in response to my stroking. I caught a whiff of the familiar spermy smell which all young boys seem to carry about them like a symbol of their youthful malehood. It was a perfume I often caught from a passing boy, or in a friend’s bedroom.

  Now I could do something about it. Now all my dreams were about to come true.

  I hesitated for the briefest moment, to overcome a momentary squeamishness. But my desire was too strong to hold back. As I lowered my face
I felt as if I were breaking the tensile surface which separates fantasy from reality. I tracked a slow, careful lick along the entire length of his dick, from the pulsing root all the way up to the moist tip. Holding the hot captive in a tight grip I had another moment of stage fright; I felt all the eyes of the world upon me. Any moment now, the whole world would burst in and catch me in the act. Then, carried away by some fierce and deep momentum, I banished all thought from my mind and set to work.

  Though I was doing it for the first time in my life, I found myself taking to it instinctively and naturally, as most boys do, knowing best how to provoke and satisfy their own desires. I closed my lips around the warm flesh and held it in my mouth before doing anything. Except for the slight salt taste, it was everything I’d expected; the throbbing warmth seemed to melt the softness of my mouth like butter.

  I filled my mouth with as much as I could without gagging. Then I began to move, bobbing back and forth, my sucking making my lips stretch out. I could feel the ridges and bumps, even the veins.

  Still holding his dick tightly with one hand I went to work with my lips and tongue, concentrating on the glans, rolling its smooth roundness around in my lips, making it slick with my spit. I thought of the lollipops I’d licked and sucked as a child—lime green, strawberry red, lemon yellow—all precursors to this hot pink one…as if all the childhood candy was an elaborate preparation for just this moment. I imagined a lollipop thrust deep into my mouth as I twirled its stick, giving it loving caresses of my tongue, worrying and worrying its tantalizing sweet roundness, rolling and curling my tongue over, under, around it.

  There was a certain sense of power in knowing the pleasure my mouth was giving him. I kissed the hot head and with the very tip of my tongue worried away at that strip of skin just under the glans which is the most sensitive spot on a boy. Then I twirled my tongue around the circumference of the head in a continuous fluttering.

  I was as good as Mark. I was better than Mark.

  With my free hand I reached up and touched his balls, crinkled up small and tight now against his groin. As I stroked them, his dick twitched in response. I bent my face down again and clamped my lips tightly around the entire glans, slowly taking in as much as I could. Then I moved my head up and down to stroke it, feeling his fingers raking through my hair, then close tightly against my temples, urging me on. As if from a distance I heard his soft whimpers; it wouldn’t be long now before I could experience the sensation I’d dreamed of so often: the warm explosion in my mouth which signaled the wrenching climax of another boy’s pleasure.